It's like 1980s chain letter photocopies-of-photocopies for the digital era.
Almost a form of emergent, collaborative human-computer art, sitting on a server, different to the one you may share this to now. By screenshotting and reuploading the image again and again, the gradients and imperfections in the lossy image reinforce themselves so that any semblance of text, with perhaps the exception of line endings, is destroyed.
What is the end point then? When will the standards of readability or aesthetic sensibility of the reader interrupt the progression towards glowing halos of unnaturally articulated edges, breaking through a sea of noise, like the ghosted patterns on an analogue television tuned to a distant channel?
I'm unsure how to regard this activity. Has the awkwardness of copy-pasting touchscreen text, a demonstrably time-consuming physical act, led to screenshots becoming a way to smooth out usability flaws or irregularities in interface that different platforms may have?
Will anyone re-transcribe the message (or simply type the first 12 words into Google, retrieving the original as first result) or will the sharing cease entirely before it begins to become as unreadable as a CAPTCHA, as inaccessible to all as sharing text in the form of an image is for anyone with a print-disability?
Or is the degeneration part of the message; that this is internet folk wisdom, gaining rougher edges and taking on new meaning and fuzzier origins as it passes through the hands and minds of everyone who wants to pass it forward, from one platform to another?
Either way, the message is sound, and hit me really hard, as if the words left cracks and impact craters from the force at which they entered my mind.
And then I got overexcited and wasted everyone's time with the sort of pretentious derivative ramblings that arise from listening to 1960s experimental music on repeat while sitting in a room performing tedious digital graphic design work. And so I'm compelled to add this self-critical coda, because I'm another of those people who can't enthuse about excitingly unexpectedly entrancing ideas without ashamedly apologising at the end.
(But feel free to crop that part out of the screenshot.)
