Dark aesthetics as tech critique. The visual language of digital dread
Dear Reader,
I make art under the name FALSE GOD. The name is not accidental. The specific aesthetic of the project is dark. Black backgrounds. Skulls. Symbols associated with alchemy, dissolution, and decay. The word "false" in the title. All of it is chosen. All of it is specifically the opposite of the cheerful, optimized, sunny aesthetic that dominates most contemporary visual culture.
Whenever the project comes up in conversation, some people ask me what the darkness is about. Sometimes the question is sincere and I try to answer it. Sometimes the question is a specific kind of concerned. As if the specific aesthetic reflects a specific psychological problem, or a specific unwillingness to engage with what is good in life, or a specific pose that I would grow out of if I let myself.
I want to write about why I do not think this is the right way to read dark aesthetics. And why, in the specific historical moment we are living in, dark aesthetics may be one of the specific truthful responses to what is actually happening, whereas cheerful aesthetics are increasingly a form of denial. This is the fourth piece in Cluster D of this newsletter series, and it is where I get most explicit about what FALSE GOD is actually doing.
Start with a specific observation about the dominant aesthetic of the current moment.
Most contemporary visual culture, particularly in tech, in advertising, in social media, and in institutional branding, is characterized by a specific set of features. Bright colors. Rounded corners. Smiling faces. Optimistic framing. Clean lines. Specific gestures toward inclusion and hope. Specific vocabulary of empowerment and possibility. The whole visual language is oriented toward the specific message that things are basically good, that specific problems are being solved, and that specific participation in specific systems will produce specific positive outcomes.
This is not a neutral aesthetic. It is a specific stance. And the stance is not accidental. It is what the specific dominant institutions of the current moment need us to believe in order to keep functioning. Tech companies need us to feel optimistic about tech. Advertising needs us to feel that specific products will improve our lives. Social platforms need us to feel that specific participation is rewarding. Political institutions need us to feel that specific participation is legitimate. Each of these institutions has aesthetic requirements, and the specific aesthetic they require is the specific one I have described.
The specific problem with this aesthetic is that it is increasingly disconnected from what is actually happening. Everything I have written about in the previous 27 pieces has been about specific ways that contemporary life is producing specific harms, specific losses, specific patterns of degradation that the cheerful aesthetic does not acknowledge. If the aesthetic is honest, it is not tracking the reality. If the reality is what my previous pieces have described, then the cheerful aesthetic is a specific form of denial.
Which means that specific aesthetic choices that refuse the cheerful surface are also, functionally, specific forms of critique. Not necessarily critique in any specific ideological sense. Critique in the specific sense of refusing to represent things as they are not being represented. Dark aesthetics, in the current moment, are a specific way of naming that things are darker than the dominant aesthetic suggests.
Let me be specific about what dark aesthetics actually are, because the concept is often used vaguely.
Dark aesthetics are visual and cultural production oriented around specific themes that mainstream culture avoids. Death. Decay. Failure. Loss. Melancholy. Alienation. Confusion. Fear. Not the specific ideas of these things, which mainstream culture can handle when kept safely abstract. The specific textures of them, the specific ways they show up in actual experience, the specific quality of consciousness they involve.
Dark aesthetics have a specific tradition. Gothic art and literature. Symbolist painting. Expressionism. Film noir. Post-punk music. Cyberpunk. Contemporary dark ambient. Certain specific traditions of religious art. Certain specific traditions of philosophy that engaged with the specific darker features of existence. Each of these has its own specific idioms, but they share a specific commitment to representing what is difficult rather than what is comfortable.
Dark aesthetics are not primarily about pessimism, though they can shade into it. They are about refusing to hide from specific features of reality that the ambient culture is systematically avoiding. This is a specific ethical stance. It says, roughly, that specific truths matter enough to be depicted, even when depicting them is uncomfortable, and that specific hiding is more damaging in the long run than specific facing.
The specific reason dark aesthetics have been dismissed in most contemporary discourse is that they violate the specific tacit rule that specific institutions need us to follow. The rule is that we should represent things as more manageable than they are, in order to sustain the specific participation those institutions require. Dark aesthetics break this rule. They insist that specific things are not manageable, and that pretending otherwise is a specific form of complicity.
Let me tell you about the specific decision that led to FALSE GOD.
I came to visual art relatively late. I had been running companies, practicing law, and doing various other kinds of work for over a decade before I started making visual work in any serious way. When I did, the specific aesthetic I found myself drawn to was not the specific aesthetic that would have been strategically wise for someone in my professional position. It was dark. The specific work I was making involved specific themes that would not fit any specific professional context I was in.
I could have chosen to make lighter work. There was no specific reason I had to make dark work. Except that when I sat down to work, what came out was dark. And when I tried to make lighter work, it felt dishonest in a way that the dark work did not.
At some point I realized that the specific dark aesthetic was doing something specific for me that lighter work could not do. It was letting me acknowledge, in specific visual form, specific things about the world and about my experience of it that I could not acknowledge in any other specific context. The specific quality of the darkness was not depression. It was specifically the quality of taking seriously what my daily professional life required me to bracket.
FALSE GOD, as a specific project, emerged from this recognition. The specific name captures something specific. The specific gods of the current moment are false. The specific institutions that promise specific salvation are false. The specific narratives of progress that most public discourse assumes are false. Naming this in a specific project, and making specific art that visually enacts it, is one of the specific ways I have of remaining sane in a specific environment that requires ongoing collaboration with things I do not fully endorse.
The specific project is not for everyone. That is fine. It is for the specific people who recognize the specific things it is pointing at, and who benefit from having those things pointed at in a specific visible form. If it is for you, you probably already know. If it is not, that is also fine.
There is a specific philosophical claim I want to make about dark aesthetics.
The claim is that dark aesthetics, done well, are a specific form of moral seriousness. Not moral in the sense of prescribing specific behavior. Moral in the specific sense of taking seriously what is at stake, refusing to look away, and committing to represent difficult things with the specific care they deserve.
This is not the specific way moral seriousness usually gets discussed. Most contemporary discussions of moral seriousness focus on specific positive commitments. Doing good. Helping others. Contributing to specific communities. All of these are worth doing, and I do them where I can. But there is a specific complementary aspect of moral seriousness that consists in facing what is bad, and doing so honestly, without softening or evading.
The specific complaint against dark aesthetics is that they are self-indulgent or performative. This complaint sometimes lands, when specific dark aesthetics are actually self-indulgent or performative. But it does not land against the specific dark aesthetics that are doing the specific work I am describing. Facing difficult things is not self-indulgent. It is one of the specific responsibilities that any serious engagement with reality requires. And doing this facing publicly, in specific artistic form, is one of the specific ways that other people who need to face similar things can find the specific company that facing requires.
Which is why I have come to think of FALSE GOD and similar projects as a specific form of ethical practice. Not the whole of ethical practice, obviously. One specific dimension of it. The dimension that consists in taking seriously what is dark, so that the specific work of navigating it does not have to be done alone.
Let me connect this to the specific patterns I have been writing about throughout this series.
Everything I have written for the last 27 pieces has been about specific ways that contemporary life produces specific harms. The attention economy is degrading human consciousness. The AI systems being deployed are exploiting evolutionary vulnerabilities. Surveillance capitalism is producing extreme information asymmetries. Deepfakes are eroding shared reality. All of these are specifically dark developments. Any honest engagement with the current moment has to reckon with them.
Cheerful aesthetics, deployed within an environment that is producing these harms, are a specific form of anesthesia. They allow specific institutions to keep functioning without acknowledging what they are actually doing. They provide specific comfort to specific people who do not want to see clearly. And they produce a specific cognitive dissonance in the specific people who do see clearly, because the ambient visual environment is telling them that everything is fine while their specific experience is telling them otherwise.
Dark aesthetics, in this environment, are a specific form of clarity. They allow the specific reality of the specific situation to be represented in a specific visible form. This is a specific relief for the people who have been seeing clearly and needing companionship in what they see. And it is a specific provocation for the people who have not been seeing clearly, in a way that may occasionally shift them to see.
Not everyone should make dark art. Not everyone should consume it. But there is a specific role for it in the current moment, and the specific dismissal of it as adolescent or performative is missing what it is actually doing.
Let me name a specific misunderstanding I want to head off.
The specific claim I am making is not that everything is bad and everyone should be dark all the time. The specific claim is more measured. There are specific dimensions of the current moment that are dark, and honest engagement requires facing them. There are also specific dimensions of the current moment that are good, and honest engagement requires facing them too. The specific problem with the dominant aesthetic is that it only faces the second and denies the first. The specific problem with pure nihilism is that it only faces the first and denies the second. What is needed is specific integration of both.
Dark aesthetics, at their best, are part of this integration. They do the specific work of representing the darkness that ambient culture avoids. They do not replace the specific work of representing the light. They complement it. In a culture where the light is represented constantly and the darkness is systematically avoided, adding specific dark work to the mix is a specific rebalancing rather than a specific denial of the light.
My own life is not particularly dark. I have a specific family I love, specific work I care about, specific friends I value. The specific art I make in FALSE GOD is not the whole of what I do or what I engage with. It is a specific practice that exists alongside other specific practices, and that does specific work those other practices cannot do. This is what dark art is for. Not as a total worldview. As a specific complement to other things, that lets specific truths be represented that would otherwise be lost.
There is a specific historical point I want to make.
Cultures that were rich in specific serious art often had strong dark traditions. The specific gothic period in Europe produced specific work that engaged seriously with death, judgment, and specific dimensions of experience that were not comfortable. The specific traditions of specific religious art in most cultures included specific representations of suffering, decay, and death alongside representations of transcendence. Specific literary traditions have always included tragedy, horror, and specific engagement with difficult experience.
What is specifically unusual about the contemporary moment is not that dark aesthetics exist. It is that they have been substantially marginalized in favor of a specific dominant aesthetic that is systematically cheerful. This is a specific historical outlier, not a specific baseline. And it is worth noting because it has been produced by specific economic and institutional forces, not by any specific general improvement in how we engage with difficulty.
The specific implication is that the current dominance of cheerful aesthetics is a specific artifact of specific institutional pressures. It does not reflect specific human preferences in any deep way. If the specific institutional pressures shifted, the specific aesthetic balance would shift. And specific individual and communal choices to produce and support dark work are one of the specific ways to shift the balance.
This is one of the specific reasons FALSE GOD exists. Not because I think dark aesthetics should dominate. Because I think they deserve their specific historical share, and that share is currently being suppressed by specific institutional forces that need suppressed. Restoring some specific balance is worth doing.
I want to close with something specific about how this connects to the AI question.
Most AI-generated visual content, particularly what is produced by commercial systems, is systematically cheerful. This is not accidental. The specific systems are trained on specific data and optimized for specific outputs that will be commercially useful. Commercial usefulness, in most contexts, is aligned with cheerfulness. So the specific outputs skew light, positive, and unthreatening.
Which means that as more visual culture becomes AI-generated, the specific balance of aesthetics will shift further toward the cheerful. This is a specific loss that I have not seen adequately named. The specific darkness that specific human artists have contributed to visual culture is going to be underrepresented in AI-generated culture, because it does not fit the specific commercial optimization targets.
Which is one more specific reason to preserve specific human dark art. Not because AI cannot produce dark work, in principle. It can, if prompted specifically. Because the specific default outputs will skew light, and the specific ambient visual environment will therefore skew light, and the specific darkness that needs to be represented will be underrepresented unless specific human artists specifically make it.
This is a specific reason I keep making FALSE GOD. It is a specific reason I keep this newsletter. It is a specific reason I write the specific things I write in the specific way I write them. The specific texture of what I do is deliberately not the specific texture that AI systems would produce by default. And this specific difference matters, in a specific environment where the AI defaults are becoming increasingly dominant.
Next month I want to write about alchemy specifically, and about the specific symbolic tradition that connects dark aesthetics, ritual, and philosophy. Because the specific symbols I use in FALSE GOD, including the specific 🜏 that has been marking sections of every piece in this newsletter, come from a specific tradition that is worth being explicit about. Stay with me.
— Transmission Sent —
Niklas Hanitsch
Reference materials
- Fredric Jameson — Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
- Mark Fisher — Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009)
- Eugene Thacker — In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 (2011)
- Byung-Chul Han — Saving Beauty (2015)
- Susan Sontag — Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
- Georges Bataille — Inner Experience (1943)
- Nick Land — Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (2011)
- https://www.artforum.com/columns/dark-side-of-the-web-236437/
Continue reading
- Why art still matters when machines can also make it
- Where does the sacred live in the digital age
- Ritual is not superstition. It is technology for the soul
- Alchemy, symbols, and why 🜏 still means something
- The Purpose Behind FALSE GOD
Frequently asked questions
Why does FALSE GOD use dark imagery? Because the specific aesthetic is doing specific work that a lighter aesthetic could not do. It allows for the representation of specific dimensions of contemporary experience that the dominant cheerful aesthetic systematically avoids. This is a specific ethical stance, not a specific psychological state.
Is dark art nihilistic? It can be, when done badly. Done well, it is the specific opposite of nihilism. Nihilism would refuse to take anything seriously. Dark art takes the specific darkness of specific experience seriously enough to represent it carefully. This is a specific form of engagement with reality, not a specific refusal to engage.
Is dark aesthetics a fringe interest? Historically, no. Most serious artistic traditions have included substantial dark work. The specific current moment, where cheerful aesthetics dominate almost entirely, is a specific historical outlier, produced by specific commercial and institutional pressures rather than by any specific general improvement in how humans engage with difficulty.
Should everyone make dark art? No. Different people have different specific work to do, and dark aesthetics are one specific option among many. What matters is that dark aesthetics exist as a specific option, so that the specific people who need to make or engage with them have access to the tradition. In a culture where dark aesthetics are marginalized, this access is at risk.
How does dark art relate to tech critique? The specific pattern of contemporary tech production and marketing is heavily oriented toward cheerful aesthetics that hide the specific harms tech systems are producing. Dark aesthetics offer a specific visual counter-narrative that acknowledges what the cheerful narratives suppress. This makes dark aesthetics a specific form of technology critique, whether or not the specific artists intend it that way.