Conquering images and the basis of transformative action

Abstract: Our rapid immersion into online life has made us all ill. Through the generation, personalization, and dissemination of enchanting imagery, artificial technologies commodify the minds and hearts of the masses with nauseating precision and scale. Online networks, AI, social media, and digital news feeds fine-tune our beliefs and pursuits by establishing narratives that subdivide and polarize our communities and identities. Meanwhile those commanding these technologies conquer the final frontiers of our interior lives, social relations, earth, and cosmos. In the Attention Economy, our agency is restricted and our vitality is depleted for their narcissistic pursuits and pleasures. Generative AI empowers the forces that homogenize and eradicate life, not through some stupid "singularity" event, but through devaluing human creativity, labor, and social life. Using a fractured lens, we will examine how narratives and networks influence us on mental, social, and algorithmic levels. We will discuss how atomizing imagery -- ideals and pursuits that alienate, rather than invigorate the individual -- hijack people's agency to sustain the forces that destroy them. We will discover how empires build digital networks that optimize society and embolden narcissists to enforce social binaries that perpetuate the ceaseless expansion of consumption, exploitation, and hierarchy. Structural hierarchy in the world is reified through hierarchy in our beliefs and thinking. Only by seeing images as images and appreciating the similarity shared by opposing narratives can we facilitate transformative action and break away from the militaristic systems plaguing our lives.