How are images changing in a world shaped by artificial media, algorithmic circulation and platform capitalism? What is the influence of attention being exhausted and of perpetual encouragement to make money and keep wanting more?

Images today often have a very short life: they are created, shared, and discarded within seconds, existing only to briefly capture attention before vanishing. This book asks what happens to an image when it is no longer meant to stay. It looks at images not simply as reflections of the world, but as active forces that help shape the world around us.

Central to this transformation is obsolescence: not mere decay or replacement, but a generative force shaping how images appear, disappear, and how images influence desire, how we see the world, and what we believe to be true.

This book is essential reading for researchers, artists, and critics interested in the intersections of media, technology, and culture. It offers a new way for understanding images in a time when synthetic desire, algorithmic governance and control, and ecological exhaustion are changing what we see and what we can imagine.