The Robert Mosesifcation of the Internet

Good links#

• Everyone sits in the same traffic now (New Creative Era). In a new episode of New Creative Era, Josh Citarella and Yancey Strickler discuss Yancey’s recent essay on “the Robert Mosesification of the internet” — the way in which a world of infinite online choice turned into a giant highway with less exploration and fewer options every day. Listen to the conversation on Apple, Spotify, or the web, or read the essay here.
• New Creative Era live in NYC (Durations Festival). Join Josh and Yancey on Saturday, November 14, in New York City for their first-ever live show, as part of the Durations Festival, highlighting excellent experimental music, art, and ideas. Not many tickets left. Get yours here.
• AI and the fall (?) of the Creative Class (Apricitus Economics). Well-researched essay showing a significant drop in creative employment around the same time that LLMs began to enter the public arena. What isn’t clear is whether this is about AI's impact on creative practices specifically, or wider changes in employment and the economy more generally. Glad someone pulled these numbers. 

DFOS Spotlight: Peckham Digital#

Aluminum prints, 3D printed objects, a UV printed mirror, generative video. That's Network Terminal, the art sale at the heart of Peckham Digital, a festival of creative computing in south east London.

Peckham Digital has been running since 2021, and last week it held its fifth festival. Co-director Bea Taylor Searle puts the mission simply: "We believe digital art can give people more freedom in how they use and understand technology." Most of the festival is free and built for newcomers, and a youth advisory board helps decide where it goes next.

This year Network Terminal, curated by our own Danielle Paterson, launched as a digital gallery on DFOS with work by fourteen artists. The festival has wrapped, but the shop is still open. Sales run through splits (more on this below), so every sale is divided automatically between the artist and the festival, with 15% going back to Peckham Digital.

We love that the art helps pay for a festival that stays mostly free for newcomers, and that the work stays alive long after the weekend is over.

The shop is open now: peckhamdigital.dfos.com

Splits, and your data in one download#

We want the money a group makes to reach the people who made it, and what you make here to stay yours. Two things we shipped this month put that into practice.

Products can pay out through a split. A space can now attach a split to anything it sells in its store. When a sale clears, each person in the split gets their share automatically, worked out from what the space receives after fees. Before, every sale landed in the space's treasury and someone had to divide it up by hand. Network Terminal is using it now: each artwork sale is shared between the artist and Peckham Digital.

You can download your data. Anyone on DFOS can go to Settings → Your data and download a copy of what they've made and shared here, including posts, comments, messages, orders and every file they've uploaded, in one zip. It's ready in a few minutes and kept for a week.

Features like these help establish exactly the kind of empowered, not entrapped, internet we want to see.