My phone is broken. It sends messages just fine and I can see my emails but the screen is cracked, I can only hear phone calls if the audio comes out of a speaker, and most inconveniently, I can’t use the camera. I can’t facetime, I can’t scan QR codes, which means I need to take an extra minute to type the serial number of my Bixi bike when I want to use it, and eating at menu-free restaurants is pretty difficult.

Okay yeah you got me. I don’t eat out. The real worst part of not having a camera is that I can’t take selfies. No BeReals, no instagram stories, no longform Tiktok culture critiques where I’m overlaid by closed captions of the latest thing I’m explaining. Too lazy and too broke to buy a digital camera to remedy this issue, I wonder if this is what it means to go post-image.

Being post-image is to admit vulnerability. It is to admit that you doubt all that is visual. That you do not live in the comfort of long substantiated symbols and representations, that an upside down spade is a heart and that a heart means love. It means that when I see people wearing those “I Heart NYC” shirts I must stop them on the street and ask “what do you mean? What does this heart mean to you? What if I told you that the little red symbol in the middle of your clothing means ‘hate’ to me and now you’re walking around wearing a shirt that says you hate New York City? How would that make you feel?”

Everywhere you look there’s images. Everything you see has an image-partner. The largest social media platform has you looking at thousands of images in succession for hours, and there is no escape from that. There is no street without its signs, no brand without its logo, no songs without their video, a cover image, a name—heck, even words are just made up of little pictures we call letters. The image has even parasitically wormed its way into our minds, and we have lost the confidence to believe that we know things without seeing it. Think of an apple. Did you think of the way it tastes? The sound of its crunch when you bite into it? The smoothness of its skin or the gritty sensation it leaves on your teeth? Or did you, like me, just think of a perfect, little apple? It may have a brown stem and a singular leaf, it is probably red and this is how a real apple appears to us in our minds.

Images make us feel pretty real too. My friend tells me that she went to a cottage over the weekend and I ask her to show me pictures of the lake. My other friend tells me that there’s this massive rat in my apartment and I say “I’ll believe it when I see it.” We have privileged the visual, have staked its position among the senses as the most reliable determinants of reality. And in turn we deny the invisible. We refuse the spirit but affirm the body, because we can see it. And because of this, we stand at the crossroads of a profound ethical dilemma, one that forces us to question the role of images in times of increasingly artificiality. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this.

AI-generated images. Its inclusion in pop culture is quite recent. It’s been used to make presidents play children’s video games and sing pop songs about heartbreak. It’s also been used to create images of things that we cannot observe in real life. We are approaching an era of boundless, realistic, image creation, and thus boundless reality. We are expanding the visual world infinitely. People are already being fooled by AI images en masse, and I think this has less to do with media literacy and more to do with our acceptance of the visual as true.

Soon, there will be no discernable difference between a photo you can take on your phone and one that is generated. For now we have the strange textures that pop up during the generation process and instances of uncanny anatomy. But AI seems to be getting better and better at what it does and we have to ask: how do we avoid being fooled by deep faked images, audios, and videos? Is it about this arbitrary measure of “media literacy” or is it about moving away from a world that values vision above all else?

Let’s return to my first point. What does it mean to be post-image? It’s not extremely literal in the sense that images should be rejected entirely. Again, it’s about casting doubt. Similar to how we cast doubt on stories we receive orally, we must bring the images we encounter under a critical lens. We need to rebalance the way we experience the world to include sensations that would allow us to acknowledge many truths. You’ll find that the world will grow around you, instead of in front of you.

I have yet to book an appointment with the Apple store to fix my phone. I guess I just don’t see the need.