privacy-preserving

Craziness and high valuations invite snark. It’s how people respond to unfamiliar things, and it’s exceedingly easy to dismiss everything as a bubble, or as temporary froth, or as COVID-boredom-induced-adventure-seeking, or as a ponzi waiting to collapse. Being skeptical makes you look smart and responsible. A surefire way to get grown-up bonus points is to make fun of people who believe “this time is different.”

“Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes.”

I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.

Art, to me, is language. It’s a way to communicate something that words can’t make you think, understand, or feel. The dream of an autonomous artist is exciting because it mediates a conversation between us and technology. To make art, autonomous, feels like creating life: a machine in the aether that is trying to tell us something. We become symbiotic, like bacteria in our biological bodies, in creating a form of life that talks to itself, and to us through art.