Analog’s Infinite Bitrate
The latest 4K monitor sits on my desk. It boasts 3840 by 2160 pixels, a color gamut close to DCI-P3, and a refresh rate of 144Hz. Looking at the spec sheet, it seems we have reached a realm where the human eye can no longer perceive any deficiency. The rendered forest on the screen is miraculously sharp. Every strand of fuzz and every vein on a leaf looks close to perfection.
However, the moment I turn my head to look out the window, that perfection instantly collapses into a mere approximation.
I watch the tree branches swaying beyond the glass. Particles of light scatter as sunshine pierces through the foliage. The undersides of leaves flip unevenly in the wind alongside the dance of shadows rushing in between. This exists on a completely different dimension from the pixel-level precision the monitor displayed. It is an overwhelming amount of information that the eyes cannot immediately keep up with.
Digital is inherently discontinuous.
No matter how much you increase the resolution or raise the sampling rate, it ultimately remains a collection of countless stairs. We split pixels finely to express curves, but the stairs simply become denser without ever ceasing to be stairs. If you look through a microscope, you will always find jagged disconnects like the teeth of a gear.
Sound works the exact same way. Even the high-quality audio we listen to is just a sequence of snapshots created by slicing airwaves tens of thousands of times per second. The moment original waves transfer to digital, continuity becomes an arrangement of dots. Subtle textures get tidied up into losses and errors during that process.
Digital omits for efficiency and compresses for transmission. The world we see through smartphone screens is the result of lossy compression algorithms. These algorithms push parts that are hard to notice out of the priority list. We might not be seeing the original, but rather a version deemed "acceptable" to preserve for the sake of efficiency.
On the other hand, the world outside the window is continuous.
Nature has no pixels and no refresh rate. The wind does not blow in chopped frames, and the gradient of a sunset creates no banding noise. The analog world is a reality that tightly fills the gaps between zero and one. While physics might say it is not truly infinite, it floods into human senses as something close to it.
This is Infinite Bitrate.
I sometimes feel afraid because we are gradually getting used to low-resolution experiences. We admire a 4K video of a forest and say it looks real. Yet, we find it bothersome to actually walk into a forest to smell the soil and feel the humid wind on our skin. We stream concerts in high definition while forgetting the physical vibration of a bass drum hitting our chests.
In a world where data replaces the body and experience is reduced to content, we often choose the 4K video instead of the scent of earth. Perhaps we are voluntarily lowering the resolution of our lives for the sake of efficiency.
On a weekend morning, I turn off the monitor and take my child’s hand to go outside. Sitting in a camping chair, I stare blankly at the flowing river. I see irregular waves and sunlight reflecting off the water so brightly it stings the eyes. I smell the raw scent of water as my brain goes into a pleasant overload. It tries to process this massive bandwidth of data. This is the real world with no buffering and no lag. No graphics card can render this in real time.
Because digital is always just a copy or an approximation, the real data is not on a server. It is in the soil and the wind.
If you want to raise the resolution of your life, disconnect right now and step out the door. That is where the infinite bitrate exists.