Art has always been one of the most central aspects of human lives. It is not unique to the human experience, but it has become more important to humans than perhaps no other species on the planet. The history of Art is one of a continuous crisis and need to reïnvent itself, and as such our current age is no different. The contemporary crisis is one partly caused by the emergence of Large Language Models (llms) and their ability to quickly generate enormous quantities of visual imagery, but it is also caused by a more long-running trend of digital life and of its consequences.

Many artists (especially those leaning towards more commercial work) decry to the use of llms to produce mere “slop” — cheap, mass produced imagery — and the threat to which this poses to the jobs of artists. But if one takes the arguments of these artists at face value, that the images and text ai not in fact Art, we are left with an interesting question; one almost as old as the medium itself: What is Art?

“Art”, as opposed to mere “art”, does not take any predefined shape or appearance. It is a pure essence that exists both between and within individuals. The lowercase form of art is a form of mechanical production — it consists of things that are merely meant to be decorative, to be pleasurable to the eye, and to fulfil some innate human desire to “fill” empty space with something interesting. Art may contain art, but it does so only in the sense that Art must be contained within some sort of vessel; it represents the numerous techniques that are used in order to bring Art into the world.

Lowercase art can be almost as, if not more, varied than the Art itself. Examples may include things like drawing, painting, casting, dancing, or singing, but a complete list of the possible forms of art would be as long as a list of all possible human activities.

From this follows a similar distinction of Artists and artists; meaning those who produce Art and art respectively. In many cases these may be one and the same, but in many others they differ demonstrably. There are many artists who are not Artists, and in the same way there are many Artists who are not artists. These differences are not always as clear as one may hope, and adds considerable difficulty in differentiating the things they produce.

Most easily noticeable is undeniably the artist; it is she who pronounces herself as the creator of art, if not also making the claim of creating Art. They are the practitioner of the art qua skill of creating art. To this class we include the professional artists such as painters, weavers, photographers and the digital artists. But the makers of Art may not be so easily seen; it includes those who indirectly labour as writers (such as lawyers, programmers, administrators, et cetera) as well as those who merely through their actions embody Art — no matter the profession.

It may not always be the aim of those who produce Art to do so, it could merely be a by-product of their intended activity. By contrast, Art is clearly the goal of the artist profession; even if they do not always succeed.

The production of Art is inherently a social activity, in that it happens as a part of the social relations between individuals. The very first forms of Art were undoubtedly song and dance that was performed socially. The visual arts were probably invented first through the collection and/or orientation of sea shells or rocks — whose meaning was created in the relations within social groupings.

The creation of art does not need to be social in the same regard. As mentioned before, Art must take some embodied form in the world in order to be experienced; it commonly does so through asocially created art. But the aspect in which it is Art only appears after the work is displayed in a social setting. A painting only seen by the artist is not itself a piece of Art¹ but only becomes so as its meaning is socially constructed. The artist must be so arrogant that they dare share their art with the world, framing it as better than what any other person has made before,² and in this bold statement creates Art.

As I explained in the thesis of my earlier text Pluribus & Alienation it is easy to mistake developments in information generation with ones in communication. Both lead to an increase in the perceived amount of information³ that is received by the individual. But interestingly enough the reverse mistake has been made in the field of art. The most revolutionary development for art in recent memory, and that has still not been properly tackled, is the expansion of the internet and, through it, digital art.

There have unknowingly been many debates as a consequence of this paradigm shift. Perhaps the largest was the original introduction, discussion and corresponding legal battles surrounding peer-to-peer file-sharing and torrenting and the resulting mass-copying and sharing of music and video works whose distribution hade previously been restricted mostly by technical limitations.

The end result of these battles did not solve the underlying problem but instead merely reintroduced the earlier status quo by the creation of legal tools and barriers, as well as the emergence of services like Spotify and Netflix that shifted the economic incentives of consumers. But the debate lay dormant for a time; creating the illusion of being solved.

The second phase of the debate came forward with the invention of the non-fungible token, an extension of the (originally Ethereum) blockchain so as to include the registration of unique (and thus non-fungible) units of account, as opposed to the fungible digital currencies that had existed before. While blockchains and nfts are inherently a boring technology, they have managed to accrue a loyal following due to the (potentially) large monetary rewards that can be gained by speculating on the values of cryptocurrencies. This then led to a fixation on a specific form of nft art (most notably embodied in the Bored Ape Yacht Club series of generative artworks by Yuga Labs) rather than nfts as a tool to manage the ownership of preëxisting artworks.

This division into what became “Owning an nft” instead of “owning an artwork” created the belief that what was owned was the digital (oftentimes) image itself, and thus a corresponding belief that someone else downloading a copy of this image was tantamount to theft, since the owner had not given their consent for a copy to be made of the art.

In fact, a “copy” is made practically every time a digital image is displayed or moved; potentially hundreds of times when moved over the internet. The blockchain itself is even built on a redundant and collectively synced copies of the entire blockchain and its contents.

This mistake is of course a relic of the analog world, where producing a copy of a work was a laborious and difficult process, and where such a work maintained a strictly separate identity from the physical shape of the original. In such a world theft is possible by removing the original owner’s ability to decide the fate of the artwork. Such a development is however impossible when it comes to digital art. Obtaining access to view (and thus by necessity also copy) something digital does not deprive the original owner of anything — only perhaps the monopoly right to extract rent on such access.

The introduction of image-generating diffusion models breaks this delicate repair of a fundamentally fractured position. Image generation allows not just the copy of preëxisting art but also the creation of brand new art. Such art is fundamentally inspired by the works of those that came before⁴ through the inclusion of such works in the training data for the models. This inclusion is highly controversial to many (primarily digital) artists, who see themselves as still having some sort of authorial control over what can be done to a work.

This stems from the idea that an owner of a physical work can share said work digitally while still maintaining control over the original. But for digital art no “original” exists, a digital copy is a perfect copy that is indistinguishable from the first. Sharing your digital art with someone else then not only allows them to take inspiration personally, but also to share the work further or to modify it as they see fit. When a social media company uses images or text posted on their platform they are only using what was, in practice, made publicly available to all. A core consequence of digital media is that the only guaranteed way to prevent it from spreading is not to share it in the first place.

The creation of generative art (as compared to the mere generation) is still a process that raises it to a certain level of Art because the creation is still a social process. The reasons for this are twofold:

1. ai models do not create some internal definition for what constitutes Art or not or of what the world looks like, just as most humans do not. Instead models create images based on the images that is is trained on, and therefore mirrors our collective societal idea of how art is supposed to appear.
2. The Artist introduces the element of Art to the work through their selection and deliberate choosing to present a work. An image silently generated and deleted is not Art in the same way that a napkin sketch by a famous artist, discarded and forgotten, does not constitute Art.

These two reasons follow naturally from the idea that Art is a socially constructed and collective idea that is not in the control of the author themselves. Even examples similar to the above only become Art when a second actor discovers the discarded work and chooses to elevate it and present it as Art.

This is not to say that ai art is always Art or that it is very good Art when it attempts to be so. Instead ai is a mere tool that does not replace Artists but empowers them in a new way. The two major historical developments that most clearly showcases this are the introduction of photography into the art world as well as the modernism-defining work Fountain by Marcel Duchamp.

Beginning with the former, it is clear that photography today is an established artform that that constitutes one of the widely recognized ways to create Art. But this was not always so. Originally photography was seen as a cheap and industrialized way to capture the world around us, missing the critical element of interpretation that was done by the painter. That the camera impacted the livelihoods of artists — most notably painters — must be undeniable,⁵ but it also led to a widespread increase in the reproduction of visual imagery. Today photography is used for many technical tasks that could never have been done by traditional artists; think of the snapshot of a restaurant menu to a friend running late so that they can order in advance.

Photography also made many pieces of art uninteresting, and thus not worthy of being considered Art. The traditional painting of highly realistic-looking fruit bowls or landscapes could now be simply automated, and the fruit bowl instead became a mere showcase of technical skill.⁶ To be considered Art the work must then inform some new perspective.

The latter example is perhaps even more famous. Fountain consists of a mass-produced porcelain urinal. Its creation was offensive in two ways, partly owning to the choice of a urinal specifically (as an intimate object that is meant to be covered in piss) as well as being offensive merely in its presentation.

This second element was shared with all of Duchamp’s Readymades — everyday objects merely positioned and presented to be Art, and therefore be imbued with such a status. Doing this requires no (or at least very little) technical skill, and is therefore accessible to everyone. All Art since Duchamp has had to grapple with this phenomena, that even if a specific artwork required technique to achieve it is nonetheless possible to create great Art without it.

The introduction of generative ai does not change this state of affairs. Some people argue that ai is putting artists out of jobs today, and they are right in doing so, but this misses the fact that the Artist — who aims to create Art and not merely art — faces the same challenge as they have always done. Paradoxically the two groups that benefit from ai are those who merely care about art qua visual communication and those who strive to create Art, and choose to use ai as (one) manner of pursuing that goal. It is the group in-between, who does not care particularly strongly about neither art nor Art but merely produces art as a manner of making a living, who will suffer and largely disappear — their labour shifting to the orchestration of ai models just as most photographers today are not Artists but instead merely “documenters”. ❦

Choosing to trust is a decision that is much ridiculed today. It is in many cases easy to see with the benefit of hindsight that it was foolish to trust someone, but doing so in advance is of course much harder. In general we are moving in the direction of trusting less and less; exposure to betrayal is simply too high a price to pay. The consequences of this ripply out across society with tremendous impact.

There are many ways to trust, but often what we trust is a person. In many cases that person is hidden from us, represented through the state or a firm.¹ Perhaps in an even greater number of cases (although the internet is making this less and less the case) we are actually trusting people directly when we believe we are trusting those abstract entities — in such simple things as the grocery store employee not being sick when handling our food or the clerk in delivering our paperwork.

I have recently found myself repeatedly enmeshed in discussions about identity and trust, often (but not exclusively) in technical forms. In this case obtaining trust is the method of making sure that the individual is who they say they are. This can be done in numerous ways like passwords,² access to physical items (like keys, sim cards, or an airgapped machine), and through a combination of the above (access to a cryptographic private key). But trust really operates on a deeper level. The point of authentication is to make sure the person carrying out an action is the one you trust, but it does not build that trust to begin with.

Technological development has led to a general decline in trust. Think of the telephone; it has generally meant a detachment from the immediate present, making us more inclined to “check up” on the activities of others. The portable (or cell) phone exacerbated this feeling and made it possible to reach another person practically at all times. It is a feeling that people of my generation now has had as our entire lived experience.

Today’s children do not have the same freedoms that previous generations did. Growing up I was still free to roam around the neighbourhood and visiting friends without anybody knowing our exact coördinates or activities. I got my first phone originally because my parents wanted some way for me to call them for help when i first started walking to and from school alone. This is quite a reasonable use of it, and it does not impose on my freedom if I am the only one initiating a communication.³

But the existence of a phone has more consequences, a child with a smartphone becomes digitized and able to operated on through the connective web. Them being able to call you inevitably means you being able to call them, and that makes you aware of this constant ability to “check up” on what they are doing. Apple’s Find my iphone became simply Find once it became clear that people were using it (or similar services) to track loved ones — to constantly “check up” on how they are doing instead of simply trusting their own agency.

Many people’s anxiety and loneliness stems from a fundamental lack of trust — in others, in themselves, and in other’s trust in them. Not being able to securely expect that the people surrounding you will be there when you most need it means a world where one has to manage entirety alone; a bellum omnium contra omnes. Managing to survive (and thrive!) in such an environment is naturally a challenge, and one that we humans are not made to deal with as tribal creatures.

It is then not strange that we, as non-trusting individuals, choose to reinforce this tradition by building structures that remove the need for trust. I have chosen to reject this. This is surprisingly difficult, it is not natural to trust someone who does not trust you in return. It leaves you vulnerable to betrayal, and thus is really only something that is possible to do if you are secure in your position and confident in yourself. But choosing to unilaterally trust is a requirement for building a generally trusting society.

In numerous developed countries, and at least in the Nordic ones, self-checkout machines are becoming increasingly common. I have no doubt that the reason for this is rooted in the ever-increasing extension of the division of labour (particularly through the employment of capital), but it has had tremendous ramifications for trust. It is now possible to maintain one’s existence in one of humanity’s most dense concentration — namely the city — without coming into contact with another person. You can work remotely, or as a lone delivery driver picking up enigmatic packages and delivering them to doorsteps, and then get all your basic needs delivered or machine-scanned yourself. But equally it has made the employees that are left behind increasingly paranoid and strained.

It is my understanding that there has occurred significant increase in theft following the implementation of these machines. This has led to workers confronting people who look young (to maintain haphazard age restrictions on self-service) or for people who bring bags into the store (who do so in order to carry home the food or items they buy). The age restrictions are particularly troublesome; alcohol, tobacco, and cinemas have age restrictions in order to help protect children for their own sake, but denying them the simple freedom of being able to skip a long line is a small erosion of democracy.

Still, age restrictions on self-service machines does not spell the end of liberal democracy. It is however a sign of how our current state no longer trusts its own citizens. If we can not trust people to buy all the things they take off the shelf in the grocery store how can we trust them to pick the right future of our nation and state in elections?

Similarly the expansion of closed-circuit television (cctv) and other forms of mass video surveillance is also a form of a negative spiral, where a decreased level of trust leads to more cameras, that in turn leads to a further erosion. Fear over crime can only be solved in the long term by a reduction in fear (for crime can never be entirely eliminated) but this can not be attained if the level of trust in society remains low.

There are few democratic nations in the world today that have a civil and collected political environment — strict polarisation has become the norm. Political extremism and division is not the fault of any one political system. It can not be fixed merely in The United States, France, Austria, or Japan. It is a flaw with the overarching system that all of these nations share.

Party membership has seen a long decline across the world, and yet people are in many ways more intensely politically engaged⁴ than ever before. I find it hard not to interpret this as anything other than an dissatisfaction with the system of participation. It is not a mere mechanical system, but also one that is social in nature — it is a question of feelings and of relations between individuals and groups.

Solving this is thus not a technical question; it can fundamentally not be solved through the use of statistics or models. Instead we must tackle it head on, in the grit of intellectual hand-to-hand combat. It must be dealt with personally and intimately. Jesus said “Love your neighbour as yourself”,⁵ and it is thus. Love should be given out unilaterally and unconditionally, with nothing expected in return. The chief requirement for this is trust, and as long as you put your trust in others you will be continuously surprised by how much your investment will pay off.

This lays the basis for a radical new democracy. Radical in the etymological sense of the word — stemming from Latin’s radicalis meaning “root”. Democracy has always been personal, just as all politics is personal in that it is acted on through people. Our abstractions and “political systems” always have their foundation in that personal level, of a politics that is done between four eyes. A truly democratic political system always derives its power from the people, and can always be changed by the people if it does not serve their purpose.

Sweden is quite a high-trust society — it is a fact commonly quoted by politicians and academics alike. But even then this trust is not something that we can take for granted. It must be nurtured and safeguarded. Were we to give, for example, the police (an institution in which there is quite high social trust) unwarranted powers it would inevitably lead to more serious mistakes; “power corrupts”. By then that trust in that institution will be gone, and the societal benefits that come with it as well. For similar reasons it is problematic when politicians like Ebba Busch are disingenuous in debates — not because of the contents of their statements but because it erodes trust in the democratic process and creates feelings like “well, politicians always lie” when it does not have to be that way.

Trusting others does not need to be foolish — you do not need to be a doormat — but the general baseline in our society can and should be raised. In general it means giving people the benefit of the doubt, of not asking needlessly inquisitive questions and giving people the space and agency they need to accomplish tasks and/or maintain themselves.

I have (unfortunately for environmental reasons) been spending a lot of time at airports recently. The airport functions as a good example of a trusting public space. People are free to browse and pick food in little open stores without being constantly watched through cameras or corner mirrors, and in a world otherwise filled with hostile architecture are free to sleep on the ample seating available. As long as you have been “vetted” to enter the sacred space of the airport you are automatically assumed to be good, to follow the rules, and to be trustworthy. This is even more true for the Lounge, whose reputation and storytelling is based on only the most respectable having access to this inner chamber.

This does not have to remain a exclusive privilege of those fortunate enough to frequently visit the oases of trust on the outskirts of major cities. It can be a fundamental value to build our societies through. And it starts with you. ❦

There are a multitude of reasons why I wanted to study Chinese. Being the language of the “workshop of the world” naturally offers many business opportunities, but I am more interested in the burgeoning fields of Integrated circuit (ic), r&d, and software development. Planet Emacslife allows me to keep tabs on the goings-on in the Emacssphere, but I also want to be able to read Emacs China; so I figured it might be a good idea to be able to read Chinese.

Right now — after 1-2 months of quite intensive study — I am roughly at an hsk 2-3 level in writing and reading, however my listening and speaking skills are far worse. I can read slightly over 70% of average Chinese text.

I’ve been interested in learning Chinese for a few years now, but the greatest mental barrier was understanding how to go about actually learning. If I were to try and learn Russian I would naturally begin with quickly learning to read Cyrillic, but how should you learn Chinese? Should one try and master speaking Chinese and reading romanisations first, before memorising thousands of characters, or the other way around?

Really, neither is possible without the others. In general I have focused more on the written language than the spoken one. This is because Chinese is intimately connected with the written form, more so than the other Germanic languages I know¹. Not only do many words sound very similar (only differentiated by tone) but there is a very large number of homonyms — words that sound exactly the same. When only romanised text is available, especially when written without tonal markers, it is often impossible to tell what is written.

This means that knowing written characters, and their corresponding pronunciation, is critical to understanding spoken Chinese. Many times there is a lot of split-second guesswork involved, with some characters having many possible meanings beyond just having to remember what character is being said.

I decided to jump in the deep end immediately by travelling to China with practically no knowledge beforehand. In hindsight this was perhaps not the best idea, I spend much of the time learning the very basics, but it was certainly fun. Formally I was enrolled in a “Chinese for beginners” online course at Uppsala University but I did most of my studies outside of the confines of the course. It was however very useful as a way to motivate myself to actually study when abroad.

Most of my study was done through Hanly, a Chinese-learning app that pedagogically introduces new characters by showing how they are composed of other ones. To give an example: Early on in my studies I looked up how to write numbers in Chinese, and was pleasantly surprised at the numbers 1-3 (一, 二, 三) but equally afraid of the character for 0 (零) with its 13 strokes. But when I eventually learned it through Hanly it was in fact quite an easy character to learn, being composed of the character for rain (雨) and for order (令).

Hanly uses flashcards, an established technique for memorisation, paired with preprepared mnemonics and ai-generated artwork. These range from quite sensible (three people 人 are a crowd 众) to absurd but surprisingly easy to learn (A racecar driver using their tongue 舌 to check if a road is suitable 适). Hanly also teaches words — combinations of characters — that both increase understanding and help ground characters in actual use. These and the characters themselves are taught in the same way, each with their own flashcard.

I try and learn 20-30 new cards (either characters or words) each day, and aim to do a minimum of 100 repetitions of old cards daily. While in the prc I would often do 200+ repetitions and sometimes even 300, especially on long subway rides. I now know roughly 600 characters and 300 words by heart, and can therefore read slightly over 75% of “average text” according to Hanly. Had I learned just the 600 most common characters I would have understood 80% of average text, but learning those 600 characters would have been a lot more difficult.

After learning new words I tried to quickly get them into my usable vocabulary by employing them in daily life. This of course varied quite a lot depending on what the words was — 戈 is quite difficult to use in everyday life for example — but I think it helped anchor a lot of words in my mind. Having a mental “mission” for each day makes practical application a lot easier, even when the words are abstract.

I am still struggling quite a bit with tones, both in speaking and listening, but that will hopefully improve with practise.

Chinese is quite fascinating as a language. It feels both familiar and alien, with a comparatively simple grammar and Subject-verb-object word order but also reliance on guesswork and rote memorisation.

My mental model of the language looks something like this:

Characters are initially grouped by pronunciation² while not having anything to do with each other, and then have their meaning narrowed down by combining with other words. To emphasise the character as its own word the sound is often repeated³, but it can also be combined with another word with a similar meaning to create a new synthesis. This sometimes works the same way as compound words do in German, Swedish, or Norwegian where the two words are completely different but combines into one word (such as 学院, college, literally “learning institution”) but also with words carrying very similar meanings (like with 打开, literally “hit on”, used similarly as “slå på” in Swedish). If a character does not have any overlap with adjacent characters in a sentence, it is its own word.

This seems like the long-term challenge with Chinese to me. Navigating this three-dimensional space of guessing the meanings of words based on their pronunciation, tone, and context rather than the quite simple one-dimensional space in, for example, English (what does that word mean?).

In general I sense a surprising similarity to toki pona in Chinese. This is something of a horseshoe I guess; the easiest and hardest⁴ languages to learn being similar. Both have very abstract building blocks that represent something conceptually rather than being fixed — with Chinese just having a few more.

Hopefully I will be able to continue improving, although likely not at the same rate as I was before. I am starting to feel that I should immerse myself more in Chinese media and start reading texts in Chinese, but the texts that I would really like to read are far too advanced.

I would of course like to improve my speaking and listening skills, but I think for the near-term I will continue focusing on reading until I get to a level where I can get some practical use out of it. ❦

In my musings on deepseek I wrote on the general economic environment in the prc, and how it differs from the central-planning-oriented one that has come to dominate the view in the west, even if subconsciously. Here I wish to offer a less “big picture” perspective, one that is more focused on the boots-on-the-ground perspective of travelling around China. It will not be representative of anything except my own perspective, and they will by definition misrepresent the truth as it is merely a sample size of one.

I travelled in to China in early June 2025 with my girlfriend, and as of writing this¹ will soon be leaving in early July, having visited for roughly one month. While here I have been trying to rapidly learn Standard Chinese, although the extent to which I have been successful is dubious. I have however learnt a lot, significantly more than I could have predicted before coming here. The majority of my time was spent in the capital of Beijing (北京, literally “Northern Capital”), but I also took an excursion to Nanjing (南京, literally “Southern Capital”), and to the beautiful mountains of Huangshan via Huangshan City (formerly Tunxi) and the tiny tourist-dependent town of Tangkuo. I have then been in cities with a population of 22 million, 9 million, 1.5 million, and less than 15000 people respectively.

In the build-up to travelling, we asked numerous friends and friends-of-friends who had travelled to the prc if they had any concrete tips. While of course helpful and welcomed, most where superficial and therefore largely fruitless². Instead these are some of the major obstacles I encountered that were not trivial.

I have found the Chinese people very welcoming and friendly. There is a noticeable absence in foreigners, not just in my personal experience, but also in seeing the reactions of the Chinese people to my presence. It is not uncommon to receive stares when walking around in public from people of all walks of life, but especially from children and the elderly. This is more prominent outside of Beijing. Many would very kindly ask to take pictures, leading more people quickly working up the courage to ask. This, combined with general compliments regarding one’s appearance, boosted my ego quite a bit and created an aura of celebrity.

There is also what seems to be a complete inability to understand the existence of other languages among many people, with people continuing to speak in fast and difficult Chinese despite the obvious limitations in both my communicative abilities and understanding.

This is quite puzzling, as I understand English is still taught in schools and the English signage, to the extent that it exists, is a reminder of the broad variety of language across the world. But perhaps schools teach quite limited English (similarly to the level of German, French, or Spanish often taught in Swedish schools), compounded with a lack of opportunities to practice often.

Many seemed to have a positive view of Sweden, perhaps as a consequence of the beautiful name in Chinese — ruidian (瑞典), auspicious canon. One inebriated Chinese man thought that the Swedes were great friends of the Chinese people. He was however very sure that we were eastern Europeans, something even an eastern European would deny.

I generally enjoyed my trip tremendously, although the cost of accommodation, travel, and administration (such as a visa) made the initial cost quite high. In comparison it was very cheap to travel around in the country, as well as to eat out — and the food was very good. I would like to return again some day, but my economic situation will likely mean I’ll have to wait.

I wish the people of mainland China all the best, and was continuously reminded by the wise words of the French author Victor Hugo that he wrote when prompted upon his thoughts of the burning of the Yuanmingyuan (圆明园) in 1860⁵:

The crimes of those who lead are not the fault of those who are led; Governments are sometimes bandits, peoples never.

❦

Paradox Interactive (2022) Victoria 3. https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/victoria-3/about

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Beller, Steven. (2006) A Concise History of Austria. New York. Cambridge University Press.

Heikaus, R. (1997) Die ersten Monate der provisorischen Zentralgewalt für Deutschland (Juli bis Dezember 1848). Frankfurt am Main.

Nipperdey, T. (1996) Germany from Napoleon to Bismark, 1800-1866. Princeton. Princeton University Press.

Treitschke, H.v. (1914) Treitschke, his life and works. Norwich. The Empire Press.

Marx, K. (1845) The German Ideology. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/