“Computers’re bringing about a situation that’s like the invention of harmony. Sub-routines are like chords. No one would think of keeping a chord to himself. You’d give it to anyone who wanted it.”
– John Cage, in the 1969 essay “Art and Technology”
“We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
– Sam Altman, in a comment during BlackRock’s 2026 U.S. Infrastructure Summit
Ian here—
This post began as a short housekeeping announcement but evolved into something more grandiose. (Though still attached to a housekeeping announcement.)
In the Spring of 2025 I taught a course titled “Closure and Infinity in Digital Media,” about the creation of theoretically infinite art. It opened in the 1960s with the process-based art of John Cage and the Fluxus movement, and worked its way to the contemporary dream of entertainment CEOs everywhere, selling AI slop to undiscerning viewers. The course was admittedly too broad in its focus (as evinced by its mouthful of a title). It took me to nearly the end of the quarter to actually grasp what its core concern had been all along: It was a course about the internet that every person in the room had grown up with, which was now dying.
You can draw a direct line from the sentiment expressed by Cage in the above quote—that computers will bring about an epoch of sharing comparable to the invention of harmony—to the utopian dreams of Wikipedia, open-access academic publishing, Reddit, TVTropes, even the humble user-submitted ASCII game walkthroughs still lurking in the bowels of IGN and Gamespot. That is to say, to the internet, as people idealistically conceptualized it in the 2000s, and which is still around today, though perhaps hanging by more of a thread than we’d like to admit.
Granted, there were skeptics of this vision of the internet. Way back in 2000, Tiziana Terranova dutifully tut-tutted the fiery optimism of the “Web 2.0” era, pointing out that capitalists were always waiting in the wings to monetize the free labor of credulous volunteers. The utopian venture of the world wide web relied on an unstable ideological union of hippy-dippy communitarianism and hardened anarcho-capitalism. It wasn’t built to last, because “free” didn’t mean the same thing to all parties.
But still, during its heyday, it was a grand thing to witness. Wikipedia’s 25 years of operation have stretched over my high school education, undergraduate education, graduate education, and now a decade of me being an educator myself. Throughout all of this, it has been not only an invaluable research tool, but also probably the best available model of socialism in action. (From each according to their research abilities, to each according to their research needs.) It’s no stretch to say that my path toward becoming an educator owes much to the general shape of the internet circa 2000–2015. It seemed like our shared intellectual commons was improving. Information was becoming freer every day. Professors were expanding beyond the classroom and academic publishing to become bloggers, posters, podcasters, and video essayists. Educators were rediscovering public communication, sharing their love of their subject matter more broadly than ever before. I was benefitting from it, and I wanted to contribute to it. It was a tantalizing moment to get caught up in.
And now LLMs are on track to end it decisively.
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