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I guess he called it the "software arts" after "liberal arts," which at Middlebury I once heard "prepares you for everything but trains you for nothing." It is

I guess he called it the "software arts" after "liberal arts," which at Middlebury I once heard "prepares you for everything but trains you for nothing." It is a little interesting to think about software education that would train you for nothing, classes I've taken in CS and Eng do train you for some pretty specific things. I'd be interested in hearing the summary of some "university courses in, for example, political theory that explore how software platforms, like Facebook, should be redesigned". But this interview has tons of run on sentences that mix together concepts and everything bleeds together. For a moment I was shocked when I saw "computer scientists like Donald Knuth and Steve Jobs" until I realized it was two breathless sentences jammed together.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Artists make art. Academics write papers about artists who make art. Some of those papers are interesting. Most of them are irrelevant to anyone who isn't also an academic. I would be surprised if that didn't apply here. There's a kind of stock liberal arts academic curriculum - a bit of feminism, a bit of Critical Theory, a bit of Marxism (but not much), stock mentions of Adorno, Horkheimer, Barthes, Baudrillard, maybe Kristeva and others - that passes for academic arts criticism these days. To an outsider, it's more of a cargo cult where you gain entry by rather robotically quoting from set texts and authorities and adopting certain standard rhetorical techniques, than a convincing philosophical movement. Given his comments, I would guess that he wants artists to learn some basic coding, and he also wants developers to have some familiarity with that kind of academic thinking. Well - no. I don't see anything useful on the table there. I'm hardly apolitical, but the reality is that some bedrock elements in politics are defined by the absolute worst elements in human nature, and by people who personify those elements - sometimes with plain old brutality, but sometimes also in sophisticated and complex ways. There is nothing in mainstream liberal arts academia that even acknowledges this, never mind offers a solution to it. So I have no faith that his idea of "political theory" is going to do much to make the next Facebook less likely, or the current Facebook (etc) less dominant and manipulative.
- peter_l_downs 7y ago
  Quite an impressively large straw man you’ve built there.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

Artists make art. Academics write papers about artists who make art. Some of those papers are interesting. Most of them are irrelevant to anyone who isn't also an academic. I would be surprised if that didn't apply here. There's a kind of stock liberal arts academic curriculum - a bit of feminism, a bit of Critical Theory, a bit of Marxism (but not much), stock mentions of Adorno, Horkheimer, Barthes, Baudrillard, maybe Kristeva and others - that passes for academic arts criticism these days. To an outsider, it's more of a cargo cult where you gain entry by rather robotically quoting from set texts and authorities and adopting certain standard rhetorical techniques, than a convincing philosophical movement. Given his comments, I would guess that he wants artists to learn some basic coding, and he also wants developers to have some familiarity with that kind of academic thinking. Well - no. I don't see anything useful on the table there. I'm hardly apolitical, but the reality is that some bedrock elements in politics are defined by the absolute worst elements in human nature, and by people who personify those elements - sometimes with plain old brutality, but sometimes also in sophisticated and complex ways. There is nothing in mainstream liberal arts academia that even acknowledges this, never mind offers a solution to it. So I have no faith that his idea of "political theory" is going to do much to make the next Facebook less likely, or the current Facebook (etc) less dominant and manipulative.

peter_l_downs 7y ago
Quite an impressively large straw man you’ve built there.