The Vidularity is Nigh Upon Us

All our lives. Recorded to video. Very soon.

The time that existed before humanity developed the technology of written language we call prehistory, and the period since, history. We don’t have a name for the moment when prehistory ended and history began, but I’ll suggest one for the moment when we will be able to understand the past not only through written words, paintings, and photos, but through the actual lens of recorded video.

It’s called The Vidularity.

Defined as the inflection point where more than half of human events are captured by video somewhere, the Vidularity will come sooner than anyone expects. We’re almost there already. We’ll accelerate past it sooner than anyone expects. And it will be awesome.

In 1903, the Wright Brothers made their historic flight at Kittyhawk. Although motion cameras had existed for several decades, no one filmed the first flight. The earliest footage of the Wright Brothers’ airplane was captured 6 years later, in 1909. (image source: John T. Daniels via the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppprs.00626).

If your workplace has security cameras, you might be recorded for at least part of the 8 hour workday. That’s 1/3rd of a typical workweek already.

If you spend any time on the road, you are being recorded by freeway traffic cams and intersection cameras. Many newer cars now have front-facing cameras to detect lane drift, rear cameras to aid when backing up (mandatory for new cars in the U.S. by 2018), and even side-view cameras for lane change assistance. Take public transportation? Cameras have become pervasive on subways, buses, and railways.

In the Spring of 1937, the Hindenburg airship tragedy was filmed simultaneously by four different news crews and at least one amateur spectator. None of the newsreel cameras filmed the start of the fire, but all captured the unfolding disaster. News crews had gathered due to excitement over the first transatlantic passenger landing of an airship in the United States. If the tragedy happened a year later when landings had become routine instead of on the journey’s inaugural voyage, it is likely no video of the event would exist.

Police use dashcams and lapel cameras. Both are becoming more popular with civilians every year, and it’s not hard to imagine them becoming ubiquitous. The Narrative Clip, SnapCam, and GoPro sell millions of units already. Wearers of Snap’s Spectacles appear unapologetically in public. Taser, which started focusing on non-lethal enforcement weapons for police, recently rebranded as Axon, a company focused squarely on video capture for both civilian and police personnel.

In the Fall of 2001, terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers in Manhattan. Only one known video of the first impact exists. Think about that for a minute — in all of downtown New York City and the surrounding area encompassing 20 million people, there was only one person able to film that terrible event.

When you shop, you are being recorded from multiple angles continuously — often from the moment you pull into the parking lot, continuing when you walk through the door, wander the aisles, check out, and return to your car.

If you have home automation or security cameras at your house, or if you walk or drive by other homes with security cameras facing the street, these capture you. Vivint’s Doorbell Camera, Nest’s Outdoor Cam, Simplicam, and Netgear’s Arlo are just a few of the many cameras that provide these capabilities.

On February 15, 2013, a 10,000 ton meteorite exploded over the Southern Urals, near Chelyabinsk. Scientists believe a meteor of this size enters the Earth’s atmosphere every 30–40 years, yet this is the only one ever recorded on video. More than 20 dashcams and security cameras captured the event live, most with direct line of sight to the meteorite’s entry, path through atmosphere, disintegration and explosion. Almost a dozen personal cameras (usually via smartphones) also recorded portions of the event, but none in its entirety.

Phone cameras are everywhere. When you attend a concert, a sporting event, a conference, a popular attraction, a family event, or any other activity with a large number of people, it is likely you are being recorded in background video snippets.

Left: CIPA’s camera sales by year (source: This is What the History of Camera Sales Looks Like. Smartphone camera data included by Sven Skafisk, data published by Gartner, Inc). Right: Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, 2007–2014 (source: YouTube Blog 2010, YouTube Blog 2012, reelseo).

Add these things up and it is easy to see that for some of us, the Vidularity has already happened. For the rest of us, it is inevitable.

We sometimes record to protect ourselves and others. Video can provide a very strong shield against government abuse. In the summer of 2014, Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Furguson, Missouri. Witnesses tell contradictory accounts of the events leading to the shooting. No video of what actually happened exists. Disputes over the event led to violence, continuing two years after Brown’s death. Contrast this with the case of Eric Garner in New York, whose death also came while interacting with police. Yet partly because footage of Garner’s death does exist, attorneys prosecuted those responsible, the family received compensation, and the NYPD Police Commissioner ordered reviews and reforms. While these two cases spurred a vigorous debate about social justice that remains unsettled, they also provide a strong argument for the benefits of video surveillance to protect both the public and police officers.

In 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan caused a tsunami unlike any seen in recent years. Due to the prevalence of security, traffic, drone, and other cameras, we captured more video footage of a tsunami in action than all previous tsunamis combined. The way the world understood and empathized with the plight of the Japanese people affected by this catastrophe was due in no small part to published video. These videos continue to help scientists and officials better understand and prevent damage and loss of life from future tsunamis.

Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable (don’t believe it? watch this or this), but they are historically the best that we’ve had in our courts of law. All of civil and criminal law changes dramatically — and for the better — when most disputes can be settled with video evidence.

There is no motion picture of anything prior to 1888. None of human history, save the last 130 years or so, is recorded on film. No video exists of the American Civil War. No film of Napolean. No video of the first steam engines, or the first railroads. No motion record of the teams who invented the first electric lamps. No moving pictures of the construction of the first telegraph or telephone systems.

The Vidularity looks less like the scarcity of film from Kittyhawk, the first Twin Tower impact, and Michael Brown. It looks more like the abundance of video from Chelyabinsk and Tōhoku.

It’s hard to predict the exact moment we will pass fully into the Vidularity, but it’s equally hard to imagine it not happening within the next two decades.

We already carry HD video cameras around in our pockets as part of our smartphones. Certain fields, including law enforcement, wear continuously recording cameras. In some countries, continuously recording vehicle dashcams are a necessity today. We install increasing numbers of always-on cameras in our homes, either to secure and monitor our property, or to interact with our families, or both. Some of us already wear lapel cameras or eyeglasses with cameras. Google just released a camera that records all the time, but only saves recordings when it’s AI brain decides something interesting happened.

Clockwise from top right: Google Glass, Snap Spectacles, Narrative Clip, Google Clips, & Axon Bodycam

The online video revolution that began before Youtube, has now spawned live broadcasting: Periscope, Instagram/Snapchat/Facebook Live, the ACLU’s Mobile Justice App, and Axon’s yet unnamed public evidence video.

The future contains more of the same. Continuous recording of everything. This is how we will document our lives and the lives of our families. It is how we will protect ourselves and the innocent. And since we often don’t recognize pivotal moments until after they’ve passed, we have no way to record them unless we are recording them all.

The questions left to answer include: How will we store all the video produced by the Vidularity? How will we access it? How will we wade through the mountains of video to find moments of interest? What technologies will we develop to help us curate and edit it? Those with solutions for these pain points will find a willing market of customers.

The Vidularity has begun. Its progression is inevitable. And it will be awesome.