Transmission #63: Readyweights, Corporate Architecture, Pitchfork RIP, Frozen on the Porch, and We're All Managers Now.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
Hello and welcome.
This is Transmissions by me, Marty Brown. It’s a fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, and other curios that float my way.
I realise that a lot of what I’m reading and linking to recently has been about death and rebirth. It’s clear that parts of the internet, (and the world) as we knew it circa 2008-2022 are dying off, and that something else is replacing it. AI is part of what’s going on, but it’s much deeper than that. I feel like we’re in a broader interregnum: a period of time where the old is fading but the new has not quite yet been born. It’s here, but it’s indescribable, latent.
It’s a theme that I’m keen to keep exploring. Stay tuned, subscribe, and enjoy the links.
x
Marty
Design
Readyweights, Minting Concepts
Holly Herndon & Matt Dryhurst • Link
The emergence of AI-generated art poses all kinds of interesting questions, beyond the cacophony of ‘BuT iS it ReAlLy ArT?’ wailings. Here the always interesting partnership of artists Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst have looked at the embeddings within large AI models, and asked: “Well, can these be art?’
Embeddings are the numerical representations of concepts that live within AI models like Midjourney or Stable Diffenusion. So the concept of this weird horse thing (pictured above) could be summoned using a prompt, but Hernon & Dryhurt have sought to look deeper, into the model itself, and have dredged up the mathematical ‘concept’ - the embeddings - of this strange figure.
And so the art becomes the maths itself, and the resulting images just instantiations of the underlying concept. Dryhurst and Herndon explain it much better than I do.
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
Kate Wagner • Link
Gensler is synonymous with the kind of extremely boring yet functional architecture that is kind of everywhere and nowhere at the same time, completely functional yet totally without vernacular flair. This article is less about virtue, and more or less a baleful shrug: this is the way that that complex, large, and potentially litigious projects need to be handled. By a corporation, with excellent processes and governance.
Ideas
How Platforms Killed Pitchfork
Casey Newton • Platformer • Link
An epitaph for a cultural touchstone, which in being merged into GQ magazine last week, was essentially killed.
I, like Casey, and many of my generation, grew up with Pitchfork. It was our generation’s Rolling Stone. Which sounds naff, and it is, but Pitchfork was a powerful divining rod for finding great music in the newly democratised, wide open discovery space that was the internet in the 00s.
The whole audience seemed to be music nerds who all thought they were too cool to be seen adhering a singular, canonical voice, yet did so anyway, because the quality of the music writing was reliably outstanding.
(This is despite the patent ridiculousness of rating an album out of 10.0 – still waiting for a description of the difference between a 7.4 and a 7.5 rated album)
So even though I would like to say I have outgrown Pitchfork, it saddens me that our current internet couldn’t sustain it, and that an heir to the music-nerd throne is hard to find, and is simply scattered amongst a thousand forums and social accounts, and that the very idea of a central cultural touchstone itself is dying.
The Knowledge Economy Is Over.
Welcome to the Allocation Economy
Dan Shipper • Every • Link
When AI makes the role of knowledge-workers redundant, what is left? Not writers, or designers or lawyers or accountants, says this article, but managers.
But what happens when that very skill—knowing and utilizing the right knowledge at the right time—becomes something that computers can do faster and sometimes just as well as we can?
We’ll go from makers to managers, from doing the work to learning how to allocate resources—choosing which work to be done, deciding whether work is good enough, and editing it when it’s not.
Ben Evans has often remarked that AI is like having a thousand interns, which is great, but someone needs to tell them what to do, and correct them when they’re wrong. Is this what’s left for us?
*Papa Lazarou voice* We’re all managers now, Dave.
He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable.
Geoff Edgers • Washington Post • Link
The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall — an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up new siding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells.
I will think about this article every time I am tempted to buy more stereo gear.
Chart of the week
Other
😵 Some guys go to their friend’s house to watch some football and end up dead and frozen in his backyard for days before anyone notices. Cue mystery music of choice. Link
⚡️ When Adobe Flash was decommissioned, a part of the early internet died with it. And in the interests of cultural preservation and maintaining its own pristine archive, the NYTimes has rebuilt its own flash player, so that you can relive those halcyon days. Link
👽 Extremely disappointing in its sober disavowal of the existence of space creatures, the outgoing director of All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Department of Defence, pours cold water on the idea that the government has a bunch of secret alien crafts stowed away in bunkers somewhere. Link
🔄 Following on from last week’s link about the declining state of internet search, another excellent deep dive into how SEO and Google are both creating and destroying the web as we know it. Link
🍽️ A survey of etiquette guides for dinner parties. Including rules such as ‘Your napkins need to be folded in a way that suggests you hold a degree in structural engineering.’ (not true), and ‘Your lighting must not throw your guests into an unbecoming shadow.’ (of course) Link
Thanks for reading! See you in a fortnight.