In this monologue, the speaker reflects on the emergence of a new class of aesthetically pleasing yet functionally useless technology, tracing its roots from physical art installations and deliberately inefficient consumer products to the modern digital realm. They argue that AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to creating beautiful, interactive software—such as 3D dashboards or “vibe‑coding” tutorials—by turning weeks of development work into a matter of minutes via simple prompts. While these digital creations are cheap, invisible, and require no physical resources, the speaker worries that they contribute to a form of digital waste, divert attention from pressing societal needs, and foster a dystopian culture of unproductive, pleasure‑driven coding. The talk raises ethical and environmental concerns about the hidden costs of such digital frivolity, questioning whether this trend undermines productivity and responsibility in technology.
Chapters
Okay, no shade, but I realize that AI has created a completely new category of beautiful but utterly useless technology. Beautiful useless technology is not new at all. Just look at any installation art at MoMA. Those things require very sophisticated engineering. You might say that that's a complete waste of resources, but Aristotle would disagree because he says that art should be for art's sake. And the beautiful thing about modern mass manufacturing is that we're able to merge some of that into things that are kind of useful in our real lives. From a utilitarian point of view, that's actually regressive because you're purposely downgrading the efficiency. But some people are okay with the design detracting a little bit of the utility as long as it makes up with the pleasure that it provides them. My favorite example of this are those irregular chrome plates. They're such a pain to clean and store, but they're so beautiful. You can say that it's the consumerism talking, but in some ways it's also representing a progress in technology that we're able to afford to manufacture things that are kind of inefficient for pleasure. I'm sure you can think of so many more examples of this, but I want to talk about how AI has spread this phenomenon to software. 3 years ago, if you wanted to build a beautiful 3D interactive jelly website, it would probably take at least a few weeks given that you have good programming programming experience, but now it just takes a prompt and maybe 5 to 10 minutes. Making beautiful useless software is even cheaper than those little gadgets I was talking about before. It takes up no space, it requires no skills, you don't need any packaging or shipping or whatsoever. Every day I see more cute little vibe coding app tutorials pop up on my For You page, and it's super tempting because it feels like free. Last week I made this beautiful 3D dashboard for my content. Is it kind of useful? I guess, but the design is completely unnecessary. I did it just because I can, but I also can't stop thinking about the implication of this. It's kind of dystopian because there's also people starving and we're out here just like vibe coding beautiful digital trash for the internet to consume. I don't know, is it antithetical to technology because it's making us less productive and it's like easier to be less productive? Digital waste feels less unethical than physical waste because you can't see it, but that doesn't mean that you're like consuming tokens and electricity and water and who knows what. Just a random thought.
