“Myspace’s ugliness was an anti-cooption force-field, because corporate designers and art directors would, by and large, rather break their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like that.”
– Author and tech pundit
Cory Doctorow, recalling the DIY aesthetic of
Myspace. In a screed against generative AI, Doctorow contrasts the “ugliness-as-a-feature” of early web counterculture to the homogenized aesthetic of AI art—which he rebukes as “
born coopted.”
