PERSON
John Berger
The British art critic, novelist, and essayist who taught a generation to ask what any image conceals—and whose framework for reading the social relations behind surfaces now supplies the sharpest tools for seeing through the mystifications of artificial intelligence.
Seeing comes before words, and for John Berger it also came before the acceptance of easy flattery. The man who opened
Ways of Seeing with that observation in 1972 spent fifty years training a critical eye on images—oil paintings, photographs, advertisements, peasant fields—asking whose interests each one served and whose labor each one concealed. His method was not cynicism but a form of
demystification: strip the aesthetic reverence from the object until the social relations that produced it become visible. That method is now more urgently necessary than it was when he invented it, because the AI tools celebrated in
The Orange Pill reproduce the same structural operations that Berger identified in the European
aesthetics of possession—smooth surfaces, concealed labor, and a
gaze that presents a specific way of seeing as though it were no gaze at all. Berger lived the last decades of his life among peasant farmers in the French Alps, writing the