image courtesy RosenblumTV
Donald Trump got whacked.
The medium that propelled him from nowhere to one step away from the Presidency has now come back to bit him, hard.
Live by the TV cameras. Die by the TV cameras.
And that is what has happened.
Oh, he may survive this. He may, in fact, still go on to occupy the White House. As a Reality TV Star, he's in a good position in this Presidential election which has been turned into a never-ending (at least until November 8th, and probably continuing after that) Reality TV series.
But what in the end nailed Trump was the very thing that made him -- television and video.
He has been in 'the business' for a long time. And as such, the clips of him on the bus with Billy Bush are probably just the beginning of what will become, no doubt, a wave of 'video revelations.' One can only imagine what lurks in the vaults of the out-takes and off-camera recordings from ten years of The Apprentice. There is probably enough in there to kill Trump, and if not to kill him, at least to drag him, and us, through more mud and dirt on our way to the White House.
The problem here is that Trump is not alone.
There was a time when being 'on television' was a very complicated event to pull off. You needed cameramen and lights and crews and microphones and often studios. You knew when you were 'on the air'; you knew when you were being recorded. And, until very recently, perhaps .001 percent of the population was ever 'on TV.' The rest of us just watched.
Now, all that has changed. And it has changed overnight.
Today, everyone with a smart phone (and that would be about 2.5 billion people worldwide), has the capacity to shoot and record video at will, any time they want -- whether you know it or not. AND -- share it with the rest of the world. And that is just the beginning. Snapchat just released a pair of eyeglasses that will record video any time. Sony has filed a patent for video contact lenses -- contact lenses that will record everything you see and hear.
But, of course, we don't have to wait for Sony or buy the Snapchat glasses. Ubiquitous, and almost constant video recording is here already. You see it on the local news every night. For every police action story, there is an accompany video. For every robbery there is security camera video. For every shooting, there is video. It is pretty safe to say that wherever you are, and whatever you are doing, and whatever you are saying, you have a good chance of being recorded now, whether you know it or not. All the time.
In 1949, George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four, his dystopian novel of the then future; a world in which everyone was watched by ubiquitous telescreens, monitored by faceless bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth. It was a portrait of an all-encompassing authoritarian state from which there was no escape.
How astonished Orwell would be, how utterly shocked, to learn that today we not only buy our own cameras, but we carry out the recording that the State was supposed to be doing against our will. We do it ourselves. And, remarkably, we complain if no one is watching.
Facebook and Instagram have become the Ministry of Truth, and we all work there.
I have been a TV producer for more than 30 years. For a production company to produce a Reality series often takes 8 months or more. That is to make 13 show. Today, we, collectively, upload 500 hours of cut and edited video to Youtube every minute. That is an astonishing 262 Million hours of content per year -- and that is just to Youtube. We are not even talking about Facebook or Snapchat or Vine or anything else.
For NBC to catch up to one year of Youtube production, going full bore, it would take them about 89 thousand years.
Do you see what is happening? We are ALL being recorded, all the time. It's not just Donald Trump in the bus. And God only knows what we are saying or doing.
As face recognition search engine technology kicks in, (and IBM's Watson is working on some amazing video search software), it is going to be easier and easier to 'catch' anyone who has ever done anything or said anything stupid or that they later regretted any time in their lives.
In the kind of world, with that kind of exposure, tell me, who in their right mind is going to ever run for public office again?