amir motlagh

Speedrunning the End of Culture

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I haven’t written an essay in a long time, so let’s not call this that. “Software will eat the world”—the famous line from the perennial tech shiller VC Marc Andreessen, one of the key architects of our most recent, suddenly defunct and utterly chaotic “vibe shift,” but an even more essential architect of a profound and lasting macro vibe shift: the digital cognitive abundance era.

Software ate, and ate well, as we shift from ape-eat-ape survival to a kind of post-scarcity culture where abundance is just assumed, baked into every phone. You want something from the matrix? Just ask. Just type. Just click. It’ll appear, as an amalgamation, from a simulacrum. Yet it passes the smell test for millions and appears as real as necessary, partly because our lives are now locked into a rolling feed. We have been trained on good enough.

With this ease, we’re promised the entering of a golden age of creativity. No more gatekeepers, no more struggling with the nuisance of craft. Just infinite music, essays, art, stories, code—all from your fingertips, or your voice, and soon, just passing thought. It's everything you ever dreamed of, vibed into existence. Every cycle oscillating faster as the machine feeds into itself as output, churning mid-level human endeavor 100x’d.

And like everything else online, this rather radical and sudden shift has calcified into two sides of the terminally online megaphone class. A PvP between the accelerationists and the Doomer archetype—one championing the augmented existence and the other, championing the human with its internal limitations—each writing take after take, while the rest of the world, the NPCs (people that actually touch grass), go about their days knowing something is different, but not able to point a finger at this difference just yet.

However, this is not why I’m writing this. Cat’s out of the bag, it’s not going back in. And for me, a couple things have happened of late that caused me to think through this thing and wrestle insight from emotion. First, the Ghibli AI takeover of the web—a grand theft out in the open—is where it hurt. Seeing forty years of painstaking craft taken so for granted, with so much cynicism and entitlement surrounding it, was where I witnessed firsthand the erosion of the social trust layer between art, artist, and the audience. Turning what we deemed sacred into slop—that thing that AI does so well. The soulless output that looks good at first glance but fades into nothingness as quickly as it’s churned out, simply as a matter of its abundance and its uncanny valley-ness—a nothingness behind the eyes, a facsimile of feeling.

The other moment for me has been more gradual—witnessing artist friends create slop to speed up workflows but confide in a feeling of hopelessness. Receiving wordy slop letters from family. Seeing friends use perfect English slop for captions when they still harbor a heavy accent in the physical world. But it’s clear: except for my artist friends, who can’t quite articulate it but feel a sense of loss, most don’t mind. In fact, most prefer this convenience for any tradeoff yet unseen.

But let’s forget the larger debate for a second. Let’s focus instead on a subgenre of this culture war—the way people talk about AI image generation, and with that, the ungrounded or sloppy arguments used to justify its legitimacy as art. I’ve seen three main ones, and I think each of them misses the mark in a big way.

First is the digital photography analogy—the idea that AI image generation is no different than going from film to digital, or from brushes to Photoshop. But this analogy doesn’t track. Digital photography is still photography. While film became file, the medium stayed intact—point and shoot, light, lens, subject. AI image generation doesn’t evolve a medium; it detaches from it entirely. It’s language into a rendition of a photo, a digital simulacrum dithered into existence. You’re not making an image; you’re prompting one into existence. It’s not painting, drawing, or photography—it’s medium-agnostic, trans-media.

Second is the idea that AI art is “something else”—a new category. Adjacent. Not in competition. While this is true in a micro sense (self-labeled AI artists exist and so does a history of programmed art), it’s not in a broader one. This is why every AI tech CEO pitches it as a better, faster, cheaper way of doing the old thing. While the old thing could be a spreadsheet, the statement is a blanket. AI is not marketed as a parallel tool but one that’s a direct replacement. Pretending otherwise is either naïve or dishonest.

Third is the democratization claim—that this technology makes art accessible to the masses for the first time. But art has always been accessible. The tools are everywhere—cameras, tablets, music software, free drawing apps. If you have something to say, you could say it. The reality of this statement isn’t access for the first time—it’s results. Output without input. The dream isn’t to make art—it’s to skip the part where you have to become someone capable of making it.

So this is the shift—and the break. Art, in either an academic lens or a layman’s sense, is a proposition, a form of communication that centers around—and has enhanced—human culture. Clicking a button and getting a Ghibli-style rendering of your dog may be fun, but it’s as distant from art as a 1099 form. As is the anime cat girl or the millionth cornball dystopian futurescape ripped straight from Blade Runner and Akira. It is, as predicted by philosopher Charles Baudrillard some forty years ago, a Xerox of a Xerox, repeated ad infinitum.

But barring some real culture shifts—maybe the forming of a post-luddite culture, where the youth treat these new tools as antithetical to human life, or rebel as an anti-boomer (not age, worldview) agenda takes over, like a new punk movement or the hippie, antiwar movements of the 20th century. In any case, these will be short-lived in the grander cycles as this technology dominates every inch of human life.

Two things stick out to me at this seismic moment. One is that we have not had time to mourn this feeling of loss of human craft. Our pursuits, our vision, our dedication and detail—those are losing essence day by day. Not everyone feels this yet, but my feeling is they will shortly. This transition, the sense that we are speedrunning the end of culture—a heaviness not fully realized. So let’s mourn. Give humanity this space. We will all need it.

The other thing that magnifies the first is our sense of entitlement to subvert our very own culture. Let’s ease this—for all our sakes. Let’s not pretend that we are artists for prompting a soulless image, or that we are sudden developers because we can craft a website or simple game in mere seconds, when we can’t read a simple Python script.

We are staring out over the cliff, nearing the end of culture, where everything is a perpetual remix of something that was a remix of an amalgamation, iterated out of our own human creativity. Let’s pause to mourn. And after we have given respect, let’s create again, with a newfound respect—from the cave to the now.

Let not the computer take our purpose, for if it does, we are dead.

Young Ali: those were the days title design process

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seen below are some of the iterating on young ali: those were the days title designs. both the english and farsi versions where done first by hand by artist martin nilchian.

he went back to his graf roots to blend between our aesthetic & story considerations. you can see some designs really signal an authentic early 90’s socal graffiti style. in the end, we chose a design that had just enough flavor of that style, without it dominating, and showing transformation of time in the details.

the persian version had additional challenges that had us consulting some experts in the language to seek a proper translation.

young ali poetic musings over at "transactions with beauty"

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canadian author & photographer shawna lemay muses about “young ali” over at Transactions with Beauty

“Is the film trying to describe this singular time to others who had been lost in the fog or to those who were not lost in the fog? Both, I think. And isn’t that a feat? Young Ali is poetic and real, the eponymous character living and trembling as we all did, under that same old, silly old storybook moon. ”
— shawna lemay


three eleven or (a meditation on stillness inside chaos) - freely available

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this work is now fully public without a paywall, originally released on 06/22/20.

*note: headphones advised*

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the United States went into shutdown to keep citizens sheltered from the threat of a mysterious global pandemic sweeping the world. In this meditative days-in-the-life-of work, a small family experiences the fog of time from a mandatory stay at home order, as a strange, comforting togetherness forms in a very uncertain time.

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directors statement:

"three eleven" is a meditation. It is a reflection of boredom, of togetherness, of uncertainty, and most of all, stillness. It intends to direct the viewer into the granularity of life in its most basic, mundane practicalities, and thus, direct focus into the beauty of routine, and of the nowness, all while under the umbrella of impending & uncertain chaos, a lingering scent of anxiety as the real outside world experiences shocks unlike any other in modern times.

It is intended as an experience, hypnosis, and a reflection. The stillness is the message. While stripping the “narrative” of the filmic medium into its most minimal building block, the frame clicks out of “narrative” time, and into clock time. It’s a universal acknowledgment of this very “moment in time”, and we intend for this to be a visual/audio documentation at its most basic level while conveying the beauty of togetherness and separation at its most minimal.

This work is indebted to Ozu & Kiarostami, who oddly enough (the latter), and without my prior knowledge shares his birthday with our release date.

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credits: Shot & Directed by Amir Motlagh
Produced by ANIMALS & Charles Borg
Story by Charles Borg & Amir Motlagh
Music by Amir Motlagh (three eleven zazen) - BMI © ANIMALS 2020

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release date: 06/22/20 trt: 33 min original aspect: 1:85:1

Young Ali nominated for two awards at the Arthouse Film Festival...

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young ali: those were the days has been nominated for the Cassavetes award and the Godard award at the Arthouse Film Festival.

you can still watch the film virtually till Jan 20th.

tickets avail here: Arthouse Film Festival

Sales on Films on Vimeo on Demand until August 10th....

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in the spirit of THREE WORLDS theatrical LA run at Laemmle Friday, August 4th-10th, there is a heavy discount on Vimeo on Demand for some of my work that is available on that service for people that are distant & or curious, or just chill like that.

not only THREE WORLDS but the 2018 sister film MAN and others….

this link will take you to the page….

w/ love & presence

THREE WORLDS - Film Poster

MAN - Film Poster