[Postman] states that the eighteenth century, the “Age of Reason”, was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites.

In the vein of a nameless internet, I also tried creating a faceless internet - the idea is that any photos that contain a face will be automatically blurred out / hidden.

Unfortunately, the accuracy of the library I was using and its performance led me to turn it off, but I’m hoping to re-visit it again in the future.

I’ve also wondered about using style transfer to perform automatic culture shifts on the internet: something like swapping faces with a random ethnicity or gender, but I definitely do not have the knowledge to do that at this point.