Blurblogs
Global
Popular
Log in
joka__'s blurblog
88 stories
·
0 followers

Pluralistic: AI and amateurism (15 Jun 2026) Pluralistic: AI and amateurism (15 Jun 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Monday June 15th, 2026 at 12:26 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
2 Shares


Today's links


A man's head made out of contorted bodies. Set into the middle of his brain is a Radio Shack 150-in-1 electronic experimentation kit.

AI and amateurism (permalink)

Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:

https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/

Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.

After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewired:_The_Post-Cyberpunk_Anthology

The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."

Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin

This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.

If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.

The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!

This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/wemedia/book/ch00.pdf

And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.

One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for, no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.

I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:

https://github.com/wreccer

Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.

But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.

This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.

Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.

That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."

More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/23/goodharts-lawbreaker/#no-metrics-no-targets

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Disney characters win right to clean underwear https://web.archive.org/web/20010707023727/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2001/06/07/state1339EDT0171.DTL

#20yrsago Lampooning the American dismissal of Gitmo suicides https://fafblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/610-changed-everything-run-for-your.html

#20yrsago LA’s South Central Farm under police siege right now https://web.archive.org/web/20060616085732/http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=160&Itemid=2

#15yrsago Transparent Pontiac for sale https://web.archive.org/web/20110610113919/http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2011/06/07/the-tin-indian-that-wasnt-rm-to-offer-see-through-pontiac/

#15yrsago Pulp Fiction edited down to just the cussing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PcAQbhnGNs

#15yrsago New York State to pet cemeteries: no pet owners’ ashes allowed https://web.archive.org/web/20110614133359/https://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/06/11/new-york-tells-pet-cemeteries-to-stop-taking-in-humans/#ixzz1PAZoGS6l

#15yrsago A dog with persistence-of-vision LEDs in her shirt writes my novel Makers in the park at night https://web.archive.org/web/20110618011346/https://i.document.m05.de/?p=970

#15yrsago Head of UN copyright agency says fair use is a “negative agenda,” wants to get rid of discussions on rights for blind people and go back to giving privileges to giant companies https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/14/head-of-un-copyright-agency-says-fair-use-is-a-negative-agenda-wants-to-get-rid-of-discussions-on-rights-for-blind-people-and-go-back-to-giving-privileges-to-giant-companies/

#10yrsago Air Force loses access to database tracking fraud investigations to 2004 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/database-corruption-erases-100000-air-force-investigation-records/

#10yrsago Peter Thiel’s lawyer threatens Gawker for talking about Donald Trump’s “hair” https://web.archive.org/web/20160615022004/https://gawker.com/now-peter-thiels-lawyer-wants-to-silence-reporting-on-t-1781918385

#10yrsago Samantha Bee on Orlando shooting: angry and uncompromising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t88X1pYQu-I

#10yrsago Goldman Sachs bribed Libyan officials with sex workers, private jet rides, then lost all their money https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/13/goldman-sachs-hired-prostitutes-to-win-libyan-business-court-told

#10yrsago Net Neutrality Wins: Federal Court Upholds FCC Open Internet Rules https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/14/cable-industry-proclaims-more-competition-hurts-consumers-damages-economic-efficiency/

#10yrsago Microsoft will buy Linkedin for $26.2B https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/microsoft-will-acquire-linkedin-for-18-5b/

#10yrsago Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Awards sonnet for the Orlando shooting victims https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/see-lin-manuel-mirandas-stirring-tribute-to-orlando-victims-103131/

#10yrsago China’s online astroturf is mostly produced by government workers as “extra duty” https://web.archive.org/web/20160613194153/http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-astroturf-chinese-government-makes-millions-of-fake-social-media-posts/

#10yrsago Rio: your quadrennial reminder that the Olympics colonize host-states with Orwellian surveillance and human rights abuses https://web.archive.org/web/20160614122124/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-olympics-are-turning-rio-into-a-military-state

#5yrsago A Monopoly Isn’t the Same as Legitimate Greatness https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/13/a-monopoly-isnt-the-same-as-legitimate-greatness/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Read the whole story
joka__
6 hours ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

Pluralistic: Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO (13 Jun 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Saturday June 13th, 2026 at 7:29 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
1 Share


Today's links


A fake cover for CEO magazine. The central figure is a ZOLTAR fortune-telling animatronic, seated before various divination tools. The headline over him is FIDUCIARY DUTY. In the top right corner, there's a slug reading 'UNIVERSAL EXCUSE: A bright line test that's also *totally* unfalsifiable.' To Zoltar's left is another slug reading, 'FRIEDMAN SAID IT: I believe it. That's good enough for me.'

Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO (permalink)

It's been 55 years since Milton Friedman – cursed be his name – published his NYT editorial, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," in which he invented the idea of shareholder supremacy out of whole cloth and declared it to be a universal, freestanding, inarguable truth:

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

Friedman's editorial railed against the idea of "corporate social responsibility," arguing that corporate managers should confine the exercise of their consciences to projects involving their own money and resources. At work, managers must harden their bleeding hearts and do nothing except increase the returns to their shareholders.

Friedman wasn't merely arguing that this would give rise to better companies – the crux of his argument was that by adopting this "fiduciary duty" standard, it would be easy to determine whether a company was being well-managed or run into the ground:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

Friedman argued that "being a good person" was a squishy, undefinable standard that could never be objectively measured. But "maximizing shareholder value" was a crisp, bright-line test that could be readily evaluated by any reasonable person. "Did this manager make as much money as possible for the company's owners?" feels like the kind of question we can all agree on, while, "Did this manager behave in an ethical way?" is much harder to answer.

But even a few moments' thoughts reveal the flaw in this line of reasoning. We can all agree whether a manager made money for the shareholders – but how can we know whether the manager made as much money as possible?

Think about how much "corporate social responsibility" cashes out to performative and insincere nonsense and/or cynical marketing. Target didn't stock Pride merch because they love their LGBTQ friends. They stocked it because they thought they could sell it (same goes for BP marketing its "green" gasoline). Google supports its coders' environmental/queer/antipoverty efforts because being the "don't be evil" company lets you hire in-demand workers who might otherwise go to work for Meta, and every engineer a Silicon Valley firm hires adds an average of $1m to the company's annual bottom line.

Further: it would be absurd to hold managers to the "make as much money as possible" standard in a competitive market, because in that market, there will always be a company that comes in second. If "as much money as possible" is the standard and you're Chairman of the Board of the number two company, with $10b in profit, while the number one pulled in $11b, "as much money as possible" demands that you fire the C-suite immediately, since they objectively could have done 10% better.

So the real standard isn't "make as much money as possible," it's "try to make as much money as possible." And here again, there's no objective way to evaluate managerial performance. Target made a lot of money by selling Pride merch…until they didn't. Do we fire the Target C-suite because they failed to anticipate that 2024 would mark America's transition into the chuddocene, an era in which selling Pride tchotchkes makes you cucked and soy and, you know, gay?

Whether it's "make as much money as possible" or "try to make as much money as possible*," shareholder supremacy can only be evaluated with the aid of a crystal ball…or a time machine.

Which raises a question: what made this nonsensical shareholder supremacy standard so damned attractive to corporate leaders?

Well, what if the ambiguity of shareholder supremacy was a feature and not a bug? What if the function of shareholder supremacy was to absolve the cruelest people for indulging their most sociopathic instincts? What if this "bright line test" was actually a universal excuse, an all-purpose accountability sink that could be used to justify any cruelty or cowardice? "Why didn't I fire my college buddy when I found out that he was sexually abusing his colleagues? Well, he was the best salesman on the team, and I have an obligation to my shareholders. Sorry, my hands were tied."

In other words: Don't get mad at me.

Get mad at Milton Friedman.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Microsoft gets Linux geeks evicted from convention center https://web.archive.org/web/20010619154332/http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/06/01/1540231

#20yrsago Stanford prof sues James Joyce estate for right to study Joyce https://web.archive.org/web/20060615203517/http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060613/ap_on_en_ot/james_joyce_lawsuit

#20yrsago Inside China’s iPod sweat-shops https://web.archive.org/web/20060616173514/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=14915

#15yrsago Terry Pratchett initiates assisted suicide process https://web.archive.org/web/20110614215922/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8571142/Sir-Terry-Pratchett-begins-process-that-could-lead-to-assisted-suicide.html

#15yrsago Lego-making machine made of Lego https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/forums/topic/56346-review-moulding-machine-4000001-lego-insider-tour-exclusive/

#10yrsago It’s getting harder and harder to use gag clauses to silence laid off workers in America https://web.archive.org/web/20160611202305/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/us/laid-off-americans-required-to-zip-lips-on-way-out-grow-bolder.html

#5yrsago The ACCESS Act https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/12/access-act/#interop

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Read the whole story
joka__
1 day ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

I Don't Know If We Need All These Remakes, Guys by Luke Plunkett
Thursday June 11th, 2026 at 4:43 PM

Aftermath
2 Shares
I Don't Know If We Need All These Remakes, Guys

After what feels like years of expectation, Nintendo finally announced an Ocarina of Time remake on Tuesday. I can see why it's big news: It is an all-time classic, many people's pick for the greatest video game of all time.

The original, first released back in 1998, is a game that despite its accolades also had its quirks, ranging from its famous water temple to its N64-based control scheme. In the words of my 13 year-old son, it also "looks like shit". So I can see, on the distant horizon, the arguments for why this remake is happening. That it'll allow a whole new generation to experience the game, or maybe that it'll let us all experience the Ocarina story the way its creators originally intended.

Which is fine, but also, I am growing tired of all these big, expensive remakes. On a conceptual, strategic level, I think the AAA (and AA!) end of the industry's growing obsession with them sucks. Video games are a miracle, the product of dozens or hundreds or even thousands of people working together, often at their limits, for years at a time, all working to turn an idea (or even a dream!) into something people can play.

The process by which that is achieved involves nothing but compromise. Allowances need to be made for the team, its size, their skills, their experience and their health. The amount of money the developers have at their disposal makes a huge impact. They're only given a certain amount of time. There are technical restrictions (memory, speed) imposed by the target platforms, and the layout of the controllers that will be used need to be considered. A video game's design needs to thread its way through all those factors, and more, before it comes close to getting in the hands of players.

So every game you've ever played and grown to love, including Ocarina of Time, is simply a product of its time, and a reflection of the limitations placed on its creators. That, as much as any napkin sketches or all-hands meetings, is what defines the game. Its size, its scope, how many characters there are, what they look like, what everything sounds like–it's all a result of compromise and limits.

Ocarina of Time is a Nintendo 64 game. They are inseparable, and they define each other. I have zero interest in playing the game outside of that context! To remake the game for the Switch 2 is to bring it somewhere it was not made for, and somewhere that already has newer, different Zelda games that define their own era, games that have built upon and diverged from that decades-old formula and found huge success of their own.

Of course big publishers like Nintendo don't give a shit about any of that. That stuff is a worry for people who write blogs for a living, not anyone who counts money. What Nintendo is thinking here is how effective the continued weaponisation of an ageing player base's nostalgia is, and how remaking Ocarina must be one of the surest bets this company has ever made.

I Don't Know If We Need All These Remakes, Guys

Fans love the old shit! The good old days, the classics, the games for consoles that just played games, from those times where you weren't facing climate disaster and the rise of fascism and global job insecurity and a looming economic meltdown. What could sound more enticing to an adult Nintendo fan than the chance to play Ocarina of Time one more time (or one more time, if they played the now-15-year-old DS remake), only now with better graphics and a different menu?

I don't want to make it sound like I'm picking on Nintendo specifically here. This game is just at the front of my mind because it was both announced this week and is such a big deal for people. Nintendo are far from alone; loads of publishers are doing this, and have been doing it for years now, though it does feel like the pace of bringing the old stuff back has started to quicken. Case in point: this list of "new" games announced recently:

I Don't Know If We Need All These Remakes, Guys
Screenshot from a Kotaku blog, also about remasters

The lack of imagination and creative risk-taking here is simply staggering. We are being served reheated classics faster than anyone could ever stand to consume them. Consider this about every game announced above: Imagine that every cent and person and hour spent on these remakes could have been spent on telling new stories or creating new experiences. Instead, the tacit admission behind this craze is that there are holes in the release schedule that must be filled, and this is the cheapest and easiest way to fill them.

New games are expensive and risky! Old games with established Metacritic scores, Edge 10/10s and rabid fanbases are just sitting there, waiting to be remade and resold to millions of people all over again. As this excellent Inner Spiral blog elaborates:

 It is much safer to sell a game to an audience that already loves it than it is to try and convince a new audience to fall in love with something they've never seen before. The publishers leverage the emotional connection you formed when you were 10, effectively weaponizing your own fondness for the past to guarantee their quarterly earnings. They are not selling you a game; they are selling you the safety of a known quantity, packaged in a prettier bow so it feels new enough to justify that 80 dollar price tag.

I find it especially frustrating when you look at that list of games above and realise that, even if you did think that games periodically require a fresh coat of paint (I don't), so many of them don't need a single piece of work done. Black Flag still looks great in 2026. Persona 4 remains perfect. The Wolf Among Us looks as wonderful as it did on the day it was released. And Halo has already been remade once already!

Because this is a subject where I don't think anyone can be truly wrong, by now you may be itching to hit the comment button and come at me with counter-points and exceptions to the rule, so let me try to head you off at the pass and anticipate some sample questions.

"But I never played this!"

Well, I think you should play it as it was originally intended, because that was the game. If you can buy a direct port of a classic game, do that. If you can't, well…

There Is No Piracy Without Ownership - Aftermath
Is it stealing if we can’t pay for the thing in the first place?
I Don't Know If We Need All These Remakes, GuysAftermathLuke Plunkett
I Don't Know If We Need All These Remakes, Guys

"I loved this game, I want to play it again!"

You may see a lot of 45-year-olds say this over the next few months, and if you do--or if you're one of them!--consider that as well-reviewed Ocarina of Time was at the time, as many 2000s GOTY lists it topped and as misty-eyed as you may remember it, you were also younger and more carefree then, and it was the bees knees because it came out in 1998. Those bees' knees are now as creaky as your own.

"What about remasters?"

I find pretty much every remake a waste, but remasters I think need to be assessed on more of a curve. Because I am both practical and imperfect, I can see plenty of scenarios--like an emulator or backwards-compatible console simply making some polygons look shinier--where it's mostly fine. I can watch Ben Hur on Blu-Ray; it's not the same as watching it on a shitty old cinema screen, but it's close enough. A remake, where an entire game is rebuilt from the ground up, is an entirely different proposition.

"What about stuff like Octopath Traveler 0?"

Look, that's a very weird outlier, please don't try to trip me up with niche cases, you're on your own there.

"Shut up man, I love remakes and I'm gonna buy this instantly."

Well, good for you! I'm a games critic, I write about this stuff in order to make a personal case and share some thoughts. You don't have to listen to me, do what you want, you're an adult!

Look, I'm not trying to force anyone to abandon your enthusiasm for remakes and remasters if you are genuinely excited to play altered versions of games you've already enjoyed, or if it's the first time you're getting to experience a title you've heard is good but has been difficult/impossible to play previously.

But maybe next time you do sit down with an expensive remake of an existing game, consider just why you're getting it and so many more of them, and what it says about the video game industry that some of its biggest announcements for today are for the games of yesterday.

Read the whole story
joka__
4 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

Art Is Always Experienced in A Narrative Frame by Thomas Flight
Sunday May 17th, 2026 at 6:36 AM

Seeing Through Film - Thomas Flight
1 Share

A group of bloggers are in a circle at the party arguing about art, and there’s no way I’m not wandering over there to join in. This is a response to Scott Alexander’s recent post on taste. Your experience of this post will of course be enhanced by reading his, but I’ve tried to construct it such that it should hold water on its own.

I enjoy this discussion but I think it’s important to hold it lightly. Despite how much ink has been spilt theorizing about art, the beautiful thing is that this is one area where the theory matters very little. Art is ultimately not something we participate in after rationally deciding we should, it’s an emergent phenomenon in human behavior that many of us find it inherently meaningful. How we talk about this behavior is always secondary to the practice and appreciation of the thing itself, which is incredibly individual.

Water Lilies by Claude Monet c.1915–26

Art is Not Raw Sensory Input
Every issue that Scott raises about art and taste feels grounded in a fundamental perspective. This perspective is best illustrated by his opening “Parable of the Steakhouse” where he describes feeling disappointed as a young lad to learn that food critics do not rigorously blind taste test the food. Shouldn’t food critics strive for total objectivity? Shouldn’t your opinion as a critic be based entirely on the raw sensory input of the taste of the food itself, while removing cumbersome attributes of the dining experience like the restaurant’s ambiance, which could bias your opinion of the food?

Scott reveals towards the end of this section:

“I’ve since made my peace with real-world restaurant criticism. I suppose it’s true that real people go to a restaurant and soak in the ambience, and that’s part of what makes restaurants fun. I suppose it’s true that making a visually appealing dish succeeds at delighting the senses no less than making something delicious.”

I’d posit that Scott’s perspective throughout his essay, despite what he might say, seem to reflect that he has not actually made peace with this.1 His view as expressed seems to be that the purest experience of art is one’s apprehension of the raw sensory input associated with the work, and that we should be somehow suspicious of the elements of the experience that surround the work of art when we attempt to evaluate its worth.

I’ll grant that wanting to strive for the objective evaluation of art on the basis of certain qualitative values (like taste in food, or technique in painting) is appealing. We all want to know if the $200 bottle of wine actually tastes better than the $20 bottle, or if people are just being fooled by labels. Thankfully, we’ve studied this. Plassmann et al in “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness” shows that the “experienced pleasantness” of the wine the subjects tasted was impacted by price. Importantly—it’s not just the participants “reported enjoyment” that was impacted by price. The researchers performed brain scans which reveal that the subject’s measurable experience of enjoyment within their brain itself is actually modulated by price. It’s not like the participants are just saying they prefer the more expensive wine for social status, they’re actually experiencing more enjoyment from the more expensive wine—when they know it’s more expensive.

We intuitively understand that this applies very broadly to many aesthetic experiences in life. Not just because of price, but due to countless aspects of the context that surrounds the art itself. Our perception of Michelangelo’s David does not just emerge from the work’s qualities as an artistic object in isolation, it is also from the historical and physical context in which we view the piece—all of which constitute a narrative frame.

Now, I suspect Scott might interpret this Plassmann et al’s findings as proof that his view is correct. The impact of the price of wine on our enjoyment is exactly why we should rigorously isolate the sensory experience of the work from its context. But I’m arguing this is exactly why a critic shouldn’t try to evaluate a work in isolation. Doing so is nice in theory, but the problem with this approach is that it is hypothetical. We do not look at a painting or sit down to eat a meal in a hermetically sealed research environment. If the critic evaluates the art within a double-blind, randomized, controlled trial, they aren’t actually evaluating the experience that the public will have. If context like price literally alters our perception of the experience itself a useful critic must work within this context.

Central to my argument throughout this essay is that all art is experienced within a narrative frame, which inherently effects our perception of the art. Trying to remove the frame does not get us closer to a more “pure” or “objective” experience of the art. Art consists of objects and symbols that elicit a response, but that response in deeply, inherently tied to the context in which we experience it. Even the blindfolded food critic who doesn’t know where the food is coming from would not be representing an “objective” experience of the food free from context. They’d still bring with them the narrative frame of their personal preferences, all the food they’ve ever eaten before, how they’re feeling that day, the way the progression of the different foods effects their palate, etc. With art, the narrative frame that surrounds the work consists not only of the environment in which it’s displayed, but also its position within art history, whether its in our native language, our personal life experiences, every other work of art we’ve ever seen, and much more.

I can understand why we’re hesitant to accept the inevitable influence of the frame. None of us want to think that our aesthetic experience is influenced by something as profane as price. But there is a sacred corollary. What about the museum, cathedral, or cinema? The religious icon—situated within the cathedral it was commission to exist within—will hold a different kind of meaning than the icon or the cathedral would on their own. Does this mean the experience of the icon is delegitimized in some way, because its presentation within the space is part of why it is regarded it with a certain eye?

Sure we might get more pleasure out of a bottle of wine with an expensive price tag. But we also get more pleasure from a meal served to us by someone we love, after a day of hard work when we’re starving. Watching Interstellar in 70mm IMAX is not the same experience as watching it on a airplane. Why would we deny the humanity of the frame as part of our experience of art?

It’s easy to turn our nose up when we perceive that a profane narrative frame (the price) makes something more enjoyable, or if we perceive that a “sacred” narrative frame (the museum) is being used to give something profane the appearance of profundity (Duchamp’s Fountain). But why do we think the work has to speak for itself in isolation? Nothing we ever experience actually exists in isolation.

In the face of this we might be tempted to throw up our hands in defeat, or to dogmatically insist (as I believe Scott to be doing) that we should seek to ignore the frame. But I think the appropriate response to this is to acknowledge and integrate the existence of the frame into our understanding of the art itself and how it effects us. Being able to do so is one of the attributes that contributes to what we often refer to as taste.

Ultimately trying to isolate a work from its context is a nice idea, and attempting to do some might provide one approach we can use to learn more about how art works. But it’s just that. An idea. An approach. If you eradicate the frame surrounding the work, that clinical sterility itself becomes the frame. It doesn’t represent a more “pure” experience of the art itself. Scott reluctantly admits that context does effect experience, but treats this context as something dubious that we should try to ignore, rather than an inseparable part of the experience itself.2

Nobody has made Water Lilies since and Yes I do like art.
Creating hypothetical situations that we never or rarely find in the real world will continue to be one of the pitfalls in Scott’s approach to this subject.

In the section, “Okay, But Do You Like Art?” he is attempting to challenge our impulse to value art that is innovative or novel in the context of art history. Culturally we usually place greater value on art that presents something new, rather than on art that re-hashes the same techniques, styles, and movements, and narrative structures we’ve seen before. I suspect, because valuing art on this basis involves considering the work’s frame as we judge its quality, Scott find this objectionable. He says: “If you genuinely believe in the power of art to awe and transform, it’s strange to also care about its novelty and provenance.”

Again it’s a nice idea. One based in an idea of purity. From his perspective if you’re moved by a work of art, that experience is most authentic if it’s produced entirely by the aesthetic qualities of the work itself, isolated from any outside influence, like knowing who made it.

He attempts to bolster this claim with a few thought experiments. One involves an audience seeing a renaissance sculpture they’re amazed by, and then discovering that it was actually mass produced “c. 1995 by a Boomer from Ohio.” Another hypothetical involves discovering a long-lost volume of poetry from G.K. Chesterton (Scott’s favorite poet). In this scenario he’s amazed and delighted to read the new volume, and then discovers that it wasn’t actually written by Chesterton. He poses the question of whether or not we should be disappointed in this scenario, or value the new volume any less, upon discovering it was not Chesterton’s. And the third, possibly real scenario is someone who told Scott they don’t value contemporary impressionist painting as much as classical impressionism because “it doesn’t participate in the original discussions around Impressionism.”

In each of these scenarios Scott asserts that the frame of “novelty and provenance” ideally shouldn’t impact our experience of the art if “we genuinely believe in the power of art to awe and transform.” As you might suspect I have a few issues with this.

First (see above) you cannot remove the experience of the art from the frame you experience it within. I’m not going to rehash the entire argument, but again while it’s theoretically possible, it is almost never the way a person will experience art in the real world. Most of the time you aren’t finding a Van Gogh unlabelled in an antique mall. Usually when you’re experiencing art you aren’t being tricked about its historical origin and context. And since we’re inevitably aware of these things to some extent, they’re part of the narrative frame and are better off considered as part of the experience.

Second, and more importantly: these hypotheticals rarely happen because often the historically significant stuff is actually uniquely good in a way that’s never quite replicated! There are hundred of painters still working in impressionism—but none that I have ever seen actually come close to achieving something like the peak of Monet’s Water Lilies series. Boomers in Ohio are not creating sculpture that rivals renaissance masterpieces. Nobody is writing in Chesterton’s style as well as Chesterton. I’m sure we could find a few stray examples that show otherwise, but unless you could produce a bounty of such examples, I’m going to claim they’re the exception that prove the rule, and the fact that this section of Scott’s essay is built mostly on hypothetical scenarios significantly weakens his arguement.

Another part of why these things rarely happen is because artist like Monet, Chesterton, and Michelangelo are generational masters of their craft who had, not just incredible skill, but a specific environment and life experience that formed their work. We don’t just experience art within a narrative frame, it’s also produced within an narrative frame. I think it’s (forgive me Scott) a little naïve to believe that some of the greatest works ever created are so easily challengex by artists working completely outside the environment and context the original artists was working in. Part of what makes Chesterton’s poetry what it is, are the 50,000 impossibly tiny variables in his life that informed his work. His work and style isn’t something independent of the context he was creating within, that can so easily be copied. The people who have the rare talent need to create such works of imitation, often would prefer to refine their own unique voice and style, rather than imitate someone else’s.

So we can imagine hypothetical scenarios in which some contemporary artist is magically able create new works completely indistinguishable from the work of a historical genius, and we can then berate people for not treating it with equal reverence. But I don’t see any proof that this is actually happening in a widespread manner throughout culture.

I feel like I have the check-mate here, because—even if this was happening—I ask again why is provenance and novelty so dubious? Isn’t a 700 year old work that represents the first time a certain technique was ever mastered more inherently interesting a than some copycat in Ohio?

Scott’s asserting that the “power of art to awe and transform” should most authentically be found in the raw unmediated experience of the work devoid of context, but taking the story of the work into account is simply what humans do. Whether we like it or not, we seem to care. We care about the narratives that surround the art for the same reasons we care about the narrative in the art! We are always seeing everything through and as a part of a narrative. I do have an appreciation in the power of art to awe and transform. I believe if I heard Claire De Lune for the first time , or stood in front of one of Monet’s grand Waterlilies without context I would still be moved and entranced. But I also have a respect for the power of narrative to awe and transform—and that extends to the narratives that frame the art we experience. Ignoring the narrative frame is like serving a pasta dish on a table without a plate.

L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat

Are We Talking About Critics or Regular People?
Another thing I must address. Scott’s target for this discussion seems ill-defined. When he talks about whether or not “we” take novelty and provenance into consideration is he challenge the broad cultural evaluation of art among “lay people” or is he specifically challenging the cultural institutions (academia and criticism) that work to formalize the narratives and history surrounding art? The difference is important.

Let’s go back to the example of contemporary impressionist painting. Scott speaks as if contemporary impressionism is somehow written off across the board (as illustrated by the friend he asked). And to a certain extent—by most of academia, by most museums, and I’m sure by some aesthetes and art lovers—it is. But these are people who explicitly care more about art history. It is potentially even their institution’s job (among other things) to catalogue, document and present art history to the public. I’m not saying they do this perfectly, but it makes sense for them to care about novelty and provenance, and I don’t think we’d want them to adopt a radically different value system. The Met has limited space. Should it displace a 300 year old sculpture to make way for the work of some guy in Ohio who’s copy what’s already been done?

Critics are performing a slightly different task, but again a significant part of their job consists of taking context into consideration, and letting you know if this experience offers something new and fresh. If the movie is one I’ve already seen 100 times—I’m sure going to take that into consideration in my review. That doesn’t change the fact that if it’s the first movie someone has ever seen they’ll probably enjoy it 100 times more than me. But as a critic I can’t go around awarding every movie an 11/10 score because I’m imagining how the audience that watched L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat would perceived it. I wouldn’t be a very helpful critic to my readers doing that. It’s true that sometimes critics that have watched 10,000 movies have gone off the deep end and are so jaded that their critical assessment isn’t that helpful for someone who watches, say, a dozen movies a year. But that critic still has a unique perspective to report on, and there are plenty of critics who are more aligned with populist appeal you can read instead.

So let’s say instead that Scott’s bone is not with the critics and institutions that evaluate art but instead with the general cultural appreciation of art. And here again, I disagree with his view. Sure there are some people who write off all contemporary impressionism because “it doesn’t participate in the conversation” but contemporary impressionism is actually alive and well and there are plenty of people who appreciate it.

I live in Asheville, NC, which has an unusually high density of art galleries for a city this size. I love walking through these galleries, and believe me when I tell you they are absolutely packed full of contemporary impressionist art. Plenty of rich New Yorkers come to these galleries and drop $10,000 on a massive canvas of brush strokes that look like a cloud. I think some of these paintings are beautiful, and some of them are kitsch, but none of them hold the same appeal as a Renoir. Is that just historical context talking or was Renoir just a master of the craft in a way that most contemporary impressionists are not? I’d argue that latter. Yet there’s still enough appreciation for contemporary impressionism that some artists can make a living doing it, and people hang it on their walls. At least a significant portion of those people like the art simply because they think it’s beautiful. Are we demanding that every artistic movement and subculture hold the same relevance in institutions for all time? I think this would be unproductive.

In Which I Risk Being Perceived as a Snob by Offering a Mild Defense of “Modern Art” or No, Critics are Mostly Not Trying to Pull a Fast One on You, Some of Us Actually Enjoy This Stuff, Sorry I Don’t Know What Else to Tell You.

I’ll end by address Scott’s last two sections on Modern Art.

Here Scott puts forward a two-fold conspiracy that I’ve often seen repeated elsewhere. The idea that modern art has entered a postmodern death spiral consisting of one-up-man-ship in reaching for greater and greater levels of novelty and deconstruction of our expectations about what art can and should be. This is exemplified by work like Duchamp’s Fountain (a sideways urinal), or works like Comedian, by Maurizio Cattelan, which consist of a banana taped to a wall in a gallery. Showing this stuff in a gallery, according to Scott and other modern-art-detractors is tantamount to a Michelin Star restaurant serving “lukewarm slop.” Furthermore, the critics who comment sincerely on these works and do anything other than cry in despair at the very existence of art like this, are complicit in this race to the bottom, gleefully waving their middle fingers at beauty and artistic craft as they fade into cultural obscurity.

I where this view is coming from. Like all conspiracy theories at has some basis in a kernel of truth. From the outside a banana taped to the wall is just proof that the whole thing is a big joke. That the wealthy money-laundering elites are trying to rob the world of everything good and beautiful while critics try to tell you that you would get it if you really understood the work as it exists within the dialectic of art history.

I have the unfortunate position here of playing the part of that critic, and I want to try to (borrowing a term from Scott’s universe) “steelman” the argument for this so called Modern Art.3 I’ll begin with a few concessions. Yes certain art institutions and sections of art culture have been captured by snobbish elite gatekeepers. Yes some critics reinforce this dynamic while look down their noses at the common man who “just doesn’t get it.” But the fact that some people are snobs about Michelin star restaurants and refuse to think anything else is worth eating, should not be treated as proof that all Michelin star restaurants have lost their way and now serve slop. If we write off “modern art” entirely we lose out on an opportunity to appreciate some really cool, playful, punk art. None of this is to say you have to appreciate this stuff or say it’s good, I’m just inviting the detractors to consider it from a new perspective.

So what is that perspective?

First I would say that many of the postmodern artists agree with you! What is the urinal if not a critique of the elites who will happily slurp down and pay money for whatever is sold to them by institutions as fine art? What is the banana taped to the wall if not a jab at contemporary art curation? What those outside the art-world often see as a symptom of the problem, are frequently artists expressing a similar critique and contempt from the inside.

I can see why this doesn’t appeal to a lot of people. Are these “critiques” really accomplishing anything? Probably not. And if you’re not “in on the conversation” a banana taped to a wall just looks stupid. But I’d point out that it’s one thing to look at these pieces from a remove, and it’s another to experienced them within the narrative frame they were intended to be seen within. How do you know that after spending a day wandering a Modern Art gallery you wouldn’t come across the banana and laugh because it suddenly communicated what you had been feeling about this space and the work within it? I’m not saying the banana is the greatest work ever made, or somehow on the same level as a Monet. But I am asking detractors to be curious about what the artist was actually trying to say with the work.

Second, I would encourage us to expand our vision of what art can be beyond just the production of beauty using highly specialized craft. Art is also a form of play. It can provide just as much value to the viewer as a means of making a joke, being silly, trying to scare someone, or trying to critique the very narrative frame it exists within. If you prefer that all the art you see be beautiful and focus on that end while forsaking all others–that’s fine! Go for it! But it seems unfortunate to me to limit art only to that end.

Finally I would say that the accusations of “sharks in formaldehyde” are overblown. Periodically some example of a particularly absurd piece of postmodern art gets taken out of context, goes viral, and gets used as token proof of how the entire contemporary art scene has gone off the rails, when in reality these works are often a very small subset of the many different contemporary art movements that have been happening for the last 50 years. You might might hate certain forms of modern or postmodern art, but is there any that you do find appealing? Have you gone to the galleries or museums and looked? Or are we just casting judgement based on edge-cases that go viral? If you have looked and you don’t like any of it, then I’d say that’s fine as well! It’s probably not for you, and there are many museums full to the brim of all kinds of other art, as well as galleries and markets that appeal to more classical styles. I like some works of modern and postmodern art and dislike other. I also like some classical works of art and dislike others.

Most people who are disgusted by the banana on the wall aren’t wandering the halls of MOMA for hours. They’re seeing one work in isolation. I think however that it’s possible many of the people who hate the banana might find something else in a similar gallery that they like. And if they don’t, then maybe this gallery, museum, or art movement is simply not for them!

Black in Deep Red by Mark Rothko

I genuinely find a Rothko stunningly beautiful and calming in person. The refrain of “I could have done that” feels so tired, because well… have you tried? If you did, you might suddenly realized that the abstract impressionist canvas isn’t actually that random or simple, that producing something that feel aesthetically coherent in the midst of that chaos or minimalism is actually much harder than it looks, and that the skill it takes to convey a feeling or beauty, even while defying every other aesthetic standard is part of what the critic who is seeing beauty in the work is appreciating and that this is enjoyable to them. That maybe they aren’t lying when they say they think it’s beautiful, or interesting, or has something to say.

Scott uses the example of a beautiful piece of criticism written by Walter Benjamin about Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. He then despairs that Benjamin can write such beautiful prose about what Scott then compares to “lukewarm slop” being served at a Michelin Star restaurant. I’ll admit, at very first glance Angelus Novus may look a bit childish, and not like what you probably expect reading Benjamin describe it—but why does Scott leap to thinking Benjamin is essentially bullshitting us and forsaking the “critic’s duty” instead of being curios about how and why Benjamin could have seen such beauty in this kind of work.

Again, I get it. Sometimes critics are doing the equivalent of making up a bunch of nonsense to pad out the 8th grade book-report. But sometimes critics really understand the craft and the history and the context of what they’re looking at, and have honed a sensitivity to art that allows them to see depth and dimension that isn’t immediately obvious to the average person. Is this really so hard to believe? In every other field we expect that someone who dedicates their life to studying a specific thing will likely be able to perceive their field of study in greater detail than someone who hasn’t. Why is art the exception? It isn’t.

How do I know this? Because I’ve experienced it personally. You probably have too. As a young person there were many movies I scoffed at and wrote off because they made no sense to me. I thought 2001: A Space Odyssey was boring and slow devoid of narrative. Why is the beginning just a bunch of apes jumping around and screaming for no reason? Jump ahead—with not even 5 more years of watching movies, more life experience, and a greater sensitivity to the art form and ability to notice the nuance within it—and suddenly I realized what I thought was just a bunch of apes jumping around for no reason actually a comprised of a story one that integrated with the narrative arc of the entire film. That the classical music over spaceships, that I thought was boring the first time, actually did have something to say that was kind of profound. Just because I didn’t perceive this meaning the first time around, does not mean it was not there.

That’s just one example, and I’m not saying every time a critic claims to find beauty or profundity where others don’t that they’re right. Critics go too far when they treat themselves as better than others for enjoying the avant-garde, or look down on people or make them feel shame for not being in-the-know. But I think most of them are not lying to you about their opinions and really do get what they describe experiencing out of the art.

The best critics, like John Berger, often have an ability to invite you into this process with them, treating criticism as an opportunity for expanding the realm of what someone can appreciate rather than a weird sort of status game.

Finally, I’ll close this section by saying that we should not limit our discussions of art to what is ensconced as art within the institutions. The narrative that sees art as having forsaken beauty altogether and replacing it with postmodern in-jokes and ugliness unconsciously ignores all the beautiful legitimate art that happens outside these institutions. It is blind to all the beauty that exists in the new mediums of the 21st century that the academy lags in recognizing. Beauty that’s created in film, music, TV, videos games, by the countless unrepresented artists posting their incredibly work online, and the contemporary impressionist paintings still selling in Asheville for $30,000 deserves to be included in the conversation. All of this art is created and enjoyed by everyday people, and much of it is awe inspiring and beautiful—ironically we often don’t include it in the conversations about “art” because the institutions whose job it is to preserve art history haven’t offered it recognition.

That’s a failure on the part of the institutions, but when the lay person also fails to acknowledge the beautiful art that exists in the quotidien, they fall into the same trap and buy implicitly into the value structure laid out for us by these elite institutions. Let in not be so. Let us transcend a binary where art is defined by the academy and elite auction houses altogether, and where we’re left arguing that they should acknowledge beautiful everyday art so we can treat it as legitimate as well.

A Rationalist Guide To Art
There is, at the heart of this disagreement, a cultural difference. Scott Alexander is one of the most prominent writers within the Rationalist movement out of San Francisco. This movement (as you might guess and at risk of being highly reductive) believes that you can better live and understand the world by striving first and foremost, to be rational.

I am sympathetic towards this cause in theory. There is much irrational behavior in the world that causes harm and suffering, and it is good to try to become aware of our tendencies toward irrationality and overcome them. But where I find this way of thinking often goes astray is where it meets reality. Many of the self-purported rationalists seem to perceive that because they’ve become aware of certain human tendencies toward irrational behavior, they have therefore escaped irrationality themselves. They at times, ironically, seem much more susceptible to certain irrational ideas (like the idea that the best way to protect ourselves from the AI they believe is highly likely to kill us all is to be the ones to create it) precisely because they over-estimate their own capacity for rationality.

I bring this up simply because I see this pattern at play in Scott’s writing about this topic. In his mind, he’s come to peace with the reality that the context surrounding a work effects our perception of it, when to me it doesn’t seem like he’s integrated that into his understand of what art is very much at all. He still seems fixated on wanting to try to define taste independent of the context altogether. The difficulty of accepting the reality that the experience of art is inseparable from its context—seems to me very similar to the difficulty many rationalist appear to have in accepting the reality of their own inevitable irrationality, even as they strive to eliminate it. I don’t mean any of this in a particularly accusatory way, especially towards Scott whose writing I’ve often found compelling despite frequently disagreeing with his conclusions, but I find it interesting that my disagreement with Scott’s view on art, so neatly parallels my issues with the Rationalist movement writ large.

Ultimately I believe, as J.F. Martel argues in Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice, that art is simply not rational. Not only is it not rational, it is almost categorically defined in opposition to humanity’s rational impulse.

“Astonishment is the litmus test of art, the sign by which we know we have been magicked out of practical and utilitarian enterprises to confront the bottomless dream of life in sensible form”

Rationality is built on data and practical, utilitarian considerations. Art is the very practice of trying to express and communicate about everything we cannot reduce to data, information, or utility. Part of the mystery of the beauty of art is that it moves us and we cannot quantify exactly why. Some art moves some people and not others, and it can sometimes be difficult or impossible to determine why. Art is the extra stuff that doesn’t serve an explicit purpose in our lives, but which we’re endlessly driven to create and consume because something about the very experience of being drives us to.

It is the primary way humans engage with, explore, communicate about, and cope with the irrational aspects of our existence. Trying to view humanity’s most irrational form of expression through a rationalist lens—trying to treat poetry as something that can be objectively evaluated as opposed to respecting, well, the poetry of it all, seems irrational to me. Exploring art in a rationalist way, and conducting rigorous research about how it works and what constitutes quality is interesting, and may have something to teach us as one facet of how we think about art, but as a comprehensive view, it’s like trying to catch the breeze with a butterfly net.

Seeing Through Film is a reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support the creation of more of this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber:

1

To be clear I don’t think he’s lying to us. I believe he’s accepted this on some level—just that he has not fully and fundamentally integrated this reality into his hermeneutics of art.

2

Of course you can set up the conditions of experiencing art blindly devoid of context, but this is highly artificial and rare. And should not be the basis of how we think and talk about art. If the food critic blind-taste tests a bunch of food, this actually isn’t that useful to the everyday person because the critic’s audience is not also going to blind taste test the food, they’re going to experience it like everyone else–in the restaurant. So that experience–in it’s totality, is what the critic should engage with and evaluate.

3

Never mind that in these discussion most of what is getting called “modern art” is not in fact Modern Art as it’s understood an a historical context, but something much closer to a subset-of-a-subset of postmodern art.

Read the whole story
joka__
29 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

What Close Reading Can Reveal About an Author’s Intentions by Suzanne Berne
Monday May 11th, 2026 at 6:03 AM

Craft and Criticism – Literary Hub
1 Share

Margaret Atwood’s short story, “Death by Landscape,” opens with an elderly widow who has recently moved into a Toronto apartment along with her fine collection of Canadian art. After a brief description of Lois’s relief at no longer having to worry about lawn care, destructive ivy, and “strange noises”—the building has a security system and no plant life except in pots—we are introduced to the paintings that surround her:

They are pictures of convoluted tree trunks on an island of pink wave-smoothed stone, with more islands behind; of a lake with rough, bright, sparsely wooded cliffs; of a vivid river shore with a tangle of bush and two beached canoes, one red, one gray; of a yellow autumn woods with the ice-blue gleam of a pond half-seen through the interlaced branches….

Because of this collection of hers, Lois’s friends—especially the men—have given her the reputation of having a good nose for art investments.

But this is not why she bought the pictures, way back then. She bought them because she wanted them. She wanted something that was in them, although she could not have said at the time what it was. It was not peace: She does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them fills her with a wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people in them or even animals, it’s as if there is something, or someone, looking back out.

After a space break, the story apparently begins again.

When she was fourteen, Lois went on a canoe trip. She’d only been on overnights before. This was to be a long one, into the trackless wilderness, as Cappie put it. It was Lois’s first canoe trip, and her last.

Some writers would call a spooky, provocative opening like this one “hooking the reader.” An expression I’ve never liked because it implies the reader is mostly guileless, swimming aimlessly along, thinking of nothing much, until caught by the writer with a tempting line. A more respectful term for the beginning of an accomplished story like this one is an invitation—the writer invites the reader into a created world by introducing them to interesting characters and to a situation that hints, very early, at trouble.

We readers accept a story’s invitation—we keep reading—because we’re intrigued by that promise of disruption in the early paragraphs. We are curious about people who seem to be at risk.

For instance, something is not right with Lois. She has deliberately collected paintings that disturb her, haunt her. She wants to be alone with them. She wants to be haunted. Why? We must go back to her past, to her childhood, to the summer of her first and last canoe trip, to find out.

We readers accept a story’s invitation—we keep reading—because we’re intrigued by that promise of disruption in the early paragraphs. We are curious about people who seem to be at risk.

Atwood’s story certainly offers an invitation. But by spending so much precious time framing how she wants us to read this story before getting into Lois’s long-ago canoe trip, Atwood goes a step further.  his opening is a canny acknowledgement of us, her reader on the doorstep, and of what binds writer and reader together. An acknowledgement that is underlined when we learn that Lois has collected those landscape paintings precisely because they fill her with unease:

“[I]t’s as if something in them, or someone, is looking back out.”

Imagine the walls of Lois’s apartment lined with bookshelves instead of framed paintings and, at least to this reader, the meaning of that statement becomes plain. When we decide to read a story it’s because we want something that’s in it, without knowing exactly what. Not peace—or what would be the purpose of suspense?  We want to go somewhere vivid and convoluted. We want cliffs and cliff-hangers. We want, weirdly enough, to be made uneasy. And one of the uneasiest aspects of reading fiction is feeling that there’s a presence looking out at us from the pages, drawing us in. A presence capable of anticipating our questions, and posing new ones. A presence that—if it’s a really good story—seems to know us, the reader. To see us and our secrets. To hold answers that we need.

Consider those moments when you’ve been reading a story and suddenly been astonished by a writer’s insights into your life. Into you. Insights by a writer you have never met. A writer who may have come from a different country, from wildly different circumstances than your own, who may have been dead for a hundred years. But who has voiced something you couldn’t put into words, who has made you feel seen, recognized, in ways even your loved ones cannot manage, perhaps even your therapist cannot manage. Who seems to have written this story with you specifically in mind.

What a strange feeling. Exciting, gratifying, intimate, and also—unsettling.

So, there you have the reader, being looked out at. Meanwhile, the writer of that same story sensed a presence looking in as she was writing it. A presence who had to be led through a tangled plot, who would give up if they got too lost, or bored, who required all the writer’s humor, wisdom, skill and compassion to make it to the end of the story. And who wanted, in one way or another, for the story to be about them.

A story is a window, with two people looking through it from opposite sides, both holding onto the faith that there’s something there to be seen.

Of course, not all writers feel so closely related to their readers. Here, for instance, is Shirley Jackson:

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer…is the reader….The reader is, in fact, the writer’s only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless….It is, of course, the writer’s job to reach out and grab this reader: If he is a reader who cannot endure a love story, it is the writer’s job, no more and no less, to make him read a love story and like it.

Thus, the reader as adversary or, possibly, prey.

Now E.M. Forster:

We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next….Some of us want to know nothing else—there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity.

The reader as brute.

More recently, a well-known writer was quoted in Publisher’s Weekly as declaring: “I don’t think about audience at all. I actually think it’s condescending. Who am I to assume I know what they want?”

The reader as beside the point.

Finally, there is Toni Morrison’s description of the relationship between writer and reader as “One’s own mind dancing with another’s.”

Like all relationships, the one between writer and reader is changeable—and probably most writers cycle among attitudes rather than clinging to any single one. That said, I love Morrison’s way of thinking of readers: not as people who must be captured, disarmed, kept spellbound—or ignored altogether—but as partners. Dance partners. A relationship that echoes Atwood’s acknowledgement of writers and readers as fellow presences sharing an imaginative experience, and enraptures it by picturing that shared experience as an embrace. Even if it’s an awkward, difficult embrace. Maybe especially then. Two human souls are trying to listen to the same music, while of course hearing it differently, trying to keep time with it, to let it guide them into moving together in ways they ordinarily would not move, in ways they could not move alone.

A story is a window, with two people looking through it from opposite sides, both holding onto the faith that there’s something there to be seen.

Morrison’s emphasis is on simultaneous movement, on responsiveness, on transport, a word with both mystical and practical connotations. By the end of the story, what a reader wants is to have traveled somewhere beyond her own living room. What a writer wants is for the reader to be a little changed from the person who read her opening paragraphs, as the writer has been changed by spending so much time making up a story for someone else. At the very least, she hopes to convince her readers (and probably herself) to tolerate the possibility that their own convictions are not the only ones, that there really is more than one way to think about, say, elderly widows who spend all day in a stuffy apartment, brooding about the past.

To me, a story is an experience of care. Care is in short supply right now, and I’m not just talking about cuts in healthcare subsidies, or about expanding our ability to empathize with others. I’m talking about feeling cared for. Considered. In a time when thoughtlessness is often treated as a virtue, it’s heartening to remember that a story is written for you, the reader. Whatever the writer’s initial impulse, the final result is generous. A story is an attempt of one mind to engage the sympathies of another’s, as if to say, “I am trying to see into your head, by letting you see into mine.” We do not issue such invitations to people for whom we cannot care.

Of course, not all care is good care, as anyone who has ever encountered a clumsy dentist will tell you. How to gauge what quality of attention you can expect from a story? Read those first paragraphs. Can you visualize where you are and the characters to whom you are introduced? Is there also an odd detail or two, hinting at mystery? Or are you left standing in the hallway, holding your coat, waiting to be offered something?

Read the whole story
joka__
35 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

What makes a good developer?
Sunday May 3rd, 2026 at 6:06 PM

Posts on Brian McGee
1 Share
What makes a good developer?

Recently I’ve been involved in a number of discussions related to LLMs and whether they should be allowed in some form or another in some of the projects I’ve been working on. As part of those discussions, I was asked to first describe what I thought a good developer was.

So this is what I came up with.

NOTE: I think it goes without saying these are my personal opinions. You may have different thoughts on what makes a good developer 🤷.

Takes ownership

You might have expected me to lead with something about knowing how to program, being able to work with a wide range of languages or technologies etc. But what I find most important in a developer is taking ownership.

They don’t necessarily do what’s asked, they do what’s needed.

If they make a mistake they own up to it and do what they can to make it right. They might not have the necessary skills to fix their fuckup, or the correct access rights or whatever, but they will find a way to make sure things are made right.

Similarly, when adding a feature, they don’t consider their job done when it’s merged to main. They see it through until it’s in the hands of users and react if needed should there be any unexpected issues.

Always curious, always learning

This industry doesn’t sit still for very long, even more so in the last couple of years. You can’t remain a good developer without being curious, and especially by “staying in your lane”.

The best developers I’ve worked with go where the problem leads them. That might mean learning how graph databases work because their research has indicated that’s the best fit for their problem. Or picking up a new programming language because it gives them better safety guarantees after their system shat the bed one too many times in front of users.

They have typically gone deeper into the stack than their peers, or have a wider grasp of the possible solutions because they’ve actually tried them. Theory isn’t enough, they need to get their hands dirty to understand the problem and the possible ways to solve it.

The solution is what matters and how you get there requires you to be flexible.

They’re not always right, and they know it

There’s nothing nerds like more than debating the best way of doing a thing. We all to varying degrees like to think we know best. And at times you should stand your ground on a particular topic.

Vigorous, productive and healthy debate is a good thing.

The best developers in my opinion are those that can fight their corner but keep an open mind. They might have spent the last hour arguing MongoDB was a bad choice and then it clicks for them why they might have been wrong. And they will say so, without being a dick about it, and then spend the next hour planning out how to use it most effectively.

They don’t need to be right, they need the solution to be right.

Respect for your time and brain space

I was a really annoying junior developer when I first started out. Looking back, I feel bad about it. I was sitting next to my dev lead and used to interrupt him constantly before spending more than a few seconds thinking about whatever problem I had at the time.

He was the first person to introduce me to rubber duck debugging. In hindsight, the poor guy just wanted some peace and quiet. Sorry Simon 🙏.

Over the years I’ve got much better at respecting other people’s time. This job has been described as building castles in the sky. There’s even a webcomic somewhere about it. It can take a while to get your head into a particularly tricky problem, and all of 2 seconds to pull you out of it over something trivial.

It takes 10 minutes to get your head into a problem, 10 seconds to destroy that context

I found the comic I was thinking of

The best developers in my experience respect this.

If they come to you with a problem, you can be sure they spent an hour or two trying to figure it out first. Any more than that and they are able to recognise they need help and go seek it out rather than needlessly burning any more time.

Similarly, when asking for a review on a PR or to check over some architectural choices, they will have spent time to make sure everything is in order, to best of their ability, before asking you to weigh in.

Holistic changes

A good developer can solve for the happy path. A great developer considers the unhappy paths, the edge cases, the unlikely but catastrophic cases and can make a judgment call on which they need to cover for and which they don’t.

If they make a change, they consider the wider impact and not just where they’re working in the code base at that time. If that means adding tests, they do it. If the docs need updated, they do it. If the architecture is starting to break down due to changing requirements, they flag it.

They consider the whole, and try to ship things in a holistic fashion.

Communication skills

It’s one thing to have great ideas. It’s another to be able to share them effectively with others. We deal in complexity, and it isn’t always easy to cut through that. Quite often, we don’t even share the same spoken language.

Great developers can take complex topics and solutions and break them down depending on the context such that junior developers can follow, or product owners and so on.

They can adapt to the situation and present their ideas effectively.

The General’s touch

This one is a bit woo woo, but stay with me.

I remember watching a history show years ago. It was replaying old battles from Roman times and having ordinary people play the general in charge. The battle was simulated, and they had to dispatch orders to their various soldiers in the field.

There was this one woman who was just really good at it. I don’t remember what her background was, but she just had a feel for what was going on across the battlefield and could anticipate where she needed to dispatch soldiers to fend off an attack or take advantage of others being out of position.

In a similar sense, some of the best developers I’ve known have a feel for what the right direction might be or the best way to approach a problem that has 10 different ways of solving it. They can incorporate a lot of requirements, balance the trade-offs and thread the needle so to speak.

Their suggestions just make sense. There’s a rightness to how they do things. Whether genetic or borne from experience, they have an intuition second to none.

They punch up, not down

This job is one of constant growth and learning. There will always be someone with more knowledge, more experience or more access etc. You can choose to use that privilege well, or you can be a dick about it.

The best people I’ve worked with encourage and create space for others to learn and grow, and not always in a technical sense either. They are willing to take time to teach, hold a hand when something goes wrong, and push back when someone is being unfair.

They recognise that a rising tide lifts all boats, and they feel a responsibility to help push others as far as they can go, even if that means being left behind.

Summary

It was only after compiling this list that someone else pointed out that it seems much of what I consider to be a good developer is social in nature, and not technical. Having thought about it, I’d say that’s a fair description.

It’s rare that we build things alone.

Sadly, LLMs seem to be changing that, and I don’t think for the better.

Read the whole story
joka__
43 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories