The 192-page collection, published by Verso Books on 19 May at £17.99 for the hardback, brings together a decade of Paglen’s writings exploring two major technological revolutions: the rise of computer vision and the emergence of generative media. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as a neutral novelty, Paglen frames it as a profound instrument of power that fundamentally alters how images interact with human perception. His writing is rigorous and imaginative, matching his investigative art practice.
The Rise of Computer Vision in Visual Culture
Computer vision technologies translate the physical world into mathematical abstractions that machines can read. These systems automate tasks like facial recognition, license plate reading, and the monitoring of industrial spaces. Paglen points out that these technologies have created an invisible, machine-to-machine image world that already dwarfs our own. They achieved mass adoption in the 2010s and now automate a vast and growing amount of the “seeing” and reading of images.
Paglen describes these systems as “extraordinarily intimate instruments of power.” They penetrate our daily lives at both far smaller and larger scales than previously possible, leaving humans mostly out of the analytical loops. This shift means that images are no longer passive representations but active interfaces serving corporate or state interests to extract value and exert influence. Digital images now act as operational interfaces, intervening in our lives ever more insidiously, ubiquitously, and granularly.
Hidden Bias in AI Training Datasets
Paglen’s investigative art practice digs into the foundational elements of these artificial intelligence systems, exposing the dangerous biases embedded in their operations. He scrutinizes ImageNet, one of the earliest and most influential image training sets. His investigation reveals the horrifically negligent visual categorization of the world within the dataset, full of racist, gender, and other discriminatory assumptions.
These biases are not accidental; they reflect the often crude assumptions of the scientists and researchers who originally structured these systems. These flawed categorizations now infect the digital systems that increasingly shape our world. These artificial intelligence tools are not objective observers; they actively encode human prejudices into automated decision-making processes at a scale and speed barely grasped. The relationship between images and power in visual culture has fundamentally changed and is far more terrifying than in the past.
Generative Media and the Society of Psyop
Generative media automates image-making and writing, shattering what Paglen calls the “fragile, fuzzy truce” between perception and reality that characterized the modern, empirical age. Beyond the existential implications for the cultural field, it is the brutal political and economic repercussions of these technologies that matter most. As philosopher John Gray observed, “Technology is an event that has befallen man,” and Silicon Valley’s recent ruthless right-wing turn underlines that technology will always serve contingent human ends.
Just a few decades ago, there was an influential belief that information technologies were inherently “technologies of freedom,” bound to empower free speech and personal autonomy. Paglen sets his timely book against this epic, dystopic landscape, challenging this outdated belief. He draws on the theorist Guy Debord to coin the term the Society of Psyop to describe the current era of digital media. In this landscape, images are no longer passive representations but heavily engineered prompts or “payloads” designed to directly activate target neurological circuits.
These “cognitive injection attacks” amount to a cumulative hack on our collective sense of reality. In the book’s most speculative and entertaining essay, Paglen dives into the mind-blowing recent history of scientific research into human perception and its manipulation. This story encompasses appalling experiments on kittens, CIA operations, and the use of magicians and magick in shaping visual technologies.
What Happens Next
As computer vision and generative media continue to expand, traditional visual arts and the broader field of AI art must adapt to a world where human perception is increasingly manipulated from the outside. Artists, critics, and regulators will need to develop new vocabulary and theoretical frameworks to understand and counter these “cognitive injection attacks.” Our traditional theories for understanding visual culture are obsolete and need radical updating to grasp the true effects, scale, and speed of these changes. If Paglen’s thesis sounds wildly exaggerated at first, by the end of the book, it all feels grimly irrefutable.
Paglen’s work suggests that readers and consumers must begin asking not what images are saying about the world, but what they are doing to us and the world. Finding safe spaces entirely outside these manipulative digital systems will become increasingly difficult. It will be up to individuals to carve out these independent spaces as best they can to defend against the ongoing technological hack on reality.
— Lucas Berg, culture desk, AXO News