Why CAPTCHA Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing

Clive Thompson: I hate doing Google's CAPTCHAs. Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects -- traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses -- just so I can finish a web search. I also don't like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems.But a while ago, while numbly clicking on grainy images of fire hydrants, I was struck by another reason: The images are deeply, overwhelmingly depressing. CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they're blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess a positively Soviet anomie. I think I've figured it out, and so now I present -- The Six Reasons CAPTCHA Pictures Make You Feel Like Crap: 1. They're devoid of humans.2. The angles are all wrong. 3. They're voyeuristic. 4. They look like crime-scene footage.5. The grids on the photos are an alien's-eye view of the world.6. There's very little nature.

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