China-US Relations Hit New Lows: In a dramatic escalation, China ordered the US consulate in Chengdu closed in retaliation for the US closing China's Houston consulate. The UK suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong after Beijing implemented its new national security law.
COVID-19 Pandemic Creates Regional Hotspots: The pandemic evolved into a series of regional crises. Northern Spain placed 200,000 on lockdown, Australia isolated 6.6 million in Victoria, and China implemented a "wartime" lockdown in Urumqi. France made masks mandatory in all indoor public spaces.
Tragic Violence Across Continents: At least 81 protesters were killed by military forces in Ethiopia. A mass shooting at a drug rehab center in Mexico killed 24. A church in South Africa was taken hostage, leaving five dead.
Cultural Reckoning Continues: The Washington Redskins NFL team announced it would drop its name and logo following decades of criticism.
July 2020 was the month the world decoupled. The sense of a shared global crisis splintered into a series of parallel, dissonant emergencies. One region faced a "wartime" lockdown while another was consumed by a diplomatic cold war. The glitch is this dissonance—a system trying to display multiple, conflicting realities at once, resulting in a jammed, incoherent signal.
This artifact simulates a geopolitical monitor fracturing under the strain of these competing data streams. Each colored band represents a different crisis—geopolitical tensions, regional lockdowns, violent conflicts—vying for attention.
The ghost in this machine is the loss of a shared narrative. Your cursor is a faulty decoder; you can try to focus on one signal, but it's constantly corrupted by the static of the others. It reflects a moment when the world could no longer agree on what the most important story was, leaving only a cacophony of broken signals.