So I was going to write something about the FCC vote this week, and then Thursday night happened and now literally everyone I follow on Twitter is fighting about a dress instead of Title II reclassification. Fine. I'll do the dress. Net neutrality can wait a day, other people are covering it better than I would anyway.
If you somehow missed it: a photo of a dress got posted to Tumblr Wednesday night by a musician up in Scotland (I'd seen it credited to a woman named Caitlin, apparently the original confusion started because a guest at her friend's wedding couldn't agree with anyone else what color the thing was). By Thursday it had migrated to Twitter and BuzzFeed ran a poll post that, from what I can tell, just about broke their servers. My whole feed was split roughly in half between people insisting it's white and gold and people insisting it's blue and black, and both sides were absolutely certain the other side was either lying or defective.
For the record: I see white and gold. Instantly, no effort, no squinting. My wife looked at the same photo on the same laptop three feet away from me and saw blue and black immediately, also with total confidence, and got mildly offended when I suggested she was seeing it wrong. We went back and forth on this for probably twenty minutes last night instead of watching the show we'd actually sat down to watch.
Here's the part that's actually interesting to me as someone who spends too much time thinking about screens and color: this isn't really a trick photo or a compression artifact thing, even though a bunch of people (myself included, initially) assumed it had to be a JPEG issue or a bad monitor calibration. It's apparently much more about how your brain does color constancy, basically guessing what the ambient lighting in a scene is and correcting for it before the color even reaches your conscious perception. If your brain assumes the dress is in shadow, it discounts the blue cast and you get white/gold. If it reads the lighting as bright and overexposed, you get blue/black. Two people can look at the exact same pixels and have their visual systems make a completely different assumption about the room, and there's apparently not a lot of consensus about why some people default one way and others default the other way.
I mention the monitor calibration angle because I do think it matters at the margins even if it's not the main cause. I run my desktop monitor a little warm because I do a lot of photo editing and it's easier for me to catch skin tones running orange than to trust a cooler profile, and on my machine the photo leans gold in a way it doesn't on my phone screen, which is basically stock calibration out of the box. So there's at least a real, boring, actually-tech reason that two devices in my own house could show you slightly different versions of the same file. That part I can defend. The part where my wife and I looked at the identical pixels on the identical panel and disagreed, that's all brain, not hardware.
Anyway, the internet did what the internet does, which is take a mildly interesting perceptual quirk and turn it into a referendum on whether you can trust your own friends. Taylor Swift tweeted about it. So did approximately every brand's social media intern trying to get a piece of the traffic, which is the part of these moments I find kind of exhausting. Within about six hours you go from "huh, weird optical thing" to "every company account is doing a dress joke" and the novelty is just gone, cooked out of it by noon.
I do think there's something a little bit wonderful about a random photo of a $50 dress from a UK retailer completely hijacking the news cycle for a day, tech and otherwise. It's dumb. It's also the kind of dumb that reminds you the internet is still, underneath all the platforms and the algorithms, mostly just people standing around arguing about what they're looking at.
Net neutrality post is coming, promise. It's a bigger deal and I want to actually get the Title II stuff right instead of half-assing it at midnight. Today's just the dress.