Links, notes, and sundries.

Taro Yamamoto, a typographer and former Adobe employee, muses aloud about the inherent constraints “AI” puts on creativity — and culture.

Are we not now witnessing the emergence of a qualitatively new stage of “enclosure,” in which even those who appear to possess and control the technology become subject to the limitations of the systems they themselves have created?

A thoughtful, insightful essay.

My pal Kaeti is a tremendously talented artist, and recently launched a lovely newsletter to talk about her work, and how she thinks about her practice as an artist. And her second issue’s wrestling with something we’re all wrestling with right now: what does it mean to make in the age of LLMs?

Part of our work as artists is close observation, engaging in the gore and mess and tedium that others might rather avoid or ignore. Removing ourselves from the process feels antithetical. Isn’t that process the whole point? The friction and effort we feel when bringing anything to life, that’s when we are most present in our work. In using AI, we seem to want to skip the messy and frustrating middle, but we do so at a cost. We can’t unearth anything interesting without digging.

Absolutely brilliant reporting from Rebekah Valentine. Though I will say: this one hurt to read.

Solidarity forever with these workers.

An essay about a quilting workshop run at a prison in southern Vermont.

We provided very little guidance or facilitation. What we contributed was structure — every time we began a session, we started with a short circle check-in where people were able to say, “This is how I’m feeling today.” There’s always someone who’s struggling with something big — like an upcoming court date or a family loss, and they can’t participate in the family grieving process because they’re incarcerated.

Their final work is beautiful; the story, even moreso.

A library for creating rather stunning ASCII art animations for web pages. Beautiful.

This brief, searing talk from Jenny is absolutely worth your time. The counterweight to so many of our issues today — the billionaire problem, extractive surveillance technology, you name it — is labor organizing.

(Jenny’s made the transcript available as well, if that’s more your speed.)

What it says on the tin: supply a link to any web page, then run around and blow up that web page.

Delightful and therapeutic little throwback to early web shenanigans.

It’s impossible for me to know whether you’re writing these emails yourself, although at this point there are tells. I know I turn up in searches for “creators who talk openly online about money and the creative process,” so it’s easy enough to have ChatGPT write to me on your behalf thinking that I’d be a good get for a platform about owning your own creative output.

The fact is: I’m now getting 4-10 emails every day from people purporting to be enthusiastic about my work.

They are not, on the whole, written by people.

Lucy speaks for all of us.

THERE IS A NEW FIRELAND DOT COM

I REPEAT, THERE IS A NEW FIRELAND DOT COM

Don’t miss Josh’s gallery of old Fireland designs, yes dad I’m old enough to remember most of these, no dad I don’t want to talk about it

Cara Esten Hurtle’s art project, using drone photography to record the placement of Flock surveillance cameras. From her artist statement:

More than anything, what stood out to me about the process of photographing these devices was geography: they exist at the boundaries of rich neighborhoods like Piedmont to track who enters; they exist embedded into poor neighborhoods to track the people who live there. Place exposes their purpose.