  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.
