The video of George Floyd's murder entered an image-driven economy, one that is much larger and more complex than the image blizzard carried on Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, and similar platforms. While it was posted to YouTube, it quickly went viral on the other platforms and then was amplified by heritage media such as television and newspapers, in the United States and then quickly around the world. It soon proved to be the most impactful recent posting in a growing stream of such visual records, the grim inheritance of centuries of law enforcement exercised through excessive brutality. In the United States, the precedent that comes most readily to mind is the video of the beating of Rodney King by several officers from the Los Angeles police department in 1991 (Fig. 10.1). There are extraordinary parallels but also several significant differences between the two videos, the events they register, and the conditions of their reception. What might a comparison tell us about how the iconomy works, nearly 30 years later, in a society—indeed, a world—engaged in all-out image wars and mired in seas of misinformation and disinformation?

In the immediate and near aftermath of its making, the video of the beating of Rodney King had different valences in three related but, at the time, quite distinct contexts: on local and national media, above all on broadcast television, both free-to-air and cable; in the legal system, specifically a court in Simi Valley, in Ventura County, outside Los Angeles; and in an art museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, during its Biennial of 1993. Today, by contrast, the George Floyd murder video counts in a media environment in which television is divided between several formats from free-to-air through cable to mobile phones and is just one among several other platforms, with multiple crossovers between them. Personal social media platforms predominate. Any image, any video clip, and every kind of information can be conveyed through them, with few constraints, although calls to impose some limits are growing louder as cultural and political divides widen in most societies.