Conquering images and the basis of transformative action

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Priniski, Hunter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Priniski, Hunter
author_facet Priniski, Hunter
contents 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, artificial intelligence (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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_11254
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conquering images and the basis of transformative action
Priniski, Hunter
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Social and Information Networks
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, artificial intelligence (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.
title Conquering images and the basis of transformative action
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11254