Useful term I discovered this week: “toxic mimicry”. It’s the pattern of substituting systems/organisations/services that look superficially like they fill a core societal need but in fact act to take up the space that a genuine system would fill, and only provide virtual nutrition.

Examples:
- 6pm TV news mimics public discourse
- Malls mimic public spaces
- Daycare mimics collective child rearing

I like the term as it suggests something predatory and insidious.

@dznz I've become somewhat elitist in my old age and have been known to say the same thing about some "art" I've seen.

@735 @dznz

I keep wondering if I'm cheating by grumbling about AI Art when I'm a maker of computer collage myself. Is it inherently more wholesome to be a human brain choosing what element goes where, instead of letting a machine do it for you? 🤔

@xenophora @735 id say not at all. Generative and procedural and computer-assisted art has a long and mostly wholesome history, it’s not that the computer was involved but that massive amounts of human work was hoovered and laundered for the purpose of devaluing the creators. Or that’s my 2c

@dznz @735

True enough. It's taken me at least a couple of decades to amass and organize the kinds materials I like to use. Probably I wouldn't get around to using even half of them, even if I could live to100 and spend all day every day making stuff.