The triumph of aesthetic

Looking back at technological innovation in the past few decades, we've seen a decided pivot away from true communication and artistry to the veneration of artifice.

Back in the long ago, we had raw LiveJournals (or BlogSpot, if you were a nerd) where teens would tear our their hearts and bleed into the pixels. The goal was connection. Sure, there was an awareness of an audience, but the hope was to find fellow travelers – to write to them, to be seen and understood.

Now, our online creations serve a different purpose. They are tools to communicate the image we wish others to see, to hold up a meticulously crafted version of the good life and convince everyone we're already living it. The connection sought is not one of mutual understanding, but of aspiration. The implicit message is not, "Here is who I am," but rather, "Don't you want to be me?"

This shift is so thorough that we've invented an entire (temporary) job category: the "social media manager" for individual personalities. (I'm certain someone is already selling an AI platform to do this for you.) That person's role is to go in and talk to community impersonating the creator. The goal is no longer the work and effort of building a community, but the performance of community care. It's about making it seem like they care about their followers for what they can provide: eyeballs and attention, the currency to be sold to advertisers.

Again, the valuing of the facade over the actual work, the creative act or its product.

We see this happen again and again.

Take evolution of photo sharing. We went from the candid chaos of Flickr albums and sprawling Facebook photo dumps to the carefully selected selfie and artfully arranged food picture on Instagram. Now, we've arrived at straight-up lifestyle "plogging" (picture-logging), where every moment is a potential set piece for a manufactured narrative.There's no personality, just videos of people and places that don't exist being passed around because it's more "interesting" than actual humans being alive in the world.

AI is now poised to remove the human from the loop entirely. Beyond the flood of AI-generated art and written content, we have technologies like OpenAI's Sora. The act of creation is reduced to typing prompts into a text editor, which then churns out a video for you. There is no personality, no lived experience. All that's left are videos of people and places that don't exist, passed around simply because they are more algorithmically "interesting" than the beautiful, messy reality of actual human connection.

I'm not even here to yell about AI, I think it's more a symptom than root cause here. We shifted our focus on the things we care about, the skills and events that we prize. We've successfully replaced communication. Our "social" media is now just media. It's entertainment, an anhedonic appreciation of aesthetic. I don't know that it's something we can consciously collectively overcome because I don't think any thought was given to it in the first place.

But it is something we can value as individuals, a torch we can carry to keep the flame alight. Create shitty music. Write your terrible novel. Perform improv. Act, do, create, be messy and revel In that messiness, because only through the struggles and pain of bad art can we get true, worthy art. Art that communicates a feeling, a thought, an idea, acting as transmitter and amplifier so that other people can feel what it is for you to be human.

Not just some pretty picture.