“Galvanic” demonstrations were amongst the vogue for scientific theatre in early 19th century Britain, an inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Engraving from Les Merveilles de la science, 1870, showing Dr. Andrew Ure in 1818, shocking the corpse of a murderer fresh from the gallows, not to mention his audience.
AGAINST SCIENCE
And how I’ve adapted my practice to resist its latest incursion
Some would blame the polycrisis on capitalism, patriarchy, religion, colonialism and bad and stupid people, without faulting science. I disagree. This is the modern world, and any number of big histories credit science with playing a leading role in creating it, along with the usual suspects. Yuval Noah Harari for instance, in Sapiens (2011), ascribes the pervasive culture fashioned by the West to the trinity of science, capitalism and imperialism, tightly knit. Science is complicit in providing a never-ending supply of new discoveries, theories and inventions, raw material for the creative disruption essential to capitalism, at the bidding of empires both national and corporate.
Science and technology have greatly benefited humanity, increasing lifespan, reducing suffering, lifting most of the world’s population out of subsistence agriculture, extending our reach and knowledge. But it’s been a messy business becoming so abundant—devastating, corrupting and exterminating other species along the way, and polluting the planet with our chemicals while raising its temperature disastrously.
I’m afraid I have no suggestions for replacing or fixing capitalism, patriarchy and science, but I have looked at how the present situation affects my design practice and taken a course of action, the why and how of which I will attempt to explain.
The Weavers’ March, Käthe Kollwitz, 1897. The subject is an 1843 rebellion in Silesia.
Weavers were early victims of the Industrial Revolution, as textile mills powered by scientifically engineered steam engines transformed a venerable craft into dark satanic drudgery. The Luddites were textile workers.
The poison is in the dose
“Progress in science was then, as today, more rapid than that in administration,”
—T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, OUP, 1948.
Progress, as currently pursued, is seriously flawed, at a crisis point of questionable benefits and burgeoning repercussions. Therein lies the problem. Government, industry, and society in general, have, up to now, been able to mitigate the negative, unanticipated consequences of discovery and invention as they emerge, to some extent, but the ever-increasing speed and scale of progress have made this increasingly difficult, if not impossible.
The theory of progress that arose in 18th century Europe was developed as a practice by such means as public education, but progress itself is an ancient and perennial expression of human culture, advancing independently on separate continents prior to the modern era. As Jakob Bronowski explained, “… a culture is a multiplier of ideas, in which each new device quickens and enlarges the power of the rest.”¹ Connectivity in media, from Gutenberg to the internet, has catalyzed rapid change. Tellingly, the volume of scientific papers published since that practice began in the late 19th century has increased exponentially. Data begets data.
Tim Berners-Lee and Steve Jobs had no idea that the internet and mobile computing would, through social media, undermine democracy and damage people’s mental health—especially that of children. Only now, 15 years after Instagram and Facebook blew up, are a few governments legislating age-specific curbs on accessing social media, and attempting to forbid “hate-speech,” which is not even the real issue—that would be how algorithms reward rage bait. Meanwhile, AI is the new threat, spreading further and faster. How could we be so reckless? Haven’t we seen the arc of history? Why are we ignoring the warnings, so sharply imagined in The Matrix and The Terminator ?
Harm must be proven, it cannot be anticipated, such is the law. The standard response to new technology is risk assessment, with the goal of responsible and beneficial use. Consequently, new tech gets its foot in the door with the go-ahead to see how it works out, in what becomes a de facto approval process, propelled by various motivations—such as Fear Of Missing Out—which, whatever their intent or lack thereof, pave the road to Hell. I doubt we can change course, but slowing down might help.
I repeat: the immediate problem is rate of change and scale. We have plenty of tech and know-how already, why not pause and apply our achievements more carefully?
John Wizi. Sioux. Son of Chief Wizi of Crow Creek. S. D. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1900, at the Hampton Institute, a residential school for black and American Indian youth founded in 1868. Just as his Victorian demeanour is a far cry from that of Wizi’s forebears, so has it been superceded in today’s society.
Progress is genocide
Words change their meaning. Genocide was coined by lawyer Rafaël Lemkin in 1944 as a legal concept to address the Armenian genocide, and gained widespread familiarity following its introduction in the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46. It meant the intentional physical destruction of a race; this concept came to be applied historically, as well as to the Holocaust, from ancient Mesopotamia to Tasmania in the 1830s, and now Gaza.
Although Lemkin had also theorized cultural genocide, this was omitted by the colonial powers prosecuting the Nazi leaders. Then in 2015 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada stated:
“Physical genocide is the mass killing of a targeted group, and biological genocide is the destruction of the group’s reproductive capacity. Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group… most significantly… families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.” [This last point addressed the role of Canadian residential schools in the forced assimilation of indigenous children.]
There were settlers who objected to the expanded definition, but the genie was out of the bottle. “Settler” has also acquired semantic creep—originally referring to someone who has moved to a relatively unpopulated land, clearing wilderness for farming, it now encompasses their city-dwelling descendants centuries later.
Let’s bring that idea home. The culture I was born into 74 years ago is history. Its words have changed their meanings, its values are now considered bigoted, its style is passé and its technology is obsolete. While it may not be the intent of progress to eliminate a people’s distinct identity, the intent is clearly to dispense with the old culture. But this is not cultural genocide. The people persist, they adapt, and their culture maintains a unique identity.
But how is it possible that a people and its culture can change substantially during a lifetime and yet remain the same people and culture? I’ll get to that, but for now this thorny paradox does not concern the concept of cultural genocide, which is defined as: intentionally eliminating the distinctive quality of a subject people’s identity vis‑a‑vis other peoples.
Is that what progress does? It certainly looks that way. Recently progress, in the guise of Big Data, while not targeting any particular group for assimilation, is nonetheless pursuing universal compliance with a model of humanity in which everybody everywhere is peering at a mobile phone all the time, making data.
It’s not enough for a people to share what appears to be a distinct culture, within parameters over which they have no control. One’s culture is not just an expression of, for instance, what one might create with AI, it also carries the stamp of those who create and manage the technology. If not cultural genocide, that’s empire building, with a dominion extending into the internet of things.
But what if “Progress is who we are”? Isn’t that our culture, aren’t we being true to its traditional ethos of continual improvement? Well, not if the method employed is harming that culture and upsetting the biosphere irrevocably. That’s not progress.
The absence of a speed limit on the Information Highway is unfortunate, because it’s speed and scale that have taken cultural evolution over the edge.
Humpty Dumpty, by John Tenniel, in Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll, 1871.
Authoring one’s destiny
“Each time he gave a talk, Stokely [Carmichael, later Kwame Ture] would cite Alice Through the Looking Glass :
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘who is to be master—that‘s all.’ ”
—Post-prison Writings and Speeches, Eldridge Cleaver, 1969.
—Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, 1871.
It’s fitting that Kwame Ture changed his name—to Kwame, after Nkrumah, president of the first colonial African nation to gain independence, and Ahmed Sékou Touré, first president of Guinea. Ture was a theorist and activist who challenged the aspirational meaning of “integration” for black Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. His reading of Humpty-Dumpty’s etymological cynicism provided a post-modern rationale against assimilation of minorities into the mainstream. Notably, he was born in the same year as Bernie Sanders, who first achieved elected office with a plurality of anti-establishment voters in Vermont, a state to which many hippies had moved in the 1960s and ’70s.
While the progressive left acknowledges cultural genocide as affecting indigenous peoples, the far right theorizes “civilizational erasure” of its own. The disruption that runaway progress causes is keenly felt by conservatives, worldwide, and it occurs in an atmosphere fraught with surveillance, passwords, rage bait, phishing and fakery. Wariness ensues, becoming focused on otherness, because social media is all about the distinctions of identity.
It might seem that rapid and drastic change in a country and its people is lethal to its culture, genocide even, but that is not the case. Ideally, what makes a people unique, important, and full of life is its sovereignty, and for a person self-determination—to be the master of their own identity. Without that degree of agency, mere existence is oppressive. By opting‑in the global population to its program of surveillance, addiction and data harvesting, scientific progress has become a form of totalizing government, obstructing the many cultures of the world from writing their own futures independently, with words of their own meaning.
Cartoon by George Du Maurier, Punch magazine, 1895.
Resisting AI
I won’t elaborate on the dangers of AI. It stinks to high heaven, despite the excellent parts. Here is how I’ve reacted and adapted my practice to avoid it.
Some background: I was an early adopter of the Apple computer as it transformed commercial graphics, and I stayed the course as the tech evolved, exploiting the opportunities that digitization presented. So I do wonder whether it is not now hypocritical of me to say “no, Ima not use AI.” Or worse than that, perhaps I’m just the old guy calling it quits because he can’t hack it any more. I don’t think so, in fact, I would love to play around with this amazing new tool and see what kind of fonts I might create with it. But I won’t go there, it’s a step too far.
Two and a half years ago, we took a new tack at Shinntype, precipitated by enshittification² of the Monotype (MyFonts) platform, which had been our major source of income from the retail sale of font licences. Since then, we’ve left MyFonts, reinstituted font sales at the Shinntype site (we had tried it briefly in the early days of ecommerce) and I’ve been active on social media building a following as a micro-influencer. It’s been a blast addressing socials as an art form with prominent typography, in static and videos—and it’s been a joy to collaborate with my daughter Zoë Shinn.
That’s business and marketing, but the fundamental question is, how can I continue to move forward as a type designer, without AI?
AI-free design strategies
1. Exploit the unrealized potential of legacy tech
It’s a tragedy the way equipment in perfect working condition is routinely trashed to make way for the new. And that goes for software too, with the interminable “upgrades” that apparently justify subscription fees. This has prompted my renewed interest in an area of design introduced by a previous generation of design tool: contextual alternates, or <calt> for short. I began using this feature of OpenType in 2005, shortly after it was introduced, and explored its possibilities for a good ten years before losing interest. But recently, with the passage of time opening up perspective, and with the attraction of it being an alternative to the grindstone of new tech, I’ve developed fresh ideas of what may be done with contextuality, in these three designs:
Scotch Biplex is an alternation of roman and italic. If the essence of contextuality is providing two or more different appearances for the same character, why not go all out and throw opposites together? Applying this idea to the Scotch Modern seemed promising, with the pot-hook serifs of the italic nicely filling out the x-height, and as an unexpected bonus, the angle of the italic matching the angle of the diagonals in the roman.
Polypraxia takes the ransom-note trope up a notch, with four alternates of each character, pseudo-randomly applied.
As a lover of the funky, inconsistent quality of old letterpress printing, both subtle and marked, in body text for immersive reading, I had thought about mimicking the effect with pseudo-random <calt> some time ago but never got around to it. I’m surprised nobody else has done that yet. So last year I had a go at it, in a project that sought to recreate the experience of reading English 400 years ago. I also programmed the Auld English Spell fonts to substitute long-s by default, according to the conventions of that time, and transliterate text into “Mock Tudor.” These three features of the Auld English could have been invented at any time during the past 20 years, but they weren’t. That’s what I mean about the untapped potential of technology.
Whether such typefaces have much use is besides the point—like all my designs, I put them out there and see what flies. It’s impossible to predict popularity, and with fonts it may take years for something to catch on—which has been the case with Nicholas and Aptly (now the best-selling Shinntype face)—and some never do, but so what?!
2. Drawing is thinking
Although one tends to categorize drawing as taking a line for a walk, to use Paul Klee’s turn of phrase, the making of letter shapes by manipulating bezier outlines with a mouse or stylus and tablet is also drawing—involving a dynamic feedback loop between hand, eye and brain. Drawing is a fundamentally different method of cognition than machine learning and image generation. It’s organic, with a personal physical style rooted in muscle memory (i.e. training), informed by cultural and emotional intelligence. As such it presents an ontological barrier against the inroads into human territory being made by generative AI. Therefore, I’m presently energizing the role of drawing in typeface design, in these works in progress:
This is a hybrid of serif (with worn type) and sans (with press-gain), ambiguously positioned between the two, the method being to represent the blurred quality of this fusion of two quite different modes of image degeneration, as I conceptualize them, by drawing in a precise yet casual style.
Many blackletter types incorporate Roman shapes in their capitals, for the sake of legibility, but I haven’t come across any that thoroughly apply the “Old English” style of Textura decoration to the classic Roman alphabet, which is my brief to myself. And, because the style is so complex and idiosyncratic, there is plenty of opportunity for inventive and expressive drawing.
You might say that AI has inspired my practice, in the absence. ●
1. The Ascent of Man, by Jakob Bronowski, BBC, 1973.
2. A technical term invented by Cory Doctorow, in this instance referring to the “chokepoint” exerted by Monotype’s program of corporate concentration, enabling it to successively decrease the royalty rate paid to suppliers.