Lossy

By Anant Saraf, 2026

Lossy is a social image-sharing platform like Instagram, except that its images degrade every time they are viewed. Comments, direct messages and stories also have their own degradation logic. Users gain points by interacting with the app (engaging with other users, posting content, etc.) which can then be used to “buy back clarity” on the images in the form of AI superresolution.

I’ve been thinking about what images do and how the contemporary image apparatus (such as social media) informs our engagement with them. Here, John Tagg’s framework of the one-eyed man (the camera) and the one-armed man (the state, the apparatus surrounding the image) is useful. Today, the one armed man, the forces that shape our interpretation of images, is a collection of corporate and governmental interests meant to usurp our intellectual capital, colonize our time, and manipulate us in ways beyond our understanding. If to photograph is to place oneself in a relationship of knowledge (and so, of power) to that being photographed (Sontag), then the ability to control the ways in which images are circulated is power.

To degrade a photograph is to strip it of its indexicality, to disallow it from contributing to history and the discursively formed “technology of truth” (Tagg). In 2026, no one would call a degraded photograph a truthful photograph.

To degrade a photograph is to acknowledge that “all photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” It is to refuse the photograph’s ability to pause the “relentless melt” (Sontag) of time.

To degrade a photograph is to computationally participate in a longstanding Indian image-practice of bodily engagement that previously manifested as overpainting, garlanding, and the dis-avowal of fixed identity (Pinney). Sorting pixels, halving image sizes, perturbing values- these are computational versions of corpothetics– the body engages through code rather than touch.

To degrade a photograph is to claim the dignity of the poor image, not solely through compression for mass circulation (Steyerl), but as intrinsic to the act of engagement. On Lossy, the two collapse into each other, and image poverty is both circulated and chosen.

The power of degradation lies in its versatility of use. An image may be degraded to forget, to hate, to love until death, for calm or catharsis, reason or mania… If a picture can represent any possible set of meaning whose worth is a thousand words, then the computational destruction of that picture can interact with that meaning in any possible set of ways.

Clarity Buyback and Virality: In a typical social network graph, value concentrates around hyper-connected nodes like influencers or pop stars. Since each view costs the image clarity, and since contributing to the network gives you points you can use to earn clarity, Lossy has a bidirectionality of engagement that reduces the number of hyper-connected nodes, and in a sense, makes the app more democratic. Virality is punished.

Appendix: Christopher Pinney's corpothetics names an embodied aesthetics — applying tika, garlanding, the practice of darshan in which the god-print looks back — as against the disinterested, textual engagement that the archive trains us into. The digital image seems to refuse the corporeal: a JPEG cannot be touched the way a god-print can. But computation is its own bodily modality. Watching an image devolve is a sustained engagement with the image's substrate, and belongs to a lineage Pinney locates in Indian practices of overpainting, composite printing, and collage: metamorphosis, the dis-avowal of fixed identity. On Lossy each view is a small corpothetic act, and attention is a kind of touch that leaves a mark.

Special Thanks to James Tompkin and Jessina Leonard.

Claude Code was used to develop the application. All features except clarity buyback are public and usable at https://lossyimg.vercel.app/

Lossy

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