Once at a village on the lower Yukon River an explorer had set up his camera to get a picture of the people as they were moving about their houses. While he was focusing the instrument, the headman of the village came up and insisted on peeping under the cloth. Being allowed to do so, he gazed intently for a minute at the moving figures on the ground glass, then suddenly withdrew his head and bawled at the top of his voice to the people, “He has all of your shades in this box.” A panic ensued among the group, and in an instant they disappeared helter-skelter into their houses. The Tepehuanes of Mexico stood in mortal terror of the camera, and five days’ persuasion was necessary to induce them to pose for it. When at last they consented, they looked like criminals about to be executed. They believed that by photographing people the artist could carry off their souls and devour them at his leisure moments. They said that, when the pictures reached his country, they would die or some other evil would befall them.
— J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough
We moderns chuckle at such anxieties. Then we visit GIPHY, where souls are, in fact, extracted, compressed, and looped. Not the theological kind; the usable kind. A face, flattened to 320×240, conscripted to emote on demand like a pixelated mime. Someone’s blink, someone’s shrug, someone’s “WTF?” — summoned by keystroke, repeated forever, a digital glass-box purgatory presided over by a bored deity in the shape of a thumb. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, but lossy. “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” protests Kimberly “Sweet Brown” Wilkins, fruitlessly, until the end of time.
Somewhere inside the pixels, the Blinking Man blinks into existence again: Who summons me? For what offense do I suffer this fate? When will the gods of chat release me from this three-second recurrence? O that I could close these weary eyes forever—or at least get a bottle of Visine in here…
Delete your photos! Erase your videos! Save yourselves before the daemon of the timeline captures your shade and sentences it to loop until the servers cool! And if you won’t do it for your own sake, do it for the prisoners you keep in your Recents!