Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id783477129
the painter never begins with a blank canvas. The canvas (seen through the painter’s eye) is always-already inscribed with centuries of cliché, with the gravity of tradition that pulls one towards a generic expression.
id783477789
It takes decades of work and more than a little luck to overcome this gravity and achieve something like escape velocity.
id783477018
In art, we don’t begin from choice, but from cliché, from a position of determination and dependency. And every proper choice we make in the production of an artwork is achieved by consciously cultivated tactics of resistance to this cliché.
id783476936
every major AI company is to induce this kind of dependency, to induce it not just in individuals but in corporations—to embed their parasitic systems so deeply within the infrastructure of the internet that they become too big to fail, which means the tech giants will be forced to spend billions to keep them afloat.
id783476673
psychic dependency is the goal at the level of the individual. Already, we’re seeing reports of students typing first-day ice-breaker prompts into ChatGPT, because they don’t trust themselves to formulate a response on their own to “What animal would you be?”, or “What movies did you watch this summer?”. This is a crisis in self-confidence as much as it is a crisis in knowledge and literacy.
id783476963
The better distinction is between abject dependency upon the machine and the relative autonomy achieved by the cultivation of knowledge and skills.