Common folk had only vague notions of their own image in the broad sense. Their individual and social identities were informed by participating in rituals and traditions rather than by reflection. On the other hand, the modern world is being paved with mirrors. A steady paper trail of bills, grades, pay stubs, and catalogs helps us create our individual identity. Pervasive digitalization of the approaching future promises clearer, faster, and more omnipresent mirrors.
Every consumer becomes both a reflection and reflector, a cause and an effect.
The Greek philosophers were obsessed with the chain of causality, how the cause of an effect should be traced back in a relay of hops until one reached the Prime Cause. That backward path is the foundation of Western, linear logic. In the realm of recursive reflections, an event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes reflecting, bending, mirroring each other in a fun-house nonsense. Rather than cause and control being dispensed in a straight line from its origin, it spreads horizontally, like creeping tide, influencing in roundabout, diffuse ways. Small blips can make big splashes, and big blips no splashes.