I somehow feel as if I don't have much to share with my friends. Rob, who I have worked, climbed, and written with since 2018, has been able to power through my distant silences—my consistent and regretful inability to start up conversation from a distance—by bringing up many topics and phenomena he's seen on the internet. He has a different attachment to the internet than I, and this helps us understand the same subject or object in differing ways that drive a more thoughtful conversation than I would have had on my own or with many people around me.
After years of conversations over Telegram, I want to share some highlights I've found with Rob—and perhaps they are only highlights for me, but I enjoy these messages so much that I'd like to see them in a slightly different format than the usual constraints of smartphone messengers. As long as it's not too personal, and a little enlightening for the reader—should they be so interested in the comments of two nobodies—I'll post it here for posterity.
RR: Yeah I think designing datasets and prompts is now an art form of its own. Can't wait to see how it goes. The granularity of niche porn is already past the point of moral absurdity. I feel like AI will be the end of the internet, because if anything can be perfectly faked online, nothing can be trusted.
DA: It's truly the Information Age. People underestimated that it was just about collecting data, but now we have ways to use data for aesthetics, which is when people truly *live* the age they’re in. Kind of like industrial design for houses in the 20th century.
RR: I hope that when "content" becomes arbitrarily easy to create, people will realize it's actually about the process and not the end result.
DA: That’s true, I think one thing social media has done for us is make people interested in others' process of production. Pimple-popping, for example: people want to watch other people do their job for some reason, and I don’t think that type of thought so popularly existed until the 90s.
It all feels a little shallow, but it's still an interesting phenomenon. Even when people decried Discovery/National Geographic/History Channel for being dumb with its reality TV shows focused on working people’s processes, people found an itch they didn't know they needed to scratch until 24/7 TV came about. Most people watching someone make a cabinet are not even interested in buying it. Process is the content now.
RR: Yeah, I'm thinking that output is a "symbol" of a process, and when that symbol becomes saturated, people once again become interested in what's behind the symbol. AI art is actually something I want to get into because I think that it's the quickest way to destroy what I consider "bad" symbols. Stuff like advertising, etc.
I actually don't find a lot of "process" videos on Youtube very helpful. I'm more interested in the philosophy of processes, which I think is where the essence of creativity is. A typical 'process' is something I associate with being in a classroom.
DA: Yeah, I don’t find much help in process videos either. There are multiple Youtube channels dedicated to showing themselves building cabins and cottages by hand, but it’s more about the zen feeling than learning much at all about how to do it myself. The instructional videos are much better, but drier for those just looking to passively watch “process”.
After years of conversations over Telegram, I want to share some highlights I've found with Rob—and perhaps they are only highlights for me, but I enjoy these messages so much that I'd like to see them in a slightly different format than the usual constraints of smartphone messengers. As long as it's not too personal, and a little enlightening for the reader—should they be so interested in the comments of two nobodies—I'll post it here for posterity.
RR: Yeah I think designing datasets and prompts is now an art form of its own. Can't wait to see how it goes. The granularity of niche porn is already past the point of moral absurdity. I feel like AI will be the end of the internet, because if anything can be perfectly faked online, nothing can be trusted.
DA: It's truly the Information Age. People underestimated that it was just about collecting data, but now we have ways to use data for aesthetics, which is when people truly *live* the age they’re in. Kind of like industrial design for houses in the 20th century.
RR: I hope that when "content" becomes arbitrarily easy to create, people will realize it's actually about the process and not the end result.
DA: That’s true, I think one thing social media has done for us is make people interested in others' process of production. Pimple-popping, for example: people want to watch other people do their job for some reason, and I don’t think that type of thought so popularly existed until the 90s.
It all feels a little shallow, but it's still an interesting phenomenon. Even when people decried Discovery/National Geographic/History Channel for being dumb with its reality TV shows focused on working people’s processes, people found an itch they didn't know they needed to scratch until 24/7 TV came about. Most people watching someone make a cabinet are not even interested in buying it. Process is the content now.
RR: Yeah, I'm thinking that output is a "symbol" of a process, and when that symbol becomes saturated, people once again become interested in what's behind the symbol. AI art is actually something I want to get into because I think that it's the quickest way to destroy what I consider "bad" symbols. Stuff like advertising, etc.
I actually don't find a lot of "process" videos on Youtube very helpful. I'm more interested in the philosophy of processes, which I think is where the essence of creativity is. A typical 'process' is something I associate with being in a classroom.
DA: Yeah, I don’t find much help in process videos either. There are multiple Youtube channels dedicated to showing themselves building cabins and cottages by hand, but it’s more about the zen feeling than learning much at all about how to do it myself. The instructional videos are much better, but drier for those just looking to passively watch “process”.
I thought it was interesting that in Chinese calligraphy, there are entire schools dedicated to judging the character of a person by the way they write. When I took a class about it, the professor was never too interested in teaching us about the content of the letters written during different ages of Chinese civilization. They only cared about the style in which the words word written. I don’t think that modern China reflects this, as all cultures under a market economy are product-focused, but there are niche cultures and periods of time when workmanship/process was 90% of the history of a made object. Usefulness was largely secondary.
RR: Sounds like phrenology, lmao.
DA: Never thought of it like that, haha. It certainly is a fetishization of nobility and how they carry themselves compared to common folk. Only people of high ranking are noted for their handwriting over the millennia.
RR: Sounds like phrenology, lmao.
DA: Never thought of it like that, haha. It certainly is a fetishization of nobility and how they carry themselves compared to common folk. Only people of high ranking are noted for their handwriting over the millennia.