December 20XX.
Say word.
It was not long after the start of Trump's second term when Project VoCo was leaked, and then shit really went down.
The software, made by Adobe, was around since the time Trump first took office. It was said to only be in development at that time, but we have our doubts. You could say the software is like photoshop, but for voice clips. VoCo allowed users to masterfully edit recorded speech without a trace of tampering; now people could be seamlessly censored, or made to say whatever somebody else wanted.
Back in 2017 when everybody thought we were headed for impeachment, a sudden supply of leaks came out. People who had only been targeted in tweets before were getting called out on cable news. Journalists, past presidents, contenders for the presidency, had all seemingly been caught on hot mics conspiring to do some crazy shit.
The public had been mostly won over. Yeah he's not the best, but he's not the worst either, they thought. Not long after the presidency was stabilized Project VoCo was released, but only for use under specialized industry licences. The FCC made that happen, no mention that it was restricted because it could be misused though, only that it had very narrow applications. Project VoCo was officially for the film and music industries, so that singing and dialogue could be fixed up more easily, no longer requiring re-recording sessions.
After that, any time Trump got into some trouble it was blamed on VoCo. An enemy of the state stole VoCo to make that, it was all fake news. The infamous pussy grabbing recording was accused as a VoCo fabrication as well. The "original" recording was released by the POTUS handle on twitter, somehow it went "grab them by the hand".
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Finally somebody leaked VoCo to the public, like a modern day Snowden, and suddenly everyone was on even ground. There were leaks everywhere, supposed interviews, and speeches recorded. Conservative extremists would release audio of a liberal leader saying something they expected, but would never actually hear. Unwitting conservative followers rejoiced in their validation; "aborted babies are actually born and then thrown in the garbage, I knew it!!" Liberal extremists would create audio of conservative leaders saying surprisingly drastic things, to try and incite revolt from their own inactive peers. Both sides created messages that they wished their own leaders would say, but were too diplomatic to do so in reality. Both sides created provokingly offensive media of their own leaders to try and bait the other side into violence.
Now tell me, how
Many revolutionary groups rose to action in this time period, the most notable being BLM. Relatively immune to the information manipulation system, they were able to maintain authenticity and relay information to their supporters.
People today sometimes ask how they were able to encrypt their information. It wasn't that. It was more that they knew how to spot forgeries. White people trying to fabricate messages from BLM leaders would get the sound all wrong. They would use slang incorrectly, not reference the new memes, or would overcompensate with some lame ass slang used too frequently.
Eventually this defence was also overcome. Machine learning algorithms and chatbots frequenting hip hop forums like kanyetothe were able to build up a decently convincing repertoire. Further, vulnerable POC were being blackmailed, or bribed to cooperate with the government.
A new method was needed to keep it real, to ensure that leaders of the resistance factions could be distinguished from the fakes. Slang, grammar, diction could all be copied now. The content of the message was no longer authenticating, so resistance leaders added rhythm, rhyming, and ad libs. These were impossible for white people to copy effectively, and rapping became the main tool for revolutionaries. VoCo was simply ineffective when used alone; the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
It was said that the great leader and martyr Kendrick Lamar was originally the one to spread this idea:
"You vandalize my perception but can't take style from me"
In the current time, nobody knows this to be true for sure though. People don't believe that the currently available tracks have the same bars on them as they originally did. That would imply that even rapping has been successfully faked with VoCo however, and there is a growing group of people that truly believe this. Some of us even believe that this VoCo software has been used to fake rapping from time ago... how else did they get those posthumously released Tupac tracks?
