We Are A Camera

When the agony of missing the shot trumps the joy of the experience worth shooting, the adventure athlete (climber, surfer, extreme skier) reveals himself to be something else: a filmmaker, a brand, a vessel for the creation of content.

Now the purpose of the trip or trick is the record of it. Life is footage.

The result is not as much a selfie as a worldie. It’s more like the story you’d tell about an adventure than the photo that would accompany it.

It’s karaoke, but with the full Marshall stack.

The short video synonymous with GoPro is a kind of post-literate diary, a stop on the way to a future in which everything will be filmed from every point of view. 

By now, so much video is being produced that it’s hard to imagine a fate for it other than obsolescence. Where does all this video go? If it’s in the cloud, will it all come falling back to earth, in an apocalypse of pets, babies, head-cam porn, flight lessons, golf swings, and unicycle tricks?

When we were done, Eric Jackson, using GoPro’s editing program, made a thirty-second video of our trip and posted it on his Facebook page. He scrolled down, interested only in how much attention his posts were getting, not in what others had to say. “I don’t read any of this,” he said. “I don’t read Facebook. I don’t watch the other videos. I don’t want to read everyone else’s diaries. I write a diary.” He posts a video almost every day, in part to promote himself and his business (he also manufactures kayaks), but also out of some compulsion to leave a record of his exploits—to draw on the walls of the cave.

I didn’t need a camera to show me what he looked like to the world, but was delighted to find one that could show me what the world looked like to him. It captured him better than any camera pointed at him could.

By enforcing uninterpretable standards of exchange, a video record has the effect of a mandatory sentence. It deprives the police of discretion, and the public of leniency. There are many things we’d rather not see or have seen.

TheEconomist called the film-everything culture “the people’s panopticon”—the suggestion being that with all these nifty devices we might be unwittingly erecting a vast prison of self-administered surveillance.