Tag: blandness

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Future Building Technology Writing

“Algogen” missing the point

Liked AI, Algogen, and Anti-Poetry (Baldur Bjarnason)

I’ve lost count of how many people in tech (and marketing, natch) who say that algogen text is just as good as that written by people. They genuinely don’t see the limited vocabulary, word repetition, incoherence, and simplistic use of sentence structure. They only aspire to perfect, non-threatening mediocrity and algogen text delivers that. They don’t care the role writing has in forming your own thoughts and creativity. They don’t care about how writing improves memory and recall. They don’t value the role of creativity in the text itself.

For them, it’s all about the idea.

That algogen fans are predominantly idea people—the lot who think that 99% of the value delivered by any given form of media comes from the idea—isn’t a new observation, but it’s apt. If you don’t think the form or structure of the medium delivers any value, then it has to be a uniform commodity that can, and should, be generated algorithmically to save people from the tedious work of pointless creation.

Algogen is a great mashup word.

See also: AIs can write for us but will we actually want them to? by Bryan Braun

That made me think about my own writing. If I had to break down my current writing activity (not counting code), it would look something like this:

 

10% – Journaling

10% – Blog posts

20% – Texting and Personal Emails

10% – Meeting notes / todos

35% – Programming notes (usually to help me work through tricky coding issues)

15% – Book notes

 

Could I hand any of these over to AI?

Categories
Art and Design Featured Future Building

What do Places give us?

Replied to The Importance of Magical Places by Coby Lefkowitz (Our Built Environment)

In most communities, we have a box that we sleep in, a box we drive to the office or school in, and then, once we’re there, a box to work or study in… These places are often devoid of any ornamentation, idiosyncratic details, or contextual elements that would ground them in a specific community.

Our buildings and places symbolize what we value. They tell the story of who we are.

But what about when we don’t know who we are?

I suspect there’s a connection between the loss of Place-making and the dissolution of community ties.

Continue reading “What do Places give us?”
Categories
Writing

Meaning through truthfulness in language

Liked Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I Have Learned About Writing From Reading Thousands of Manuscripts by Jeannine Ouellette (Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette)

Our most important job as writers is—I believe—to make language capable of telling the truth. The essayist, activist, and poet Wendell Berry has written about this idea many times. In 2010, he addressed it in a letter to an English teacher and her class, writing: “By taking up the study of writing … you are assuming consciously … a responsibility for our language. What is that responsibility? I think it is to make words mean what they say. It is to keep our language capable of telling the truth. We live in a time when we are surrounded by language that is glib, thoughtless, pointless, or deliberately false.”

We must reject overly easy, overly familiar images and phrases and push ourselves instead for the slight adjustment that can make a world of difference.

This is what it means to defamiliarize language enough to let it hold truth. If the language is so familiar it washes over us, any truth it contains will be lost.

Categories
Art and Design Culture Society

Article pairing: the monotony of modern culture

Why Culture Sucks by John Ganz

There’s something very slight and unsatisfying about recent film, television, art, architecture, design, fashion, cuisine—you name it… It often feels like we’re being fed the cultural equivalent of Soylent, a kind of nutrient-rich goo that we’re supposed to believe does the same thing as food.

In place of art, we have “content,” which in its very conception makes cultural products totally interchangeable, just stuff to fill up space.

See also: The Homogeneity of Millenial Design

20th century modernist avant-garde movements implicitly understood the experience of world-loss and their projects were often about reinvesting the lifeworld with an aesthetic character. They built world-views as much as artworks, trying to come up with new entire styles of architecture, design, novels, poetry, painting, and sculpture.

(Emphasis mine)

 

Pop Culture has Become an Oligopoly by Adam Mastroianni

In every corner of pop culture––movies, TV, music, books, and video games––a smaller and smaller cartel of superstars is claiming a larger and larger share of the market. What used to be winners-take-some has grown into winners-take-most and is now verging on winners-take-all.

See also: Where did the long tail go? by Ted Gioia

As options multiply, choosing gets harder. You can’t possibly evaluate everything, so you start relying on cues like “this movie has Tom Hanks in it” or “I liked Red Dead Redemption, so I’ll probably like Red Dead Redemption II,” which makes you less and less likely to pick something unfamiliar.

Another way to think about it: more opportunities means higher opportunity costs, which could lead to lower risk tolerance.

A couple years back I had an art project that sold shirts, and posted for some advice in a t-shirt forum. The other sellers wished me luck selling original designs: the only thing people wanted to buy, in their experience, were IP that they liked. (I suspect that’s partly true, but also that discoverability is a problem. If you just want a cool t-shirt, it’s a lot of searching and browsing to find something totally new that you like versus looking for a Star Wars shirt.)

Movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, jumpstart our imaginations, and introduce us to new worlds and stories and feelings. They should alienate us sometimes, or make us mad, or make us think. But they can’t do any of that if they only feed us sequels and spinoffs…

We haven’t fully reckoned with what the cultural oligopoly might be doing to us.

See also: Book industry insights from Penguin Random House merger trial

It’s like anti-entropy: culture converges when profit is the sole motivator, and efficiency is nirvana. Why take risks when the formula works?