The Unintended Consequences of Digital Compression: How File Size Optimization Creates Expansion Artifacts

From the very first studies into compression (at Bell Labs in the 1940s), researchers knew they'd have to accept a tradeoff: you can achieve smaller file sizes if you're willing to accept some loss of quality.

The internet is limited by how much data we can squeeze into the narrow pipes of transmission infrastructure. So we invented compression, ways of representing the same object — a website, a picture, a song, a movie — within ever smaller digital footprints.

YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, and the algorithms that make them work, wouldn't be possible without it.

Compression artifacts have become so pervasive that they now define our digital aesthetic.