With the comprehensive application of Artificial Intelligence into the creation and post production of images, it seems questionable if the resulting visualisations can still be considered ‘photographs’ in a classical sense – drawing with light. Automation has been part of the popular strain of photography since its inception, but even the amateurs with only basic knowledge of the craft could understand themselves as author of their images. We state a legitimation crisis for the current usage of the term. This paper is an invitation to consider Synthography as a term for a new genre for image production based on AI, observing the current occurrence and implementation in consumer cameras and post-production.

A good industrial designer understands the capabilities and limitations of the human body in manipulating physical objects, and of the human mind in comprehending mechanical models. A camera designer, for example, shapes her product to fit the human hand. She places buttons such that they can be manipulated with index fingers while the camera rests on the thumbs, and weights the buttons so they can be easily pressed in this position, but won’t trigger on accident. Just as importantly, she designs an understandable mapping from physical features to functions—pressing a button snaps a picture, pulling a lever advances the film, opening a door reveals the film, opening another door reveals the battery.

When the software designer defines the interactive aspects of her program, when she places these pseudo-mechanical affordances and describes their behavior, she is doing a virtual form of industrial design. Whether she realizes it or not. #The software designer can thus approach her art as a fusion of graphic design and industrial design. Now, let’s consider how a user approaches software, and more importantly, why.

Mainframes were followed by PCs, and then the web, and then smartphones. Each of these new models started out looking limited and insignificant, but each of them unlocked a new market that was so much bigger that it pulled in all of the investment, innovation and company creation and so grew to overtake the old one. Meanwhile, the old models didn’t go away, and neither, mostly, did the companies that had been created by them. Mainframes are still a big business and so is IBM; PCs are still a big business and so is Microsoft. But they don’t set the agenda anymore - no-one is afraid of them.

We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them.

There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.

Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm’s structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny.

This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive.

These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible.

Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.

there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares.

LinkedIn tried to take the flat, dumb address book and turn it into both structured flow and a network of sorts. But by doing that for everyone, it has the same problem as a spreadsheet, file share or email - it’s a flat, lowest-common-denominator canvas that doesn’t capture the flows that many particular professions or tasks need.

There’s clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning.

every application category is getting rebuilt as a SaaS web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there’s almost no native PC application that can’t be rebuilt on the web. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time

an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring ‘roughnecks’ in a mobile app would have sounded absurd - now it sounds absurd if you’re not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.

The internet is a firehose. I don’t, myself, have 351 thousand unread emails, but when anyone can publish and connecting and sharing is free and frictionless, then there is always far more than we can possibly read. So how do we engage with that?

So your feed becomes a sample - an informed guess of the posts you might like most. This has always been a paradox of Facebook product - half the engineers work on adding stuff to your feed and the other half on taking stuff out. Snap proposed a different model - that if everything disappears after 24 hours then there’s less pressure to be great but also less pressure to read everything. You can let go. Tiktok takes this a step further - the feed is infinite, and there’s no pressure to get to the end, but also no signal to stop swiping. You replace pressure with addiction.

Another approach is to try to move the messages. Slack took emails from robots (support tickets, Salesforce updates) and moved them into channels, but now you have 50 channels full of unread messages instead of one inbox full of unread messages.

Screenshots are the PDFs of the smartphone. You pull something into physical space, sever all its links and metadata, and own it yourself.

Email newsletters look a little like this as well. I think a big part of the reason that people seem readier to pay for a blog post by email than a blog post on a web page is that somehow an email feels like a tangible, almost physical object - it might be part of that vast compost heap of unread emails, but at least it’s something that you have, and can come back to. This is also part of the resurgence of vinyl, and even audio cassettes.

The film-camera industry peaked at 80bn consumer photos a year, but today that number is well into the trillions, as I wrote here. That’s probably why people keep making camera apps with built-in constraints, but it also prompts a comparison with this summer’s NFT frenzy. Can digital objects have value, and can a signature add scarcity to a JPEG - can it make it individual?

there are now close to 5bn people with a smartphone, and all of us are online and saying and doing things, and you will never be able to read everything ever again. There’s an old line that Erasmus, in the 15th century, was the last person to have read everything - every book that there was - which might not have been literally possible but which was at least conceivable. Yahoo tried to read everything too - it tried to build a manually curated index of the entire internet that reached 3.2m sites before the absurdity of the project became overwhelming. This was Borges’s 1:1 scale map made real. So, we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and Futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.

This is all build-up to my proposal for what Musk — or any other bidder for Twitter, for that matter — ought to do with a newly private Twitter. First, Twitter’s current fully integrated model is a financial failure. Second, Twitter’s social graph is extremely valuable. Third, Twitter’s cultural impact is very large, and very controversial. Given this, Musk (who I will use as a stand-in for any future CEO of Twitter) should start by splitting Twitter into two companies. One company would be the core Twitter service, including the social graph. The other company would be all of the Twitter apps and the advertising business.

TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would: Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph. Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model). Implement their own moderation policy. This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:

A truly open TwitterServiceCo has the potential to be a new protocol for the Internet — the notifications and identity protocol; unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company. That would be insanely valuable, but it is a value that will never be realized as long as Twitter is a public company led by a weak CEO and ineffective board driving an integrated business predicated on a business model that doesn’t work. Twitter’s Reluctance

For the layman to build their own Folk Interfaces, jigs to wield the media they care about, we must offer simple primitives. A designer in Blender thinks in terms of lighting, camera movements, and materials. An editor in Premiere, in sequences, transitions, titles, and colors. Critically, this is different from automating existing patterns, e.g. making it easy to create a website, simulate the visuals of film photography, or 3D-scan one's room. Instead, it's about building a playground in which those novel computational artifacts can be tinkered with and composed, via a grammar native to their own domain, to produce the fruits of the users' own vision. The goal of the computational tool-maker then is not to teach the layman about recursion, abstraction, or composition, but to provide meaningful primitives (i.e. a system) with which the user can do real work. End-user programming is a red herring: We need to focus on materiality, what some disparage as mere "side effects." The goal is to enable others to feel the agency and power that comes when the world ceases to be immutable.

I hope this mode can paint the picture of software, not as a teleological instrument careening towards automation and ease, but as a medium for intimacy with the matter of our time (images, audio, video), yielding a sense of agency with what, to most, feels like an indelible substrate.