While readng "Reading Exquisite Code" I kept thinking about how the artistic process is being changed by algorithmic processes beyond intentional projects like Exquisite Code. In particular, I was struck by how social media as a landscape has driven artist's styles to be more similar. In the animation world, there has been a crop of new tv shows with young showrunners who graduated from the notorious CalArts, that often get criticized for having a "CalArts style", and while I think the criticism is lazy—there is a bit of truth behind the notion, I just think it's misdirected at the school itself. 

Instagram as a site has become worse and worse for independent and freelance artists as a marketing tool because of the way the algorithm works. That is to say, I think there's a sort of cannon to online digital art. Scrolling though my own feed while intermittently reading "Reading Exquisite Code"  it really struck me how much influence the algorthim of social media sites influences trends in the art world. I don't' think writing is quite as susceptible to this, since it isn't distributed through such avenues, but for visual arts, your social media can make or break your career. In order to be successful on the machine, you must constantly post to your feed, and thus a lot of artist's spend time creating content simply to post it. The meaning behind the artistic practice has changed. Content is created for the sake of being consumed rather than for the sake of creation. I'm dealing in generalizations here, but the sliced and diced formatting of social media itself, in some ways, is hegemonizing the artist's eyes.