Human Signal

Tuesday evening on Earth. A letter written on my way back from London.

For a long time, an image, a selfie, a video, or a turn of phrase was enough to prove that we were human in our online exchanges. A photo attested to a presence. A voice seemed to guarantee a source. A way of writing pointed back to an identifiable person. We still lived in a regime where certain traces carried authority.

In chatrooms, moving from an encounter to instant messaging and then to the use of a webcam followed a logical progression: first you encountered words, then a body.

That logic has partly reversed with feed-based social networks: physical representations are immediately accessible on an Instagram account; conversely, the absence of a profile photo on LinkedIn raises suspicion. Stories, voice notes, spur-of-the-moment videos, and messages written on the fly have gradually formed a grammar of ordinary, expected presence: a set of signs of life, of aliveness.

Artificial simulacra and cascades of informat…