The Cultural Significance of Generative Art

Tech folks are often intelligent and have a good enough work ethic to make a decent living for themselves. Demand for software development has always been consistent and high, and will probably stay that way for a while to come. But on a personal level, techies often struggle with self-expression and developing people skills, which leads to problems down the line, especially when it comes to human contact and relationships.

The classic way to "fix" these sorts of issues is to do art - which trains people to get better at expressing themselves and develop emotional resilience to the world around us. It worked for me, and I've seen it work for countless others. For intelligent people, art is their best chance to connect to the rest of society in a meaningful way and feel like they're part of a bigger whole. But you do have to have to muster the time and discipline to find your own "voice" during the process.

People who don't take their creativity seriously often end up like Mr. Wonderful, who knows how to play the guitar - sort of - but never bothered developing his craft beyond the superficial basics. He has money, sure, but his performances have nothing to say because he doesn't actually stand for anything. Can you actually "hear" the lack of principles and convictions dripping from every note that he plays? The signs are all there (including the fact that he calls himself Mr. Wonderful - show not tell, eh) but if you can't see it, you'll probably be tricked by him and people like him, FTX-style. Culturally competent people, on the other hand, took one listen at his performance and already moved onto better waters.

Artists often have the opposite problem of tech workers in that they're emotionally intelligent but are bad with business/money, which puts them in very vulnerable spots: the depressing parts of the art industry often involves artists doing things they don't want to - knowingly - because they have no other (economic) choice. I do think that the ideal is striking a balance between the resources that tech can provide, guided by the cultural expertise of the creative classes out there. Only then will real progress will be made in the industry's cultural development. (What we have right now is the opposite, which most people agree has been ineffective - if not disastrous - at this point.)

For what it's worth, I've been trying to create the bridge between technologists and creatives even before I got into crypto (in 2014), but I do believe that the NFT art markets are where these two streams are going to collide, finally. But first, there needs to be a level of mutual respect between the two parties before this can even get started - in today's world where polarization and paranoia runs supreme, that can be a very tall ask.

In the last few years we've see an interesting trend happening on fxhash where the Tezos ecosystem has managed to create a genuine grass-roots "generative art" community, where code is no longer merely the delivery system, but is the art itself. It's an interesting space to be in because not only is it new and novel, but it also completely bypasses the legal and moral dilemmas that AI-based artworks normally face: Attribution? No problem, the generative art is obviously the work of the programmer who made it. Plagarization? Much harder to do when the work itself literally generates a different version every time. (Even AIs will struggle to "train" off of these algorithms because it currently doesn't have the capability to integrate dynamic content.) Monetization? Don't worry, NFT tech has them covered.

But more importantly, it gives programmers a real outlet for creative expression, which has nothing to do with building a startup or money-making app - which is probably a healthier alternative in most cases anyway. (Starting a whole company because of an existential crisis is overkill in most cases, really.) When programmers become artists themselves, they might also develop a sense of empathy for the challenges creatives face as well - most artists want to just create art, not become experts at playing "the game" - which is what is driving most of the content markets in digital spaces right now. That side of the story often went untold in the hallways of Web2, but that may finally change as developers are now finally directly in the shoes of what creatives have gone through, thoughout history.

I think that there's a shift that happened here that many people overlooked - the dev community may finally be on its way towards striking the balance it needs to maintain an healthy outlook and lifestyle regarding content delivery and content creation. And most of this will be done through the personal experiences of ordinary people - not the implementation of an "advanced" AI. It'll take a little while for this shift to happen, but the seeds have already been planted and we're already well on our way.

While the traditionalists stick to what they know - machine learning and AI, which is already hard-capped at the limitations of hardware processing power - sites like fxhash has leap-frogged the industry by several times at this point and are just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up, now. The hype right now is obviously going towards things like OpenAI and ChatGPT, but in the long run I do think that the Tezos ecosystem will win out in the end. It's one of the few places where real things are happening, after all.