Planet of the Vertical Rectangle: How Video Became the World’s Mother Tongue (and Part-Time Tyrant)
The Universal Language Nobody Asked For
A world tour of the 21st-century’s most democratic art form: the shaky vertical rectangle that ends civil discourse, launches revolutions, and lets your aunt in Jakarta rate your soufflé.
PARIS – In the beginning was the Word; now it’s the 15-second clip set to royalty-free ukulele. From the favelas of Rio to the glass towers of Riyadh, humanity has agreed—without ever actually agreeing—that reality is best served in 1080p, auto-stabilised, and monetised by a platform whose name sounds like a sneeze. The UN recognises 195 sovereign states; TikTok recognises one: the People’s Republic of Influenza.
Consider the numbers, if your attention span still permits such indulgences. Five billion souls—roughly the population that believes Wi-Fi is a human right—watch online video daily. That’s every man, woman, and unimpressed cat viewing the equivalent of 65 years of footage before breakfast. Meanwhile, literacy rates stall, but who needs Dickens when an algorithm can compress the human condition into a 0.75x speed dance routine?
In Myanmar, the military junta live-streamed its coup like a budget Bond villain, accidentally proving that totalitarianism looks even worse in portrait mode. Across the border in Thailand, protestors answered by flashing the three-finger salute on Instagram Reels, thereby shortening their life expectancy but lengthening their follower counts. One side uploads torture; the other uploads memes about it. The comments section remains the last true neutral zone, equal parts Amnesty report and potluck recipe swap.
Further west, the European Commission—an institution historically fond of paperwork—now spends its afternoons DMCA-ing deepfakes of Ursula von der Leyen selling male-enhancement gummies. The Continent that gave us Mozart has been reduced to playing whack-a-mole with fraudulent Estonian crypto-bros lip-syncing AC/DC. Somewhere in Brussels, a civil servant weeps into his Orval while muttering “this is not what Schuman died for.”
And yet, for every crisis live-cast in real time, there’s a quieter miracle. A Kenyan midwife WhatsApps a three-minute tutorial on birthing complications to a village with no roads but decent 4G. A Ukrainian teacher uploads a physics lesson from a bomb shelter; by Thursday it’s homework in Buenos Aires. The same tool that spreads QAnon can also teach you to tie a tourniquet—provided you scroll past the conspiracy theorist in a Batman mask.
Naturally, the market has noticed. Netflix spends $17 billion annually so you can rewatch The Office for the ninth time in Bucharest. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund bankrolls a glitzy esports league where teenagers earn sheikh-level salaries for shooting digital terrorists, presumably a growth sector back home. Even the Vatican has a YouTube channel, because nothing says “eternal salvation” like pre-roll ads for mobile RPGs.
Economists—those cheerful undertakers of optimism—estimate the global “creator economy” at $250 billion, which is coincidentally the same figure the IMF attributes to worldwide mosquito-net funding. One industry keeps people awake doom-scrolling; the other keeps them alive. Guess which one gets the tax breaks.
Of course, the medium isn’t entirely to blame. Video merely amplifies the species’ existing hobbies: showing off, freaking out, and monetising both. Give Homo sapiens fire and we invent the flaming Lamborghini; give us a camera and we invent thirst-trap diplomacy. The only thing more predictable than the next viral atrocity is the comment “First!” underneath it.
So where does this leave us, besides hunched over blue-lit rectangles in various time zones? Possibly at the same crossroads Guttenberg faced, except instead of movable type we have movable eyebrows. The printing press birthed the Enlightenment and the Thirty Years’ War; video will birth something equally grand and ghastly, already loading at 92%.
Until then, hit record: the algorithm is hungry, history is buffering, and your fifteen frames of fame are just a ring light away. Don’t worry if you miss it—someone else is already re-uploading your life with a better caption.
