Worry not for Kate; worry for us
Don’t worry about the princess: after all, there is photographic proof that she is alive. No, not that photo. No, the grainy ones of Kate Middleton in a car, this time next to her husband Prince William, facing away from the camera and in shadow, marking the second time she has been seen in public since Christmas Day. See? Right as rain. Or something.
It’s understandable that the public might not be satisfied, if only because the public can never be satisfied. After all, England’s Royal Family are among the world’s favourite zoo animals: all that ritualistic privilege and extravagant plumage, then piled with steep responsibilities and claustrophobic scrutiny that is all but designed to drive them mad. It’s the other “Coronation Street.”
But honestly, should we be worrying about Princess Catherine? She took part in a traditional walk to church on Dec. 25, was admitted to hospital Jan. 16, and the Palace announced she underwent successful abdominal surgery on Jan. 17. Abdominal surgery can mean a great many things, and the Palace noted she would not resume public duties until Easter, nearly three weeks from now. She was in hospital for 13 days. That isn’t short.
What happened next was as predictable as the sun setting on the English empire: in the absence of good information, the internet rushed in to feast. Conspiracies, speculation, jokes. It all got a little frenzied, to be honest. This is what a lot of people do now for entertainment; this is the age of memes. Princess Catherine was photographed March 4, in a black Audi SUV driven by her mother. But that was all we got.
And then came The Photo, officially released by The Palace on March 10. The news agencies expected the usual Mother’s Day photo — Mother’s Day just passed in England — and this one, credited to Prince William, was apparently rushed out without the usual oneday warning to the press.
It was immediately torn to shreds by both the citizens of the internet and, more importantly, by actual news agencies, who deemed it manipulated. All those twisty fingers and weirdly clipped clothing edges had the uncanny valley stink of AI, plus Princess Catherine wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. The Palace would only concede it was Photoshopped, and a statement attributed to the princess was released March 11 that said, “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.”
I would like to meet the person who believes the Princess of Wales sat down and badly edited a photo taken by her husband and then The Palace, which has traditionally operated like some sort of shadow MI6, sent it out to various news agencies. I would like to meet that person and inspect their wallet. Look, maybe the ruthless and professional PR of the Palace has faltered since the Queen died, but this is absolute amateur hour stuff.
It’s all fun and games, of course, except that The Kate Photo arrives at a moment where we are losing reality. Traditional media had and has its flaws, but its ongoing collapse is a huge part of the wider decline in societal trust. So, too, is the largely conservative war on media, in the United States and here in Canada. The profitable rise in disand misinformation is being harnessed by many public figures and politicians.
And even if AI was not a part of this photo, AI is in the process of layering an entire civilizational layer of erratic, soulless and often inaccurate garbage across the internet. It will make creating misinformation that much easier.
In this case, the real beacons were The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters, who issued kill notices when the manipulation was discovered. Again, journalism has problems, but honest journalism has always operated with a set of professional standards.
The rest, though, was a trip through where we are going: sloppy manipulation and jokes and conspiracies all colliding and intersecting in a low-trust environment. In this case, we could figure out who not to trust: The Palace. In this case, there is still a truth out there.
But the problem is the conspiracy game is fun. Photoshopping things into an obviously Photoshopped Princess Catherine photo is fun, and making jokes about the Royal Family is fun. Wildly speculating that the princess has a body double, that this is an ongoing divorce, that her face was pasted in from a Vogue cover shoot, is all fun. And that’s OK, to a point. Have you really looked at the real world lately? Ongoing climate worries, another American election that could end American elections, the after-effects of the COVID emergency, endemic decline. It’s a lot.
It’s more comforting to spend time on the internet going as crazy as a minor English royal, but the way we now engage the world in the absence of shared facts seems more prone to veering into conspiracies: partly because it’s a natural response to a vacuum, and partly because that’s just how the internet communicates now. And between tools we’ve had for decades, like Photoshop, to the new stuff like AI and deepfakes, anyone can make a conspiracy theory now. Like Kate, we can all experiment with editing.
So the question is, what will bind us to reality? If the internet has changed how we talk to each other, how we process events, then if anything, it’s made real truth harder to discern. The higher purpose of propaganda, of misinformation, of disinformation, isn’t just to create an alternate truth; it’s to discredit the notion of truth as a concept. But you don’t have to aim for the erasure of truth to do so, either. If we can all create our own conspiracy theories, whether out of fun or out of malice, how does reality maintain its signal? What happens when institutional trust is further degraded, and when honest media shrinks further in the age of memes?
This was just a photo, yes: a clumsily manipulated one. And maybe there is room, after all, to worry about the princess: maybe something is really wrong. But we should definitely be worrying about us.