Evolution would seem to predict that survival is our highest priority. Yet history repeatedly presents moments where people willingly subordinate survival to significance. Soldiers throw themselves onto grenades to save comrades. Parents sacrifice comfort for children. Activists endure imprisonment for ideals. Religious martyrs accept death rather than renounce belief. Whatever else humans are, we appear to organize ourselves around meanings that cannot be reduced to material self-interest.
Having survived the concentration camps, Viktor Frankl concluded that humans can endure extraordinary suffering when they perceive it to possess meaning. History repeatedly suggests that humans are not merely creatures of reason or survival, but of significance. We willingly sacrifice comfort, wealth, even life itself for things we consider meaningful. If that is true, then the technologies through which societies materialize significance deserve to be counted among humanity’s most consequential creations.
This is why the transformation and industrialization of modern image-making is more than an aesthetic or technological curiosity. Modern image systems continue to foster the rituals around significance at scale, and increasingly optimize for its rapid production and consumption divorced from the depth and real substance.
A Twinkie is not fake food; it satisfies hunger, tastes sweet, and provides calories. It is an extraordinarily successful food product, optimized for shelf life, consistency, transportability, and dense, sugary calories. Even though it tastes like sweet survival, it does not, in fact, provide the nourishment that humans need from food. But because our bodies are not evolved to consume Twinkie buffet amounts of sugar, our modern diet of ultra-processed foods is doing the opposite of nourishing — it has become a leading cause of a slew of pathologies from cardiovascular illnesses, to cancers, to mental decline.
Modern image systems increasingly resemble the Twinkie. They do not eliminate our hunger for significance; they industrialize the means by which that hunger is temporarily satisfied. They manufacture stand-ins for significance that are optimized for attention, circulation, novelty, and continual renewal rather than durability, continuity, and depth.
And like the Twinkie, these stand-ins are not necessarily fake, but they become convenient and incomplete proxies for human experiences. The fanfare of a wedding is not a marriage and does not transmit the depth of the commitment required to maintain a relationship. A neighborhood Facebook group is not a community and does not transmit the thoughts and labor each neighbor puts into building that network. A keyboard declaration of solidarity on X is not solidarity and does not transmit the fervor and devotion revolutionaries put their lives in danger for. Each of these outward manifestations represents deeper social structures where meaning is derived, but in consuming the former without engaging with the latter, we come away with only the emotional residue, not the necessary relationships, rituals, sacrifices, and obligations that give them their substance.
This distinction matters because significance has historically been expensive. It has required time, repetition, commitment, shared experience, memory, sacrifice, and often participation in something larger than oneself. Industrial image-making changes the economics of this process. It makes the appearance of significance cheap, reproducible, measurable, and infinitely scalable. It can compress the outward signs of belonging, conviction, beauty, intimacy, or transcendence into forms that can be produced and consumed almost instantaneously. What once required years of participation can sometimes be represented in seconds.
The danger is not that we will become incapable of recognizing significance. It is almost the opposite. We become extraordinarily fluent in its visual language. We learn what belonging looks like, what conviction looks like, what rebellion looks like, what spirituality looks like, what love looks like, what an interesting life looks like. We become increasingly capable of producing and consuming the signs of meaningful existence while becoming less certain of the conditions that make existence meaningful in the first place.
If humans are, at the core, meaning-seeking, this shift doesn’t just create epistemological problems — it creates existential ones.
Modern humans continue to search for significance but increasingly encounter it through infrastructures optimized for attention rather than cultivation. We remain as hungry as ever yet become progressively alienated from the foundations of the relationships, rituals, institutions, and communities through which significance once acquired its depth and durability.
Then, perhaps, the challenge is not to condemn or deny image-making, but to become more conscious of how images are made, what they invite us to value, and ultimately, the kinds of significance we choose to cultivate.