EP. 46: THE TEXTURE OF LIFE (Frictionless Medieval Sludgeshop)
EP. 46: THE TEXTURE OF LIFE (Frictionless Medieval Sludgeshop)
The soundtrack to this week's ep is "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You'll see.
Hear ye hear ye! Before we dive into the episode, we just want to plug Justin’s (soon-to-launch) lo-cost art school 4 freaks / experimental gathering space, Bathers Library, which is coming soon to Oakland. Justin published a set of artists’ games-as-publications (think Fluxist 2.0) which you can check out on the same page as our 40 Trillion merch!
and now, without further ado…
In which Instagram tries to be a Canva girlie <3
We get all existentially twisted with the Canva-ification (sp?) of IG. And this time the new features aren’t just limited to Stories or Reels—Instagram’s new text-editing tools even work across the sacred space of the OG Post (*gasp*). Moreover, we become fixated on what we started terming the “ahistorical typographic backbone” of the new fonts you can use, some of which were custom-drawn by Colophon Foundry themselves:
That Instagram is commissioning custom typefaces is no surprise—so did Canva recently—it feels motivated in one part to have the “look” of a post feel visually attributable to IG, much like how we automatically understand TikTok content from its watermarked identity. The naming of each font feels strangely divorced from the backstory of why these fonts are visually known in our generic cultural periphery. Though there may be an argument here as to “who cares, we just wanna make our posts look cute.” Sigh, fine. Fwiw, Helen personally really cannot get over Directional. Directional? Why? In what manner? Who said???
The Sugary AI Slop Factory, sponsored by Facebook’s Creator Bonus Program
At some point in the backlog of episodes, we briefly touched upon this phenomenon of AI-generated content producing a combination of both generated AND truthful responses on Facebook. Images of fantastical dream home estates with walkways and doors leading to nowhere, set into a jagged but scenic mountainous overlook, with sweeping dramatic waters below, are but one of the many “AI image buckets” plaguing feeds.
Fast forward to last week: bastion of tech teardowns, 404 Media, published this article on exactly how this stuff has come to proliferate the internet. It makes us sad, but essentially, this content pipeline self-churns its chicken mcnugget soft pink insides, thanks to a variety of tools such as the Facebook Creator Bonus Program, Microsoft’s AI Image Creator, and FewFeed (a spam tool). Tutorials on the exact mechanistic workings of creating virality are distributed by AI image creators on WhatsApp, Telegram, and YouTube.
The reasoning for such bizarro images going viral (i.e. shrimp Jesus) are due to translations of prompts from one language to another, which then get fed through all the necessary mechanisms (spam tools, fake accounts, Meta’s algorithm favoring such content), to bring these images to the feed surface.
What makes all of this entirely worse is that these AI content creators are definitively earning more doing this line of work than the typical professions they might enter into in their home countries. Saying it loud enough for the back row to hear: this is modern-day colonization.
Future Medieval: Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition
We put on our best hosiery and meditate on Elizabeth Goodspeed’s recent article in It’s Nice That, which covers the recent uptick in what Elizabeth terms as “Ye Olde Future Medieval.” Granted, we’ve perhaps seen some takes on this more squarely within a video-gamey context (some of David Rudnick’s past work comes to mind), but the 2024 edition of this sees the “olde” being transported through the lens of “retro 70’s”.
Contrasting this trend against the plasticky, Bella Hadid-y, monocultural visuals of AI, Future Medieval is perhaps a recognition that we are couched in modern times, but we yearn for a simpler existence. Oh, for the times when could simply duel with heavy, awkward lances, sip ice cold water from our cupped hands in a brook, and call it a day. We have many a calligraphically-talented monk to thank for the way that the Teenage Engineering EP-1320 appears today.
Alright, and that’s it! Again if you’re around the Bay, keep your eyes peeled for Justin’s own Bathers Library!! opening soooooooon!! Ciao!!