Image-Junkies

“Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.” 

- On Photography, Susan Sontag

In the years since the installment of personal cell phones, mass accessibility to the internet, and high-speed data, the age of the “new image” has begun to form: an age where we do not perceive the world on its own, but we also perform through it within our devices. In no domain is this more apparent than in the omnipresence of the short video app TikTok—a twenty-first-century online stage where identity, perception, and performance collapse into a single, looping video clip. TikTok, and its acolytes, the “Influencers”, have transformed how perception is organized, produced, and consumed. This shift, though digital in format, is ontological in consequence. It is not merely the way we see that has changed, but what one might assume seeing is. The platform is not content-driven as we once understood content– now, it is perception-driven. What succeeds on TikTok is not the articulation of truth but the choreography of sensation. The Influencer, unlike the artist or thinker, is not beholden to meaning. They are emissaries of affect—curators of visual pleasure, bearers of mood, and merchants of glance.

This is not new. One must recall that photography, too, once disrupted the sanctity of presence. But TikTok is not merely the latest in a line of technological developments, it is the culmination of what Baudrillard might have called the triumph of the simulacrum, wherein he synthesizes that “the space itself decays when the map of the territory replaces the territory by being the territory itself”. The Influencer is not a person but a pose—an archetype spun into being through algorithmic preference and marketable aesthetics. Identity is flattened into a mask and authenticity becomes its own parody. To understand TikTok as a whole is not to critique the platform as a purveyor of distraction or a reducer of attention spans—these are facile condemnations, more moralistic than analytical– instead, I ask you to consider: What does it mean to see on TikTok? What does it mean to be seen? Perception, in this economy of images and reproductions of images, is less an act of interpretation and more an act of consumption. The viewer scrolls, not searching for meaning but for feeling. The image must hit—quickly, viscerally, with a kind of visual violence that bypasses thought. Most people swipe on a video within the first few seconds, and so the desire to latch on a viewer becomes essential to the exchange of goods. TikTok trains perception in speed. The “For You Page” (the central homepage on the app that, with a swipe of your finger, flits through video after video based on the data of your consumption) is an infinite corridor of flashes. It teaches the eye not to linger but to slide, quickly, down the rabbit hole and the consequence is that duration becomes a liability; immediacy, a virtue. How we see changes; the frame, once hallowed in photography and cinema, now becomes ephemeral and malleable– it is a placeholder for the next. The Influencer, alongside the home page and the wandering finger, becomes an embodiment of the new logic of visual charisma: they are not experts but their appeal lies in relatability, in a dance between aspiration and accessibility to the viewer. Expertise becomes irrelevant, and status takes its place: if the viewer knows the influencer, they are likely to take their word and not interrogate their claims. In doing so, their power truly lies in what they represent, and what they feign to offer: a semblance of connection. And in this semblance, perception becomes emotionalized, personalized, and algorithmically incentivized. They make their money, and their image, on TikTok where perception is outsourced to the feed, the loop of videos plundering through the viewer’s conscience. The user no longer chooses what to see; the algorithm sees for them, makes choices, and therefore the influencers shown become a part of that. The culmination curates a mirror of desire—subtle, insidious, exacting. And so we arrive at a crisis: when perception is shaped by what pleases us, we cease to perceive the world as it is, and instead, only as we wish it to be. But let us not mistake this for a crisis of culture alone. It is a crisis of epistemology. If seeing is knowing—as so many metaphors insist—then the colonization of sight by the algorithm means the colonization of thought. The Influencer, as a figure, is not merely shaping taste. They are shaping the scaffolding of reality itself.

I wrote a long time ago the quote that starts this essay, one that showcases the idea of an “image-junkie”, and how accustomed we have become to taking the world through a camera lens. It was written in the analog age of still images and darkrooms and reverberates with even greater clarity in the current digital regime—particularly in the era of the “day in the life” video, where influencers film moments of their days from start to finish to create a lived reality that is, in itself, a lie. These are the new diaries of the internet age: curated montages of breakfast bowls, morning routines, desktop arrangements, and skin-care regimens, stitched together with an aesthetic commitment so complete it becomes ideology. Viewers become enthralled with being like those influencers, trying to create a life around a figment of reality. These fragments of daily life are less about the day than they are about the image of the day, about a life worth seeing. The act of filming a “day in the life” aestheticizes it, and then editing it begins to falsify it. It becomes enhanced and stylized, and then the lines blur: fictions start to present themselves as fact. The viewer is told, implicitly, that they are witnessing something authentic, when in fact they are consuming a controlled representation of experience. This is not life as it is, but life as it wishes to appear. In “Day in the Life” videos, the camera does not document reality, it constructs a version of reality that flatters both the subject and viewer: the breakfast is plated, the sunlight is filtered, and the moment of tiredness is aestheticized into a slow-motion shot of coffee being poured. The banal becomes beautiful—but in doing so, it becomes a kind of propaganda. Not for the state, but for the self, somewhat of a soft authoritarianism of lifestyle. To accept this portrayal as “truth” is precisely the danger many have warned against. These videos promote the seductive notion that by seeing, we know—that understanding is a function of exposure, that watching someone’s morning routine grants us insight into their life, their mind, and their world. But understanding begins not with acceptance, but with doubt—with the refusal to trust appearances. The “Day in the Life” video closes that aperture of doubt. It insists: This is what life is. This is what it looks like. This is enough.

But it is not.

Understanding requires friction. It requires confronting what the image cannot show: the tension between what happens and what is presented, between the smooth surface of the clip and the chaotic, often contradictory interiority of human experience off the camera. In these videos, that tension is absent by design and they are the triumph of presentation over complication. The influencer, performing their life, does not offer it up for interpretation, but for admiration. These videos are not interrogations of the everyday—they are advertisements for it. More than that, they perpetuate a mode of perception in which life is judged by how it looks. The self becomes inseparable from its documentation. The inner world of feelings, ideas, or contradictions is reduced to an aesthetic rhythm: shot, transition, song, outro. Understanding—the messy, unglamorous, difficult work of thinking—is sacrificed to the logic of the scroll. And yet the format seduces. Why? Because it offers a fantasy of control. Tasks are completed. Meals are nourishing. Beds are made. The body is productive, the environment serene and the viewer sees not the filmmaker’s life, but a version of life they wish to inhabit. This, too, is why understanding falters: because these videos do not challenge our view of the world—they comfort it. But real life is not content. It is not branded and, in the best cases, it resists framing. It contains failures, hesitations, and inarticulate thoughts. To understand it—to truly see it—is to move beyond the image or what the camera can record and into that unfilmable realm where the contradictions of being are not resolved, but acknowledged. To begin to question the reels and videos and pictures and brand deals. We must go beyond what the camera understands about our world because it is only a blip of true interrogation and understanding– which is hard to do as the camera has become a narrative of its own. If photography once taught us to fetishize the moment, video has taught us to fetishize the narrative– yet, it can be argued, that both perform the same cultural function: they substitute surface for substance. They offer feeling in place of thought, or they ask to be consumed, not questioned. Both do not ask what life means necessarily, only how it looks. To make understanding possible again, we must learn to look without the expectation of beauty, of coherence, of spectacle. We must learn to see without needing to record. We must begin from where the camera stops—from what it cannot frame, cannot sell, cannot simplify. Only there does understanding begin. To live under the regime of the camera is to cease to believe in the intrinsic value of experience. The capitalist culture of the influencer has not only taught us to frame life but to live for the frame, and the act of seeing becomes subservient to the act of showing. One no longer walks through a city but scouts locations. One does not read but annotates for performance. Memory is no longer preserved through introspection but packaged for engagement. The influencer economy, if we may call it that, is an economy of perpetual self-display, but this display is never raw, never unmediated and because of this, it is a display shaped by capital—sponsored, filtered, monetized. The authenticity fetishized by influencers is merely another costume, another aesthetic and because this aesthetic is profitable, it proliferates. What was once genuine experience becomes raw material for content. The camera does not capture life—it predigests it before regurgitating it back out to a viewer. To understand something—a text, a person, a political condition—demanded duration, presence, and reflection. A sort of slowness that now takes great concentration to achieve, and the realm of influencers and Tiktoks have revoked that slowness and replaced it with impressions, hastiness, and reactions. We must not forget that the logic of virality is not the logic of comprehension because a successful post compels attention, not one that provokes understanding– and in this way, the camera has become a censor. Not by what it forbids, but by what it insists we prioritize. The lens privileges the visible, the appealing, and the sellable, and that which cannot be easily framed is discarded. The slow, the difficult, the obscure—these are the enemies of the influencer economy. The result is a cultural myopia. A disinterest in that which cannot be commodified. Social justice, history, literature, and philosophy—fields once essential to self-understanding—are now summoned only as backdrops, as “aesthetics,” as poses of depth. Reading is less about absorption and more about the image of reading, and activism is refracted through the ring light. Here, capitalism (the silent undertone of this whole online world) does not simply exploit attention, it truly reshapes an understanding of desire. It trains us to value the immediately gratifying over the patiently discovered. The self must be legible—easily decoded, easily consumed, and there is little room for opacity, for ambiguity, for the unseen. And what cannot be seen cannot be monetized, and what cannot be monetized cannot survive.

The most insidious effect of this culture is not that we see too much—but that we no longer trust what we cannot see. There is a growing skepticism of the invisible: the thought that does not announce itself, labor that is not spectacular, quiet care, lives that do not seek an audience. These are treated as irrelevant, as failures of performance. We are taught to believe that if it is not documented, it does not exist and so we live with the anxiety not of being misunderstood, but of being unseen; this is the great reversal. Once, the camera was a tool for exploration and now, it is a tool for certification wherein the world is not to be known—it is to be proven. The moment outside the frame becomes a kind of ghost, haunting our mediated lives with the suggestion that something more real might exist, but we have chosen not to look, and this begins the impoverishment of understanding and we have reshaped how we relate to others. The ubiquity of the camera—literal or metaphorical—renders every interaction potentially performative. The self becomes an avatar of the brand, and the other is reduced to audience or collaborator. Affection is calibrated by visibility and intimacy becomes a public performance.

To be loved is now, often, to be witnessed and to witness is not to see, but to like, to share, to comment. The affirmation of presence—the nod, the gesture, the silence of true attention—is replaced by engagement metrics. The messy, inconvenient realities of personhood are airbrushed out. We love the version of others that is most photogenic, most legible, and most consumable, but legibility, like all aesthetic standards, demands exclusion, it cannot abide contradiction. Real relationships, which are founded on misrecognition as much as recognition, are corroded under the weight of performance. We document our love of others not to preserve it, but to prove it. The camera, once a witness, becomes a third participant—a quiet interloper insisting that no moment is real unless it has been properly staged. The classroom, too, is not immune to the logic of the feed. Students, trained by platforms to expect a reward after every swipe, find the slow rhythms of thought intolerable. The desire for understanding has been replaced by the desire for recognition. A clever post, a viral project, a branded thesis—these are more valued than the often silent, humbling work of learning itself. The teacher, once a guide through complexity, is increasingly seen as a content provider and the student is reimagined as a consumer. Education is now judged by its marketability—its relevance to “the real world,” a euphemism for profitability. In the world shaped by the influencer, this kind of learning is anachronistic—an indulgence for the privileged or the eccentric. Political understanding, too, is degraded under this regime. Activism becomes aesthetics; resistance, a pose. The influencer is not apolitical—they are hyperpolitical—but in a way that flattens complexity into a spectacle. Causes become “content buckets.” Injustice becomes an opportunity. The language of liberation is filtered through branded templates, designed not to provoke thought but to signal allegiance. The performance of outrage becomes more important than its object. The protest sign is held not for the crowd but for the camera. The march is interrupted for the photo. The radical act becomes indistinguishable from the ad. And in this collapse, politics is stripped of its historical density. The past becomes a style; the future, a pitch.

This is not to suggest that digital platforms have no political value–they do– but the influencer logic that dominates them privileges surface over depth, presence overpowers. It rewards visibility, not strategy; charisma, not critique. The most shareable ideas are often the most reductive. The political system becomes emotionalized, dramatized, and abstracted. The question is not, what is just? But what performs justice well? Solidarity risks becoming sentimental, identification with the oppressed is expressed not through organizing or risk, but through hashtags, filter changes, and story reposts. These gestures are not without value—but their ease renders them susceptible to substitution. The symbol replaces substance. Aestheticization replaces action.

We are not witnessing the disappearance of understanding, but its commodification. It is no longer enough to know. One must appear to know—visibly, beautifully, fluently. The intellectual, like the artist or the friend, must now be “relevant,” “accessible,” “branded.” In such a climate, the deepest form of resistance may not be speaking the truth—but learning to dwell in silence, in difficulty, in that which cannot be captured and is outside of the lens of capturing. In the pre-digital age, class consciousness was tethered to materiality– it emerged from labor, shared economic conditions, proximity to production, and its exploitations. It was organized through the visible, tangible structures of inequality: factories, neighborhoods, unions, and the stark binaries of owner and worker. To be working-class was not only a condition but a position from which to see—and resist—the world. Now, class consciousness exists largely as content. The internet, and especially the social web, has abstracted class from its economic and geographic contexts and refashioned it into an identity that is performed rather than embodied. One can appear poor, strategically. One can adopt the posture of the oppressed for cultural capital. Conversely, one can obscure wealth behind curated minimalism, humility-filtered abundance. Class becomes aestheticized, narrativized, and memed. This shift is not accidental. It is the logic of the internet: to flatten, to equalize, to offer the illusion of access where there is only access to illusion. The feed is democratic in appearance—everyone has a profile, everyone can post, and everyone can go viral. But virality is not solidarity. Visibility is not power. The class system, rather than being dismantled by the internet, has been rendered less transparent—hidden behind algorithms, buried beneath lifestyle content, cloaked in the soft vernacular of “relatability.” Where the working class once recognized itself in the rhythms of shared labor, it now recognizes itself—if at all—through the mimicry of cultural tropes. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube: these platforms become stages where poverty is sometimes fetishized and wealth is always reframed as personality. The poor are made entertaining; the rich, are aspirational. This is not consciousness. It is a spectacle. “Wealth” and “poverty” are invoked not to describe systems, but to signal feelings—alienation, resentment, aspiration. Capitalism, ever adaptable, has learned to monetize class discourse itself.Suffering becomes a niche and even critique becomes a career path. Under this regime, upward mobility is not measured in wages but in followers, and influence becomes the new currency. It is possible, in this economy, to be poor in material terms and rich in symbolic capital where one can command attention while living in precarity. And so the old metrics of class—the job, the house, the union—are displaced by metrics of engagement: likes, shares, views. Alienation is no longer only from labor—it is from being itself.

This distortion has consequences. The traditional goal of class consciousness—to organize, to dismantle inequity, to redistribute power—has been supplanted by the desire for visibility, for “platform.” The influencer is not the revolutionary; they are the exception that sustains the myth that anyone can win. They are the proof that capitalism works—if you are charismatic enough and digital movements, which often emerge from genuine frustration with inequality, are vulnerable to this commodification. What begins as a critique of class quickly morphs into branding: Anti-capitalist aesthetics are sold on t-shirts, or meme becomes more potent than a manifesto. We begin to trade systems thinking for slogan and nuance for reach. 

There is, in this, I believe, a profound forgetting. We forget that class is not just a feeling—it is a material relation. It is not something one performs online, but something one experiences in the wage gap, in housing insecurity, in medical debt, and in inherited precarity. The internet can narrate these realities, but it cannot substitute for the political mechanisms that once addressed them: unions, strikes, radical theory, and coalition. The internet rewards the articulation of grievance—but often punishes the organizing of it. The former is personal, emotional, and algorithm-friendly while the latter is slow, boring, unprofitable. And so we remain in a loop of expression without transformation.And yet, even in this bleak terrain, a new kind of consciousness flickers. It is fractured, yes, but it is there—in the comment sections, the mutual aid spreadsheets, the refusal to aestheticize pain, the insistence on naming structures. There is a hunger for something beyond the influencer economy, beyond performance. A return, perhaps, to reality. But for this to become a tool for repair and restoration, it must detach itself from the camera and it must learn to speak again in the language of materialism—not in the Marxist sense alone, but in the sense of touching the world, inhabiting it, not just documenting it. To lay the image junkie to rest, in order to let the critical mind flourish with doubt, contemplation, and reconciliation.