"We are, at present, surrounded by maximum aesthetic signaling, online and off, living partly in the timeline of Labubudubaichocolatematcha even as we move our sensing, feeling bodies through 3D space."
Escaping Peak Visuality by Adina Glickstein
10.17.25
We’ve reached peak visuality, a moment when the systems circulating images have begun to overrun the production circuits that feed them. Yet out of this saturation emerges an exciting new opportunity, an opening to foster new human experiences that elevate the multi-sensory, the embodied, and the communal.
On October 23rd at DOG, Adina Glickstein will lead a conversation on this topic with Jake Nagle, VP of Osmo a machine olfaction startup using AI to digitize smell and Alex Yenni, co-founder of Fjord (a company building a thermal culture authentic to California).
Adina Glickstein is a writer and editor at large for Spike Art Magazine currently pursuing her PhD in art history & media studies at Stanford University. She writes a monthly column on internet culture called User Error.
The constant updating and circulation of aesthetic codes and -cores, status symbols and signifiers is profitable for those at the top of the pyramid of value – namely, the social media platform titans which furnish the main infrastructure for image-circulation. For the rest of us, it is sheerly exhausting. What happens to memory and experience when we are so inundated? How long can we go on like this?
Our social media environment creates a peculiar sense of derealization vis-a-vis the offline world, ironically obfuscating the very real ecological toll of always-on computing. And as cultural critic and founder of New Models Carly Busta has observed, the tightening feedback loops between attention, cultural production, and monetization afforded by social media platforms have given rise to a sense of flatness and disconnection.
Our social media environment creates a peculiar sense of derealization vis-a-vis the offline world, ironically obfuscating the very real ecological toll of always-on computing. And as cultural critic and founder of New Models Carly Busta has observed, the tightening feedback loops between attention, cultural production, and monetization afforded by social media platforms have given rise to a sense of flatness and disconnection.
“In short, as reactions against the “attention economy” mount, there is an urgent need for platforms and spaces that transcend the flatness of the screen and the visual-first logic of the social media feed.”
If the technology industry intends to make good on its foundational promises of radical innovation and meaningful connection, it must turn in another direction. Could the creation of more embodied, multisensory experiences be a salient alternative?
To answer this question, let’s embark on a brief history lesson to examine how we arrived at this cultural moment of Peak Visuality. It’s too easy to suggest that our present state of aesthetic saturation started with the advent of the iPhone, released in 2007. Over the nearly 20 years since, social media image-sharing platforms like Instagram have certainly effectuated a major change in our preferred modes of receiving dopamine. But the hyper-emphasis on visuality and aesthetics did not begin with Instagram or Apple; it is a tendency that has been gestating and intensifying since the onset of modernity.
The privileging of sight in Western culture has been called “ocularcentrism,” its contours traced by intellectual historians like Martin Jay and Hal Foster. The celebration of vision above the other senses – sound, smell, touch – is not, they disclose, an immutable fact of human history. Ancient Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle considered sight to be the noblest of the senses, but this tendency properly intensified during the Enlightenment as part of a cultural project of “civilizing” and disciplining the body. Sight was taken to be a clean, appropriately-distanced and masterful way of interfacing with the world as other forms of embodied sensory experience, which came to be considered base and vulgar, were marginalized.
Our ocularcentric culture thus long pre-dates the tech industry. But the advent of the internet has no doubt thrown it into overdrive, and globalization has endowed it with new capacities for extracting profit. The rise of digital networks and social media doubled down on the primacy of the visual as images came to circulate more easily than ever before, enabling trends to spread frictionlessly across the world. The researcher and trend forecaster Toby Shorin describes the primary mode of brand innovation today as one of “aesthetic production: the production of images and their value in society.”
Initially, the rise of social media was cause for optimism. Some, like the German art historian Hito Steyerl, thought that this newly-frictionless infrastructure for image circulation would have a democratizing effect – paralleling the cyber-utopian dream that new network structures would automatically lead to more horizontal relations of power writ large. Sadly, that is not what happened. The utopian future of frictionless global connection was colonized by the onset of the aforementioned attention economy rife with behavioral capture, exploitation, and manipulation. As social media platforms grew, misaligned incentives led them to turn against users, in a process that the tech critic Cory Doctorow has termed “enshittification.”
In parallel with platforms’ collusion and corrosion, the rise of generative AI has driven the marginal cost of aesthetics to nothing — but it has also severed the human experience layer which was once presumed to underlie social media. We can make and circulate fake images faster and cheaper than ever. We can fake it till we make it. We can looksmaxx offline to better resemble our online avatars. But the core kernel of felt experience – the affective center of it all – has been thoroughly hollowed. We have reached Peak Visuality, the culmination of centuries of post-Enlightenment ocularcentric culture collapsing from its own emptiness.
Back in 2018, well before we were collectively subjected to Labubudubaichocolatematcha brainrot, Shorin argued that we were hitting the point of diminishing marginal returns on the visual. He writes: “Usually disruptions create new markets, which generate enormous wealth and value. In the case of aesthetics, much of this value has been soaked up by the existing infrastructure providers […] the forces of technology that have created these markets are simultaneously destroying the monetizable value of the entire cultural category.”
It is my contention that, in order to stay competitive in a market oversaturated with aesthetics, cultural production and technological innovation must pivot to the multi-sensory — the embodied domain beyond the visual, including the kinesthetic and the olfactory. There is evidently a desire for technologies that facilitate connection in new ways; especially as mainstream applications of AI pose a perceived threat to existing modes of social connection, “the hunger for something shared is going to increase,” writes Ben Thompson for Stratechery.
To answer this question, let’s embark on a brief history lesson to examine how we arrived at this cultural moment of Peak Visuality. It’s too easy to suggest that our present state of aesthetic saturation started with the advent of the iPhone, released in 2007. Over the nearly 20 years since, social media image-sharing platforms like Instagram have certainly effectuated a major change in our preferred modes of receiving dopamine. But the hyper-emphasis on visuality and aesthetics did not begin with Instagram or Apple; it is a tendency that has been gestating and intensifying since the onset of modernity.
The privileging of sight in Western culture has been called “ocularcentrism,” its contours traced by intellectual historians like Martin Jay and Hal Foster. The celebration of vision above the other senses – sound, smell, touch – is not, they disclose, an immutable fact of human history. Ancient Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle considered sight to be the noblest of the senses, but this tendency properly intensified during the Enlightenment as part of a cultural project of “civilizing” and disciplining the body. Sight was taken to be a clean, appropriately-distanced and masterful way of interfacing with the world as other forms of embodied sensory experience, which came to be considered base and vulgar, were marginalized.
Our ocularcentric culture thus long pre-dates the tech industry. But the advent of the internet has no doubt thrown it into overdrive, and globalization has endowed it with new capacities for extracting profit. The rise of digital networks and social media doubled down on the primacy of the visual as images came to circulate more easily than ever before, enabling trends to spread frictionlessly across the world. The researcher and trend forecaster Toby Shorin describes the primary mode of brand innovation today as one of “aesthetic production: the production of images and their value in society.”
Initially, the rise of social media was cause for optimism. Some, like the German art historian Hito Steyerl, thought that this newly-frictionless infrastructure for image circulation would have a democratizing effect – paralleling the cyber-utopian dream that new network structures would automatically lead to more horizontal relations of power writ large. Sadly, that is not what happened. The utopian future of frictionless global connection was colonized by the onset of the aforementioned attention economy rife with behavioral capture, exploitation, and manipulation. As social media platforms grew, misaligned incentives led them to turn against users, in a process that the tech critic Cory Doctorow has termed “enshittification.”
In parallel with platforms’ collusion and corrosion, the rise of generative AI has driven the marginal cost of aesthetics to nothing — but it has also severed the human experience layer which was once presumed to underlie social media. We can make and circulate fake images faster and cheaper than ever. We can fake it till we make it. We can looksmaxx offline to better resemble our online avatars. But the core kernel of felt experience – the affective center of it all – has been thoroughly hollowed. We have reached Peak Visuality, the culmination of centuries of post-Enlightenment ocularcentric culture collapsing from its own emptiness.
Back in 2018, well before we were collectively subjected to Labubudubaichocolatematcha brainrot, Shorin argued that we were hitting the point of diminishing marginal returns on the visual. He writes: “Usually disruptions create new markets, which generate enormous wealth and value. In the case of aesthetics, much of this value has been soaked up by the existing infrastructure providers […] the forces of technology that have created these markets are simultaneously destroying the monetizable value of the entire cultural category.”
It is my contention that, in order to stay competitive in a market oversaturated with aesthetics, cultural production and technological innovation must pivot to the multi-sensory — the embodied domain beyond the visual, including the kinesthetic and the olfactory. There is evidently a desire for technologies that facilitate connection in new ways; especially as mainstream applications of AI pose a perceived threat to existing modes of social connection, “the hunger for something shared is going to increase,” writes Ben Thompson for Stratechery.
"The infrastructure for disseminating aesthetic content is cannibalizing the very production circuits that feed it. So, as invisible cybernetic systems come to exercise growing control over the visible world, where do we go from here? How do we escape from Peak Visuality?"
In view of this hunger, a major growth opportunity exists in offering communal experience geared towards heightening embodiment. It’s already self-evident that “wellness” is a flourishing market niche; a case study by Tony Wang of the Office of Applied Strategy notes that the global wellness industry is worth $1.8 trillion (about $1.5 trillion more than the global luxury market) and growing at a projected 10 percent annualized rate. But “wellness” is, too often, merely a euphemistic way of selling existing beauty ideals. Nevertheless, the booming consumer demand for wellness products is telling insofar as it speaks to a widespread desire for interventions that heighten the experience of inhabiting a body, which we are all doomed to do until the singularity cometh.
In step with this trajectory, I’ve observed a growing desire for a new wave of Third Places: non-home, non-work public spaces that foster community and sociability. Building on previous waves of desire for communal spaces, this new wave foregrounds well-being. “Wellness” is, all too often, code for individualized market-based solutions. But, of course, actual wellbeing is not a product of isolation; it can only take root in community. And the ability to offer activities grounded in embodied experience is a huge value prop for Third Places. Think of run clubs; social saunas; “physical culture” activations; and meditation studios.
The necessary escape from Peak Visuality will only happen when we reinvest in multi-sensory experiences where the premium is placed not just on how things look, but how they feel; in spaces where we can explore these sensations together. As technology encroaches ever further into our lives and psyches, creating and maintaining offerings that hold onto the uniquely human forms of embodied experience will no doubt prove essential. Spaces to connect and unplug, like Fjord – a floating sauna in the Bay in Sausalito – are exemplary in this regard.
To the converse, I also anticipate that one of the next major frontiers in wellness will be the ability for computers to transmit multi-sensory data — to foster new realms of intimacy and interoperability between humans and technology that augment the experience of our physical existence. We know how to relay words, images, and sounds as data — but our existing protocols do not yet have established pathways for communicating the full richness of embodied experience: taste, smell, and touch.
What new kinds of feelings, sensations, and health interventions could be possible? There is so much white space in the market here. Hence: another aligned space for growth exists in the realm of teaching computers what it means for humans to feel, in all its fullness and richness. We see this in startups like Osmo working at the frontier of digital olfaction; projects like Corsetto exploring tech-assisted body haptics for use-cases like breath training for athletes; and initiatives like the Multisensory Intelligence research group at the MIT Media Lab geared towards advancing AI for physical sensing, including smell and taste.
Whether you fall into the camp that strives to protect and enhance the physical experiences that have up until now been reserved as uniquely human — or whether you’re excited by the opportunity in expanding technology’s ability to draw on and enrich these experiences — it is clear that multi-sensory media is an emerging vertical with room still to grow, even within the already-booming wellness sector. Notably, millennials and Gen Z spend disproportionately in the wellness market — perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that younger generations also self-report higher levels of burnout (according to McKinsey). That last figure is particularly telling: anecdotally, my own feelings of burnout are intimately connected to the screen-fatigue associated with Peak Visuality. How will the market respond? I forecast a future that is post-aesthetic, multi-sensory, breathy, communal, and grounded – engineering new ways of augmenting embodiment and celebrating the irreplaceable dimensions of being human.
===========
On October 23rd at DOG, Adina Glickstein will lead a conversation on this topic with Jake Nagle, VP of Osmo a machine olfaction startup using AI to digitize smell and Alex Yenni, co-founder of Fjord (a company building a thermal culture authentic to California). Click here to register for the event.
In step with this trajectory, I’ve observed a growing desire for a new wave of Third Places: non-home, non-work public spaces that foster community and sociability. Building on previous waves of desire for communal spaces, this new wave foregrounds well-being. “Wellness” is, all too often, code for individualized market-based solutions. But, of course, actual wellbeing is not a product of isolation; it can only take root in community. And the ability to offer activities grounded in embodied experience is a huge value prop for Third Places. Think of run clubs; social saunas; “physical culture” activations; and meditation studios.
The necessary escape from Peak Visuality will only happen when we reinvest in multi-sensory experiences where the premium is placed not just on how things look, but how they feel; in spaces where we can explore these sensations together. As technology encroaches ever further into our lives and psyches, creating and maintaining offerings that hold onto the uniquely human forms of embodied experience will no doubt prove essential. Spaces to connect and unplug, like Fjord – a floating sauna in the Bay in Sausalito – are exemplary in this regard.
To the converse, I also anticipate that one of the next major frontiers in wellness will be the ability for computers to transmit multi-sensory data — to foster new realms of intimacy and interoperability between humans and technology that augment the experience of our physical existence. We know how to relay words, images, and sounds as data — but our existing protocols do not yet have established pathways for communicating the full richness of embodied experience: taste, smell, and touch.
What new kinds of feelings, sensations, and health interventions could be possible? There is so much white space in the market here. Hence: another aligned space for growth exists in the realm of teaching computers what it means for humans to feel, in all its fullness and richness. We see this in startups like Osmo working at the frontier of digital olfaction; projects like Corsetto exploring tech-assisted body haptics for use-cases like breath training for athletes; and initiatives like the Multisensory Intelligence research group at the MIT Media Lab geared towards advancing AI for physical sensing, including smell and taste.
Whether you fall into the camp that strives to protect and enhance the physical experiences that have up until now been reserved as uniquely human — or whether you’re excited by the opportunity in expanding technology’s ability to draw on and enrich these experiences — it is clear that multi-sensory media is an emerging vertical with room still to grow, even within the already-booming wellness sector. Notably, millennials and Gen Z spend disproportionately in the wellness market — perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that younger generations also self-report higher levels of burnout (according to McKinsey). That last figure is particularly telling: anecdotally, my own feelings of burnout are intimately connected to the screen-fatigue associated with Peak Visuality. How will the market respond? I forecast a future that is post-aesthetic, multi-sensory, breathy, communal, and grounded – engineering new ways of augmenting embodiment and celebrating the irreplaceable dimensions of being human.
===========
On October 23rd at DOG, Adina Glickstein will lead a conversation on this topic with Jake Nagle, VP of Osmo a machine olfaction startup using AI to digitize smell and Alex Yenni, co-founder of Fjord (a company building a thermal culture authentic to California). Click here to register for the event.