As generative AI erodes the very nature of the image, the world will continue to thicken with surfaces with signs slipping past meaning. It is another stage in the Information-Age iconoclasm. The great unravelling of the image as a stable carrier of truth.
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Surface Without Substance
This week, whilst shopping in town, I listened to two podcasts back-to-back: Gideon Jacobs on the newest episode of New Models, and Never Post with its segment on the disappearance of buttons from our devices.
I’ve written before about the surface flatness of contemporary society, but these two shows reignited the idea. There is, I think, a compelling argument that the physical design of the modern smartphone with its dark, glassy, featureless surface, has reshaped how we perceive reality: a reality now dominated by images, detached from any material origin or anchor.
Jacobs contends that our present media environment has produced a world saturated with self-referential imagery. Reality, he says, has become a loop of symbols, gestures, and signs that point only to more of themselves: meaning without anchor. Baudrillard diagnosed this condition nearly forty-five years ago, calling it hyperreality. Once an academic abstraction, it is now tangible with every scroll and swipe.
This is not merely an aesthetic or media-literacy concern; it is about the broader conditions through which we perceive and interpret the world. The simulation, as Baudrillard put it, has grown so seamless, so ever-present, that the scaffolding of “the real” feels less persuasive than the abstract surfaces it supposedly supports.
In my own writing I refer to this domain as the Semiosphere: a para-reality of signs, symbols, and meaning-making that restructures the material world through the attention we pay to it.
Donald Trump, Jacobs argues, is the embodiment of this shift — an idea larger than the man himself, composed entirely of signs: soundbites, slogans, facial expressions, media feedback loops. He operates within the Semiosphere so fluently that base reality becomes an irrelevant medium. What matters is presence, affect, the high-stakes manipulation of symbol. Trump exudes a distortion field. What the old tales would have called glamour turning the world into something closer to theatre or a game.
No object, save perhaps a magic wand or a conductor’s baton, crystallises the peculiar new reality conjured by the smartphone.
With its smooth, depthless glass, the smartphone is the ultimate surface: no ridges, no contours, nothing to locate you. It denies the body its place in the interface. There is no entrance or window into the Semiosphere via a smartphone, only exposure to it.
You don’t grip a smartphone; you stroke it.
Interaction with symbol becomes pure glide. Nothing truly moves, yet with our fingertips we influence the world. The screen-tap is a magician’s gesture: something appears, something vanishes. “The doing” is replaced by the appearance of something happening. In this frictionless flow, symbols need relate to nothing deeper; we drift, untethered, immersed in the feed. The smartphone is an occult object: a black mirror through which pure image flows, unburdened by resistance.
The home button once provided interruption, reminding you the device was a machine with limits, an actual object. Its removal dissolves the membrane between user and content.
Gestural interactions on a seamless surface are inherently theatrical; every motion becomes performance, aligning neatly with today’s urge to self-mythologise. We don’t merely consume content, we perform our consumption of it. We react and gesture: swipe left, swipe right.
Steve Jobs’s first demonstration of the two-finger pinch-to-zoom was staged for show; the boundary between performance and interaction vanished. Buttons, knobs, and sliders possessed depth. Their erasure from our fridges, washing machines, and even our cars reflects the self-referential nature of our age: everything must resemble everything else, a literal collapse of depth.
Yet this flattening is neither inevitable nor irreversible. I genuinely believe that people who spend most of their internet time on laptops or desktops are wired differently from habitual phone users.
Laptops retain a tactile grounding: the click of keys, the heft of the machine, the edge of the screen with the real world behind it. These affordances anchor the body in reality. There is a boundary, a distinction between self and system. And with that boundary comes a different mode of attention, one less susceptible to seamless surfaces and frictionless signs.
The desktop or laptop is also more sensorial: cords, ports, sounds, even smells on occasion. It demands a place in your environment. Even if the device perches on your lap like a cat.
You look at the internet on a laptop,
but you touch the internet on a phone.
As generative AI erodes the very nature of the image, this spiral will only accelerate. VR and XR are approaching fast. The world will continue to thicken with surfaces: shimmering, shifting, signs slipping past meaning. It is another stage in the Information-Age iconoclasm. The great unravelling of the image as a stable carrier of truth.
We can no longer gesture at the future; if we want it to be different, we must grip it tight.
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