Welcome to Ethan’s Turtles - I’m Ethan (spoiler) and I write this newsletter to explore the relationship between digital design and culture.
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As someone who has spent quite a few years researching and experimenting with digital user interfaces, I often think about how little support there is for innovation in visual design.
The reason I often think about this, is because it really pisses me off.
Occasionally, I will excitedly notice an email with a subject along the lines of ‘design innovation’ - only to take a closer look, and see the ‘design’ being referred to is for a new kind of semiconductor, agricultural engine system, or some kind of ‘social’ innovation around how to structure a workshop.
I’m sure these are perfectly reasonable avenues of innovation. But, truthfully, they are not what I’m looking for.
Compared to the multiple decades we saw of the Bell labs, a testament to unrestricted state support for innovation powered and informed by the arts, there is next to no sources or avenues of innovation that look to explore what else we can do with visual design in the digital space.
On the opposite end of this spectrum - we are all plainly aware of the major focus drawing the attention of innovation funders: Artificial Intelligence.
The state of innovation’s focus is, at least in the UK, a microcosm of a wider financial strategy that has been employed over the last ten-to-fifteen years - a total focus on engineering and STEM, whilst the arts is shrunk to near extinction.
The effects of this strategy have undoubtedly shone in the last few months, as we have witnessed what has been made possible via the newest wave of AI-powered technologies able to mass-produce original images and writing.
The effect this is currently having, and will have, on the visual arts deserves a separate article, probably a few. For now, I want to focus on writing, and writers.
But first, let’s talk about reading.
A Culture of Reading
Michael Sacasas wrote his essay Reading as Counter Practice on the wave of people (particularly in the tech scene, think Sam Bankman-Fried) who are actively against reading books. He suggests that we should view the act of reading books as a counter-practice against “the default settings of our techno-social milieu.”
I think this suggestion is a good one, and he makes some great arguments in favour of reading books - but the concept we must see this style of reading as ‘counter-practice’ reflects how the practice of reading is seen as little more than “pointing toward information” amongst a majority of people, rather than as a source of original, artistic practice (something Sacasas highlights in the article.)
In The Matrix, we see a hard-drive plugged into Neo’s neck - and once the loading bar is full, he is now a master of martial arts. Those who share Sam Bankman-Fried’s perspective would like to see the reading experience ‘improve’ to this point: maximum efficiency, zero process.
The attitude comes from the post-industrialist, productivity-obsessed culture that dominates much of modern culture - speed and efficiency is everything. As arts is cut out of education and culture more and more, any arguments against why this attitude shouldn’t necessarily enter the space of reading and writing is hard to find.
It has taken longer for the technological sophistication to arrive, but with the newest innovations in AI, this attitude is now starting to enter the practice of writing more aggressively than ever.
Writing and AI
We have already had the ubiquitous example of Grammarly for a number of years now - the poor souls who have been a student at any point in the past three-to-five years and also didn’t have an ad blocker (a small demographic, admittedly) will know of the plague of Grammarly adverts which would follow you around the internet.
Value propositions along the lines of ‘improve your writing’, ‘save time on your essays’ and ‘be more concise’ are all Grammarly classics - a piece of AI-powered software which would analyse your writing and find ways to ‘improve’ it.
I really despise Grammarly. Not only is the deliberate breaking of the rules of language such a hugely important part of the joy of writing (think, you know, literally Shakespeare) but I am always reminded of Roland Barthes’ concept of écriture (from Writing Degree Zero)
Écriture, a French term, doesn’t have a direct English translation, but refers to the ‘style’ of writing of a particular author. This concept of style isn’t inferring perfection, accuracy or ‘effectiveness’ by some metric - it refers to originality, to artistry.
Grammarly destroys originality. It destroys artistry.
If you are unable to write fast enough to make your assignments, you shouldn’t have to take away your originality in order to do this. We should be changing the education system to accommodate what you need in order to bring the ideas from your head into the world, on your own terms.
But Grammarly was only the start. Something even more sinister is approaching, fast.
A Glimpse of the Future
We have already seen the rise of copywriting AI software. Copywriting refers to informational writing typically for marketing purposes, which seeks to promote a certain business, organisation or project through clear, digestible writing. A skill in itself, one which some people have mastered impressively. However, clearly a prime target for the new skillset of current Large Language Model AI systems.
But I am even more interested in a novel application of AI to the writing world. Just recently, I watched a short video on what seemed like an AI-generated CEO announce an ‘exciting new product’ which can generate longer-form, original writing - automatically.
https://twitter.com/jamesjyu/status/1658933765824192512
The CEO suggests that this tool is meant to be a ‘partner’ to writers, like a co-writer. Their tagline is ‘writing AI that puts the author in charge.’ I’m not joking.
I’m almost left speechless by this tagline. It sounds satirical.
To be clear, the issue with software like this is based on how Artificial Intelligence works. The ‘output’ of any AI system works on the basis of aiming toward results that are as close to the ‘line of best fit’ as possible. This is a line, we can imagine it drawn on a graph, which reflects the average mathematical values of training data that is deemed to be ‘successful’ or ‘optimal’.
But it is this definition of success that is the problem. The software advertised in the tweet above will only have one definition of this, and thus all generations will be aiming towards the same concept of ‘perfect.’ This ends one way: with us all reading, and thinking, the same.
Technology like this doesn’t put the author ‘in charge.’ It is the exact opposite. This technology represents the beginning of a campaign with one purpose - to remove the need for writers, and to make the experience of writing the same as the idealised experience of reading: maximum efficiency, zero process.
Anyone who is involved in the arts will tell you that art is about the creation and engagement with the art - it is about the process.
Instead, we have engineers, who have had little to no education or exposure to the arts, and who believe art is simply a product to be bought and sold, creating ‘solutions’ to problems that don’t exist, and actually only create problems.
When it comes to technology and actually supporting writers, I believe there is a much more interesting discussion to be had.
And at its core, is innovation in visual design.
A Different Future?
Writing has a much closer relationship with technology than we may think.
Writing itself is technology. The pen, the paper, the system of alphabets and characters themselves are all technological feats, that propelled our capacity to communicate further through space and time immeasurably.
We can also see much more modern examples on the power of technology to support writing. The creation of new mediums like film provided an entirely new framework for writing to be expressed and engaged with.
The fact that all technological innovations to writing are focused entirely on automating the process out of existence demonstrates how utterly devoid of involvement the arts actually is in technological innovation.
It often feels like there is a sense that we are finished with innovating the visual design of digital user interfaces. For non-developers, you may be unfamiliar with a software package called TailwindCSS. Tailwind is actually a really useful tool for developers that makes managing the visual design of coded websites much easier to create - however, if you venture onto their website and look at their visual components, you may notice something: it looks like every single website you ever visit.
And it looks nice. It works. It’s accessible.
But I just despair at the idea that there is nothing more we can do with how we display digital information on a computer. This field is still so unbelievably new in the grand scheme of things, we should be just at the beginning of exploration into this space.
And I’m not referring to multi-media, or video games - I’m referring to the written word.
Substack is a huge testament to the continued timelessness of written language. The rise of the platform amidst the waves of social media and digital culture which has created a milieu of new, visual means of communicating.
But, like the medium of film, I believe the digital space can still go much, much further when it comes to what we can do with writing.
But the innovations that achieve this won’t be in technology itself - this will not be algorithmic. This will come from visual design, from how we construct a written text, and how it is read.
If we want to create digital technology that actually supports writers, we need to be exploring how digital technology can give writers new ways to express their ideas, and new ways for readers to engage with those ideas. Writing, reading, art - is about the process.
Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article and beyond…