Eigengrau
It is a visual perception occuring inside the eye, resulting from the isomerization of rhodopsin, a light-sensitive molecule in rod cells.
In complete darkness, eigengrau appears brighter than a starry night sky, indicating that the human visual system processes light intensities through contrast.
As children know, it is possible to generate entoptic imagery by applying pressure to the closed eyelids: the cells of the retina can be stimulated by friction as well as light.
The statistical images produced by diffusion models are evolved from noise patterns. Gaussian noise, specifically, produces a distribution of color intensities on the image plane that follows a normal distribution curve, resulting in a uniform colored noise that averages to a grey goo.
Grey goo is also the name of a hypothetical eschatology: the world devoured by swarms of nanobots, all matter digested and transformed into copies of themselves. Many such thought experiments and science-fiction scenarios are built around self-replicating machines consuming the earth and all life on it for some obscure, or absurdly prosaic purpose. Endless paperclips and so on.
Intrinsic grey can be used as an image of an agressive averageness. Not an average derived from a set of extremes, but a normative, prescriptive process by which what exists in the dead center encroaches upon the surrounding area; changing the mean into a median, contaminating the esoteric and the abstruse and pulling it towards the mediocre.
French historian Pierre Serna talks of the extreme centre as a mode of government: a strategy devised by an opportunistic, deeply cynical class of technocrats and business school majors, offering to a jaded people the lure of an escape from bipartisan logic, presenting themselves as the only reasonable option, the pragmatic, liberal renewal for a dead system, splitting the traditional spectrum in a point arbitrarily defined as the center.
This mode of government is notably characterized by an explicit rejection of extremes. Anticipating a horseshoe theory that it will itself bring into existence, the young and charismatic leader must throw in the same bag the racists and the wokes; against all this madness, the reasonable, hardworking, silent majority has no option but him.
The extreme center, crucially, is not an extremely moderate or reasonable political alignment. It is not a tolerant or otherwise patient inclination, but rather an extremely centralizing force, one that attempts to pull towards itself all the power and legitimacy. It establises itself far above left/right quarrels, outside the spectrum of conflictual debates. Prophetic and holder of the sole truth, it needs not lie in the dirt of ideological debate. In this way, it tends towards a sleek exit from democracy itself, a slope that slides towards illiberalism, and fascism.
The agents of this slow revolution are not the racists, not the marxists, but rather the cynics, the suits who loan money to those who they know will default, the rug pullers, the shadowy parliementary assistants. The grey goo that slowly, exponentially devours the salient features, that sand off the edges. They bring a tide of desert, and there are more and more of them. The desert grows, woe betide he who harbours deserts...
In time, they threaten our perceptions, our vision. All vision is pareidolia - all vision is discernment, identification from a chaos of intensities. The flattening into grey threatens the very ability to see. Reducing contrasts, closing the horseshoe.