What Jim Carroll Saw Coming
Original archive: 2023-01-04 — 23 Trends for 2023 : #18 The Battle for Reality.
In his December 2022 “Battle for Reality” trend, Carroll focused on the growing danger of misinformation, conspiratorial thinking and contested facts. That concern precedes the latest wave of convincing synthetic media. The voyage asks how his broader warning about trust evolves when audio, images and video can be fabricated at scale.
What has changed in the real world
A convincing image or voice recording used to be costly to fabricate. Generative systems have changed the effort required to produce plausible synthetic material. That shifts the trust problem: seeing or hearing something is no longer enough to determine how it was made. Cryptographic provenance can attach a verifiable chain of declarations about a file and its edits. But verifying a signature is not the same thing as verifying whether the content is true, complete or presented in context.
Carroll’s wider body of digital-trust and technology foresight offers a starting point for understanding why familiar assumptions about evidence are changing. Standards organizations are developing technical methods for recording content provenance. Newsrooms, businesses and public agencies face a more difficult institutional task: what to do when a recording lacks provenance, or when an authentic clip is edited to produce a misleading impression. Technology can help describe a chain of custody; humans must still judge a claim.
A fact that changes the scale of the question
The C2PA technical specification provides a method for attaching cryptographically verifiable provenance claims to digital media. The original source is Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. The distinction behind the number or capability matters just as much as the headline: A valid signature can establish a chain of claims about a file; it does not prove that the scene depicted is true. The point of introducing the fact here is to show the actual scale of the machinery, knowledge, data or infrastructure involved in this particular voyage. It is not evidence that the imagined 2036 destination is inevitable.
2036: one possible destination
An imagined scene, not an account of an event that has happened.
Imagine receiving a dramatic video in 2036. Your device displays a clear history showing which camera recorded it and whether particular edits were declared. A second clip has no reliable origin information, and an investigator seeks independent confirmation before publishing. The first record is easier to audit, but neither deserves blind acceptance. This future is about provenance as part of everyday literacy, not a magical detector that knows what is real.
One image captures the possibility: A family verifies a believable synthetic emergency call before acting. The conditions behind that image deserve attention. A future built around this capability would also change work, trust, operating costs or personal choices for someone outside the technology industry. That is why this voyage is less about predicting the arrival date of a device and more about understanding the environment that would let it matter. Different communities and businesses could arrive at the same destination at different speeds, or choose a different route altogether.
The detour that could change everything
People can strip metadata, legitimate creators may use tools that do not support a common standard, and attackers can exploit gaps between platforms. A genuine recording can also be misleading because of framing, omission or an incorrect caption. Organisations need policies for verification that do not automatically discredit vulnerable witnesses who lack sophisticated tools.
There is no requirement that technical progress and adoption advance together. People may welcome one application and reject another. The most persuasive future is the one that survives comparison with cheaper, simpler or better-understood alternatives. This is also where the archive has value: an old idea can be supported in direction while the timetable, commercial model or surrounding institutions evolve in ways that could not have been obvious at the start. That history deserves to be told rather than edited into perfect hindsight.
The next chapter is still being written
Look for cross-platform preservation of provenance information and clear policies about what a verified credential establishes. Test whether newsrooms and ordinary users can interpret it correctly. The meaningful progress is fewer false claims surviving scrutiny, not merely more badges attached to media.
The practical test is this: Do not conflate deployed synthetic media with speculative universal identity protocols The question for the people making choices today is not whether the imagined 2036 scene is visually convincing. It is whether emerging evidence alters a real decision: where to invest, what to build, which safeguards to demand, and which assumptions should be checked again next year. Will authenticity become a service and a civic infrastructure? The answer is not locked in. That is what makes tomorrow a voyage worth taking.