Over the past few weeks, we’ve been taking a look at the members of CUNY PIT Lab’s inaugural advisory board: six individuals brought together to help strengthen our capacity and continue to pursue our mission of making technology accessible, sustainable, and equitable for all.
This week, we spoke to Ruby Justice Thelot, a designer, artist & cyberethnographer based in New York City. He is a professor of design and media studies at NYU whose work focuses on digital phenomenology, virtual ontology and the implications of being-on-line. He writes about virtual realms, digital communities, and artificial intelligence, and his work and research have been presented and published in journals, magazines, and conferences all over the world. He is the author of the books “A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints” and “A Few Essays of Taste” (Metalabel’s 2025 zine of the year). He is the founder of 13101401 inc, a design and research studio.
In your lecture “Why Are There No New Aesthetics?”, you say: “To build new mass aesthetics we need a shared vision of the future and a philosophy.” So much of what eventually comes to dominate culture often starts in subcultural or countercultural forms. Do you think it’s important in itself to have “mass aesthetics”?
It is important, insofar as we believe that having a shared vision of the future is important for nation building. Now, what do I mean by this? Part of the underlying belief is that some monoliths are good. Some monoliths, culturally, allow us to share common cultural ground. They allow us to see what the nation will become, the path it can take, the future we want to build for our constituents, our children, our grandchildren. Today, you can kind of feel conflicting visions of the future. Before the lecture, the students had read this essay of mine called Mining the Future that I wrote for Art Forum, in which I describe how the monocultural events of a movie like Star Wars aligned a generation of future technologists into building some of the things that they saw in those movies. Famously, Mark Zuckerberg read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash; that became a vision of the future he wanted to build with his company, formerly known as Facebook, [which he] then called Meta for “Metaverse,” because that book, which was science fiction, led him to want to build that vision of the future. And so I think that political conversation is very important as we’re making these foundationally important decision as to what technologies we will build. Who gets to build it? Who gets to own it? Right now, we are at a pivotal moment with AI. And we’re faced with something that could be highly transformational. And the fact that we do not have a shared vision of the future, I think, is causing a lot of fraughtness around the technology, because we don’t know whether that technology will be used for curing cancer, or taking away jobs from my family who lives in Georgia. Is the future one of total automation, where the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few tech oligarchs? Or is the future one where the spoils of this incredible, extraordinary technology do get not trickled down, but passed around to the whole of Americans. And that, in itself, is a decision as to what [kind of] future we want. And that future is promulgated, it’s disseminated, through mass aesthetics. There can be conflicting ones, and that’s always happened. But having that allows us to align and know what we are building for the future.
A recent focus of your work and discussions has been that of “slop,” and you also point towards “machinic taste”: “a phenomenon where digital content is increasingly shaped by non-human preferences rather than human desire.” Here’s a quote from you: “We are witnesses to a wonderful waltz between audience capture, algorithmic capture and machine capture.” What do you think are the negative or positive impacts this has on culture?
Well, the first one is this bit of a morbid curiosity: what do automated systems do when left on their own behalf? What are their aesthetic proclivities? And what do they make? And as I said in the essay, we’re seeing it with the slop. I think the reason why it’s so strange is because it’s not really meant for us. It’s kind of meant for us, because we’re still part of that “waltz,” but we’re slowly being eclipsed. And once we are truly eclipsed, then I’m genuinely curious to see what kind of weird, truly strange things we see. I think we learn a lot about the values of these systems as we see the kind of images they produce. It’s gonna reveal a lot of what [they] want to be rewarded by — I don’t want to say the word “want,” but… what they’re rewarded by as a part of their automated system.
The second thing is, as we stop relying on these recommendation systems, my sense is [that] there’s a reversal. Once you get to the point [where] you feel like you’re no longer seeing recommendations made by humans, then you return to your neighbor, you know? To me, there’s a hyper-locality that steps in. You start to take a look at your neighbor: you ask them, what’s their blender? Instead of going on a TikTok where maybe half of the likes and half of the comments are bots. But if Amelia likes her blender, maybe I’ll get the same one. And so we go back to what I’ve been calling a more tribal, more oral way of defining aesthetic affiliation or purchase decisions: all things that were very much influenced by the algorithm. As the algorithm gets further and further away from us, we need to find new modes of understanding the cultural space, and therefore we go back, in my opinion, to our neighbor. This is a process I call hyper-local global skepticism. The more things are on the platform, the more things are doubted: is this AI-generated, is this AI-influenced? Is this real, generally? Then the global, the thing that is macro, the thing that is big, gets doubted. That becomes a new epistemological route. That’s how we build knowledge, through tribal modes, oral modes, local modes.