Liz Cory
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evcory.bsky.social
Liz Cory
@evcory.bsky.social
69 followers 330 following 4 posts
data viz design & dev @newamerica.org

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poetrysociety.org/poetry-in-motion/whose-side-are-you-on
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evcory.bsky.social
great read from @robhorning.bsky.social this weekend:
“Vibe coding” retains the implication that you can’t explain or even understand how something works. But under the pressure of AI hype and its championing of incomprehension, there seems to be not a “vibe shift” but a “vibe” shift occurring, as the term drifts toward a different connotation. Where vibe once conveyed something that can’t be analyzed, now it conveys a purposeful indifference to analysis or explanation, as well as to the components that make up something. It is as though the preponderance of vibe talk made explanations irrelevant in all cases, and now we speak of vibes to forbid comprehension, which would be unfun. “Giving in to the vibe,” then, means deliberately refusing to understand, as though that would be to defy AI’s supremacy. One should let AI handle the data and the details so that you can just have gratified impulses, which are ultimately just a matter of data being manipulated to your liking — prompting, waiting, tweaking, and trying again until you are satisfied or bored with what you’re doing. Being involved with the thinking process, the details, would be to go against the vibe. It’s a superfluous burden that sets you against the spirit of the times. “Vibe” in this usage tries to lend exuberance and cachet to what amounts to being passive and negligent. It borrows from the earlier connotations of relaxing into conditions and not disrupting them by trying to pick them apart, but now applies it to the alienation that “AI” must produce if it is going to be profitable for its makers. “Vibe” evokes the the dream of a life that contains no processes, no skills, no research, no effort — just feelings that machines interpret and turn into substance. If “vibe” once could refer to a range of nameless feelings, now it refers to thoughtlessness, in every sense of the word.
March 9, 2025 at 8:34 PM
evcory.bsky.social
Boycott Tesla, Buy Esla
Red ice sled on a frozen lake with the label “Esla”
February 15, 2025 at 2:06 AM