The Words of the Prophets Are Written on the Facebook Walls

Something is happening to how we perceive history. As you've seen, protesters took to the streets of Tehran, with their smartphones and pocket digital cameras bearing witness to tumult encapsulated into grainy viral videos, their voices fluttering in tweets and blogs while the Iranian government tries futilely to shut the whole thing down—surely a telltale sign they'd prefer to pummel the revolt without witnesses showing the world how they went about with the pummeling. Yet again, the world watches history unfold on the internet in the assumed position—hands behind the backs, fingers crossed, vaguely optimistic things will work themselves out for the best.

I was a kid when the violence of Tiananmen Square slewed its ugly face on the evening news twenty years ago in June. Honestly, all I can remember is the reel that burned a hole in our heads, and there it is forever: a man standing in front of a Chinese tank, a fate of torture and death all but certain, and as the tanks try to maneuver around him, he sidesteps again in their path. The scene is almost comical, if it weren't so deathly real. I was too young to consider running over him was an option.

Death and injustice must always have their witnesses.

I imagine the desperate hands punching fax numbers written on a crumpled piece of paper, as the police in riot gear and the child soldiers stomp up the stairwell. And then we were introduced to the coldness of the video camera. The silent spectator filming a scene he may have seen countless times already: a black man being beaten relentlessly by three white cops.

We are entering a new era in which nothing is unseen. The comedian tucked away in the comedy club spouting racists slurs at the audience, the tsunami wiping out the coastline, the Scottish hermit-songstress taking over our imaginations and our wildest Horatio Alger dreams, the aftermath of a hurricane and then of a human catastrophe waiting, stranded, with no sign of help arriving—we invite over our family and friends to see the digital streams, to take part in the people's history. Soon our heads are filled with this shit, and these streaming videos and images will never leave us, so that even as we are old, dying on stoops in rocking chairs, we will still see the starlet's beaver shot as she climbs out the limo.

We are living in real time, for better or worse. We are documenting our own history, and I hope we can document everything, so there will be as few questions as possible. For so many things that have happened I don't think I'd ever be able to find adequate words to explain why they had to.

Concerning Iran and the world, the idealist in me foolishly wants the passion of justice to burn the hearts of all men and women, so they no longer have a choice, and must change their lives and their governments. It foolishly wants the internet to render tyranny obsolete. It foolishly wants peace and foolishly believes peace will prevail.

But, for now, the realist in me is hedging his bets on evil, that when the network cameras return, the protestors will have returned home with their new government the same as the old government, as so many before them have returned home with their efforts lost and exhausted. And we will go back to the internet and again treat it as only a source that provides countless hours of pop-ups and money-shots and movie star rants, and I'll be just another voyeur bumping up the view count, as Wayne Coyne sings gleefully, "with loving hands knowing that evil will prevail . . . evil will always win."

We are superconnected now, and thank God for it and oh dear Christ for it. The internet's either our greatest weapon or a realization of some of Orwell's unhappier visions. We have all placed our heads atop the archaic torso of Apollo. History is ours now. Keep the cameras rolling.