I do still use images a bit for shopping or ideation purposes especially, but for much of the rest of the web I’m happy to say good riddance to images. I can safely say that I am not missing much for the most part.
Not only that, but it is happening again and again lately that when I go image-less, I check my few RSS sources or websites I still like (vanishingly few and far between these days), click around a couple things… and then somehow the interest in continuing with that kind of pointless browsing just sort of dries up and goes away pretty quickly. Dissipates. Instead of that like ceaseless chasing of your eyes gobbling up images and your brain and emotions getting pushed around by them.
Browsing the web like this (in a trickle or ‘garden hose’ mode – instead of firehose) is… boring? And that is exactly what I want. A web that forces me out of it, that leaves little place for my projections. Where my activity is not constrained by artificial screen time measures, but simply by the fact that it just doesn’t look that good visually. It’s not “sticky” and I can just then go do other things offline.
It definitely has taken a few days for my brain to get used to browsing without images. Something in me rebelled at first, and was always reaching for the toggle. Now its easy to see that your stock photo image of the sky isn’t adding anything to my life, and I don’t need to allow all those intrusions into my personal thoughts and emotions like that anymore. Unless there’s some good reason.
The upshot of all this is now, when the web work of the day is done, I’m more and more having this feeling of like, okay, just close the computer. Go read a book. Because the web without images is revealed as a sort of emperor with no clothes: a really badly edited and disorganized book. It makes you realize, fuck, it’s better to go read a book. Fuck all this noise.
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