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What Would You Do? Of course we would stand up for what was right. Of course we would hide the fearful and innocent targets of the regime in our attics and crawlspaces. Of course we would oppose the dictator, join the resistance, maybe… sabotage a bridge??? It’s unclear which bridge or how that would help, but surely we would know these things when and if that unthinkable day came. We would be ready, and we would resist. And now, here it is. As Donald Trump laughed and mugged for cameras in front of the chain link fences of Florida’s new concentration camp, as Kristi Noem and Ron DeSantis joked in front of the kennels they had built for human beings they planned to abduct and confine there, human beings they planned to starve and torture there, what I did was: paint my bedroom. What Would You Do? I would carefully scrub the accumulated decades of grease off the old paint with TSP, making sure to rinse well so as not to leave a residue that hampers adhesion by the new paint. I would cut in with a 2 ½“ angled brush around all the window and door trim. I would listen to podcasts while I shuffled along the baseboard on my knees, pausing occasionally to stretch my aching back. I would make hot dogs for lunch and eat them while reading posts on Bluesky about the passage of a bill through Congress that will ramp ICE funding up to levels competitive with other countries entire military. I would text my wife in New Zealand that things back home are pretty bad, and I don’t know what to do.

It begins to feel like a broad celebration of mediocrity. Finally, society says, with a huge sigh of relief. I don’t have to write a letter to my granddaughter. I don’t have to write a three-line fetch call. I don’t have to know anything, care about what I’m doing, or even have an opinion. I can just substitute some Content™. I can just ask the computer for Whatever But I like programming. I like writing. I like making things and then being able to sit back and look at them and think, holy fuck, I made that. There is no joy for me in typing a vague description into a computer and refreshing my way through a parade of Whatever until something is good enough.

The AI bubble popping will not be one single event, but a succession of smaller ones, and I believe this situation is one of them.

To begin with these platforms forced us all into their stylised boxes and now, as you can see up top, they’ve made all the boxes look and feel the same. So if web aesthetic = the messy, expressive look of the open internet, and platform aesthetic = the polished, standardised design of closed ecosystems, both aesthetics say a lot about power, creativity, and who controls the experience. That’s probably uncontroversial. What I want to think about now, though, is what the new web aesthetic is.