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. Certainly since the pandemic, when phrases like “screen fatigue” entered common parlance, there has been a palpable desire for something beyond the attention economy, from “techlash” to simply touching grass.
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.” Enshittification traps users in feedback loops of hyper-individuated consumer categories guided by recommender algorithms – creating a sense of solipsism that I’m sure anyone who has ever slid into an inadvertent doomscrolling session can relate to. It is now harder than ever to sustain the belief that social media platforms’ main goal is to inspire or connect us.
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.
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