All images are propaganda

I’ve been blocking images and videos in my web browser lately. Not everything, but I’d say well over 60%. Experimenting with the right balance of what to allow and what to reject. My brain feels like it is reclaiming lost territory from not being incessantly exposed to just a stream of endless visual trash. It’s given me this sinking feeling, that all images are propaganda.

If we look at it etymologically, image comes from Latin imago for copy, imitation, or likeness. And propaganda, also from Latin, for extend, spread, increase. A copy that spreads. An imitation which increases.

Increases what? Itself, I guess we could say memetically speaking, but I’m not sure I buy all that, at least not in solo. What it propagates is not merely itself but an information complex, embedded socio-cultural assumptions, political situations, historical moments, on and on. Through the choice of what is depicted, what is not depicted, who is doing (or pretending to be doing) the depicting, or not doing (or pretending to not be doing, through false attribution or claims of origin, for example).

Every image evokes a splash of emotional response, of mental and sensorial connections, chains of references and associations. A constant triggering in all directions. That’s why being on the internet today feels so much like being a passenger in the sidecar of a richocheting pinball strapped to an atomic bomb in a brutalist arcade machine owned by a malevolent gnostic demiurge who sent his only son to our planet to buy Twitter, so that he could look at all our DMs trying to find nudes so he could decide which of our species he wants to impregnate.

I guess this is just to say, I’m good without all that noise.

I also understand that language, perhaps all communication and signalling, in some sense is an attempt at propagation of something. So why draw the line at text? Because I like it. It feels right to me. It feels like something I can evaluate at a human scale without constant bombardment, constant flashing lights and notifications drawing you ever farther down and out in the Cone of Light.

I’m aware too that extracting oneself from the clutches of the Cone of Light industrial complex is a fraught and perilous voyage full of steps forward, and backward, and sideways – an intricate dance with many partners coming and going. And few obvious viable long-term solutions at first glance…

It’s sure that the Cone of Light seeks to propagate itself, and it is wildly successful in doing so. From its perspective, the contents of the images it flashes before our eyebrains are only of consequence insofar as they propagate the existence and ascendancy of the Cone of Light.

Anyway, just working this out in real time out loud. It’s a feeling, but it’s growing. I can see it rising out of the mist in the moonlight.