Episode 10: Ruby Justice Thelot

To kick off our new weekly release schedule, we have Chase &⁠⁠ Daniel in conversation with designer, artist, NYU design/media professor & cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot (@being_on_line)

Ruby’s output is thoughtful, extremely prolific, and multifaceted. His writing on virtual realms, digital communities and AI offers a unique perspective that overlaps with our interests at Vaporware in key ways. Chiefly, how crucial it is for people and small communities to truly own their own means of coordination and memory. But also how the specific affordances of those digital tools dictate the bounds of memory itself.

• Ruby’s new habit of buying old film home movies off eBay

• The concept of ‘Mnemophagy’: “the devouring of memory” and the ephemerality of online culture

• Checkpoints: Ruby’s book about an accidental community that formed in the comment section of a now-deleted YouTube video

• His early internet archiving habits and how they sucked him into academia through meme page admin

• What he’s learned from teaching young designers at NYU and the new generational attitudes towards technology that he sees crystallizing

• How comparing the iPod to the Stem Player made him both optimistic and pessimistic about the future of hardware design

• Why it’s a good thing that 64% of Gen Z call themselves ‘creators’

• The rise of para-content: content about content

• Why we want AI to give us malleable, interoperable, remixable tools, not to repeat forms from the past

• The rise of synthetic training data and concerns about its usefulness or creativity

• Why it’s important to write more non-dystopian sci-fi, so that founders are inspired to build things besides cyberpunk and ‘the Torment Nexus’

Artwork: Louis Daguerre [inventor of the Daguerreotype and the diorama], “The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel”, 1824