14/04/25. “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger”. However, in the age of artificial intelligence, the hand can have as many as seven fingers.

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I contributed to the second volume of Medial Disorders with a series of notes, quotes, and aphorisms compiled since 2023.

Opting for fragments as a means of addressing the Argumentative Inevitability (AI) is a deliberate choice. In fact, I feel a certain pride in stating that, over the last three years, I have spent less than three thousand words on the subject, most of which are not even mine. The contribution can be found on my website and, of course, in the book.

Remember when people growing up before the advent of the computer and the web would say things like “the computer is just a pencil”? This is an example of what I call “floppy-disk thinking”: that is, understanding the floppy disk as a material object in a world where it has become a metaphor for saving data. Nowadays, we apply a lot of floppy-disk thinking to AI, for example when we talk about “agents”. We do so because we look at automated operations from the point of view of a world where a physical person had to perform them: someone (back in the day an employee, and more recently ourselves) needed to check a train destination, look for the times, compare the prices, and finally buy the ticket. Now an AI agent can do that (veeeery sort of). Once someone becomes accustomed to this reality as the default, the “agent” will lose its anthropomorphic attachment and become a metaphor without a referent, a catachresis, like floppy disks for Gen Z users.

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I wrote a 7000+ essay on on Serif Populism, what came before it and what might come after for Dinamo’s Guest Takeover. Here’s a small excerpt:

In the populist mindset, “serif” stands for tradition, regardless of whether that tradition is invented. It also stands for beauty, but understood as decoration, often cheap, as in the Oval Office. Thus, Serif Populism is a reaction to what is perceived as sans: sans soul, roots, history; sans decor or decorum. It is a reaction to a bland nothingness that “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever”. The culprit? Corporate simplification (which goes hand in hand with the modernizing style of graphic design – remember Hillary’s right-arrowed H?). Serif Populism presents itself as “honest work” made by “real folks” who are neither corporate drones nor branding experts.

Read the rest here.

by Silvio Lorusso, 2025

The box is black
And we don’t like it
But we don’t like
Even more that
Even if
The black box
Weren’t black
But transparent
We wouldn’t get
What’s in the box
So we complain
About the black
In the black box
To not complain
About ourselves

(This short statement was written for Next Nature’s Design Debate 2025, which took place during Dutch Design Week on October 25, 2025, at the Evoluon in Eindhoven. I debated with Richard van der Laken – who joined remotely – and Hendrik-Jan Grievink on the prompt “When Design Must Do”.)

“What Design Must Do”. Oh boy… If there is one political philosophy I can call my own, it is anti-authoritarianism, so the verb must doesn’t really belong to my vocabulary. That said, I’ll try to provide an answer anyway. Design must mitigate the effects of the climate emergency, must make AI adoption safe and worthwhile, must revert platform enshittification, must take a side on wars and genocides. But what happens if design doesn’t do any of that? Not much, I’d say.

As no one seemed interested in verifying the claims designers and design writers made ten, fifteen or twenty years ago, I doubt anyone will do so for today’s. The issue has to do with reminiscence: design culture suffers from short-term memory loss. Somehow it makes sense, for a field so obsessed with the new that it can’t be too bothered with the old, especially the not-so-old, which lacks both the allure of wisdom and the thrill of rediscovery.

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Each edition of Entreprecariat has been an opportunity to experiment with book design, and the Korean one is no exception. Published by The Flexibility Club, this edition will feature a business card on the cover – a nod to the relentless self-promotional drive demanded by entrepreneurialism, with a touch of vintage.

The cover idea was inspired by one of my all-time favorite movie moments: American Psycho’s business card scene, where Patrick Bateman quivers with envy at his colleague Paul Allen’s card. But what do those stiff bankers have to do with the entreprecariat? Arguably, Bateman represents its polar opposite: neither precarious nor entrepreneurial. He enjoys a lucrative position and is, at least on the surface, a staunch conformist. His rivalry with his peers is simply about being exactly like them – only a bit better.

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Kate Wagner’s review of The Brutalist is good, especially when she focuses on the empty canonization of “masters” carried out by critics and intellectuals. However, it spins the simplistic narrative, now very popular in certain architectural and design circles, of the “architect as worker”. In doing so, she romantically generalizes work. Wagner writes: “This is yet another iteration in a series of events that show that the architect—no less than the furniture builder, the coal shoveler, and the draftsman—is also a worker” forgetting that if Toth had kept shoveling coal, there would be no movie.

In fact, throughout the whole film, proletarian and even clerical work is depicted as a curse (compare it to Perfect Days to get an idea). These activities represent the narrative bottoms of the story. Shoveling coal is Pavlovianly associated with poverty and homelessness, from which Toth is generously saved by an angel with a check—the same person who earlier refused to pay for his work. Later in the story, our Bauhaus alumnus decides to abandon the calm but anonymous job in a big firm to go back to work, far from home and from his wife, for a childish, vile patron, to complete his signature work. Toth is moved by his professional ego. After all, he is an architect and has an architect’s soul. At this point, he himself becomes bossy and starts firing people on the spot. So much for worker solidarity.

I don’t deny that the way the director represents diverse forms of work is convincing and original, but the movie is not just about work: it is about professional status and proletarianization, about the always reversible processes (except for the ruling elites) of class. This can happen at any time and under circumstances nobody has control over. The Brutalist is not a rags-to-riches movie, but one of riches, either symbolic or financial, to literal rags. It shows that in our world, Howard Roark and Saint Francis could be the same person.

Link to the original essay here. Julian Bleecker’s response here.

Dear Julian,

Always happy to read your thoughts (this is also, by the way, the first response to the essay from someone who deals with futures).

As you know, I have a soft spot for your work and for design fiction in general, as it has that material, crafty, everyday, and somewhat messy quality (I mean these words in the most positive sense) that sets it apart from its slick, artsy brother (speculative design) and its annoying managerial cousin (the Platonic world full of cones, circles, and spheres of methods).

I see your point regarding the Fisher/Jameson quote. I promised myself it would be the last time I use it, only because I focus—originally, I believe—on the imagination part and not on the capitalism part. Also: let’s go back to the source to revive Jameson’s work, now that he has passed away.

The thing with the hustle: it’s not the hustle itself (I hustle a lot on social media), but the specific way it is carried out. I don’t need to tell you that LinkedIn, with its optimistic slang, has become a mainstream joke. Now, does the late futurist want to kill the good in their ideas by expressing in every single post how “thrilled” and “excited” they are? By branding yet another plausible (read: commonsense) but abstract diagram with their handle and hashtags? The choice is theirs. I admit that in the text I indulged in more snark than necessary, but come on, I need to have my fun too!

With the notion of help, we come to the crux of the issue. What gives the late futurist the certainty that they’re helping people imagine things differently? Differently from what? Are they even aware of their own standpoint? Don’t they see that there is something nostalgic about the very idea of the future? Most of the recent things I’ve read on futures and the radical imagination are bland rehashes of the contemporary art discourse from five years ago (the same ritualistic, fuzzy, new-agey discourse that alienated a lot of art practitioners; the joke in that field had to do with “mossy” exhibitions). So, by all means, do your thing, build your pre-totype, write your speculative fiction, run your workshop, but don’t call it “help”.

Here’s a good quote by Philip K. Dick, who himself needed help, that could well be applied to late futurists: “Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”

Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son redrawn by Twitter user @clayhor using the Corporate Memphis illustration style (2020).

The best example of “style transfer” is not done with artificial intelligence, it is not the ghiblization of a banal selfie but the hand-made rendering in “flat style” (also called Corporate Memphis) of a Goya painting. The vector Saturn devouring his son is more blunt and profound than any output of OpenAI’s anime engine because it is not a simple stylization but a reflection on the logic of stylization, that is, on its conceptual innovation, which for some is violence or imposture. The flat Saturn shows us how the corporate imagination infantilizes reality, producing a flattening of signs, contexts, and registers into a generic “niceness” á la Google/Alphabet. The point is not that synthetic images are right-wing (although it is well possible to add a cutesy touch to photos of deportations), but rather that they are transversal in a totalitarian and totalizing way, universal as multiculturalism has been, that is, according to a very partial idea of the universe, thus both oleographic and stylized, but always within the shifting parametric boundary of the stylized and the oleographic.

The generation of an image “in the style of” is therefore a triumph: the triumph of postmodern vertigo, pastiche elevated to the syntactic level; and I do not say this as an accusation: there is indeed something exciting and somewhat liberating about this new technical possibility. But it would be unfair to deny a sense of loss. In a few days all this has become normal, and we already struggle to remember the time when that vase of sunflowers always corresponded only to those dense brushstrokes – as if they were two separable entities, save through an artificial caesura… there it is, I already think in the “paratactic” terms of style transfer, that is, I conceive formal features and content elements as a list or summation. It’s a new archaic style: warrior’s body + death = the same body placed horizontally. The question then becomes: what hypotaxis could be in the times of style transfer, that is, what other operations are possible besides addition – assuming they are possible. We talk about future and revolution, but we have ended up, who knows how, in the time of myth.

About a week ago, Elizabeth Goodspeed published a widely-read article on the disillusionment of graphic designers, which is as rich and nuanced as a piece on a design magazine can be. I won’t attempt to do it full justice here; instead, I want to zoom in on a single facet that struck me in particular. But before that, I want to comment on those readers who dismiss the emotional atmosphere of a professional category (in this case designers) as mere “navel-gazing”, self-referential and out of touch. How can one talk about self-deprecating memes about the job, when dictators are on the rise?

The answer is simple: the little things are part of the big things. By dismissing the former, we miss the chance to understand both. Instead, the small things help us frame the big things better. Goodspeed’s article is a good example of that. Let me illustrate this through a bit of critical cherry-picking.

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