First "Bitcoin Nation": El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, a radical, disruptive experiment in decentralized finance.
G7 Summit & "Vaccine Diplomacy": Leaders of the world's wealthiest democracies met, pledging to donate 1 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to poorer nations, while also confronting the rise of China.
Miami Condo Collapse: The sudden, catastrophic structural failure of the Champlain Towers South building in Surfside, Florida, killed 98 people, becoming one of the deadliest structural collapses in US history.
NATO Labels China a "Security Challenge": For the first time, NATO formally identified China as a persistent security challenge, signaling a major strategic shift for the Western military alliance.
Canada Residential School Graves: The discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools for Indigenous children forced a national reckoning with Canada's colonial history.
COVID's "World's Deadliest Day": While the G7 pledged vaccines, Brazil reported its highest-ever single-day death toll from COVID-19, highlighting the stark reality of "vaccine apartheid."
June 2021 was a month of profound divergence. The signal was not a single, coherent crisis, but a schism between two opposing worldviews operating simultaneously. One was the signal of the old world: centralized, top-down control, represented by the G7 and NATO making pacts and pledges. The other was the signal of a new world: decentralized, disruptive, and chaotic, epitomized by El Salvador's Bitcoin gamble and the literal, physical collapse of an old structure in Miami.
The glitch for this era is this "Divergent Signal." It is the visual representation of a system being pulled in two directions at once, unable to resolve which reality is dominant.
This artifact simulates a data stream fracturing under this strain. On one side, the data of the centralized world flows in an orderly, predictable manner. On the other, the data of the decentralized world is emergent and chaotic. The ghost in this machine is the tension between these two futures. Your cursor controls the focus of this conflict; as you move it, you give power to one signal, causing the other to corrupt and glitch. It is a reflection of a world that has not yet decided which path it will follow.