Published on CAN
Since starting this blog in 2023 I have managed to publish just seven posts. This is largely because I resist posting anything unless I feel it to be sufficiently polished and to be worthy of your time. Consequently, over this period I accumulated over sixty posts that were not quite complete enough to warrant publishing.
Earlier this year, I began to write a post that I thought was going to be little more than a brief critique of Vibe Coding. Yet this rapidly grew well beyond the bounds of my initial ambitions. Each time I thought I was done, a further section came to me, and fell into place within what eventually felt like a coherent whole. I even found I had already done the reading, research, and much of the writing in those sixty unpublished drafts, for the ground needing to be covered in each section.
Once I had all the pieces, as is often the case, the last 20% of polish proved to require 80% of the effort. Today it has finally been hammered into shape. The result is a book-length, somewhat Marxist critique of AI —or what, through the course of writing, I have come to feel is more accurately termed “Predictive Capital”.
Filip from CreativeApplications.Net (CAN) —a community site for artists that has so diligently served and nurtured the electronic arts over the past twenty years— kindly offered to publish it there. He has been incredibly generous in dedicating the time and effort required to accommodate a text of this length, and I am extremely grateful for his help and support.
I hope, dear readers, you will not mind too much that this one post does not land in your inboxes, or on Substack —at least for a while. Please click through to read it on CAN instead. I believe you will find the reading experience there to be superior to Substack, thanks in no small part to the excellent chapter navigation widget —revealed by clicking the dots on the left of the page. Especially useful for a piece of this length is the progress bookmark button at the top of this widget: click it and, next time you return, the page will scroll to your last location. You can also switch the site between dark and light mode to suit your reading environment by clicking the down arrow in the top right of the site’s header.
Anyway, I do hope you find some time to have a read and that you find some use value in whatever sense I have managed to make.
https://www.creativeapplications.net/theory/predictive-capital/