# Becoming Illegible Source: https://x.com/sunfishposting/status/1998184344817389703 ## Summary The author argues that modern life has pushed people to make themselves increasingly legible to institutions, advertisers and each other, and that a backlash against generative AI and "slop" is beginning to create interest in illegibility as a counter-strategy. They point to Adam Harvey's STEALTH WEAR collection, which uses designs meant to evade machine vision, as an early example of this idea. They also cite the 2015 Cambridge Analytica and Trump campaign era, the 2021/22 peak in political striation, and the spread of Palantir-linked surveillance concerns as signs of the trend. ## Article A little over a decade ago, while researching "cool" merchandise I could sell to make my then-artist project seem "cool", I discovered Adam Harvey's STEALTH WEAR collection. ...Stealth Wear is a vision for fashion that addresses the rise of surveillance...Building off previous work with CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection, Stealth Wear continues to explore the aesthetics of privacy... This project gobsmacked me for a multitude of reasons (please keep in mind we were just coming out of the Banksy/KONY2012 era) - some of which are now trite (bro, SURVEILLANCE bro!!!), some that have become increasingly relevant. One of these latter concepts is illegibility. More specifically, the act of performing and harnessing illegibility on an individual level. I felt there was something genuinely transgressive about the notion of wearing clothing in an adversarial manner, for non-human eyes. All the while overtly signaling to human observers that you are A Part of Something. Becoming illegible to some observers, increasingly legible to others. The paradox was interesting. While I seriously doubt anyone who purchased one of these garments used them for any practical reason beyond proto-virtue signaling they know "The State is bad", the point stands: We were approaching a point in history where individuals may need to consider dual (or multiplexed) purpose for their observable identity, obfuscating at least a part of it in the increasingly inhuman eyes of The State. At the time, I'd argue that many concepts related to surveillance were still quite abstract to the average person, primarily experienced through Jason Bourne/Michael Bay/Mission Impossible "he's hacking the mainframe...performing 4D shape rotation gait analysis to geolocate his SIM card" vignettes. Sure, the specter of post-9/11 PATRIOT Act shit had begun to materialize more tangibly around the peripheries of modern life, but IF YOU'RE NOT DOING ANYTHING WRONG WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO FEAR LOL ARE YOU A CRIMINAL????? Now? Brother. Do I really need to get into it? When I bought a house last year, I got a flyer from the local police department suggesting that I opt in to share my realtime security camera feeds with them directly. They've got a portal for you to link your Ring™ doorbell to their Cop Mainframe. "7 out of 10 neighbors do it". Not like that matters, Amazon will do it for you if a beat cop so much as asks. Even to the normie, modern life is surveillance. The least literate among us know they're functionally sending a photocopy of their anal print to thousands of advertisers every time you look at something online. "They" know exactly who you are. It's table stakes. Not only that, it's good and OK because look at this IG ad I got how did they know I wanted that :) This obviously didn't happen overnight. It was a long, leisurely walk down a steepening slope that has ultimately lead the average person to desire total exposure - the complete opposite of my naive, post-STEALTH WEAR fantasy. I Am So Legible In the U.S. at least, most of us born between ~84-96 spent a part (or all) of our time after the advent of broadband internet making ourselves increasingly legible, desiring deeper self-identification that is instantly perceptible to others online. Forum signatures, Facebook groups, Tumblr. You know. THIS IS WHO I AM AND EVERYTHING I LIKE!!! This accelerated into the 2015 Cambridge Analytica/Trump Campaign era, at which point "Identity Politics" were fully loosed onto the rapidly liquefying minds of a populace just starting to develop short form video addictions, and zoomers/gen alpha children who had SpiderMan Elsa Waterbirth Emergency Singalong instead of a present father figure in the home. Some of the latter went on to become Republican State Senators. At this point, I am primarily identified by what I am opposed to. And you better fucking show me what you're opposed to or ELSE!!!! Don't worry though, I never stopped doing the other shit, categorizing what I buy and how I think in increasingly meticulous and public ways. BUT BE CAREFUL because if you like the WRONG thing...umm yikes? I would argue that American society (and perhaps Western society in general) reached peak striation and individual legibility by 2021/22. BLM/"defund the police" really did a number on everyone, pushing preexisting political animosity into full on "I will fucking kill you and shoot my dog if you call my red hat gay" territory. And, of course, THE VIRUS that nobody wants to name anymore. Every normal person's profile as a little diorama of their internal and external world, shockingly personal, ready to fight. Dubiously human. We've been marinading here for a while now. Politically and ideologically naked, enthusiastically offering advertisers and viewers particularly handsy and aggressive cavity searches. May I squat deeper for you, sir? Can you see all the way up there, chat? Many people who read bad things online seem to have accepted that this is where we are now. Insert Simpsons "worst day of your life so far" image. I'm starting to see a shift, though. Slop Giveth, Slop Taketh Away I've watched the advent of LLMs (and the subsequent animosity directed at their increasing prevalence) begin to pierce to the core of this previously impenetrable apathy blanketing most of modern Western life. In "good" ways and "bad". How could it not? It's quite existential. Either we birth Tha Machine God or the global economy collapses? Uhh...is there a third option 😂LOL! It should go without saying that this is a ludicrously broad topic. I'll focus on a few key observations that I believe point at what is to come, with respect to the politics of il/legibility. We'll start specific and get broad: 1. I LOVE PALANTIR!!!!!!!!!! For one, Palantir-pilled MAGAcells have revived some sort of neo-PATRIOT Act moral panic across party lines about capital S Surveillance that is inextricably linked with LLMs/AI development. I don't know if the Theilian crew thought they could just slip this kind of shit in and nobody would care, but even the most ardent AMERICA FIRST chuds are publicly wondering why Palantir LLMs are creating urethra diameter databases for every American citizen (on behalf of Israel). This, plus companies like OpenAI and Anthropic partnering with intel agencies, plus the ludicrously broad (and under-publicized) NSPM-7 directive that flags ideological wrongthink as grounds for terrorism investigation, plus a generally worsening climate of political violence, has a lot of people questioning how legible they need their politics and identity to be. Perhaps I am too optimistic that average people will critically examine this new, bloated surveillance environment en masse. Anecdotally, I've seen it happening. The Banksy-era anti-surveillance performance art is coming back, with an Elder Millennial twist. Some of the concepts explored as theoretical at the time are now quite concrete, however. This time, I think there are genuine stakes for way more people, and way more people are aware of the consequences. It's a little hard to tell what the all-consuming shoggoth harnessed by Palantir considers kosher. 2. Unauthorized Training Data Perhaps the most visible (or at least the loudest) consequence of LLM disruption is on display within the left-ish arts-adjacent world. You've surely encountered many different creative communities reckoning with what I consider to be one of the bedrock issues preventing "acceptance" of AI. It goes something like: "These things are trained on MY output, intellectual property is SACRED, and they will REPLACE ME". Their fears are all happening, and I am genuinely, unironically sorry that Columbia College or Full Sail University said there was anywhere near enough room for the bottom 90th percentile of creative people to make a living. There never was. New frontiers are being born, for better and for worse, and reckoning with that is hard. That being said, browbeating 15 year old furry commission artists and smol bean D&D OC printmakers - while dubiously useful - is producing some interesting consequences. One of these consequences that I find most exciting is borderline-guerilla deployment of new technology to make your work illegible to machine eyes. Tools like Glaze and Nightshade, regularly used to poison images to prevent generative AI reproduction, engage deeply with the frontier (my opinions on the futility of intellectual property notwithstanding), and echo what I found interesting about the physical obfuscation of the STEALTH WEAR collection. More broadly, I'm watching a useful reflection on legibility and genre unfold in parallel with the guerilla efforts. What does it say about me that my art "style" is not only indistinguishable from thousands of other CalArts furries/LoFi beatmakers/hypebeast photographers, but reproducible with an individual prompt? What does this call into question more, the ethics of AI, or the intrinsic value of my own work in the marketplace? Those aren't rhetorical questions. They, like questions about the future of intellectual property as a concept, are dense, emotional, and often paradoxical. However, I welcome a borderline-apocalyptic challenge to existing hard lines of genre, culture, and the failing business of entertainment post-Limewire. Similar to the models wearing too-early-but-not-wrong anti-drone fashion in Adam Harvey's work, the creatives who stopped complaining and started engaging with our present reality have begun to embody the same paradox - become increasingly illegible to machines lest you be destroyed, become increasingly legible to your allies. Or give up, I guess. 3. Grey Goo Culture By now, it is neither revolutionary nor challenging to discuss how the last decade+ of vertical feeds have collapsed regional and niche microcultures into one Millennial Grey Cinematic Universe. An alchemy of corporate nostalgia, failing social/economic policy, and Dogecoin Libertarianism has left us in a downright swagless tar pit of monoculture, neatly and totally stratified in the ways we've discussed. Everyone is sick of it. Please, someone do something. Fill out all of the stuff you like and dislike, and the algo will deliver your woke or based content, sir. I am obviously not saying nothing good or worthwhile has been produced lately. There is plenty. The lion's share, however, is Disney Adult x Stranger Things. Ironically, I don't think it was BLM-era IdPol pandering that broke the camel's back and forced a reckoning with this culture. It was not the 10th Avengers. Nor was it any of the distasteful, low effort, cash grab shit that inspired mass revulsion amongst the stratified normal people of the West. It was generative AI. "Slop", in particular. A revulsion to slop generally crosses legible ideological lines. (Your neoliberal wine aunt and ultraMAGA divorced uncle meet at the bottom of the horseshoe and are OK with it, though - that dog saved a baby!) It offends everyone for different reasons. Throw a dart: ethics, the quality, the economic impact, propaganda, corporate pandering, etc. I won't assert that most people think of it in this way, but I believe the thread that unites the rejection of generative AI and the subsequent desperation for cultural change is more broad. I think slop is a funhouse mirror, and it reflects back a distorted, uncanny vision of the most base, most legible, most striated aspects of our culture. Slop is possible largely in part because we've been dumping neatly categorized works directly from the assembly line into increasingly specific, consumer-facing troths for algorithm-optimized profit over the last decade plus. The invention of the Transformer architecture and subsequent creation of the LLM is incredible and sophisticated, sure - but let's be real. The climate, ecosystem, and social conditions required for slop were created by us, not LLMs. They just needed to pull together all of the data points we so meticulously labeled for them. However, the response to AI figuratively (and literally) wearing our faces is anguished and schizophrenic. It is melting our supremely optimized, perfectly legible identities built from consumer preference over the last two decades. Some are clinging on, charging $30 per furry OC until the tidal wave takes them under. Others, such as myself, are going limp - as you are taught to do if you fall out of your raft in white water, so you break fewer bones on impact. I want the rapids to take me faster, I think most people do. It's like the fear and anticipation of puking being worse than the actual thing. Let's get it over with. The identities that are useful to us - politically, socially, economically - are not in the flooding neoliberal Atlantis finally buckling under the weight of genAI. If you stay longer, you will be entombed. Illegibility and Me Let's wrap this up. I am not a big theory guy, but please indulge me for a moment with a concept from Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (BOO! HISS!) IT'LL BE QUICK I PROMISE! They describe traditional political organizing as arborescent - tree structured, hierarchical, with clear leaders and stated goals. Rhizomatic organizing is the inverse - multiple entry points, no clear center, connections rather than representations. You don't join, you just connect at some point. I learned of rhizomatic organizing in the Banksy era, and thought it was cool like how Banksy or Anonymous was cool. Both of these entities interacted with the pragmatic, mostly physical surface of "The State" and "Surveillance". What if there were cameras everywhere...and you were like...being watched??????? Rhizomatic ANYTHING didn't seem practically useful here. Things were just becoming legible. I orbited back towards these concepts of rhizomatic thinking and capitalist schizophrenia over the last few years, spurred on by the multidimensional impact of generative AI and LLMs terraforming reality. The accelerated collapse of consensus reality, "LLM psychosis", the erosion of legible identity...these were mental and emotional attack surfaces that warranted increasingly robust mental technology to engage, before considering the rerocked Surveillance State: 2 scanning your dickprint in the physical world. Oh shit....I'm not rhizomatic enough. Thus, I propose illegibility as a cousin to, or Cool Friend of rhizomatic action. We are in the midst of a great identity collapse, with great beasts and nation states attempting to define new ones for us. Contain and demonstrate contradictions. High and low-brow. Based and cringe. The dual identity of the Banksy/Anonymous/STEALTH WEAR era is obviously no longer enough. If you want to avoid automated classification and Minority Report-style fisting, you've gotta be a multiplex with false walls and intersecting chambers. Becoming illegible isn't merely pragmatic in the sense of dazzle camouflage preventing computer vision systems from measuring your weewee. I suspect it's good for the soul. Speaking for myself, I had internalized quite a lot of dogma about my own identity over the last 20 years, experiencing anguish at times that I couldn't package it all up in a way that would allow me to enjoy egoic charms of social media. I am not in the right shape. Who gives a fuck lol. I just wrote 2500 words about this and nobody will read them. I will collage ideas I find interesting like a weird bird collecting colored garbage. You will know part of me but not who I am. I don't write well or consistently enough for an LLM to impersonate me. Yay XD But - the real me is present in this system. I make sure he really exists, ready to greet and welcome in an ally. I will be here, illegible to machines and my enemies, quite obvious to you. Thanks for reading. I will write more things like this unless everyone gets really mad at me and tells me to stop, in which case I will have to think about it. Thanks to @somewheresy, the above post tied together the last mile of this concept which I had been kicking around for a while.