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Let me begin with a disambiguation: I’m not talking about AI as some theoretical intelligence emerging from non-biological form — the sentient computer of science fiction. That, I suppose, can be thought about in an intellectual vacuum, to a point. I’m talking about AI, the product. The thing being sold to us daily, packaged in press releases and demo videos, embedded in services and platforms. AI is, fundamentally, about money. It’s about making promises and raising investment based upon those promises. The promises alone create a future — not necessarily because they’ll come true, but because enough capital, deployed with enough conviction, warps reality around it. When companies raise billions on the promise of AI dominance, they’re not just predicting a future; they’re manufacturing one. Venture capital, at the highest levels, tends to look from the outside like anti-competitive racketeering than finance. Enough investment, however localized in a handful of companies, can shape an entire industry or even an entire economy, regardless of whether it makes any sense whatsoever. And let’s be clear: the Big Tech firms investing in AI aren’t simply responding to market forces; they’re creating them, defining them, controlling them. Nobody asked for AI; we’ve been told to collaborate. Which demonstrates that capitalism, like AI, is no longer a theoretical model about nice, tidy ideas like free markets and competition. The reality of modern capitalism reveals it to be, at best, a neutral system made non-neutral by its operators. The invisible hand isn’t invisible because it’s magical; it’s invisible because we’re not supposed to see whose hand it actually is. You want names though? I don’t have them all. That’s the point. It’s easy to blame the CEOs whose names are browbeat into our heads over and over again, but beyond them is what I think of as The Fear of the Un-captured Dollar and the Unowned Person — a secret society of people who seem to believe that human potential is one thing: owning all the stuff, wielding all the power, seizing all the attention. We now exist in what people call “late-stage capitalism,” where meaningful competition only occurs among those with the most capital, and their battles wreck the landscape around them. We scatter and dash amidst the rubble like the unseen NPCs of Metropolis while the titans clash in the sky. When capital becomes this concentrated, it exerts power at the level of sovereign nations. This reveals the theater that is the so-called power of governments. Nation-states increasingly seem like local franchises in a global system run by capital. This creates fundamental vulnerabilities in governmental systems that have not yet been tested by the degeneracy of late-stage capitalism. And when that happens, the lack of power of the individual is laid bare — in the chat window, in the browser, on the screen, in the home, in the city, in the state, in the world. The much-lauded “democratic” technology of the early internet has given way to systems of surveillance and manipulation so comprehensive they would make 20th century authoritarians weep with envy, not to mention a fear-induced appeasement to the destruction of norms and legal protections that spreads across our entire culture like an overnight frost of fascism. AI accelerates this process. It centralizes power by centralizing the capacity to process and act upon information. It creates unprecedented asymmetries between those who own the models and those who are modeled. Every interaction with an AI system becomes a one-way mirror: you see your reflection, while on the other side, entities you cannot see learn about you, categorize you, and make predictions about you. So when a person resists AI, don’t assume they’re stubbornly digging their heels into the shifting sands of an outmoded ground. Perhaps give them credit for thinking logically and drawing a line between themselves and a future that treats them as nothing more than a bit in the machine. Resistance to AI isn’t necessarily Luddism. It isn’t a fear of progress. It might instead be a clear-eyed assessment of what kind of “progress” is actually being offered — and at what cost. Liberty in the age of AI requires more than just formal rights. It demands structural changes to how technology is developed, deployed, and governed. It requires us to ask not just “what can this technology do?” but “who benefits from what this technology does?” And that conversation cannot happen if we insist on discussing AI as if it exists in a political and economic vacuum — as if the only questions worth asking are technical ones. The most important questions about AI aren’t about algorithms or capabilities; they’re about power and freedom. To think about AI without thinking about capitalism, fascism, and liberty isn’t just incomplete — it’s dangerous. It blinds us to the real stakes of the transformation happening around us, encouraging us to focus on the technology rather than the systems that control it and the ends toward which it’s deployed. Is it possible to conceive of AI that is “good” — as in distributed, not centralized; protective of intellectual property, not a light-speed pirate of the world’s creative output; respectful of privacy, not a listening agent of the powers-that-be; selectively and intentionally deployed where humans need the help, not a leveler of human purpose? (Anil Dash has some great points about this.) Perhaps, but such an AI is fundamentally incompatible with the system in which the AI we have has been created. As AI advances, we face a choice: Will we allow it to become another tool for concentrating power and wealth? Or will we insist upon human dignity and liberty? The answer depends not on technological developments, but on our collective willingness to recognize AI for what it is: not a force of nature, but a product of flawed human choices embedded in vulnerable human systems.
Technological entitlement, knowledge-assumptions, and other things. Are we entitled to technology? A quick thought experiment: A new technological advance gives humans the ability to fly. Does it also confer upon us the right to fly? Let’s say this isn’t a Rocketeer situation — not a jetpack — but some kind of body-hugging anti-gravitic field, just to make it look and feel ever so much more magical and irresistible. Would that be worthy of study and experimentation? I’d have to say yes. But would it be a good idea to use it? I’d have to say no. We’ve learned this lesson already. Are we entitled to access to anyone, anytime? That’s a tough one; it tugs on ideas of access itself — what that means, and how — as well as ideas of inaccess, like privacy. But let’s just say I’m walking down the street and see a stranger passing by. Is it my right to cross the street to say hello? I would say so. And I can use that right for many purposes, some polite — such as introducing myself — and some not so — like abruptly sharing some personal belief of mine. Fortunately, this stranger has the right to ignore me and continue on their way. And that’s where my rights end, I think. I don’t have the right to follow them shouting. It turns out that’s what Twitter was. We got the jetpack of interpersonal communication: a technology that gives us the ability to reach anyone anytime. With it came plenty of good things — good kinds of access, a good kind of leveling. A person could speak past, say, some bureaucratic barrier that would have previously kept them silent. But also, it allowed people with the right measure of influence to inundate millions of other people with lies to the point of warping the reality around them and reducing news to rereading and reprinting those lies just because they were said. Leave something like this in place long enough, and the technology itself becomes an illegitimate proxy for a legitimate right. Free speech, after all, does not equal an unchallenged social media account. Steeper and slicker is the technological slope from can to should to must. – Today I learned that before Four Tet, Kieran Hebden was the guitarist for a group called Fridge. I listened to their second album, Semaphore, this morning and it’s a fun mix of noises that feels very connected to the Four Tet I’ve known. The reason I mention this, though, is that it represents a pretty important principle for us all to remember. Don’t assume someone knows something! I’ve been a Four Tet fan ever since a friend included a song from Pause on a mix he made for me back in 2003. Ask me for my top ten records of all time, and I’ll probably include Pause. And yet it was only today, over two decades later, after watching a Four Tet session on YouTube, that I thought to read the Four Tet Wikipedia page. – Other Things I’ve been staring at Pavel Ripley’s sketchbooks this week. It has been especially rare for me to find other people who use sketchbooks in the same way I do — as a means and end, not just a means. If you look at his work you’ll see what I mean. Just completely absorbing. My bud Blagoj, who has excellent taste, sent this Vercel font called Geist my way a while back. It has everything I like in a font — many weights, many glyphs, and all the little details at its edges and corners. USING IT. These hand-lettered magazine covers are so good. I’m vibing with these cosmic watercolors by Lou Benesch. An Oral History of WIRED’s Original Website is worth reading (paywall tho), and especially in an ad-blocking browser (I endorse Vivaldi), because as much as I love them, WIRED’s website has devolved into a truly hostile environment. “As a middle-aged man, I would’ve saved loads on therapy if I’d read Baby-Sitters Club books as a kid.” SAME. Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature. If you’re reading this via RSS, that’s really cool! Email me — butler.christopher@proton.me — and let me know!
I often find myself contemplating the greatest creators in history — those rare artists, designers, and thinkers whose work transformed how we see the world. What constellation of circumstances made them who they were? Where did their ideas originate? Who mentored them? Would history remember them had they lived in a different time or place? Leonardo da Vinci stands as perhaps the most singular creative mind in recorded history — the quintessential “Renaissance Man” whose breadth of curiosity and depth of insight seem almost superhuman. Yet examples like Leonardo can create a misleading impression that true greatness emerges only once in a generation or century. Leonardo lived among roughly 10-13 million Italians — was greatness truly as rare as one in ten million? We know several of his contemporaries, but still, the ratio remains vanishingly small. This presents us with two possibilities: either exceptional creative ability is almost impossibly rare, or greatness is more common than we realize and the rarity is recognition. I believe firmly in the latter. Especially today, when we live in an attention economy that equates visibility with value. Social media follower counts, speaking engagements, press mentions, and industry awards have become the measuring sticks of design success. This creates a distorted picture of what greatness in design actually means. The truth is far simpler and more liberating: you can be a great designer and be completely unknown. The most elegant designs often fade into the background, becoming invisible through their perfect functionality. Day to day life is scattered with the artifacts of unrecognized ingenuity — the comfortable grip of a vegetable peeler, the intuitive layout of a highway sign, or the satisfying click of a well-made light switch. These artifacts represent design excellence precisely because they don’t call attention to themselves or their creators. Who is responsible for them? I don’t know. That doesn’t mean they’re not out there. This invisibility extends beyond physical objects. The information architect who structures a medical records system that saves lives through its clarity and efficiency may never receive public recognition. The interaction designer who simplifies a complex government form, making essential services accessible to vulnerable populations, might never be celebrated on design blogs or win prestigious awards. Great design isn’t defined by who knows your name, but by how well your work serves human needs. It’s measured in the problems solved, the frustrations eased, the moments of delight created, and the dignity preserved through thoughtful solutions. These metrics operate independently of fame or recognition. Our obsession with visibility also creates a troubling dynamic: design that prioritizes being noticed over being useful. This leads to visual pollution, cognitive overload, and solutions that serve the designer’s portfolio more than the user’s needs. When recognition becomes the goal, the work itself often suffers. I was among the few who didn’t immediately recoil at the brash aesthetics of the Tesla Cybertruck, but it turns out that no amount of exterior innovation changes the fact that it is just not a good truck. There’s something particularly authentic about unknown masters — those who pursue excellence for its own sake, refining their craft out of personal commitment rather than in pursuit of accolades. They understand that their greatest achievements might never be attributed to them, and they create anyway. Their satisfaction comes from the integrity of the work itself. This isn’t to dismiss the value of recognition when it’s deserved, or to suggest that great designers shouldn’t be celebrated. Rather, it’s a reminder that the correlation between quality and fame is weak at best, and that we should be suspicious of any definition of design excellence that depends on visibility. This is especially so today. The products of digital and interaction design are mayflies; most of what we make is lost to the rapid churn of the industry even before it can be lost to anyone’s memory. The next time you use something that works so well you barely notice it, remember that somewhere, a designer solved a problem so thoroughly that both the problem and its solution became invisible. That designer might not be famous, might not have thousands of followers, might not be invited to speak at conferences — but they’ve achieved something remarkable: greatness through invisibility. Design greatness is not measured by the recognition of authorship, but in the creation of work so essential it becomes as inevitable as gravity, as unremarkable as air, and as vital as both.
Our world treats information like it’s always good. More data, more content, more inputs — we want it all without thinking twice. To say that the last twenty-five years of culture have centered around info-maximalism wouldn’t be an exaggeration. I hope we’re coming to the end of that phase. More than ever before, it feels like we have to — that we just can’t go on like this. But the solution cannot come from within; it won’t be a better tool or even better information to get us out of this mess. It will be us, feeling and acting differently. Think about this comparison: Information is to wisdom what pornography is to real intimacy. I’m not here to moralize, so I compare to pornography with all the necessary trepidation. Without judgement, it’s my observation that pornography depicts physical connection while creating emotional distance. I think information is like that. There’s a difference between information and wisdom that hinges on volume. More information promises to show us more of reality, but too much of it can easily hide the truth. Information can be pornography — a simulation that, when consumed without limits, can weaken our ability to experience the real thing. When we feel overwhelmed by information — anxious and unable to process what we’ve already taken in — we’re realizing that “more” doesn’t help us find truth. But because we have also established information as a fundamental good in our society, failure to keep up with it, make sense of it, and even profit from it feels like a personal moral failure. There is only one way out of that. We don’t need another filter. We need a different emotional response to information. We should not only question why our accepted spectrum of emotional response to information — in the general sense — is mostly limited to the space between curiosity and desire, but actively develop a capacity for disgust when it becomes too much. And it has become too much. Some people may say that we just need better information skills and tools, not less information. But this misses how fundamentally our minds need space and time to turn information into understanding. When every moment is filled with new inputs, we can’t fully absorb, process, and reflect upon what we’ve consumed. Reflection, not consumptions, creates wisdom. Reflection requires quiet, isolation, and inactivity. Some people say that while technology has expanded over the last twenty-five years, culture hasn’t. If they needed a good defense for that idea, well, I think this is it: A world without idleness is a truly world without creativity. I’m using loaded moral language here for a purpose — to illustrate an imbalance in our information-saturated culture. Idleness is a pejorative these days, though it needn’t be. We don’t refer to compulsive information consumption as gluttony, though we should. And if attention is our most precious resource — as an information-driven economy would imply — why isn’t its commercial exploitation condemned as avarice? As I ask these questions I’m really looking for where individuals like you and me have leverage. If our attention is our currency, then leverage will come with the capacity to not pay it. To not look, to not listen, to not react, to not share. And as has always been true of us human beings, actions are feelings echoed outside the body. We must learn not just to withhold our attention but to feel disgust at ceaseless claims to it.
How elimination, curation, and optimization can help us see through the technological mirror. Technology functions as both mirror and lens — reflecting our self-image while simultaneously shaping how we see everything else. This metaphor of recursion, while perhaps obvious once stated, is one that most people instinctively resist. Why this resistance? I think it is because the observation is not only about a kind of recursion, but it is itself recursive. The contexts in which we discuss technology’s distorting effects tend to be highly technological — internet-based forums, messaging, social media, and the like. It’s difficult to clarify from within, isn’t it? When we try to analyze or critique a technology while using it to do so, it’s as if we’re critiquing the label from inside the bottle. And these days, the bottle is another apt metaphor; it often feels like technology is something we are trapped within. And that’s just at the surface — the discussion layer. It goes much deeper. It’s astounding to confront the reality that nearly all the means by which we see and understand ourselves are technological. So much of modern culture is in its artifacts, and the rest couldn’t be described without them. There have been oral traditions, of course, but once we started making things, they grew scarce. For a human in the twenty-first century, self awareness, cultural identification, and countless other aspects of existence are all, in some way or another, technological. It’s difficult to question the mirror’s image when we’ve never seen ourselves without it. The interfaces through which we perceive ourselves and interpret the world are so integrated into our experience that recognizing their presence, let alone their distorting effects, requires an almost impossible perspective shift. Almost impossible. Because of course it can be done. In fact, I think it’s a matter of small steps evenly distributed throughout a normal lifestyle. It’s not a matter of secret initiation or withdrawing from society, though I think it can sometimes feel that way. How, then, can one step outside the mirror’s view? I’ve found three categories of action particularly helpful: Elimination One option we always have is to simply not use a thing. I often think about how fascinating it is that to not use a particular technology in our era seems radical — truly counter-cultural. The more drastic rejecting any given technology seems, the better an example it is of how dependent we have become upon it. Imagine how difficult a person’s life would be today if they were to entirely reject the internet. There’s no law in our country against opting out of the internet, but the countless day-to-day dependencies upon the it nearly amount to a cumulative obligation to be connected to it. Nevertheless, a person could do it. Few would, but they could. This kind of “brute force” response to technology has become a YouTube genre — the “I Went 30 Days Without ____” video is quite popular. And this is obviously because of how much effort it requires to eliminate even comparatively minor technologies from one’s life. Not the entire internet, but just social media, or just streaming services, or just a particular device or app. Elimination isn’t easy, but I’m a fan of it. The Amish are often thought of as simply rejecting modernity, but that’s not an accurate description of what actually motivates their way of life. Religion plays a foundational role, of course, but each Amish community works together to decide upon many aspects of how they live, including what technologies they adopt. Their guiding principle is whether a thing or practice strengthens their community. And their decision is a collective one. I find that inspiring. When I reject a technology, I do so because I either don’t feel I need it or because I feel that it doesn’t help me live the way I want to live. It’s not forever, and it isn’t with judgement for anyone else but me. These are probably my most radical eliminations: most social media (I still reluctantly have a LinkedIn profile), streaming services (except YouTube), all “smart home” devices of any kind, smartwatches, and for the last decade and counting, laptops. Don’t @ me because you can’t ;) Curation What I have in mind here is curation of information, not of technologies. Since it is simply impossible to consume all information, we all curate in some way, whether we’re aware of it or not. For some, though, this might actually be a matter of what technologies they use — for example, if a person only uses Netflix, then they only see what Netflix shows them. That’s curation, but Netflix is doing the work. However, I think it’s a good exercise to do a bit more curation of one’s own. I believe that if curation is going to be beneficial, it must involve being intentional about one’s entire media diet — what information we consume, from which sources, how frequently, and why. This last part requires the additional work of discerning what motivates and funds various information sources. Few, if any, are truly neutral. The reality is that as information grows in volume, the challenge of creating useful filters for it increases to near impossibility. Information environments operated on algorithms filter information for you based upon all kinds of factors, some of which align with your preferences and many of which don’t. There are many ways to avoid this, they are all more inconvenient than a social media news feed, and it is imperative that more people make the effort to do them. They range from subscribing to carefully-chosen sources, to using specialized apps, feed readers, ad and tracking-blocking browsers and VPNs to control how information gets to you. I recommend all of that and a constant vigilance because, sadly, there is no filter that will only show you the true stuff. Optimization Finally, there’s optimization — the fine-tuning you can do to nearly anything and everything you use. I’ve become increasingly active in seeking out and adjusting even the most detailed of application and device settings, shaping my experiences to be quieter, more limited, and aligned with my intentions rather than the manufacturers’ defaults. I spent thirty minutes nearly redesigning my entire experience in Slack in ways I had never been aware were even possible until recently. It’s made a world of difference to me. Just the other day, I found a video that had several recommendations for altering default settings in Mac OS that have completely solved daily annoyances I have just tolerated for years. I am always adjusting the way I organize files, the apps I use, and the way I use them because I think optimization is always worthwhile. And if I can’t optimize it, I’m likely to eliminate it. None of these approaches offers perfect protection from technological mediation, but together they create meaningful space for more direct control over your experience. But perhaps most important is creating physical spaces that remain relatively untouched by digital technology. I often think back to long trips I took before the era of ubiquitous computing and connection. During a journey from Providence to Malaysia in 2004, I stowed my laptop and cell phone knowing they’d be useless to me during 24 hours of transit. There was no in-cabin wifi, no easy way to have downloaded movies to my machine in advance, no place to even plug anything in. I spent most of that trip looking out the window, counting minutes, and simply thinking — a kind of unoccupied time that has become nearly extinct since then. What makes technological discernment in the digital age particularly challenging is that we’re drowning in a pit of rope where the only escape is often another rope. Information technology is designed to be a nearly wraparound lens on reality; it often feels like the only way to keep using a thing is to use another thing that limits the first thing. People who know me well have probably heard me rant for years about phone cases — “why do I need a case for my case?!” These days, the sincere answer to many peoples’ app overwhelm is another app. It’s almost funny. And yet, I do remain enthusiastic about technology’s creative potential. The ability to shape our world by making new things is an incredible gift. But we’ve gone overboard, creating new technologies simply because we can, without a coherent idea of how they’ll shape the world. This makes us bystanders to what Kevin Kelly describes as “what technology wants” — the agenda inherent in digital technology that makes it far from neutral. What we ultimately seek isn’t escape from technology itself, but recovery of certain human experiences that technology tends to overwhelm: sustained attention, silence, direct observation, unstructured thought, and the sense of being fully present rather than partially elsewhere. The most valuable skill in our digital age isn’t technical proficiency but technological discernment — the wisdom to know when to engage, when to disconnect, and how to shape our tools to serve our deeper human needs rather than allowing ourselves to be shaped by them. “It does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it.” – Thomas Merton
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Contributed by Florian Hardwig Source: movieposters.ha.com Image: Heritage Auctions. License: All Rights Reserved. Csillagok háborúja (Star Wars), 1979. The custom acute accents are simple squares. The secondary typeface is ITC Avant Garde Gothic. More info on StarWarsMoviePoster.com. Tibor Helényi (1946–2014) was a Hungarian painter, graphic designer, and poster artist. Among his most famous works are the posters he created for the original Star Wars trilogy, commissioned by MOKÉP, Hungary’s state-owned film distributor. Today, the posters are sought-after collector’s items. The typeface Helényi used for the titles is Langdon Biform. Characterized by triangular notches, the boxy design is by John Langdon (b. 1946). To most people, the graphic designer and retired typography professor is best known for his ambigrams, and especially those he made for Dan Brown’s 2000 novel, Angels & Demons. Langdon Biform is an early work of his, drawn in 1971 when he was in his mid-twenties, years before embarking on a career as freelance logo designer, type specialist, and lettering artist. Langdon submitted the design to a competition organized by Californian phototype company Lettergraphics, who added it to their library of typefaces. It didn’t take long before it was copied by other type providers. I’m aware of at least six digitizations, under various names including Lampoon, Harpoon ART, and Dominion, none of which were authorized by its original designer. In a 2014 interview, Helényi was asked about a debate among fans who wondered whether he’d even watched Star Wars before designing the poster. After all, his art includes creatures that don’t appear in the film. Helényi laughingly replied that he indeed had seen the film, and that he had a lot of fun with designing the poster. In addition to his impressions from the advance screening, he also worked from lobby cards. You can learn more about Helényi and see more of his work at his official website (maintained by his daughter Flora) and also at Budapest Poster Gallery. Source: movieposters.ha.com Image: Heritage Auctions. License: All Rights Reserved. A Birodalom visszavág (The Empire Strikes Back), 1982. Subtitle and credits are added in Univers Bold. More info on StarWarsMoviePoster.com. Source: movieposters.ha.com Image: Heritage Auctions. License: All Rights Reserved. A Jedi visszatér (Return of the Jedi), 1984. The secondary typeface for this poster is Univers Extended. More info on StarWarsMoviePoster.com. Source: www.liveauctioneers.com Image: Budapest Poster Gallery. License: All Rights Reserved. The original painted art created for the posters was sold in Budapest Poster Gallery’s Tibor Helenyi Estate Auction in 2015, alongside many other items by the artist. Stephen Coles. License: CC BY-NC-SA. Glyph set for Langdon Biform with its fifteen alternates, as shown in the “Do a Comp” fan by Lettergraphics International Inc., 1968–1975 This post was originally published at Fonts In Use
Let me begin with a disambiguation: I’m not talking about AI as some theoretical intelligence emerging from non-biological form — the sentient computer of science fiction. That, I suppose, can be thought about in an intellectual vacuum, to a point. I’m talking about AI, the product. The thing being sold to us daily, packaged in press releases and demo videos, embedded in services and platforms. AI is, fundamentally, about money. It’s about making promises and raising investment based upon those promises. The promises alone create a future — not necessarily because they’ll come true, but because enough capital, deployed with enough conviction, warps reality around it. When companies raise billions on the promise of AI dominance, they’re not just predicting a future; they’re manufacturing one. Venture capital, at the highest levels, tends to look from the outside like anti-competitive racketeering than finance. Enough investment, however localized in a handful of companies, can shape an entire industry or even an entire economy, regardless of whether it makes any sense whatsoever. And let’s be clear: the Big Tech firms investing in AI aren’t simply responding to market forces; they’re creating them, defining them, controlling them. Nobody asked for AI; we’ve been told to collaborate. Which demonstrates that capitalism, like AI, is no longer a theoretical model about nice, tidy ideas like free markets and competition. The reality of modern capitalism reveals it to be, at best, a neutral system made non-neutral by its operators. The invisible hand isn’t invisible because it’s magical; it’s invisible because we’re not supposed to see whose hand it actually is. You want names though? I don’t have them all. That’s the point. It’s easy to blame the CEOs whose names are browbeat into our heads over and over again, but beyond them is what I think of as The Fear of the Un-captured Dollar and the Unowned Person — a secret society of people who seem to believe that human potential is one thing: owning all the stuff, wielding all the power, seizing all the attention. We now exist in what people call “late-stage capitalism,” where meaningful competition only occurs among those with the most capital, and their battles wreck the landscape around them. We scatter and dash amidst the rubble like the unseen NPCs of Metropolis while the titans clash in the sky. When capital becomes this concentrated, it exerts power at the level of sovereign nations. This reveals the theater that is the so-called power of governments. Nation-states increasingly seem like local franchises in a global system run by capital. This creates fundamental vulnerabilities in governmental systems that have not yet been tested by the degeneracy of late-stage capitalism. And when that happens, the lack of power of the individual is laid bare — in the chat window, in the browser, on the screen, in the home, in the city, in the state, in the world. The much-lauded “democratic” technology of the early internet has given way to systems of surveillance and manipulation so comprehensive they would make 20th century authoritarians weep with envy, not to mention a fear-induced appeasement to the destruction of norms and legal protections that spreads across our entire culture like an overnight frost of fascism. AI accelerates this process. It centralizes power by centralizing the capacity to process and act upon information. It creates unprecedented asymmetries between those who own the models and those who are modeled. Every interaction with an AI system becomes a one-way mirror: you see your reflection, while on the other side, entities you cannot see learn about you, categorize you, and make predictions about you. So when a person resists AI, don’t assume they’re stubbornly digging their heels into the shifting sands of an outmoded ground. Perhaps give them credit for thinking logically and drawing a line between themselves and a future that treats them as nothing more than a bit in the machine. Resistance to AI isn’t necessarily Luddism. It isn’t a fear of progress. It might instead be a clear-eyed assessment of what kind of “progress” is actually being offered — and at what cost. Liberty in the age of AI requires more than just formal rights. It demands structural changes to how technology is developed, deployed, and governed. It requires us to ask not just “what can this technology do?” but “who benefits from what this technology does?” And that conversation cannot happen if we insist on discussing AI as if it exists in a political and economic vacuum — as if the only questions worth asking are technical ones. The most important questions about AI aren’t about algorithms or capabilities; they’re about power and freedom. To think about AI without thinking about capitalism, fascism, and liberty isn’t just incomplete — it’s dangerous. It blinds us to the real stakes of the transformation happening around us, encouraging us to focus on the technology rather than the systems that control it and the ends toward which it’s deployed. Is it possible to conceive of AI that is “good” — as in distributed, not centralized; protective of intellectual property, not a light-speed pirate of the world’s creative output; respectful of privacy, not a listening agent of the powers-that-be; selectively and intentionally deployed where humans need the help, not a leveler of human purpose? (Anil Dash has some great points about this.) Perhaps, but such an AI is fundamentally incompatible with the system in which the AI we have has been created. As AI advances, we face a choice: Will we allow it to become another tool for concentrating power and wealth? Or will we insist upon human dignity and liberty? The answer depends not on technological developments, but on our collective willingness to recognize AI for what it is: not a force of nature, but a product of flawed human choices embedded in vulnerable human systems.
Album art didn’t always exist. In the early 1900s, recorded music was still a novelty, overshadowed by sales of sheet music. Early vinyl records were vastly different from what we think of today: discs were sold individually and could only hold up to four minutes of music per side. Sometimes, only one side of the record was used. One of the most popular records of 1910, for example, was “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine”: it clocked in at two minutes and 39 seconds. via Wikipedia The packaging of these records was strictly utilitarian: a brown paper sleeve to protect the record from dust, printed with the name of the record label or the retailer. Rarely did the packaging include any information on the disc inside; the label on the center of the disc was all there was to differentiate one record from another. But as record sales started to show signs of life, music publishers took note. Columbia Records, one of the first companies to sell music on discs, was especially successful. They pioneered the sale of songs in bundles: the individual discs were bound together in packages resembling photo albums, partly to protect the delicate shellac that the records were made of, partly to increase their sales. They resembled photo albums, so Columbia called them “record albums.” There were many more technological breakthroughs that made it possible to mass-manufacture and distribute music throughout the world at affordable prices. The five-minute-long 78 rpm discs were replaced by 20-minute discs that ran at 33 ⅓ rpm, which were replaced by the hour-long 12″ LP we know today. Delicate shellac was replaced by the more resilient (and cheaper) vinyl. Both recording technology and consumer electronics were always evolving, allowing more dynamic music to fit into smaller packages and be played on smaller, higher-fidelity stereos. The invention of album art can get lost in the story of technological mastery. But among all the factors that contributed to the rise of recorded music, it stands as one of the few that was wholly driven by creators themselves. Album art — first as marketing material, then as pure creative expression — turned an audio-only medium into a multi-sensory experience. This is the story of the people who made music visible. The prophet: Alex Steinweiss Alex Steinweiss was born in 1917, the son of eastern European immigrants. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Steinweiss took an early interest in art and earned a scholarship to Parsons School of Design. On graduating, he worked for Austrian designer Joseph Binder, whose bold, graphic posters had influenced design for the first decades of the 1900s. The Most Important Wheels in America, Association of American Railroads (1952) via Moma Joseph Binder, Österreichs Wiederaufbau Ausstellung Salzburg (1933) via Moma Joseph Binder, Air Corps U.S. Army (Winning entry for the MoMA National Defense Poster Competition [Army Air Corps Recruiting]) via Moma After his work with Binder, Steinweiss was hired by Columbia Records to produce promotional displays and ads, but the job didn’t stick. At the outbreak of World War II, he went to work for the Navy’s Training and Development Center in New York City, designing teaching material and cautionary posters. When the war ended, Steinweiss went back to freelancing for Columbia. At a lunch meeting in 1948, company president Ted Wallerstein mentioned that Columbia would soon introduce a new kind of record that, spinning at a slower speed of 33 ⅓ rpm, could hold more music than the older 78 rpm discs. But there was a problem: the smaller, more intricate grooves on the discs were being damaged by the heavy paper sleeves used for the 78s. After the lunch, Steinweiss went to work to create a new, safer jacket for the records. But his vision for the new packaging went beyond just its construction. “The way records were sold was ridiculous,” Steinweiss said. “The covers were brown, tan or green paper. They were not attractive, and lacked sales appeal.” He suggested that Columbia should spend more money on packaging, convinced that eye-catching designs would help sell records.1 His first chance to prove his case was a 1940 compilation by the songwriters Rodgers and Hart — one of the first releases on the new microgroove 33 ⅓ records. For it, he asked the Imperial Theater (located one block west of Times Square) to change the lettering on their marquee to read “SMASH SONG HITS BY RODGERS & HART." Steinweiss had a photographer take a photo, and back in his studio, superimposed “COLUMBIA RECORDS’’ on the image to match the perspective and style of the signage. The last touch, a nod to the graphic abstraction of his mentor Joseph Binder, were orange lines arcing around the marquee in the exact size of the record underneath. Album art was born. Smash Song Hits by Rodgers & Hart via RateYourMusic Steinweiss would go on to design hundreds of covers for Columbia from 1940 to 1945. His methodology was rigorous; the covers went beyond nice pictures to be visual representations of the music itself. Before most people owned a TV set, Steinweiss’s album covers were affordable multi-sensory entertainment. Looking at the album cover and listening to the music created an experience that was more than the sum of its parts. “I tried to get into the subject,” he explains, "either through the music, or the life and times of the composer. For example, with a Bartók piano concerto, I took the elements of the piano—the hammers, keys, and strings—and composed them in a contemporary setting using appropriate color and rendering. Since Bartók is Hungarian, I also put in the suggestion of a peasant figure.” via RateYourMusic Steinweiss was prophetic: His colorful compositions sold records. Newsweek reported that sales of Bruno Walter’s recording of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony increased 895% with its new Steinweiss cover.” 2 Eroica The challenger: Reid Miles From 1940 to 1950, Columbia Records was the dominant force in music sales. Buoyed by Steinweiss’s initial successes, Columbia hired more artists and designers to produce album art. Jim Flora led the charge from 1947–1950 with irreverent illustrations and more daring explorations of typography, and like Steinweiss, his work mirrored the music on the records. During the era, Columbia began to focus much more on popular music. Flora’s campy compositions screamed “this isn’t your parent’s music.” Gene Krupa and His Orchestra via JimFlora.com Jim Flora's cover for Bix and Tram via JimFlora.com Jim Flora's cover for Kid Ory and His Creole Jazz Band via JimFlora.com But while Columbia was focusing on making it into the hit parade, an upstart label was honing in on a sound that would come to define the era; Blue Note Records, founded in 1939, was fixated on the jazz underground. From its founding and throughout the 1950s, Blue Note focused on “hot jazz,” a mutant strain of jazz descending from the big band swing era, often including twangy banjoes, wailing clarinets, and rambunctious New Orleans second-line-style drumming. Founder Alfred Lion wrote the label’s manifesto: Blue Note Records are designed simply to serve the uncompromising expressions of hot jazz or swing, in general. Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression. … Blue Note records are concerned with identifying its impulse, not its sensational and commercial adornments.3 One way Blue Note stood out from labels like Columbia was their dedication to their artists. Many of the working musicians of the ’50s lived like vampires, waking up after dusk and playing gigs into the early hours of the morning, then rehearsing until dawn. Blue Note would record their artists in the pre-dawn hours, giving musicians time to rest up before their next night’s gigs started. Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and John Coltrane are household names now; but then, because of their drinking, drug use, and frenetic schedules, labels wouldn’t work with them. Blue Note embraced them, feeding their fires of creative innovation and creating an updraft for the insurgency of jazz to come. Album art was one more revolutionary way for Blue Note to explore “genuine expression.” Just as they fostered talented musicians, they’d give young designers a chance to shine. Alfred Lion’s childhood friend Francis Wolff had joined the label as a producer and photographer; he’d shoot candid portraits of the musicians as they worked. Then, designers like Paul Bacon, Gil Mellé (himself a musician), and John Hermansader would pair Wolff’s black-and-white photos with a single, bright color, then juxtapose them with stark, sans-serif type. Genius of Modern Music Vol. 1 via Deep Groove Mono Gil Mellé's cover featuring Francis Wolff's photography for his band's New Faces — New Sounds via Deep Groove Mono John Hermansader's cover featuring Francis Wolff's photography for George Wallington's Showcase via Deep Groove Mono As the 1960s approached, the musicians Blue Note worked so hard to cultivate were forging new styles, leaving behind the swing-era pretense of jazz as dance music. Charlie Parker and Bud Powell kept speeding up the tempo and stuffing more chords into progressions. Max Roach started playing the drums like a boxer, bobbing and weaving around the beat with skittering cymbals, waiting for the right moment to land a single monumental “thud” of a kick drum. Without the drums keeping a steady rhythm, bass players like Milt Hinton and Gene Ramey had to furiously mark out time with eighth notes, traversing chords by plucking up and down the scale. This was bebop, and it was musicians’ music. Blue Note’s ethos of artistic integrity was the perfect Petri dish for virtuosic musicians to develop innovative sounds — they worked in small ensembles, often just five players, constantly scrambling and re-arranging instrumentation, playing harder and faster and louder. Then, around 1955, just as Blue Note was hitting its stride, Wolff met a 28-year-old designer named Reid Miles. Miles had recently moved to New York and had been working for John Hermansader at Esquire magazine. He was a big fan of classical music but wasn’t so interested in jazz. Wolff convinced Miles to start designing covers for Blue Note all the same and kicked off one of the most influential partnerships in modern design. The first cover Miles created was for vibraphone player Milt Jackson; it picked up from the established art style, with Wolff’s photos and a single bright hue. But the type was even more exaggerated, and the photo took up more than half the cover. White dots overlayed on Jackson’s mallets were the perfect abstraction of the staccato tones of the vibraphone. It’s a great cover, but it was just a hint of what was to come. via Ariel Salminen A common theme of Miles’ covers was the emphasis on Wolff’s photography. We’re familiar with these iconic images today, but at the time they were revolutionary; before, black musicians like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald were portrayed in tuxedos and evening gowns, posed smiling genially or laughing, rendered so as to not offend the largely white listening audience. Wolff’s portraits were candid, realistic, showing black musicians at work. For example, the cover for Art Blakey’s The Freedom Rider shows Blakey lost in a moment, almost entirely obscured by a cymbal. The drummer is smoking a cigarette, but it’s barely hanging onto the corner of his lip — his mouth is half-open, his brows clenched in a moment of agony or ecstasy. Miles would let the photo fill up the entire cover, cramming the name of the record into whatever empty space was available. The Freedom Rider via London Jazz Collector Miles sometimes reversed this relationship, pioneering the use of typography to convey the spirit of the music. His cover for Jackie McLean’s It’s Time! is composed of an edge-to-edge grid of 243 exclamation marks; a postage stamp picture of McLean graces the upper corner, almost a punchline. Lee Morgan’s The Rumproller is another type-only cover, this time with the title smeared out from corner to corner, like it was left on a hot dashboard for the day. Larry Young’s Unity has no photo at all; the four members of the quartet become orange dots resting in (or bubbling out of) the bowl of the U. It's Time via Ariel Salminen Reid Miles' cover for Lee Morgan's The Rumproller via Fonts in Use Reid Miles' cover for Larry Young's Unity Miles fulfilled the Blue Note manifesto. His album covers pushed the envelope of graphic design just as the artists on the records inside continued to break new ground in jazz. With the partnership of Miles and Wolff, alongside Alfred Lion’s commitment to artistic integrity, Blue Note became the standard-bearer for jazz. Columbia Records couldn’t help but notice. Even though Blue Note wasn’t nearly as commercially successful as Columbia, their willingness to take risks had established them as a much more sophisticated, innovative, and creative label; to compete for the best talent, Columbia would need to find a way to win the attention of both artists and listeners. The master: S. Neil Fujita Sadamitsu Fujita was born in 1921 in Waimea, Hawaii. He was assigned the name Neil in boarding school — leading up to World War II, anti-Japanese sentiment was rampant, especially in Hawaii. Fujita moved to LA to attend art school, but his studies were cut short in 1942 when Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, allowing the imprisonment of Japanese Americans living on the west coast. Fujita was sent to Wyoming, where he enlisted in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Before the war was over, he’d see combat in Italy, France, and the Pacific theater. After the war, Fujita finished his studies in LA. He quickly made a name for himself in the advertising world; his résumé landed on the desk of Bill Golden, the art director for CBS, which owned Columbia Records. Alex Steinweiss, the first album artist and Columbia’s ace in the hole, had moved on to RCA. Columbia needed a new direction. Golden called Fujita and asked him to run the art department. Fujita would be building a whole new team, replacing the relationships that Columbia had built with art studios for hire. This wasn’t going to be the hardest part of Fujita’s work; when offering him the job, Golden warned him that he’d experience a lot of racist attitudes still simmering in the wake of World War II.4 Still, Fujita agreed to take the job. Fujita’s first covers fit in with the work that Reid Miles was doing at Blue Note: single-color accents set against black-and-white photography. The Jazz Messengers via Discogs Fujita's cover for Miles Davis' 'Round About Midnight via Discogs In 1959, jazz was leaving the stratosphere. Ornette Coleman was performing what he called “free jazz,” frenetic, inscrutable compositions that drew backlash and praise in equal parts. John Coltrane recorded Giant Steps with a level of virtuosity that even his own bandmates struggled to keep up with. Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, which would go on to be regarded as one of the best recordings of all time. Fujita was also breaking ground at Columbia. He was one of the first directors to hire both men and women in a racially integrated office.5 He delegated work, tapping painters, illustrators, and photographers to contribute to covers. Fujita himself trained to be a painter before starting his career in design; he started looking for ways to incorporate his own original paintings into the covers: “We thought about what the picture was saying about the music,” Fujita recalled, “and how we could use that to sell the record. And abstract art was getting popular so we used a lot more abstraction in the designs—with jazz records especially.” He got the perfect opportunity to make his mark with two albums released in 1959: Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um and Dave Brubeck’s Time Out. Mingus Ah Um Fujita's cover for Dave Brubeck's Time Out Fujita’s abstract paintings reflected the pure exuberance of Mingus’ and Brubeck’s music. In the case of Mingus Ah Um, the divisions and intersections spanning the cover read like a beam of light passing through exotic lenses, magnifiers, refractors, and prisms; through his music, Mingus was reflecting on the transition of jazz from popular entertainment to mind-expanding creative exercise. For Time Out, the wheels and rollers spooling out across the page echo the way that Brubeck’s quartet was experimenting with how time signatures could be interlocked, multiplied, and divided to create completely new textures and musical patterns. Fujita’s covers made it plain: Jazz was art. ’59 turned out to be a watershed for both jazz and album art. Brubeck’s Time Out went to #2 on the pop charts in 1961, and was the first jazz LP to sell more than a million copies; “Take Five,” the album’s standout hit, would also become the first jazz single to sell a million copies. For a unique moment in time, the music and art worlds were being propelled forward by a commercially successful record. Fujita’s paintings were making their way into millions of homes, driving sales of records by the vanguards of jazz. Fujita left Columbia records shortly after these major successes. “I wanted to be something other than just a record designer,” he said, “so I left to go on my own.” He’d go on to design the book covers for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather — when the latter was turned into Francis Coppola’s breakthrough film, Fujita’s design was used for its title and promotional art. But he’d continue to design album covers, creating paintings for each one. Far Out, Near In Fujita's cover for Dony Byrd and Gigi Gryce's Modern Jazz Perspective Fujita's cover for Columbia's recording of Glenn Gould performing Berg, Křenek, and Schoenberg. The next generation As jazz continued to evolve throughout the ’60s and ’70s, melding with rock ’n roll to produce punk, electronic, R&B, and rap, album art evolved alongside. Packaging became more sophisticated: multi-disc albums came in folding cases called gatefolds, accompanied by booklets of photography and art. New printing techniques allowed for brighter colors, shiny foil stamps, and textured finishes. Budgets for production grew larger and larger. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band featured an elaborate photo of the band members, 57 life-sized photograph cutouts, and nine wax sculptures. For the first time for a rock EP, the lyrics to the songs were printed on the back of the cover. In another first, the paper sleeve inside was not white but a colorful abstract pattern instead. Also inside was a sheet of cardboard cutouts, including a postcard portrait of Sgt. Pepper, a fake mustache, sergeant stripes, lapel badges, and a stand-up cutout of the Beatles themselves. The zany campiness of Sgt. Pepper’s could only be matched by an absurd gift box full of toys and games. The stark loneliness of the Beatles’ next album would be paired with a plain white cover, without even ink to fill in the impression of the words “The Beatles” on the front. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, designed by Jann Haworth and Peter Blake and photographed by Michael Cooper The cover of The Beatles, designed by Richard Hamilton via Reddit The most famous artists and designers of each generation would try their hand at album art. Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Saul Bass, Keith Haring, Annie Leibovitz, Jeff Koons, Shepard Fairey, and Banksy would all create work for albums. Some of those pieces would become the most recognizable ones in an artist’s catalog. Greatest Hits by The Modern Jazz Quartet Andy Warhol's cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico via Leo Reynolds Saul Bass's cover for Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems of Color via Moma Keith Haring's cover for David Bowie's Without You Annie Leibovitz and Andrea Klein's cover for Bruce Springsteen's Born In The USA Jeff Koons' cover for Lady Gaga's Artpop Shepard Fairey's cover for The Smashing Pumpkins' Zeitgeist Banksy's cover for Blur's Think Tank None of this would have been possible without the contributions of Alex Steinweiss, Jim Flora, Paul Bacon, Gil Mellé, John Hermansader, Reid Miles, S. Neil Fujita, and others. If not for the arms race between Columbia Records and Blue Note for the best art and the best artists of the ’50s, many artists would never have found their career. And in some cases, an album like The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers would be remembered more for its art than for its music. When music was first pressed into discs, design was less than an afterthought. Today, album art is an extension of music itself. Footnotes & References https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/business/media/alex-steinweiss-originator-of-artistic-album-covers-dies-at-94.html ↩︎ https://web.archive.org/web/20120412033422/http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/1998/?id=318 ↩︎ https://web.archive.org/web/20080503055603/https://www.bluenote.com/History.aspx ↩︎ https://www.hellerbooks.com/pdfs/voice_s_neil_fujita.pdf ↩︎ https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/s-neil-fujita ↩︎
