China-Taiwan Crisis Reaches Dangerous New Heights: US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan triggered China's largest-ever military exercises around the island. The PLA fired ballistic missiles over Taiwan for the first time, raising fears of military miscalculation between the superpowers.
Ukraine Nuclear Plant Becomes Flashpoint: The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant became a major international crisis as Russian rockets damaged the facility. Both Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for shelling attacks, with international inspectors warning of a potential nuclear catastrophe.
Pakistan Faces Climate Catastrophe: Pakistan declared a "climate catastrophe" as devastating floods killed more than 1,000 people and caused an estimated \$30 billion in damage, in what became the world's deadliest flood since 2017.
FBI Searches Trump's Mar-a-Lago Residence: In an unprecedented move, the FBI executed a search warrant at former President Trump's Florida residence as part of a Justice Department investigation into classified documents, triggering intense political controversy.
Mikhail Gorbachev Dies at 91: The final leader of the Soviet Union, who presided over its peaceful dissolution and helped end the Cold War, died, marking the end of an era.
The signal of August 2022 was not a single narrative but a violent competition for bandwidth. Three distinct, system-level crises unfolded simultaneously: a military crisis in the Taiwan Strait, a nuclear crisis at Zaporizhzhia, and a climate crisis in Pakistan. Each demanded the world's full attention, creating an overload condition where reality itself felt contested.
The glitch for this era is this "Contested Signal." It is the experience of being caught in the crossfire of multiple, overlapping emergencies, where focusing on one means losing sight of the others.
This artifact simulates that signal war. The screen is a tactical display overwhelmed with conflicting data streams. The ghost in this machine is the finite nature of attention. Your cursor acts as a tuner. As you move it, you amplify one crisis signal, bringing its terrifying clarity into focus, but this action actively corrupts and degrades the signals of the other concurrent disasters. It is a reflection of a world where you cannot watch everything at once, and every choice of focus is also an act of omission.