“What if tech itself is the next big thing in the art world?”
“Fifty years after McLuhan’s Understanding Media, the medium that drives the message is still the message—and sometimes it seems like the only hope for any message at all.”
“I’ve noticed that almost nothing annoys an engineer or mathematician more than asking if they ever think about potential superpowers unleashed by the things they’re working on—whether unintended or otherwise.”
“Only once have I received a full and honest answer to this question. A coder in an optical fiber research facility in New Jersey told me, “It can sometimes be really depressing to come to work every day knowing that all of what we do is largely to create an ever more satisfying porn experience in the $29.95-per-month price range.””
“If one were to investigate the degree of interest engineers and mathematicians have in the art world qua art world, one would only find piles of Legos, Rubik’s Cubes, and Star Wars tchotchkes on office desks—three items representing binarization, proof of successful problem solving, and a timeless emotional myth with which to bond.”
“A $50,000 productivity bonus given to a Valley engineer would, in all likelihood, be used to buy original animation cells from vintage Marvin the Martian cartoons. I once visited the Palo Alto apartment of a friend who’s an expert in 3-D fly-through experiences; in his apartment was a table, a few flat-screen monitors, several drives, and a folding chair—nothing else. I asked him when the rest of his stuff was arriving and he said, “I’ve been living here for six years.””
“You can’t call the tech world or the Silicon Valley an art wasteland. There’s a lot of work and collecting there, but it all inhabits the world in a different way.”
“The art world gets mad at the Valley for not throwing it more money, but tech is just an industry, albeit one that does very well and that happens to be geographically hyperconcentrated.”
“Technicians have spent their lives becoming technicians, so it’s what they care about, and you could say the same about workers in many other industries.”
“Except tech is different because technicians can make insane amounts of money and they have borderline alchemical powers to shape reality in a way that bends it to their will, whether or not the bending is cognitive, programmatic, unintentional, or subconscious.”
“The fact that many of them become wealthy is just a bonus factor that makes the outside world curious about them: nerds—they buy crazy, nutty stuff like T. rex skeletons!”
“What happens if you take the Valley’s relentless desktop triumvirate of Legos, Rubik’s Cubes, and Star Wars tchotchkes to their logical end state of binarization, problem solving, and reductive myths that occur out of time—are we approaching a world that’s being turned into a programmer’s desk? Actually, yes, and the clearer you envision a world just like that, the closer you are to seeing the world that is actually going to happen.”