> I, too, found it compelling. I scheduled an interview with the two filmmakers who said they had been digitizing the footage. Their publicist explicitly told me these were “real” dating tapes.

> The clips, they revealed, are not found footage from a lost era. The videos are staged.

It feels silly to complain about an art project that definitely felt staged from the beginning, but this does kind of keep eroding any sense of trust online.

Maybe that's a good thing; we've already talked to our child about online videos - every time you watch one, especially one that arouses strong emotions, you have to ask yourself: why was this scene being filmed in the first place? What are the odds that this interaction was caught on film by chance?

It just feels like whimsy is slowly being eradicated from online spaces.