Just so you can’t say I didn’t mention the clouds 101 Figure 2: Left: “Blue Marble,” NASA, 1972. Right: Image of the planet on Google Earth, 2023. Since then, two decades have passed, and North Ameri- can social platforms have become true global empires of plan- etary scale. I refer to a visual indication of this transformation: the clouds I once hunted on Google Earth have disappeared. The iconic image of the “blue marble” has evolved from a photograph of the planet taken with the naked eye to a digital collage of thousands of satellite images (Figure 2), representing a new way of viewing our planetary self-image (MIRZOEFF, 2016a). This has resulted in a synthetic image of a planet without a single cloud, with a smooth and transparent surface, where everything is vis- ible, without atmosphere, and where night never falls (DE CAR- VALHO, 2016) – a planet without haze (WISNIK, 2018). Once a habitable celestial body, the planet has become an interface, transformed into a planet-image. 1. Entering the Fog If the Internet was previously considered the catalyst for a major social transformation of a distributive nature, today it has become a toxic terrain, where the logic of surveillance and technological hyper efficiency generate injustices and democratic destabilization on a planetary scale (Zuboff, 2019).
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