Does Evidence Even Matter?

I was taught never to discuss money, politics, or religion in public. Those childhood lessons are why I avoid political commentary, though I don’t lack beliefs or convictions. With the growing rancor in our social, political, and economic arenas, I turn away from the news and toward longer, more considered writing. 

And for that I look to writers and thinkers who do in-depth reporting and analysis. They see things more clearly. I am comfortable talking about technology and its impact on the present and future. I look for patterns that matter beyond today. Today, though, I had to put all that aside. My heart and my conscience couldn’t ignore the events in Minnesota. I couldn’t ignore Alex Pretti. I felt sad and sickened. I couldn’t look away. There is a deep sadness within me.

Pretti was a 37-year old ICU nurse at the VA hospital. On January 24th, federal agents shot him multiple times. The videos show him holding a phone. Filming. And then helping a woman. The Department of Homeland Security called him a “domestic terrorist” who arrived to “massacre law enforcement.” Video evidence contradicts the official story. How did we get here?

This is not what I thought could happen in America. The sixties protests, Vietnam. That’s just history I read about in books. Grainy photos. Distance. I used to see similar scenes on early CNN: Tiananmen Square in 1989. Arab Spring! I covered that story as a writer who covered social media. 

Beijing. Tunis. Cairo. Not Minneapolis. And the sweet irony is that we are threatening to send our army to root out the Iranian regime because it is killing its citizens.

Federal agents shot an American citizen, and it was caught on video. It is the sickening outcome of virulent tribalism sweeping our world, enabled by the internet. We have forgotten that life is not a football game. Pick your team. Defend your side. Ignore evidence if it contradicts your tribe. 

We think democracy is the flag, the ability to vote, or words in the Constitution. It is not. Democracy is an idea, an ideal, an agreement. Once you decide evidence does not matter if it hurts your team, you have already lost the thing you think you are defending. We are not seeing what is happening to us.

Red Sox vs. Yankees. Mac vs. Windows. Harmless tribalism. Then the internet scaled it to everything. Cable news figured it out first. Outrage gets ratings. Social networks weaponized it. Algorithms reward tribal warfare. Fight harder, see more content that makes you angrier. That’s the business model.

Divide and rule. The oldest trick in the book, supercharged by platforms built to profit from our blindness. This isn’t a conspiracy. Cable needs viewers. Social platforms need engagement. Politicians need votes. Tribal warfare delivers. Political machinery seized the chance to capitalize on it. Now we’re trapped. The system profits when we cannot see clearly. Videos show X. Your tribe tells you Y. You believe your tribe because the infrastructure has trained you to. Innocents die!

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“All that happens must be known.” The Circle by Dave Eggers

Being a guy who looks at the world through a technology lens, I have been noodling about how reality is being presented to us outside our normal channels. Raw footage from hundreds, if not thousands, of phones. They are recording historynot for posterity, but for the present. Yet in our present, history has no meaning, just as the future seems futile.

For long-time readers, my fascination with cameras and their omnipresence isn’t new. In 2017, I framed it as The Third Eye, a new era in which the omnipresence of cameras would redefine society. The idea came from Hindu tradition: thethird eye as the eye of insight, seeing beyond ordinary sight. The phone camera has become our virtual third eye. A witness. A way to document reality that official narratives cannot control.

A smile is a smile in Chinese, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, and English. The emotional payload is universal. The visual web was emerging as a universal language. Photos were becoming the atomic unit of social platforms. I was excited. Millions of vantage points were creating a collective sight. I asked: How can we create a way for visuals to tell the near history of our time?

Minnesota is answering that question, and I don’t like what I see.

Cameras are everywhere. More than a billion surveillance cameras are installed worldwide. Last year, 1.2 billion smartphones with cameras were shipped. Two trillion photos are taken each year. In Minneapolis bystanders filmed everything. Reuters verified the footage, as did the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. The visual record is unambiguous. It contradicts the official story completely. Yet the official story continues.

I was right about cameras democratizing witnessing. Anyone can document reality. We bypassed gatekeepers. But I was wrong about accountability. I thought seeing would create it. I thought evidence would force consensus. That shared visual reality would make it harder to lie. The assumption was simple: if enough people saw the same thing, power couldn’t ignore it. Minnesota proved me wrong.

I keep thinking about The Circle, a wonderful book by Dave Eggers. It imagines a world dominated by one company, loosely modeled on Facebook, where cameras record everything and no one even pretends otherwise. “Secrets are lies,“ the company insists, and total transparency is sold as moral progress. This is the kind of nonsense I believed in my younger days. 

In The Circle, a man is hunted in real time by crowdsourced tracking. The footage is not denied. It is reinterpreted, and it eventually loses moral weight. Truth does not disappear; it drowns in commentary, metrics, and ephemera. In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Together, Eggers and Orwell reach the same unsettling conclusion. The crisis is no longer whether technology can show us what happened; it iswhether society is still willing to believe its own eyes.

Forgive me if I sound fatalistic, but the Third Eye can document everything. It doesn’t change anything. It was supposed to overcome official narratives, and it has. Yet it has left us drowning in fragments, each of us constructing a reality from the pieces we choose to believe. The cameras have shifted the burden of judgment from institutions to individuals. We all see the fragments. We all have access to evidence. So we all decide what it means. In a tribal system, we decide based on our team.

“People of Illinois, we need your help. Get your cell phones out—record what you see. Put it on social media.” JB Pritzker, Governor of the State of Illinois

If this is where we are now, when we can still verify videos, what happens when AI gets better at generating convincing ones? We are already primed to deny inconvenient truths and question everything as fake, or true, depending on which side you’re on. Inconvenient footage surfaces. Someone claims it’s AI-generated. What if the “powers” decide to label any real footage as AI and fake?

In a tribal system where people already believe their side over their own eyes, you don’t need to prove the video is fake. You only need to plant the question. Doubt is the weapon.

Perception is becoming reality. Propaganda has moved from pamphlets to radio, television, social media, and now AI, each transition faster, cheaper, and more personalized. Governments have always used propaganda. What’s different now is scale and speed. AI generates content faster than humans can fact-check it. It tailors the message to what you’re predisposed to believe, hyper-targeted, inside your own bubble. And it is moving so fast.

Velocity has replaced authority in media. Algorithms reward motion over truth. Doubt is the virus that will eat us from within. AI doesn’t just create fake content; it creates doubt about what is real. That is more powerful. You don’t need to convince people the fake is real. You only need to convince them the real might be fake.

I wrote these as separate essays: cameras as witness, tribalism as blindness, velocity as authority, AI as reality distortion, Half truths. Suddenly, they have converged into an ugly reality.

Today I feel deep sadness, a sense of loss for Alex, for his family, for all of us as citizens, and, most of all, as humans.

January 26, 2026. San Francisco

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Addendum

What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that, if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame. From Chernobyl via my post The Cost of Lies

The past week has also shown us the power of the third eye — the camera on our phone. Hundreds of thousands of videos, photos, and voices have been recorded and shared on social platforms. These same social platforms have been the source of much consternation, raising questions about who we are trusting to decide what and how we get to view information. So far, the response of those in power has largely been a denial of what the eyes can plainly see for themselves. We may not have a complete handle on whether the information being fed to us by our algorithmic masters is fact or half-truth, but it is easy enough to see what’s happening in a short clip of an old man pushed to the ground and bleeding. It is difficult to refute the brutal and repeated beating of a young black woman. It is hard to ignore that.

From my June 2020 piece, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly of Technology,