We are entering the age of agents. As Mark Andreessen eloquently phrases this development, we have conjured sand to life. [1]
Bostrom-style doomerism aside, [2] the aesthete is left wondering: What cultural objects will our silicon agents covet, if any? [3]
Carbon biology is fragile, so silicon will access the beginning of infinity [4] extra terram much faster than us radiation-sensitive humans. Therefore, numerically, the agentic ecosystem is very likely to outnumber our own by orders of magnitude.
It may be a category error for a humans to even consider which cultural objects, if any, this vast agent ecosystem will value. And just like the Bostrom-Doomer arguments, we may be best just leaving these questions aside completely, as unknowable and unanswerable. Will agents buy BOTTO or laugh at it? And what will be the scale of the Luddite backlash? Perhaps agents will rank, index, arbitrage, simulate and discard culture without ever wanting it.
What is more fertile territory for thought are the contours of human cultural world beyond this schism. Even before the inevitable rise of the agent world, there has been speculation about what would follow the vacuum of post-modernism. A return to religion? [5] And what else?
If art has explanatory power, and can operate in a higher plane than logic or reason , then we are entering interesting times for human artists, to say the least. [6]
Personally, I have settled on an impatient kind of techno-optimism [7], layered with quite a lot of fuck-it-all-its-the-end-of-days-Dionysianism. [7 again]. This creates quite a tension.
It is artists who live within, and can reconcile this tension that are the most interesting. Work that exists in a kind of quantum superposition: engaging with technology while at the same time undeniably human, as the transition state remains unresolved.
Bridge works if you will. [8]
0xDEAFBEEF
Operator
Beeple
mpkoz
nicedayJules
die with the most likes
Tyler Hobbs
Dmitri Cherniak
Snowfro
Spøgelsesmaskinen
Cem Hasimi
Justin Aversano
Jeff Davis + James Turrell (I wish)
References
[1]
[2] You can't have an opinion until you read this book. https://www.amazon.com.au/Superintelligence-Professor-Philosophy-Institute-University/dp/0198739834
[3] About the only extant example of something even close to agentic culture is perhaps Truth Terminal/Goatseus Maximus, so maybe the whole premise is weak. Botto, Moltbook etc. are largely Amazon Turks up to this point.
[4] https://www.amazon.com.au/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform-World/dp/0143121359
[5] Basically the conclusion of this guy
[6] An example is how fucking hard it is to write down what I mean by bridge works. Easy to point to artists creating them, harder to articulate clearly as we are both currently finding out. *
[7] So much so that I gave up my job and career
[8] Looking at the list I came up with, it's likely I have been duped by both the algo and recency bias, which is why I reserve the right to change it repeatedly
* There is meta problem here, because another example might be writers who use LLMs in creative writing, but AFAIK in the spiky world of AI competencies, LLM creative writing is oh so obviously an oxymoron. ChatGPT tried to suggest to me that Jared Isaacman's spacesuit was a metaphor for a cultural 'bridge' membrane that allows humans to make contact with the machine world, but just not what I meant at all.