Post-individuals have a desire to belong, to be seen and recognised beyond economic compensation or status. As an answer to the individualism of the creator economy, metalabels are a new paradigm where groups of people team up under a shared purpose to create public releases that manifest their point of view.
chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.
For creative people this hits especially hard as social media’s invention of “personal brands,” “influencers,” and the “Creator Economy” turned the few remaining aspects of life that hadn’t yet been marketized into the last ways we could make a living without working for somebody else. Gradually and then suddenly creative people found themselves... See more
If you’re lucky, perhaps something you post will temporarily spark a surge of engagement, but those same spectators, exhausted by the onslaught, will soon shift their weary attentions to the next recommended item flowing close behind. This relentless pace rewards passive consumption, not active interaction with individual creators. The... See more
Simon Denny Weirdly, I just mentioned Avery and Jon in a talk I did at a conference where Mat was also speaking, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, at the invitation of Hito Steyerl’s Emergent Digital Media class. I prepared a talk called ‘Vibe Coding the Future’, presenting the context behind my AI plotter paintings. Part of the talk was about... See more