The dropout at the top of the frame was a fault. The head-switching noise was a fault. The way the chroma smeared behind a moving red shirt was a fault, and engineers in Osaka worked for a decade to remove it, and they succeeded, and the fault is now a paid filter.

It is applied to footage that has never touched tape, to signify a decade that the people applying it did not live through, in order to produce a feeling of authenticity in an image that has no negative anywhere in the world.

This is not nostalgia. Nostalgia requires a home to ache for. This is the aesthetic of degradation applied as a surface to something that was born clean, which is a different operation entirely, and a newer one.

The tell is that the artificial damage is always tasteful. Real generation loss is boring and ugly and takes the whole frame. Simulated generation loss knows where the face is and stays off it.

The copy has learned which parts of itself to spare.