I’ve become a movie director.
This project began with our symposium on cognitive warfare with Bianca Banova and Renée di Resta. I thought it was a terrific—and an important—discussion.
I wished all of you had been there. But you weren’t, and I know very well that a three-hour Zoom call, however interesting to the participants, isn’t much fun to watch.
There were some parts of that meeting, I thought, that would be great in a movie. I was curious to know whether AI had advanced to the point that I could, by myself, transform a the video of a Zoom call into something that resembled a professionally-produced documentary.
The answer is “no.” But I got way closer than I could have a few years ago.
I did it all by myself. It took forever. But this film was produced by exactly one person (with the assistance of ChatGPT, who proved far more useful than Descript’s AI. Now that this film is done, I’ve fired Descript. Goodbye, Descript. You were too expensive, and your AI was incompetent.)1
The War for Reality is a full-length professional documentary about cognitive warfare, active measures, algorithmic manipulation, plausible deniability, and how, exactly, a democracy can defend itself without becoming something undemocratic itself. There are some delicious, gossipy scenes, too, where Renée di Resta unloads on Matt Taibbi. (She feels about him much the way I do about Descript’s AI. And for good reason.)
So this is NOT just another Zoom video. It’s not just people droning on in boxes. It is a proper documentary.
Now, I won’t pretend Netflix is about to acquire it. You’ll detect the hand of someone learning as she went. But it should hold your attention all the way through, if social media hasn’t completely fried it. I’m very proud of it.
I also spent many, many hours making it. I’ll probably never do that again.
So watch the damned thing.
