CAPTCHA images are pictures of the outside world, but it’s a world that is unsettlingly bare of people. This is likely for privacy reasons, which is a laudable motive on Google’s part. But it winds up making the pictures look totally postapocalyptic. Each CAPTCHA depicts a world blasted by a neutron bomb, where the objects survive but none of the people do. CAPTCHA pictures are often shot from extremely awkward angles angles that we humans would never pick and they are frequently grainy and badly focused. How depressing are the CAptcha’s ? .

