What if going viral destroyed the image?

Save a JPEG over itself enough times and it starts to fall apart. The compression artifacts multiply, colours bleed, edges dissolve into noise. This isn't a bug — it's the physics of how digital images travel. Every screenshot-and-repost cycle on social media is a compression cycle, stripping a little more information each time. The decay is already happening. What if we make that visible and intentional.

Hito Steyerl wrote about this in 2009, in a piece for e-flux. She called the heavily compressed, low-resolution images circulating online "poor images" — copies in motion, deteriorating as they accelerate. Her counterintuitive argument was that the deterioration wasn't the problem. "By losing its visual substance," she wrote, "it recovers some of its political punch." The poor image builds alliances as it travels. Its erosion is evidence of its journey, a watermark of cultural reach. Around 2015, deep-fried memes formalised this as deliberate aesthetic practice — images intentionally degraded, their garish compression artifacts mocking the natural decay that happens when something gets shared widely enough. The degradation became the proof of travel. Photographer Ellie Pritts took this further still, building a whole project around iterative JPEG compression: each cycle reveals anomalies hiding beneath the surface, "a glimpse of the computer itself, watching how it thinks it should deal with a file which is broken."

Every platform is built on the assumption that reach is reward — more views, more distribution, more value. A post that visibly degraded with each view would treat mass attention as entropy instead. The thousandth person to see it would see something different from the first. Not worse, necessarily — different in the way a book looks different at a hundred years old than it did the day it was printed. Researchers studying poor images found that degradation grants outsider status, exempting an image from the normal hierarchy of quality. A deliberately decaying post would wear its viral history on its face. There's also something it would do to the act of looking: interactive art research suggests that when a work responds to its audience, attention shifts from the content to the interaction itself. Every reader would become aware of the crowd they're already part of.

I'm not sure this is a design question worth taking seriously. The attention economy is built on the assumption that visibility and value move together. What would it change — about how we make things, what we choose to publish, how we think about an audience — if we designed honestly around the possibility that they don't?