Seeing is no longer believing — and every history has an author

In the back of a kitchen cupboard we keep a biscuit tin that hasn't held biscuits in twenty years. It holds photographs — the printed kind, soft-cornered, a little sticky. My daughter was digging through it when she went quiet and held one up to me. It was my mother's family on a stoep, everyone squinting into the sun. Except one figure at the edge had been cut out with scissors, neatly, leaving a person-shaped hole and half a shoulder that now belonged to no one. "Who was that?" she asked. "Ag, nobody," I said, taking it back. "Long story." I put the lid on the tin.

It wasn't nobody, of course. And it took me a few days to admit that the little scissored hole in that photograph had more to teach my daughter than anything I would say to her about the internet that week.

We are raising the first children who genuinely cannot trust their own eyes. A photograph used to be a kind of promise — this happened, the camera was there. That promise is gone. A picture on a phone can now show a flood that never came, a person saying words they never said, a crowd that was never that size — and do it so smoothly there is no seam to catch. "I saw it with my own eyes" used to end an argument. Now it barely starts one.

The camera never lied to us more than it does now — but it was never quite telling the whole truth either.

And here is the part we forget, because we think this is a brand-new problem: the picture was never the whole truth. Someone always chose where to point the camera, when to press the button, which shot to keep and which to tear up. Long before anyone could fake an image on a phone, my mother's family faked one with a pair of scissors. Every photograph, every news report, every history in a school book has an author — a human being who chose what goes in the frame and, just as powerfully, what stays out. The fakery got faster and more invisible. The deeper question didn't change at all: who made this, why, and who isn't in the picture?

This is not a reason to believe nothing, which is its own kind of trap — the person who trusts nothing is just as easy to push around as the person who trusts everything. The skill isn't suspicion; it's the habit of one extra question before you share, before you're outraged, before you're sure: where did this come from, who made it, and what would they want me to feel?

You can build this young, and you need no technology to start. Look at old family photos together and ask who took it, and who is missing. When something dramatic lands on the family WhatsApp, don't fact-check it at them — wonder out loud, "I'd love to know who first posted this, and where." Let them catch you not sharing something because you couldn't tell where it came from. You are not teaching them to disbelieve. You are teaching them to ask for the author.

Which brings me back to the biscuit tin.

I did, eventually, tell my daughter the long story — who the scissored person was, and why a hurt that old had once reached for a pair of scissors. But the lesson she had already grasped, holding that person-shaped hole up to the light, was the bigger one. Someone had edited the past to keep the version they could bear. Not with an app. With scissors, on a stoep, decades before she was born.

Seeing was never quite believing. It's only that now the scissors are invisible.

Seeing is no longer believing — and every history, it turns out, has an author.