Ted And Walter
Ted and Walter is an ongoing documentation of snippets of conversation and generated documents with chatGTP on what happens when "Walter Benjamin and Ted Kaczynski meet the algorithmic age".
It might be a bit dense, but eventually It will probably end up being a sock puppet musical.
Benjamin mourned the decay of aura, art’s unique presence, under mechanical reproduction. Kaczynski feared the collapse of human autonomy under industrial systems. Both diagnosed a form of loss, but in different registers: one poetic, one militant. We wondered how those trajectories unfold in a culture where art is not reproduced but synthesized, and autonomy is not eroded but automated.
From Aura to Autonomy: Benjamin, Kaczynski, and Art in the Age of Technical Production (PDF)[+]
- Benjamin + Kaczynski ? AI-age aesthetic logic isn’t just speculative; it feels inevitable once you follow their trajectories.
- From Benjamin, we inherit the insight that technological mediation alters the ontology of art and its cultural function.
- From Kaczynski, we take the idea that technology evolves according to its own imperatives, subordinating human autonomy.
Put them together, and the endpoint almost writes itself:
- Art becomes fully immanent to the system—not created for meaning, but for metrics.
- Culture loops back on itself, pre-optimized for predicted engagement.
- Difference survives only as simulated novelty because the system needs variance to feel alive, but always within parameters of optimization.