#195: Trouble in the Message Centre

I still feel silly calling Facebook by its new name, but Meta mostly ends up in the news for bad reasons these days, the same way it did before rebranding last year. Meta’s recent notoriety has mostly involved the company’s promotion of its metaverse vision: cartoonish trailers and demos along with awkward announcements like “legs are coming soon,” all of which seems designed to provoke ridicule (or else is shockingly out of touch). During this cycle, the metaverse’s janky graphics became a particular focal point, drawing comparisons ranging from ‘90s computer games to “buttcheeks” and unleashing a wave of disparaging memes. To the hordes who already disliked Mark Zuckerberg, each metaverse announcement was a new bucket of chum dumped into their shark tank. And while I love piling on and punching up as much as anyone else, I found myself unconvinced that the ugliness of Meta’s metaverse mattered at all. It even seems like looking bad might be preferable to looking good. After all, most of the internet is hideous, and many of the most popular parts of the internet, from TikTok to Minecraft to Reddit, have aesthetic styles ranging from unpolished to downright chaotic. Already-disheveled memes are increasingly deep-fried on purpose. Aside from notable exceptions like Instagram, tasteful imagery is at odds with the goal of jamming maximal information through a given channel.

For a virtual reality metaverse, there are many valid reasons for subpar graphics, one of which is the hardware’s limitations. “Lighting, textures, transparency, and many of the effects that make things look good in modern games, at the resolution and framerate required for smooth VR, can’t currently be done on a $400 headset,” a Hacker News commenter explains. While most digital media has more modest requirements than VR, hardware is still a bottleneck: The vast majority of visual content is viewed on 6-inch phone screens, while sound is more likely than ever to play through laptop speakers or cheap headphones. Not only does most of this not need to look or sound fantastic, but excessive resolution might be disorienting and counterproductive—three-camera sitcoms need to be watchable on even the worst TVs (and don’t watch Dunkirk on an airplane like I did). In her 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” Hito Steyerl presents low resolution as a more liberated information format, circulating more freely: “The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.” Later in the essay, Steyerl articulates the core ethos of contemporary digital culture, well before it would reach its present mature state: “Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread.” Visual information, in other words, is defined by a tradeoff between quality and mobility.

The notable exception to this, of course, is the aforementioned Instagram, where all other values are subservient to visual appeal. Instagram’s native aesthetic is deeply familiar by now, as is its influence on the physical world, so often optimized for the platform. Ana Kinsella recently lamented Instagram’s “flattening” of fashion. “Flat is what happens when consumers buy clothing on the basis of how it looks in two dimensions, in an image to be shared on social media,” she writes. “When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.” Kinsella’s usage of “flat” is basically literal—dressing for two dimensions—but the word has also been used more loosely to describe the algorithmic standardization of culture, in which an increasingly reductive image of our own taste is iteratively mirrored back to us, ironing out any quirks and surprises that remain. The two uses of “flat” are closely related; both refer to a simplification process and loss of information. But that flattening also implies a kind of precision or control that blinds us to the much messier reality that forms the backdrop to hyperlegible Instagrammability. For every starchitect-designed museum or concert hall there are thousands of featureless luxury apartment buildings that are essentially the solution to a financial equation. And if physical reality optimizes itself for online consumption, then we can expect the vast majority of that reality to be optimized for something less visually demanding than Instagram. That is, we can expect it to look uglier, or at least messier. As long as we’re viewing the world through a digital lens, the images we see will only be as good as the hardware we use to see them.

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Last week’s subscribers-only issue was about James Turrell’s fragrance collaboration and the gradual infusion of brands and branding into every facet of human experience.

Reads:

• Sam Kriss predicts the end of the internet. “All language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces, spat-out enzymes to digest the world.”

• Landfills are being clogged with IKEA-style “fast furniture,” which sold furiously during the pandemic and is often not biodegradable or built to last.

• Dean Kissick weighs in on Dimes Square hyperreality. “Dimes Square is a real place mapped onto the internet—but 'Dimes Square' as a concept might also be understood as a mapping of online performances and aesthetics back onto the real world.”