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. ❦

For a period in high school my cellular data stopped working for some inexplicable reason. This meant that my phone only had an internet connection when I was at home or had access to some other Wi-Fi network. At first this was of course incredibly frustrating, but since I had no time to fix it I simply had to come up with ad hoc solutions. This forced me to be a lot more intentional when it came to my media consumption.

If you want to consume something when you are out of the house (say on your commute) this meant that you have to have downloaded it in advance. pdfs, html documents, music to listen to — it all has to be pre-planned. Most troublesome however was the inability to use gps. Instead one had to memorize or write down addresses and routes, download maps of different areas, and ask strangers for directions. This last practice has practically dissipated from everyday use, but it was of course quite common before. This was perhaps one of the most strongly positive aspects of not being able to find your way around — it gives you a stronger anchor to your surroundings rather than merely gliding past a world of extras. Being consciously aware of what media you are consuming, and for what purpose, also allows you to more critically evaluate that media, rather than just letting it flow through you.

I think doing something of this sort is a good idea for most people. It does not involve any major sacrifices in that you still have access to your tiktok slop feed, but only at home. You don’t sacrifice the security of being able to call for help (you still have your phone) but you also can’t respond to slack messages immediately as they come in. Instead you have these specific moments of prescence whenever you are out partying, walking the dog, or just commuting. The knowledge that you are capable of this stays with you even if you choose to enable mobile data (or in my case your connection suddenly starts working one day).

The biggest downside of not using social media is not getting regular updates in things that are going on. The largest issue I had with this is that I would spend enormous amounts of time trying to read everything there was to know about everything going on at any given moment. Not only was this incredibly draining to do, I also realized that it didn’t give me enough time or energy to think about big-picture trends. The solution for me was twofold:

1. Stop using news apps and read an actual newspaper.

Reading a newspaper — ideally a physical paper one — creates a hard cut-off for consuming news. You can’t read any more about a topic than what is in your hand! It also gives you a nice feeling of being “caught up” on everything that has been happening. Getting your flow of information from an actual reputable source is also better than merely having it filtered through some unknown twitter user. In my case I read The Economist, a general news paper with some extra focus on business and politics². I particularly enjoy the number of graphs and data-driven journalism since I love statistics. Since it is released weekly I also get to read it at a leisurely pace.

1. Get updates through rss feeds

Reading on an analog paper is lovely, but there are of course some things that can’t be delivered to physically or that come out on an irregular basis. These sort of things are best served through an rss feed in my experience. rss is supported in more places than you might think, and if not there are often ways to integrate it with an rss reader³. Having a fixed, reverse-chronological list of things to read (or otherwise go through, rss can be used for formats other than text) also gives you this feeling of being “done” that a newspaper gives you. There is no infinite feed that can get you stuck scrolling for 6 hours. You can still use get some digital media delivered to your phone, but won’t be glued to it and it will return to “just” a communications device after a short while.

“But what about discovery?” I head you say. For this I recommend Andreas Gohr’s indieblog.page (where you can also find this website). He has rss feeds to a number of random daily indieblog entries⁴. Not every random blog post will be interesting, but sometimes you’ll find someone doing interesting things — at which point you can subscribe to their rss feed. You can read feeds in lots of different ways — I use feeder on my smartphone and elfeed on my laptops and desktop.

1. Actually talk to people

Scrolling through your friends’ social media posts may seem like a good way to keep in touch with them, but in actuality you are not creating or maintaining a genuine connection with them — you are merely interacting with a simulacrum of them. Our brains are not made for distinguishing the differences between the two⁵ but we nevertheless suffer the consequences. The solution to this? Just reach out to people that you might otherwise not have. Either message them directly, email them, or give them a quick call.

There doesn’t have to be any stress about it — and in fact there should not be. Genuine human interaction is by definition messy, and that is okay. Social media often tries to show the existence some of perfect social being, the “pickup artist” that always has the perfect lines that always work, the influencer with the perfect jokes that everyone laughs at (while being at a carefully orchestrated photo-shoot) et cetera. The techniques they are employing is of course just simple cherry picking, but it is easy to fall for it in the moment. Embracing the messiness of human conversation — and the cost and benefits that come with it — is much more rewarding in the long run.

Social media is in practice not a social endeavour. Instead it is a form of entertainment, a means to observe things going on. This does not have to be inherently bad in any way, but it is clear to anyone in the modern day that social media platforms are not your friend, but instead want to keep you addicted while they show you more advertisements. It would be a mistake however to abandon all forms of media.

It has become clearer to me over the period after the covid-19 pandemic that contentedness — although not happiness — can only be attained through active engagement. Victor Breder puts it as “I love having read”. Happiness can be found easily in the individual moment through listening to someone else’s jokes, social media, sex, or drugs but long-term contentedness requires effort to be put in. It requires the mind to be fully occupied with whatever one is doing. It is straining, and it has to be because it should challenge you.

The difference then is not as simple as “stop doing X”. Watching instagram reels is not inherently negative, it is possible to be intellectually stimulated through them, but it is much harder to misuse a physical book or magazine. I also have no problem with movies in this regard because if I am sitting down to watch a film I am entirely focused on the subject matter at hand. A problem would theoretically emerge if I am merely watching it to “pass time” or get some cheap dopamine. The problem merely emerges with one’s interaction with media, not the media itself.

But this still does not mean that we should blame ourselves for failing to restrain ourselves when it comes to these new addictive technologies. They are genuinely problematic, and you need to identify where the line is for you and what media you can regularly interact with without misuse. For me I will confess that this line is quite low — I found most pure social media platforms too addictive — but it might be different for you (although I think that it is really quite low for most people).

The methods outlined here work for me, but they are by no means guaranteed to work for you. Experimenting with different forms of media consumption is not only one of the most impactful changes you can make to your life, but it is also quite fun! Optimising this is also one way to easily challenge yourself — is what you are doing right now really what will satisfy you? If yes; great! Maybe try and do more of it? If not; try and identify what caused you to get into that situation and create frameworks in your life that will effortlessly guide you away from those activities. ❦

I usually always carry a few business cards. This is quite uncommon in this day and age, with the need for remembering phone numbers having disappeared and with the ubiquity of social media for creating, sharing, and maintaining contact. But I reject the use of mainstream social media, partly for ideological reasons but also for practical ones¹. This inevitably requires making certain sacrifices when it comes to what events I can participate in, on how learning about what people I know are up to, and on how I can communicate with the people in my life around me. There are some drawbacks that you might expect — you can not dm someone on instagram if you do not have instagram yourself — but there are hidden drawbacks that may not be immediately obvious.

People want to communicate in the medium that they like the best, that is almost tautological. While I am not shy about my feelings about the wonders of email I still do not expect others to share them. This means I that email is usually not an option. But I still want to use open standards. Thankfully, likely because of their open nature, these standards are next to ubiquitous. Email is one of them, and sms (and phone calls) are another. sms is not a great technology by itself (primarily because it is not encrypted), but it works well enough for planning meetups where you can continue talking about your secrets in person. Signal works very well in combination with this, as you can give out your phone number to people and easily “upgrade” to an encrypted connection if your conversational partner has signal. But people usually do not prefer using sms, and so there will always be some friction in dialogue. This is the use case that business cards serve for me.

When meeting a new person, they will commonly ask for my {snapchat, instagram, twitter et cetera} and I will proceed to have a short conversation where they cycle through the services they use — followed by me saying I do not use them. Business cards instead allow me to quickly communicate my preferences without going through a fruitless conversation, and are usually well appreciated. Since business cards are so rare in regular interpersonal contexts they serve as a good conversation starter and are quite memorable as well. The cards contribute to a memorable interaction, and mean that people are more likely to keep in touch (since they get to keep the card).

My first batch of cards were made in 2023, and I made a total of 250 of them. I usually carry a few (2-5) on my person at all times and give them out to new people I meet. If I am going to some kind of networking event I might bring more, but usually not more than will comfortably fit in my phone or wallet. Having carried them for perhaps 2 and a half years now (and also having run out) I get an average consumption of:

(/ 250 (* 365 2.5))
;;; => 0.273972602739726

So I have on average given out one card every 3-4 days. This does not mean that I meet someone new that often; what commonly happens is that I meet lots of new people in a new context, and proportionally give out lots of cards at once. A common occurance is that I give one person a card, and then that person shows shows other people (“omg look at what Joar gave me”) and then more people ask for them. That means having to carry cards unnecessarily most days and running out almost immediately when I do need them. Nevertheless I have found a target of 5 cards is a good amount.

If you are thinking of getting cards of your own I highly recommend designing them yourself. It is a great opportunity for a truly free form of creative expression. No one is in charge of deciding how your cards will look or be shaped other than yourself, and its a way to express yourself in a new medium. While most printers will give you a generous bulk discount for ordering large volumes of cards I like that smaller orders allow you to experiment with new designs and doesn’t put as much pressure on getting it “right” the first time.

With the new second-generation cards I had a few things that I wanted to do with the design:

1. Move from a Swedish business card format to a more continental size². This is the size of credit cards and ids and so will comfortably fit into people’s wallets. This was a very annoying issue, and I am okay with sacrificing the ability to use certain business card holders.
2. Include my whole name. I think “Joar Alexander Pablo von Arndt” looks quite striking when written out in full, and so I would like to include it once again on the card, rather than just the shortened “Joar von Arndt”. It is quite long however, and so requires some creative design work.
3. Make use of the International Typographic Style or elements from 1960’s Swiss-style design. This is a deviation from my old design using the older-looking serif font of im Fell. This might have been caused by watching the wonderful documentary Helvetica (2007).
4. Switch to the new provider-independent email address of “joarxpablo@vonarndt.se”.
5. Use the correct domain for this website, rather than redirecting from my old neocities domain.

This is the first-generation card that is being replaced:

The line at the top is fun, and has on some occasions sparked conversations just by itself, but I did not feel a very intense need to keep it for the next batch of cards as it is quite difficult to work into another design and also may be a bit too narcissistic. The texture on the card is from the paper, 300gsm Conqueror laid.

Throughout the creative process, I saved eight different designs as ideas worth keeping around (so that I could continue working on them or use them as reference). There were of course an infinite number of variations of these, some of which were different enough so that they could very well be regarded as new designs of their own. These are the ones that survived, displayed in as chronological an order as possible.

Compared to the front, this was quite easy. This side should not try to “compete” with the front for attention, but should more just be a supportive space for additional information, chiefly a qr code to this website. For this I had three main approaches.

Designing your own business cards is not just a fun project, but it is also practical. It makes you more willing to give them out, that is why you made them the way they are after all. I highly recommend anyone to do the same, and please email me if you do — I’d love to see what you have made. I made all of my designs in inkscape a wonderful free-as-in-freedom vector design tool. I printed my cards at Pixel Palace, an independent print shop in Stockholm. ❦

The first post I’d like to critique is Decide what not to learn by Dylan Fitzgerald, a self-titled “voracious learner/metalearner”. He opens with an unsourced quote that goes “You can learn anything, but you can’t learn everything”. This is of course undeniable, but I struggle to see what relevance it actually has. In return I’d like to offer my own quote, but Mahatma Gandhi:

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Learning everything is impossible, but it is only in striving toward that unattainable goal that one can come close to it. Learning more is in-and-of-itself a worthy goal. He then goes on to talk about how “career-adjacent” learning can be valuable, but also “bottomless and neverending”. Once again, a trivially true statement phrased as a problem without any real motivation. His claim of this being especially true for technology workers is even more absurd:

there’s every day a new language, framework, process, or entire field of study promising to make the life of you and those around you somewhere from better to utterly transformed

The strange thing about this claim is that for anyone who has done any serious (or even amateur) programming will realise that the more languages¹ one learns, the easier it is to learn another one. Ideas don’t just come up out of nowhere, requiring us to build entirely new mental system to accommodate them. Instead they are based on other preëxisting things that we can use to “anchor” these new ideas to. The more one learns, the easier learning becomes. Getting a “Wikipedia-depth summary of each topic” is not a problem, as that knowledge allows one to create novel new pathways to new knowledge.

Fitzgerald proposes this as his solution to this “problem”:

If you, like myself, struggle with this, a tactic: write down all the things you want to learn, are in the middle of learning, haven’t quite had time for, know you really would benefit from…you get the idea. Pick the top one. The rest of the list–especially #2 and #3!–is the stuff you absolutely must avoid at all costs. That’s not your “next” list. That’s your “danger” list.

This is anathema to me. Fitzgerald’s ideas may be rooted in some sort of technical thinking — where the mind is some sort of robot; studying continuously before moving on to the next thing — but this is not how learning works (at least not in my experience). Learning is instead a fluid, moving process, where one moves from topic to topic as their interest waxes and wanes. We create the aforementioned pathways by learning new things that support each other. Knowledge is like a brick wall; much stronger if standing in a lattice of other bricks than if placed on top of each other one after another.

The second post is Neel Nanda’s Post 34: Learning how to learn. I agree much more with this post that the former one, but still think it falls into the same sort of thinking about learning as Fitzgerland’s. This is perhaps surprising, as the two are really diametrically opposed in their advice. Nanda’s post mostly focuses on how to learn through teaching, introspection, and spaced repetition, but it also does have a section on what he calls the 80/20 Rule, a personal spin on the Pareto principle². In it he says that you should find out how to get “80% of the value from 20% of the effort”, and then do that. He expands on this idea in a post titled The world is full of wasted motion.

In summary, one should try and reduce (in both the literal sense and in the sense of cooking) ideas and try and obtain a “big picture” view, to see what really matters. This reminds me a lot of advice that one should “go back to first principles”, axiomatic ideas that all other assumptions are built upon. Learning these is most important, and so learning the axiomatic basics and “key ideas” (the reduced knowledge) in a given field is what is most valuable. I agree with all of this in principle, but in practice I think it falls apart.

Stepping back and looking at the “big picture” is a common technique for trying to distance yourself from one’s obsession with whatever is in front of them, and to re-prioritise toward what is really important. For this purpose it is very useful; but as a general attitude for learning I find it almost as harmful as Fitzgerald’s suggestion.

The main obstacle to long-term learning, in my experience, is almost never time or “wasting” it on learning the wrong thing. Instead, it is ambition and interest. This may very well be a natural instinct guarding against what Nanda warns about — I usually have no interest in learning about something that is not useful³.

Just as it is problematic to try and avoid merely getting “Wikipedia-depth [knowledge] of each topic”, it is equally problematic to aim for it. Learning should be an intuitive process that we are prompted to naturally, and trying to “choose” what to learn strategically will almost always be a mistake. What (and when something) will be useful is almost impossible to predict in my experience. One will always encounter newfound situations where one’s knowledge of an obscure topic will become relevant.

That learning should be fluid and intuitive does not however mean the rejection of structured, deliberate practice. Techniques like spaced repetition can significantly speed up long-term memorization and do not need to be discarded. But what you choose to learn through such things does not have to be equally rigid. Perhaps this is what modern schooling gets wrong? It sees that intensive, rigid learning works, but wrongfully applies that to the curriculum. Just because the metaphors (fluid vs structured) are antipodes does not need to mean the same in practice.

There are of course certain situations that in microcosm appear worth focusing on. If you are a material sciences researcher, it might be more important to read up on crystal structures than to study the work of Shakespeare. But this is a consequence of our society’s technical view; a material science researcher should only be focusing on material science — everything else is unnecessary. But in reality humans are multifaceted individuals who not only may be interested in multiple things, but they also interact with other people interested completely different things. Having a broad base of knowledge, or an unnecessarily deep knowledge of something niche, allows us to see new perspectives, but they also deepen human connection and makes us able to empathize with others. ❦

In order to apply functional programming to our activities, we must first endeavour to understand what a function is in this new context. Strictly speaking a function transforms each element in the set X into exactly one element in set Y. This is where the second point listed earlier comes from, since each element in set X must always output the same element (so no randomness).

A function must therefore produce something; it is not a activity merely done for the sake of doing. Things like doomscrolling or verbal communication are not functions, since they do not produce a tangible output — even if they may impact you in some way.

In what activities do we produce things then? One obvious example is cooking. Ingredients are combined or separated and should hopefully come together to create the dish that you aimed for. This will not be entirely deterministic since ingredients may be of a differing quality, your tools may be different from time to time, and your own skills as a chef means that you will inevitably make mistakes. In reality — as opposed to the realm of mathematics and computer science — the world will never be truly deterministic. But this does not mean that we should surrender completely, instead we must aim toward cooking a dish as we intended each and every time.

Another example where it is perhaps not imminently obvious that the activity is functional is cleaning. It also highlights the aspect of functional programming that is perhaps most famous, and is also present in the act of cooking: side effects. Side effects are when a given function not only transforms the input X into output Y, but also modifies a third value. This impacts the global state and may mean that the function, or any other function, behaves differently when run in the future. When I vacuum my apartment I have to move furniture to reach all of the nooks and crannies where dust settles. This means that the function whose purpose is to rid the floor of dust causes the side effect of moving my furniture. These side effects have to be managed and dealt with quickly, and critically be seen as part of the task itself.

It is easy to dismiss many side effects as something that can be dealt with later, but this dramatically increases the mental effort involved. Not only are you more familiar with the various items whose position and status must be dealt with, but you are also already performing the task, and so there is no “startup” cost involved with dealing with it straight away. Staring at the dishes that need to be done after a meal is an experience I expect most people to be familiar with, but it can often times be avoided when they are seen as inexirably linked to the task itself.

Life may never reach the pure determinism prized by functional programming, but adopting its mindset allows us to manage the increasing complexity of everyday life. By thinking of our actions as functions we can try and deal with side-effects immidiately instead of waiting for them to pile up over time, minimizing unwanted distortions in our personal “global state”.