The Future of Symbols

2027 will be the golden jubilee of the most omnipresent idol of our times: the Apple logo. The Apple logo is Donna Haraway’s forbidden fruit. The Apple logo gave birth to our cybernetic embodiments. Are we Adam and Eve? And are the digitally rendered worlds our gardens of Eden? What are the symbols of our time anyway? Canva-fication of graphics makes most contemporary designs look indifferent. Helvetica Neue is the cult typeface of the last decade. The glass really has started to appear half empty; devoid of symbols, but an accelerated ‘core’ where the future of symbols appears to be a supermodern form, a minimal gravestone. How, if at all, do we see ourselves out of the orifice?

Museums are where symbols go to die. To place an anthropological object in a setting which is sterile rips it from its subjective qualities. The perception of these symbolic objects then gets tied to a small plaque that describes its meaning. The reception to these symbols becomes a pedagogical prison where shapes, motifs and archetypes adopt institutional meanings. Symbols have always been personal vessels for attaching one’s memories to a material form: mother’s spice rack, a coin left behind by a great-grandparent, logos of discontinued snacks from one’s childhood, an orange Le Creuset hiding in the attic, keys to an old car that sits in a junkyard somewhere, photo albums hiding behind clothes, letters used as bookmarks, the Cartoon Network logo. Throughout the course of history, symbols have shed or co-opted onto newer meanings because they are living (maybe not breathing) objects. How the future holds these objects changes in tune with how it moulds us into newer beings responding to different edifying stimuli.

The Cartesian Symbol: I, Eye, Aye

On 30 June 1986, artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in a letter to her friend: “Symbols are empty bottles. They function only through what you put in them—personal symbols mean personal alphabet, our uniqueness is all we have. The image is sacred and should not be stolen.”

In Cartesian terms, ‘I’ refers to a subjective self that is ‘thinking’. The age-old phrase of Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is a linguistic description of it, widely used to symbolise our mind as a pillar of human experience. The ‘I’ is not just a physical entity or some kind of spiritual energy trapped inside our flesh, but a conscious thinking subject that reasons, visualises and quite frankly tries to make sense of what the actual f*ck is going on. The eye plays a big part in shaping our ‘I’s. There’s a certain sense of relief when we come across cave paintings and hieroglyphs depicting forms and motifs that make us feel a bit sane about our embodiments. Seeing forms, which we can relate to thousands of years after they were etched into stone, makes us feel connected to the old world(s). We decode meaning. We become computers. Eye as a webcam, and the I as a GPU. Copy this, Nvidia.

What I’m trying to say is that seeing, in most cases, is a prerequisite to the formation of symbols. Symbols demand to be seen. They are like a time capsule floating across oceans, longing to be picked up by a sailor. Or like the corpuses of letters inscribed onto the walls of the Indus Valley Civilisation waiting to unravel for an archaeologist’s eyes. Even blindness is a form of symbolism in the prose and poetry of the Indian poet Mirza Ghalib, where he compares the lack of sight to ineptitude in perceiving the divine truths of the universe. Foresight without sight, an I without an eye. Symbols are the sores in my eyes.

These sores only got bigger with a new kind of battle: the screen time summary reports from our phones. With a wide shift of our personal embodiments as online figurines, technology evokes a lot of parallels between the digital and natural realm. The symbolic nature of ‘nature’ often invoked by our tech overlords might be the trick of the century. The cloud is where we store our digital memories. It serves as a metaphor for our minds and all the barely revisited selfies conveniently stored on servers in glass chambers. Why does removing anything from my recently deleted folder shrink my brain by a nanopercent? But, sometimes, I do wish to have the ability to remove all remnants of any symbols from my mind and press Ctrl+Delete to wipe memories which do not serve me.

The antennas on a computer chip resemble a tree in the ancient rainforest. The wired extension to a cursor does look like a mouse. Pest of the written code a bug, pestcontrol:debugging. The unwanted spread of programmes from one system to another, a virus. Maybe antiviruses should be renamed ‘vaccines’ for syntactic purposes, of course. Browser to an ecologist refers to grazing done by mammals, which prescribes a whole new meaning to ‘Safari’. Kernels are the central parts of both corn and operating systems. Networks in the natural order are symbiotic relationships between organisms and landscapes, but to our devices, they are interconnected systems that share information. Bluetooth still doesn’t make sense to me. Don’t even get me started on Wi-Fi.

I might be reaching here, but the meaning I derive from the names of large language model softwares, OpenAI and DeepSeek, is the invocation of the Afroasiatic god of the sea: Yamm. It attaches the vastness and might of our oceans to these interfaces. We really do surf the internet. Subway Surfers, but between devices.

Logos > Language

The verbification of corporations. The crystallisation of logos. The space between symbols and logos is shrinking at an accelerated pace. We inhabit a visual culture that is flooded with symbols in forms of advertising, television, movies and magazines that subconsciously shape our worldview. Let’s play a game: if I ask you to visualise some contemporary symbols, your imagination will direct you to at least one branded logo. We don’t perceive logos as simple trademarks, but rather as cultural symbols. Imperialism across the global majority can be traced by prevalence of double golden arches plastered onto a red backdrop (do not want a lawsuit, but I’m implying a fast-food chain currently on the BDS for funding a genocide in Falasteen).

There are now more of these golden M logos across the globe than Christian crosses. The widely circulated image of this logo against the backdrop of the devastating wildfires of California made rounds on the internet, symbolising the collapse of empires and nature’s divine justice. Revenge of the missionaries. The eucalyptus tree, a herbalist’s revered companion, morphed into an entity full of rage, fuming with embers to mark its displacement from its ancestral ancient forests to mega mansions of the elite.

Logos and their cheeky placements in everything from music videos to unsuspected paid partnerships by our favourite internet personalities make them contemporary symbols of pop culture and media. Logos here function as markers of brand identity trying to imitate archaeological motifs, giving them ancient symbolic powers. Logos give our brains an itch, maybe an itch of consumerism, still an itch nonetheless. They hold an unconscious appeal and can even be used to convey social cues of class and taste. The marketing executives seem to have taken Picasso’s words – “pull out our brain and use only our eyes” – very seriously.

Symbols have always reigned supreme as identifiers of our social cues, and modern mythology is deeply imbued with logos for similar reasons. The appeal of any product increases drastically when the product is stitched together to a logo for symbolic purposes. The more symbolism connects to those ancient, mystical motifs of tribal carvings, sculptures, and carved bones, the stronger its impact on our minds. Marketers have caught on to this, realising that today’s world isn’t just about logic and science—it’s full of mystical images and mythic symbols popping up in all kinds of forms and disguises.

But when did trademarks turn into logos? As the word suggests, trademarks were literally “marks of a trade”, propped on roofs of businesses and signalling the nature of “trade” offered. The longstanding red-and-white pole found atop barbershops has quite an interesting history. The pole we now spot when we go to get a trim used to be shared with surgeons in the Middle Ages, as both these professions performed operations, but only barbers performed any bloodletting rites, which the surgeons considered to be ‘demeaning’. It is bloodletting symbolised by the red-and-white barber pole—red for blood, white for bandages.

The 20th century gave birth to the term ‘logo’, and its makers are more complex in their designs than the trademark folks. Logos are not exactly what chiromancy was, but they do shape much more of our realities than we think. I see logos as accelerated versions of hieroglyphs embellished with consumerism and abstraction. The mythic forms and fetishistic fantasies once satisfied by looking at ochre symbols on ancient rocks are now replaced by geometrically designed digital footprints, leaving serious marks inside our hippocampus. As British novelist James Graham Ballard wrote in the preface to the French edition of his 1973 novel Crash, in a world steered by logos, we live in an enormous novel:

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

Perhaps the future of symbols doesn’t exist as found physical objects or signs. Farming for digital trinkets on the World Wide Web is a practice adopted by many internet dwellers. Websites such as Are. na, or Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index, serve as hunting grounds for a new kind of symbolism that is digital, logocentric and nostalgic. Who doesn’t want to feel like a building block in a Minecraft game, constructing worlds with newer forms and symbols which feel ‘of the time’. Rendering new possibilities of what we consider symbols to be is a hybrid cybernetic form, now morphed not only by ancient cultural zeitgeist, but also the ever-expanding technological influence of advertising, branding and consumerism.

Symbolism’s contemporary usage now serves not only as a path that leads to the deepest caves of the soul, but also as a medium for marketers in suits to flood the path with imagery of consumption. Online Cores invoke symbolic aesthetics that dictate the I’s subjective place in a society when images and motifs are so fleeting that we often collectively experience amnesia. Every image, idea, form, structure and prose feels impermanent—not in a sense of it having an expiry date, but every manifested metaphor feels like it exists independently outside of a movement.

If brutalist structures were erected in the past decade, an online pop culture magazine would have conveniently labelled the design movement as “technocore”. So, is Endcore the future of symbolism? Is Plato’s Cave a VR headset? Is the apple of my eye Steve Jobs?

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01 | Order Here