Signed

Synthetic media became perfect in 2031. Not good enough to fool most people — perfect. No detection algorithm works because generation and detection are mathematically the same problem, and generation won. Courts, insurance companies, employers, and platforms adopted the only remaining solution: cryptographic signing at the point of capture. By 2035, only media signed by a Certified Device — a camera, microphone, or sensor on the C2PA Certified Device Registry — is legally admissible as evidence, publishable as journalism, or accepted as documentation for insurance claims, employment verification, or government records. Everything else is legally classified as Creative Content — a polite term meaning it cannot prove anything happened. Your phone video of a car accident is Creative Content unless your phone's signing chip was authenticated that morning. The officer's body camera footage is Signed because the department pays $4,200 per camera per year for certification. A new divide runs through daily life: Signed existence, which is expensive, institutional, and legally real — and Unsigned existence, which is everything else. The poor live mostly Unsigned lives. Their injuries are harder to prove. Their alibis are harder to establish. Their memories are legally equivalent to imagination. An art movement emerges in the gap: Unsigned artists who deliberately create work without provenance, exploiting the ambiguity between real and synthetic as an aesthetic medium. The question is not whether the video is real. The question is who can afford to prove it.