IMAGES DESTROY. Scopic Colonialism and the Violence of the Gap
Oct. 2026
What does an image demand from your body before you have decided whether you like it?
A face fills the phone, and your hand moves toward your own cheek. Nothing has been said, yet something needs correcting. Further down, a couple embraces in a kitchen where nobody seems to have washed a dish. Your life has dishes, fatigue, a lover who sometimes wants silence; now these ordinary conditions begin to look like evidence against it. The image has supplied the terms of comparison before you agreed to be compared.
Even the image that promises reassurance can leave a prescription behind: this is what health, tenderness, a life worth living should look like. A moment extracted from existence acquires authority over everything existence must carry. Try to reproduce it: the body ages, the room gets dirty, the embrace ends. The distance reopens, and you inherit the responsibility for closing it. The standard is the weapon; the gap is the wound.
In 2021, Frances Haugen, the whistleblower from Facebook, now Meta, brought the company’s internal findings before the U.S. Senate. Among surveyed teenage girls, roughly one in three said Instagram made them feel worse. Other young respondents associated the platform with worsening anxiety, self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Haugen accused Facebook of prioritizing profit despite warnings about harm and demanded independent access to its data (Haugen 2021). Suffering could be known inside the company while outsiders lacked comparable access to investigate its systems.
But close the application. The stomach still needs flattening, the intimacy improving, the life becoming something else. This is where scopic colonialism acquires its terrible economy: you take over the work of inspecting yourself. The borrowed standard speaks in the first person. “I am not enough.” An image can disappear after installing the judgment that survives it, follows you into bed, interferes with a meal, makes solitude another place of exposure. The screen is off; the examination continues.
The gap then recruits your labor: another attempt to become the person whose appearance would finally excuse you from comparison. Yet the promised exemption keeps receding. And when shame reaches the consulting room, it arrives attached to a name, a body, a personal history, ready to be treated as someone’s disorder. The civilization supplying the measures has no appointment.
What happens when images acquire the authority to judge life, and the lives they make unbearable are sent away for correction?
Liviu Poenaru
Reference
Haugen, Frances. 2021. “Statement of Frances Haugen.” U.S. Senate, October 4. Written testimony.
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