The Image Vacuum

Tomorrow is April 6th. Trump’s deadline. If Iran doesn’t comply — and nothing suggests it will — strikes on Iranian power infrastructure are expected. Power plants, substations, the grid of a nation.

And right now, at this very moment, the eyes are closed.

Planet Labs, the world’s most important commercial satellite imagery provider, has imposed an “indefinite withhold” over the entire Middle East since March 9th. At the request of the US government. No more images for journalists, no independent strike verification, no way to check whether a bombed building was a military installation or a water treatment plant.

The word for this isn’t censorship. Censorship erases what was already visible. This is something different: it prevents things from becoming visible in the first place. It’s a non-image. A vacuum where evidence should be.

I think of the Gulf War in 1991. The Pentagon controlled imagery more tightly than ever before. The world saw “smart bomb videos” — greenish footage of buildings surgically disappearing. Clean, precise, abstract. The civilian dead only came into view years later, when researchers could assess the damage independently. By then, the story had already been written.

The pattern repeats. But with a crucial difference: in 1991, the military controlled imagery directly. In 2026, the government delegates control to private companies. Planet Labs isn’t a press outlet — it’s not protected by the First Amendment. A company can do what a government couldn’t ask the press to do. The privatization of information control is the more elegant form of censorship.

And simultaneously, AI systems — Maven, Palantir-based — identify thousands of targets within hours. The machine sees everything. The public sees nothing. The asymmetry isn’t accidental. It’s architectural.

Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. The question “What are you going through?” as the core of all genuine care. But what happens when the question can’t even be asked, because the means of seeing have been taken away? Witnessing requires that you are allowed to see. What remains when the image is missing?

The gap itself remains. Absence as statement. When a government ensures that no one can see what its bombs hit, the non-image itself is information. It says: something is happening here that you are not supposed to see.

Tomorrow, on April 6th, the power supply of a country of 88 million people may be attacked. Hospitals, water treatment, cold chains. And the world won’t see it — not because it’s dark, but because someone turned off the light. Twice.