View on Zencastr

This episode is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts.

Alexandra Juhasz
My best friend from college, and the first love of my life, was a man named James Robert Lamb. And we lived together as friends and companions, and Jim got AIDS. He was very isolated and he was scared and he was manic. And Jim invited me to Florida to make a video.

Jason Fox
That’s Alexandra Juhasz. This is some of the footage she recorded back in 1992.

Because he’s fabulous as that Norma. And I have the Lupe costume. She wore . . . in this thing she wore dresses. I mean I’ve seen these dresses down here which we can get for a song, for you and for me . . .
—James Robert Lamb, Video Remains

AJ
I was only recording for him in that moment because I thought he was unstable.

And pink carnations or roses all the way down her bust like this. Like, you could almost do it with this shirt with three big red carnations . . .
—James Robert Lamb, Video Remains

JF
Jim’s young, classically handsome, and he’s sitting on the beach in Miami in a crisp, short-sleeved shirt, half-unbuttoned. He’s wearing a hotel towel as a headdress, and he’s looking off into the distance. Jim is talking to Alex, but it’s kind of hard to figure out what he’s talking about.

. . . Hello, Dolly! And I did a lot of this and with flowers coming out. And then I kept changing hats for all the characters. And then I did Guys and Dolls, which I just . . .
—James Robert Lamb, Video Remains

AJ
It is an honoring of what was a brutally painful, but loving, honoring of his request to make art with him as he was dying.

JF
The tape just sat in Alex’s closet for over a decade before she felt like she could do anything with it. But when she decided she was ready to revisit it again, she started making a film called Video Remains (2005). Video Remains combines the footage she shot with Jim with reflections from friends about the ongoing war on people living with HIV and AIDS in the US. Then, in 2005, she was invited to show it at the Flaherty Seminar. And during the post-screening discussion she said something pretty surprising about it.

AJ
I hated the footage, hated it. He wasn’t telling stories neatly, and therefore it was hard to imagine making it into a documentary, because documentary demands the proper subject. And if you were asked to sum up your life in an hour, how coherent would you be? He fails in the way that we all as regular humans would fail in the task of making a video that sums up our life for posterity, which is what he was trying to do. I mean, he knew he was dying.

JF
Remember that this was still early in the consumer video era. In the 80s and the early 90s, it was finally getting affordable for lots of people to record video without thinking about what they were recording for. But Alex was mostly using her camera to record activist tapes about AIDS.

AJ
HIV was utterly misrepresented in mainstream media. If you wanted to learn how to take care of yourself, utterly misrepresented. If you wanted to learn who had HIV and what their lives were like, utterly misrepresented. Fundamentally racist and sexist and homophobic, definitively. So part of it was a politic that people who are ill are experts in their own conditions and lives, and their voices must lead conversations about the experience of the illness, but also what should happen next—the political conversation as well. For me, activist tapes are very utilitarian. They’re for an audience. They’re about an issue. They understand their relevance in relationship to a set of goals in the world.

JF
But Alex’s tape of Jim doesn’t do those things. It’s not an activist tape. It’s just Jim, with Alex, as he was dying.

[Interviewing Alex] Was part of your sitting on Video Remains a fear about how images of HIV and AIDS in general, and how Jim’s image in particular, might be misinterpreted at best, or weaponized at worst?

AJ
I had no worries about showing Jim not as a heroic person with AIDS. I had trauma. And I wasn’t ready to be in that awful space where my best friend was dying and was not at his full capacities. And I had videotape memory of that—like, what an awful legacy. And of course it wasn’t an awful legacy, because it was an honest legacy.

JF
Video Remains is painful to watch, even if you didn’t know Jim. And maybe that’s because we’re watching it from the present, and we know the full toll of the war on people with AIDS. But it’s not painful in the way images of war often are. It’s not really a window onto an atrocity in a faraway place or time, and there isn’t a sum of information to tell viewers what can or what should be done about it. Really, it just holds space for the loss, and for grieving. And that means everyone takes away something different. Those differences are baked into the film. When Alex finally decided to revisit the footage, she was just starting to come to terms with her loss. She couldn’t really make sense of what she was seeing, so she asked her friends to take a look, and to tell her what remains.

You know, how do you remember? Have you remembered enough? So there’s even a kind of guilt at not holding fast to memories of people well enough, or strong enough. I can’t say that I feel that I’m . . . I don’t know . . . I’m honoring people’s memories as well as I would like to.
—Alisa Lebow, Video Remains

JF
That’s Alisa Lebow. As an AIDS activist, she’s grappling with the idea that not remembering Jim enough might mean she’s not doing enough.

And this is Sarah Schulman.

If you suffer and you never get resolution or justice, then you learn that it doesn’t matter how you treat other people, and you’ve learned by the example of being the victim, and it becomes extended. Now if you get accountability and justice, then I think you can have a real healing and the suffering can end. And that’s why people strive for that.
—Sarah Schulman, Video Remains

JF
We often treat images of pain and suffering as if they have some intrinsic meaning that will be immediately obvious to everyone. But for Sarah Schulman, these kinds of images only gain their clarity once the conditions that caused the suffering have been addressed. Millions of people died of AIDS, but it felt like the world just moved on. Maybe it’s less about finding meaning in images of pain, and more about the struggle to give them meaning. In the absence of any kind of resolution or justice, the images of Jim . . . they just kind of hang there.

JF
I’m Jason Fox, and this is Trust Issues, episode 5: “What Remains.” Alex’s original footage of Jim was only seen by a handful of friends, and the meanings they gave to it are contained in the final film. But these days, raw footage is circulated online to millions who quote, tweet, caption, reedit and recontextualize it, sometimes beyond recognition. So what happens today when the same footage can be shared by opposing forces with very different political aims? That question stuck with me after seeing this one video clip online a few years back, and I asked a friend of mine, Stefan Tarnowski, to walk me through it.

Stefan Tarnowski
Funnily enough, I haven’t seen the video for a couple of years now.

JF
He’s an anthropologist who writes a lot about videos from the Syrian revolution. It’s the first publicly known execution video made by a member of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

ST
The video begins with three men kneeling on a square, with someone holding a black flag behind their backs and reciting verses from the Qur’an, and explaining that these men are traitors and they’re going to be executed. Three men stand point-blank range behind them and execute them. Corpses are being thrown down a ravine into an abyss. It continues to film the ravine, which is being morbidly circled by birds, and one by one the masked men throw the corpses down the ravine. It seems to have very little more involved than simply a man filming with a camera—probably a phone camera—and then posting the video online, probably on YouTube.

JF
At a glance, the video looks like a thousand others that were recorded during the Syrian revolution and war. Honestly, that’s what I thought. What I didn’t know is the story of how I came to see it—that it was hand-carried out of Syria by an ISIS defector, only to end up in the US State Department’s social media campaigns. And the thing is that, once you know that story, the video stops being a window onto the reality of ISIS, and it starts being a sort of funhouse mirror that reflects Western imaginations of the Middle East. But to make sense of the video’s evolution, we first have to understand how it came to be.

It’s 2011, and cellphone videos of Syrian protesters in the streets of Deraa are being streamed to viewers in Damascus and in Homs.

ST
There was a huge amount of optimism that the videos being uploaded by Syrians themselves were going to inevitably lead to a revolutionary overthrow of the Syrian regime. So there was a way in which the videos and the aspirations of the protesters were mutually reinforcing of each other.

JF
For a lot of Syrians, social media wasn’t the battlefield, but it was a tool they could use in their battle. At the time, Stefan was working as a researcher for the performance artist Rabih Mroué. You can see this kind of aspiration Stefan is talking about in a performance called The Pixelated Revolution that Mroué did in 2012.

He’s sitting in the middle of a dark stage, and he’s lit by a reading lamp on a desk in front of him. And then behind him videos from Syrian protesters’ Facebook and YouTube accounts play on a big screen. He introduces one video he calls “Double Shooting.” It’s a showdown between a regime soldier with a rifle and a protester who is filming him. We’re watching the video the protester was recording, and Mroué starts to talk us through what we’re seeing.

JF
Then the screen goes black. Mroué saw hundreds of videos like this, where Syrian protesters dared to record and upload images of Syrian military brutality.

ST
And low-res is equated with cheap production values, and is thus a kind of sign of the essentially democratic nature of pixelated images.

JF
Revolutionaries knew that amateur video was an important tool for galvanizing people, but it wasn’t a silver bullet. I mean, Assad could just as easily dismiss it all as fake news or, worse, as a terrorist conspiracy, like he did in this March 2011 speech to the Syrian parliament.

It is no secret to you that Syria today is the target of a great conspiracy whose strings are pulled from countries near and far, and extend inside the homeland.
—Bashar al-Assad

ST
They could circulate images of torture and killings in detention that attempted to terrify these popular movements. So Syrians, right from the beginning in 2011, were aware that these technologies—far from guaranteeing a sort of transition to democracy—for all of the ills that they solved, they created new ills of their own.

JF
While revolutionaries were battling against the state in the street and on social media, Western coverage was acting like Silicon Valley had already won the war in Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria.

Syria’s uprising has been called the “YouTube Revolution” because of the distinctive videos documenting state violence against peaceful protests.
—NPR, August 3, 2011

In a Skype interview from Cairo, Zidane says the Egyptian revolution made history because of the internet.
—If I can name it. I will name it the “Twitter Revolution.”
In a major speech on internet freedom, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US will provide more help for internet users worldwide to get around filters and get their message out.
—We have our ear to the ground, talking to digital activists about where they need help, and our diversified approach means we’re able to adapt to the range of threats that they face.
—CNN, February 16, 2011

JF
That was CNN and NPR on the wonders of social media, but no one overstated it better than Hillary Clinton’s former advisor Alec Ross.

The Che Guevara of the twenty-first century is the network.
—Alec Ross, March 22, 2011

ST
I don’t know if these Western media outlets really thought that it was social media companies that were driving this third wave of democratization, or whatever they called it. It kind of seemed that by granting these media companies naming rights for these popular movements, it could at least make them palatable to a global audience.

JF
People sometimes refer to this as the “find-the-white-actor” school of journalism. Like, if a popular uprising on the other side of the world feels confusing or unrelatable or scary, then you just filter it through Western ideals and values. I mean, one difference between Che Guevara and Facebook is that only one of them is a person. When journalists focus exclusively on tech platforms, they forget that the people holding the cameras are actually fighting for their lives.

ST
In 2011, when the revolution started, Syria was still a relatively closed country. It didn’t have a large number of foreign journalists in the country, nor did it have an independent media of its own. You know, there was a regime-controlled media and regime-controlled TV stations, and so foreign journalists were either denied entry to protests or they had their visas revoked and were simply kicked out of the country. So very early on, there were kind of two choices that people following events in Syria from the outside had. They could either follow the regime narrative by following regime media, or they could turn to the images and posts being produced by Syrian activists themselves on the ground.

JF
By 2014, basically all the footage coming out of Syria was recorded secretly by citizen journalists, or openly by soldiers and fighters. And it was a great situation for broadcasters. I mean, amateur videographers would upload shaky, grainy, frontline video to YouTube, and then news producers just downloaded it and incorporated it into daily news segments. The footage is authentic, and they don’t have to pay for it.

ST
And as these tapes become recirculated, news organizations, especially ones like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, start reaching out directly to various activists and asking them to produce more and more clips for them in order to fill their news slots about what’s happening in Syria. And on the other hand, activists themselves start reaching out to satellite news companies and sending them their footage directly.

JF
But that didn’t last. A couple of years in, media activists needed to actually make a living. News broadcasters were ultimately producing a commodity, and commodities need to be unique if they’re going to be valuable. So outlets decided they wanted exclusive rights to footage, and they started hiring amateurs to get it.

ST
This often took place with exploitatively low pay. I’m thinking of one war photographer in Aleppo in particular who shot images for Reuters for three years. Once the revolution militarized, he continued to follow a particular militia and was killed on the front. And it came out, after he was killed, that in fact this young war photographer was in fact only sixteen or seventeen years old. And so, the time at which he started working for Reuters, he was just thirteen. Stringers often didn’t have contracts. And if anything did happen to them—if a stringer was killed—they wouldn’t have to pay any compensation to the family.

Jonathan Giesen
It’s great if you’re a citizen journalist and you get your story and it’s posted on CNN, and you’re like, “Wow, I’ve been published on CNN.” But the question of going back out there and doing that day in, day out and digging deeper into the stories, you have to have some type of remuneration.

JF
That’s Jonathan Giesen. In 2011, he was living in Cairo and thinking, There’s got to be a better way to do this. So Giesen cofounded a company called Transterra, this online marketplace where big news agencies could buy footage from local journalists.

JG
News agencies didn’t have the reach from an on-the-ground coverage standpoint that they had historically had, just because of budget cutbacks and so forth. And so CNN needs to get a story out of Fallujah. How would they find the people? How would they manage it? How would they know where they are in production? How do we deliver that content?

JF
Transterra was basically an image broker. Here’s how it worked. Citizen journalists upload photos to Transterra’s server and then Transterra edits it and packages it into a story for CNN, or whoever’s buying it. But first they needed to make sure buyers could trust the footage was legit.

JG
I’m just trying to think of any moment where somebody actually faked their content. I think there was a plane crash once upon a time that was faked, and they gave us, like, footage from Afghanistan or something like that. One of the strengths of Transterra was really to understand who these guys are and have extensive conversations with them through the onboarding process, and then cross-check who they’re working for, who they’re affiliated with. And we would put together a whole kind of ranking system on the back end.

JF
That was the easy part. Remember when Stefan said Syria is a closed country? For most of the war, journalists couldn’t get in or out. But there was this brief window after revolutionaries liberated a lot of the areas along Syria’s border with Turkey.

ST
A huge number of international organizations, companies, humanitarian organizations, media outlets, and satellite news stations set up offices in certain big towns and cities quite near the Syrian border. And because the border was open, towns along the Turkish border with Syria became sort of hubs for everything from international NGOs to media organizations.

JG
We built an uploader that was capable of accepting video at two kilobytes per second over the course of days, but where the journalists were not able to upload, they would hand-carry that content directly over the border.

JF
And that’s how Transterra first got hold of a literal handful of videos from an ISIS defector. He had carried them two hundred miles across hostile terrain, from Raqqa to Gaziantep, which was a Turkish city just north of the Syrian border. And when Giesen reviewed the footage, he felt like people really just needed to see this. So he brought the clip to the head of VICE News and he was like, “There’s this new Islamist militia that’s committing war crimes.” But VICE wasn’t interested. To them, it was just another atrocity video by a group they’d never heard of, from someplace they’d never heard of. And he wasn’t just getting it from the networks.

JG
Journalists were getting a little bit, shall we say, peeved with Transterra in terms of, “Look, this is an amazing story. Don’t you understand what’s going on?” We’re like, “We totally understand what’s going on. It’s just that nobody’s necessarily interested in the story.”

JF
The problem is that, at this point, ISIS wasn’t ISIS yet. They’re just another militia. And to VICE and other networks, any thirteen-year-old in their parents’ basement could find gruesome videos on the internet. So the clip just sat on Transterra’s server, waiting for the news to catch up. And eventually, it did.

Brutal, well organized, and well financed. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS, has rapidly morphed into the world’s most dangerous jihadist organization.
—CNN, June 13, 2014

ST
This was one of the most media-savvy organizations out there. It started producing more and more of its own execution videos, which it circulated online, generating a kind of moral panic in the West. As the panic surrounding ISIS grew, so did the value of this clip.

JF
Giesen went back and took another look at the footage from the ISIS defector in Gaziantep, and he noticed something. One of the clips featured a woman talking with her family in Raqqa, but she was speaking French, not Arabic. So he ran the clip over to the French broadcasters TF1, France 2, and France 24.

A glimpse into another world. This footage has been filmed by a woman who’s concealed a camera under her required niqab, risking her own safety as she walks through the streets of Raqqa.
—France 24, September 24, 2014

JG
Now you had a linguistic cultural connection directly to a French citizen in Raqqa, and that pinged on the radar of the French, and they picked it up. Once the major French broadcasters picked it up, then the rest of the world was very much interested in that story.

JF
And by the rest of the world, he doesn’t just mean the rest of the West. Even the Dubai-based broadcaster Al Arabiya told Giesen that they picked it up based on coverage in The Times.

ST
And in the end, Transterra Media went from not being able to find a buyer for it, to this clip being the most expensive clip, he said, that they ever sold. So it was sold for $710, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a YouTube clip that is quite a lot of money.

JF
I really wish I could say that that was the end of the story. But the clip was sold in 2014, just as the Syrian revolution was devolving into a full-on proxy war, with Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Britain, and the US meddling to serve their own interests. Enter President Obama.

We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.
—President Barack Obama, August 20, 2012

JF
And here’s a reporter asking Prime Minister David Cameron about it.

People have heard you say that this is crossing a red line. They hear the strength of the rhetoric and they maybe ask, What does that mean?
—Well, I think we should be clear that this is not about putting British boots on the ground. That is not . . .
—BBC, April 26, 2013

JF
In the summer of 2013, the US and Britain are constantly talking about Assad’s use of chemical weapons as “crossing a red line.” But the US-led invasion of Iraq a decade earlier was clearly a disaster, and it meant that leaders had to think twice about putting “boots on the ground.” Still, ISIS was such a classic supervillain, and they hated to let a good moral panic go to waste.

ST
The lack of appetite for intervention, coupled with the optimism for social media, created a kind of faith that, you know, the next best thing to military intervention is intervention in the media sphere.

JF
Instead of soldiers, the US and British governments sent strategic communications teams into neighboring Lebanon to set up nonprofits.

ST
You can have one media office that this “stratcoms” company would be setting up to counter radicalization. And another media office this stratcoms company would be setting up would be to promote democracy and human rights. And this only grew exponentially with the rise of ISIS and with ISIS’s own media strategy . . . not very successfully, it has to be said.

I could go to a Syrian working for an independent newspaper like Al Balad, and I would say, “Do you know anything about this media platform?” They would take one look at it, maybe read the About page and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s an American-funded one.” And I’d be like, “How do you know?” “Oh, I can just see it there. You know, it’s this stuff about women’s rights and democracy and this and that.”

JF
One of those media platforms was called Masarat, an Arabic word for path or track, as in “the right track.” They’re ostensibly a grassroots Lebanese nonprofit. According to their YouTube, they’re committed to journalistic objectivity. But really, they’re funded by the British government, funds that Masarat ended up using to buy the execution footage from Transterra in a more direct attempt to delegitimize ISIS in the eyes of the Syrian people.

ST
But the thing about ISIS was that for the huge, vast majority of Syrians anyway, they were completely illegitimate. So that in itself was quite an absurd task.

JF
Not that it mattered to Masarat. They hastily edit the ISIS clip together anyway, adding satellite images that geolocate the gravesite, and then upload it to their YouTube channel. They call it “Where ISIS Hides Its Corpses.”

ST
It was presented as a kind of forensic investigation, identifying the location of ISIS mass graves. It has this cut of the pictures of the execution to geolocation images, back to images of the corpses being disposed.

JF
In other words, Masarat created a splashy video claiming to solve a crime that no one was actually investigating, and that the video would help them wrest the hearts and minds of a generation of young Arabs away from ISIS. And they said they had the data to prove it. But that’s not what the data actually showed.

ST
What those YouTube analytics tell you is, in fact, really blunt. You can tell how long someone watched a clip. You can tell at what point they clicked off. You can tell, potentially, the location of the viewers and maybe some demographic information about them as well.

JF
And this is when things really start to get weird. Cue the US State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, which is essentially a kind of counterterror social media meme lab that’s run by middle-aged guys in khaki pants. This is their former coordinator Alberto Fernandez talking about al-Qaida, or “AQ.”

AQ, of course, were the vanguards. They pioneered a certain style, a certain way of doing things. But al-Qaida is your parents’ internet. It’s AOL.com or Myspace.
—Alberto Fernandez, Washington Post, May 8, 2015

JF
These guys get the ISIS clip on loan from Masarat, and they decide to take things a step further with a video they call “Welcome to ISIS Land.”

ST
It involved repurposing the footage of ISIS atrocities and including sarcastic captions that were meant to dissuade viewers from going to join ISIS.

JF
Even though they swore by the power of social media, they still had no idea who was actually clicking on the videos they made. But someone working for CNN saw it, and so did a producer for Last Week Tonight, the HBO show hosted by comedian John Oliver.

It seems that everyone has noticed ISIS’s viral success, even the US government, because they recently decided that, for some reason, it would be a good idea to try to beat ISIS at their own game.
—The State Department has produced a counternarrative, Wolf, a new video from the State Department. We can show you a clip of that right there as well that sarcastically kind of tells potential ISIS recruits that they can “learn new, useful skills by blowing up mosques, by crucifying and executing Muslims,” as you see there.
—Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, September 7, 2014 

JF
Cue an incredulous-looking Oliver.

JF
Jonathan Giesen buys the clip in an open-air market along the Syrian border in Turkey and can’t sell it to anyone—not even VICE, who built an empire on this kind of stuff. Then, when ISIS conquers Mosul and starts making headlines, Masarat buys the clip and repackages it as a forensic investigation into the heart of darkness.

ST
It then gets picked up by a US State Department counterpropaganda organization, which creates really one of the most surreal pieces of video art you’ll ever come across. And then, finally, this kind of Frankenstein of a piece of work gets spoofed on John Oliver. So you just see this clip take on a life of its own. And really, that life is being animated at every stage by different Western imaginations, and lack of imagination, regarding what this group is.

JF
In the two years after the clip aired on John Oliver, a lot happened that would curb Western journalists’ enthusiasm for the democratic ideal of social media. In summer 2016, 51 percent of British voters approved a referendum to withdraw from the European Union. And then five months later, Donald Trump gets elected president. And because it was easy to blame social media, that’s what we did. But we couldn’t just laugh it off anymore. And so YouTube, or more accurately Google, changes its user agreements to make it harder for people to access stuff that might radicalize them. But they either didn’t know how or just couldn’t be bothered to distinguish between revolutionaries and ISIS.

ST
In 2017, they took down roughly 400,000 videos from the Syrian revolution. This generated a big outcry. People were pretty sure that the revolution wasn’t going to succeed, or at least not in any immediate sense that they envisioned in 2011. Syrian media activists turned a lot of their focus to war crimes tribunals. And so these videos became key evidence for the promise of a future war crimes tribunal. Organizations like the Syrian Archive started setting up their own servers in order to archive images since 2011 produced inside Syria. So they created their own web crawler that managed to harvest most of the images that were on YouTube and Facebook and store them securely on their own servers. But the problem is that they could only restore the images that they knew existed. So things that we thought would exist forever online were now being lost forever.

JF
You can still find the ISIS execution footage online, but not directly. It will be embedded in an international news story, some hokey psyops project, or a late-night comedy show. And I wonder if all the different lives that ISIS footage has lived is evidence of our ambivalence about circulating images of pain. Our news media tells us we do it because images have power. They’re effective at bringing moral clarity to a distracted world. Then we take them out of circulation because they’re effective, just not in the way we wanted. And either way, the people most affected by images from the Syrian revolution . . . they didn’t have much of a say. The cliché that histories of war are told by the victor is a cliché because it’s true. In this case, it was John Oliver who got the last word. And those words are valuable. Because without access to all of the media produced across a decade of struggle in Syria, that’s what remains.