The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara is the second book I have read recently about Silicon Valley, this review follows my review of Chip War by Chris Miller. The Code covers the history of Silicon Valley from the post-war to the present.
Margaret O’Mara
In terms of her background, O’Mara is a Clinton administration era policy wonk. When O’Mara left policy circles, she became an academic and is now a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – at the other end of the country. Her area of focus is on the history of the modern technology industry. She spent five years researching the book in the mid-2010s, just as Silicon Valley was going under a technological and social change.
The lens shaping everything else that I have written here
I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and like Chip War, The Code was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.
Like Miller’s Chip War, O’Mara brought a degree of distance from her material to her writing. She has done a lot of research and surfaced lesser known characters like community computing pioneer Liza Loop in her work, she doesn’t have the inside track.
Bob Cringely with his work on InfoWorld‘s Notes From the Field column got an inside track from the Valley’s engineers before he went on to write is magnus opus Accidental Empires. Like Cringely, Michael Malone was brought up in the Silicon Valley area and then worked the business section beat as a reporter for the local newspapers. Cringely and Malone lived and breathed the valley. If you are are fan of Cringely and Malone’s works, expect something that is interesting but stylistically very different.
On to The Code itself
Other reviewers have used words like ‘masterful’ and ‘majestic history’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality aren’t really all that helpful. In contrast to Chip War which took me six months, I managed to storm through The Code in a week. This is partly down my familiarity to the material covered and the airplane view that O’Mara takes when writing about her subject. I enjoyed O’Mara’s writing, but could also see someone coming to it with a good grasp of American political history and current affairs, but no knowledge of Silicon Valley history enjoying it just as much.
Being an academic O’Mara worked hard to source everything in The Code, she also provides a recommended reading list that goes into different aspects of the story that she laid out in more depth including John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley.
H-P’s first product taken by Robert Scoble
The book starts in the post-war period as Stanford and Silicon Valley peaked as an area for military contractors. O’Mara references the political lives of the H-P founders alongside the growth of cold war technologies and the space race.
O’Mara leans hard into Stanford’s defence industry connections that started pre world war II. The book then veers to the decline of the military industrial complex in the area due to a number of factors. The Vietnam war demolished the defence budget. The space programme started to wind down after NASA met Kennedy’s challenge to put man on the moon. Johnson’s social programmes took spend away from scientific developments. Finally the social climate in the US changed.
The next stage of computing was shaped by counter cultural values which O’Mara covered the libertarian instincts of Silicon Valley pioneers alongside the more community orientated views of the counterculture folks. Unlike other writers, O’Mara also covers the Boston area technology corridor that Silicon Valley eventually overshadows.
O’Mara focuses more on the finance of Silicon Valley covering some of the highlights featured in Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law. But O’Mara also delves into the public markets and the role of lobbying in the Silicon Valley finance machine.
O’Mara tells how immigration affected the nature of Silicon Valley through the story of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!. As is the case with policy wonks she puts a lot of emphasis on Al Gore, the information superhighway and the Clipper chip. The Clipper chip resurrected like Godzilla the libertarian Republican party arm of Silicon Valley elites and paved the way for the likes of Peter Thiel later on.
The Code finishes on the future hopes for autonomous driving by university research teams and Google’s Waymo business.
You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.
It has taken me far too long to finish Chip War and write this review, so apologies in advance. Chip War was one of the FT’s best business books of 2022. In reality it’s a book about history, that happens to feature businesses.
The lens shaping everything else that I have written here
I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and Chip War was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.
The author
The author Chris Miller wasn’t a familiar name to me. Unlike Cringely, Markoff, Malone or Levy; Miller is an academic rather than a former journalist. Miller currently teaches international history at Tufts University. Chip War wasn’t his first book, his previous ones have focused on Soviet and Russian history. As a technology sector outsider, Miller’s Chip War has a very different tone my other favourite books from the genre.
It also allowed Miller to view the history of semiconductors in terms of a global perspective, that I hadn’t previously seen done.
On to Chip War itself
Other reviewers have used words like ‘outstanding’ and ‘epic’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality and length of read aren’t really all that helpful. It took me six months to read as a casual book. This is partly down to a hectic work schedule and that its a long book. I suspect that some readers when they reviewed the book seem to have thought ‘long’ as difficult to read. It’s actually 351 pages ignoring acknowledgements and the footnotes at the back of the book. Being an academic Miller worked hard to source everything in Chip War.
The book starts in the post-war period as the defence industry moves from being focused on hammering steel to developing smarter systems using semiconductors. That road takes the book past Texas Instruments and the early Silicon Valley of Bob Noyce and other members of the treacherous eight.
The book also zooms out to cover the Soviet Union’s failed efforts to replicate Silicon Valley as well as domestic industrial espionage and the start of globalisation which begat the current industry.
The Japanese challenge is covered in depth as is the rise of Korea including challenges that the industry faced in the early 2000s. The rise of Taiwan and its use of semiconductors as a hedge against invasion from the mainland. European tool maker ASML gets its own section, which is a case study in how to make a virtue of necessity. Finally it covers the technology conflict with China. Bring this up to date circa 2022.
If you are student of Silicon Valley history, then Chip War is unique in the way it puts everything in context. There were some completely new parts to me such as the political role that Sony founder Akio Morita played in advocating for a robust Japanese semiconductor industry as part of reasserting Japanese importance internationally.
You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.
The author of The Big Score is a lifetime inhabitant of Silicon Valley, Michael Malone. Malone went to school with Steve Jobs and spent his entire working life as a journalist covering technology companies of the area. His own career sounds like a veritable history of technology sector business reporting. Malone had written and or edited for the San Jose Mercury News, Fast Company, Upside, Forbes (ASAP), The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine. Now he co-hosts a weekly podcast on the goings on in Silicon Valley.
The book was originally published in 1985 and has been finished prior to the launch of the Apple Macintosh. At the the time of writing, Malone had been an early to mid-career journalist.
Silicon Valley time capsule
His book is time capsule of how Silicon Valley would have likely seen itself. The people portrayed in it lack the kind of artifice that pioneering PR people like Pam Edstrom would later drum into a young Bill Gates with media interview training and briefing books. Companies have since gone a step further and seldom engage with the media at all; instead putting out news by blog post or staged video production a la Apple under Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.
Steve Jobs on Apple’s future back in 1997
When we come to understand modern-day Silicon Valley five decades into the future, we won’t have the same level of intellectual honesty that we have in The Big Score because the artefacts and interviews will be so vanilla.
The book had become a largely forgotten business history book. Michael Malone revisited much of the history of covered in the book with a slightly longer term perspective in his 2002 work The Valley of Hearts Delight, which covered the history of the area from the 1960s to the dot com era. While The Big Score might have been forgotten, it was resurrected when Stripe through its publishing arm put it out again in 2021. They did this because while the book was forgotten by the general public, it has been read in libraries by university students and in their own collections by people like me who followed the technology sector.
Getting things wrong
In the introduction to the book, late career Malone freely admits the three things that he got wrong in The Big Score:
The impact of the internet. While it didn’t reach public consciousness until I was in college; as a high schooler in 1969 Michael Malone had got a chance to try the ARPAnet during a class visit to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Secondly, the San Jose Mercury News had been using email and bulletin boards as part of their business process and offering since the 1980s. Yet Malone’s past familiarity gave him little idea of what was likely to lie ahead. His elevated access as a journalist to the great and the good of the technology sector didn’t help either; in fact Bill Gates made a similar error to Malone in the first edition of his bookThe Road Ahead. Gates worked very quickly with the publishers to get out a second edition that corrected his mistake. But I think Malone’s inability to see and his intellectual honesty about that is instructive for all of us
While he had the chance to meet Doug Engelbart, Malone wrongly assumed that Engelbart was an eccentric inventor trying to get people to pay him his dues for technology that got bypassed. So, Engelbart doesn’t feature in The Big Score at all, despite The Mother of All Demos
Intel’s Andy Grove, who Malone now considers to be the most important business man in the history of Silicon Valley doesn’t get a prominent role in the book. That’s not so bad as Andy Grove managed to write a lot in his own right, notably Only The Paranoid Survive
The Big Score on excess, greed and ethics
Malone’s The Big Score like Robert X Cringely’s later work Accidental Empires wastes no time in showing Silicon Valley’s underbelly. At the time of writing there was a large amount of industrial espionage happening between hardware companies, many start-ups were being developed by greedy experienced executives and top performing workers were burning out by trying to keep up self medicating with drugs and stimulants and alcohol to take the edge off. Something you still see today with engineers using Adderall to help them focus.
In this respect The Big Score is very different from other works that cover this era such as Chip War, Fire In The Valley and Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
The Big Score by Michael Malone tells the tale of Silicon Valley before the Apple Macintosh and the large media companies of Yahoo!, Excite, Alphabet or Meta et al.
While the counterculture did play a substantial role in the PC revolution, much of early Silicon Valley was about trying to accumulate wealth and while the successful are lionised for a while; most people did middling to ok at best. There was a work culture of hard working and hard drinking which meant that marriages didn’t last. The first barrier that Silicon Valley broke through was one of class, if you were bright and successful enough, class didn’t matter.
Robert X. Cringely in his later book Accidental Empires talked about how Bob Noyce (a key player at Shockley Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel) was rejected from joining a local country club despite his business success. Class still existed, but not within these companies to the same extent. Michael Malone in The Big Score conveys how the culture clash over class between its workers and those who funded it, ripped apart Silicon Valley and created an explosion of semiconductor companies that dominated from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s and beyond.
While Silicon Valley provided a greater egalitarian opportunity for the corporate man who worked there, women are seldom mentioned.
(Aside: At the start of my career in agency life I had LSI Logic as a client. LSI Logic was founded by Wilf Corrigan a veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor. Even then at the height of the dot com bubble; ‘real men’ were engineers or salesmen and women worked as secretaries or in public relations. As the company had grown their female corporate marketing manager had been pushed out of the headquarters and to the far flung European office, which was the smallest part of the business were she could do the least damage. I still remember how awkward it was to see her treated with distain by her main colleagues. She had many faults, but the treatment lacked decorum and discretion. This kind of culture is fostered from the top of an organisation down. Despite all this she had still been granted shares in the business and a good deal of share options meaning she could be comfortably well off and fund various American christian endeavours.
I even got to meet Corrigan, the son of a Liverpool docker came across as a Silicon Valley analogue of Michael Gambon’s character in The Layer Cake – rich but not sophisticated. Someone who mistook his mix of hard work and good fortune as a divine right.)
While much is said about the egalitarian nature of David Packard, William Hewlett and Bob Noyce, they still had the social conservatism of Leave It To Beaver. Malone eulogised Hewlett and Packard in his later award winning business history Bill and Dave. The Big Score portrays them with a clearer eye. But Bill and Dave came out later on when Silicon Valley was starting to lose its moral compass. H-P under Carly Fiorina had ruptured the H-P way and was an indicator of what was to come – so Malone recast them as mythical heroes.
Silicon Valley soap opera
Malone’s description in The Big Score of the break away of talent from Shockley Labs and Fairchild Semiconductor is accurate. But the story itself is engaging in the same way that the family drama of the soap operas that my Mam used to follow.
Stripe Press
Stripe Press have given The Big Score a much needed needed design refresh. They typography makes it easy to read and the book is immensely well read. The hardback cover, binding and paper are high quality for a book of this nature. It is the kind of book that will be an heirloom that can be handed on down to the next generation. If not for the value, for the historical knowledge. Beyond the self penned introduction at the front, the contents of the book itself were left alone.
Recommendation?
If you are student of Silicon Valley history or have read Malone’s other books The Big Score is a great complementary read. The republishing of the book by Stripe Press is timely given the fads of the metaverse and NFTs that have swept through the technology sector recently.
However if you wanted one book to start you off on your Silicon Valley journey, I wouldn’t recommend it. I would suggest that you read the following books before getting to The Big Score. Its not because these books are better, but that they provide a better initial entry point into the world of Silicon Valley and its history. Malone’s book was written relatively early one and other books can provide a better basic knowledge framework because of The Big Score‘s age:
Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely was something so different to what I’d been used to. I’d worked in industry, but hadn’t experienced anything like this. There are similarly great books to read like Fire In The Valley and Where Wizards Stay Up Late – but they aren’t as entertaining to read as Accidental Empires and pull their punches in order to be seen as ‘serious’ business books
Architects Of The Web by Robert H. Reid. He wrote up the profiles of many of the pioneer web companies including Netscape, Real Networks, Marimba, Yahoo! and Silicon Graphics. It’s helpful to revisit the future the way it was envisaged during the late 1990s and see how the future has changed.
Bill and Dave by Michael Malone tells the story of Silicon Valley pioneers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Nowadays people think of them as just a brand of laptops or printers. But Hewlett Packard was much more. They pioneered the Silicon Valley start-up, their successor businesses Agilient, HPE and HP. Bill and Dave’s biggest impact was in Silicon Valley culture and lore. They built the company in a garage and started the egalitarian culture with The HP Way.
Chip War by Chris Miller. Miller is a think tank wonk and history professor who tells the story of the semiconductor industry specifically through its relationship with the military industrial complex and its relationship with national security. Chip War deservedly was recommended as one of the FT’s business book’s of the year 2022.
Dogfight by Fred Vogelstein. Fred Vogelstein is an experienced journalist who most notably covered the technology sector for Wired magazine. If your familiarity with the tech industry starts with Google and Apple. Dogfight is a great entry point.
The New, New Thing by Michael Lewis. Pretty much every book that Lewis writes will compare unfavourably to his first book Liar’s Poker, but that book doesn’t mean that The New, New Thing shouldn’t be read. The book profiles Jim Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics and aimed at the time to turn the healthcare industry with a new project. Lewis is capturing Clark when he is past his prime from a creative point of view. What Lewis does capture is the optimism and hubris in Silicon Valley that it can change anything.
What The Dormouse Said by John Markoff. John Markoff is one of the titans of reporting on the business of technology alongside Steve Lohr and Walt Mossberg. In this book Markoff draws a line between the counterculture of the 1960s and the personal computing revolution through to Web 2.0
Valley of Genius by Adam Fisher promises to be ‘the uncensored history of Silicon Valley’ based on stories that founders and programmers told to each other. All of which begs the question how much is myth making and how much is true?
Valley of Genius front cover
Getting to the truth
Having worked for Silicon Valley clients and in-house at Yahoo!; I recognise that the truth doesn’t get out there and the myth making is largely self-serving. There is also a big question about how far the collective memory actually goes back.
Finally, there is the challenge of how big tech companies have got so good at controlling their story in the wider world. Whether it was keeping close tabs on journalists like Fred Vogelstein found out while working at Wired magazine, through Frank X Shaw’s reputation for robust rebuttal, funded their own media outlets like Pando Daily and eventually disintermediated the media altogether.
Adam Fisher
Adam Fisher grew up in the Bay Area and became a journalist and later editor at Wired. He left there and freelanced for a number of publications, branching out from technology writing to other areas like travel and tourism.
Style
The most noticeable thing about Valley of Genius when you get into it is that there is no prose. It is all dialogue. Fisher has cut together segments of interviews to tell a story. Sometimes it feels like people around a table, other times it feels more disjointed.
The book is described as an oral history and Fisher in his interviews describes the process as being like putting together documentary interviews.
Fisher went out and interviewed many of the great and the good of Silicon Valley to get this material, however given some of the soundbites were things I had heard before such as Steve Jobs talking about a computer as a ‘bicycle of the mind’; I was not sure if these people like to self reference or if Fisher has interspersed his interviews with archival material. Right at the end of the book, Fisher comes a list of people by chapter and where he had to source secondhand quotes from.
I’ve read a number of books on Silicon Valley over the years, so had a frame of reference and I had context, so I found Valley of Genius enjoyable to read. But for someone who is coming to the subject with just a cursory knowledge of Silicon Valley, there is benefits to having a guide. Reading the quotes without understanding the context, or having been to Silicon Valley still leaves you outside.
I honestly don’t know if Fisher would have been a good guide, so him removing his voice from the book maybe less of a loss than we might think. But a new reader to the subject matter would benefit from a guide like Michael S. Malone or the insider snark of Robert X. Cringely (aka Mark Stephens). Fisher’s book Valley of Genius is a book for insiders and future academics who might be looking at the history of Silicon Valley in the future. According to Fisher, he managed to secure the last interview that Bob Taylor ever gave. Bob Taylor played key roles in moving Silicon Valley forward while in managerial positions at NASA, ARPA and XEROX PARC. In those interview quotes are more granular aspects of things, like Nolan Bushnell having a champagne party on the grass outside the offices of a recently bankrupt competitor, or that the video card to power the monitor used in Doug Engelbart measured about 3 foot by 4 foot in size.
It’s also a very one dimensional view of Silicon Valley. It largely misses out hardware and hard innovation; which is problematic for a technology hub that is competing against China and India for that matter. There is no 3Com, Cisco or Juniper Networks. The hardware story is very much lacking, there is no Intel, AMD or Nvidia, Sun Microsystems or SGI. It is largely a consumer technology vision that writes out businesses like Oracle and Salesforce together with the characters that lead them.
Plot line
Valley of Genius ignores a good deal of early Silicon Valley, such as the the pre-war nature of Stanford, Varian, Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s garage start-up, Shockley Labs, the treacherous eight, defence contracting and the missile age.
Mother of all demos
Instead Valley of Genius history starts at 1968, when Dough Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute provides the Mother of all Demos to a mix of academics, government people from the likes of the department of defense and technologists.
Engelbart talks about his developments in 1986
He the talked about his career on the Google campus in 2007.
Atari
The story moves on to Atari and Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell was responsible for popularising computer games and arcade consoles. Bushnell was a bridge between the counter culture and Silicon Valley hustle. A few chapters later Valley of Genius also covers the acquisition and eventual (first) failure of Atari.
Here’s Bushnell being interviewed for the 50th anniversary of Atari by IGN.
Bushnell did a Google Talk a number of years ago as well.
Xerox PARC
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) was a west coast R&D facility put together by Xerox to understand what the future of work would look like. They had already realised that it would be computerised. From PARC came modern computers, local area networks, file servers, laser printers and productivity software.
Apple
In separate chapters Valley of Genius covers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s commercialisation of phone hacking tools, and the evolution of the Apple computer line up from the Apple II to the Macintosh.
Retailer High Technology did the first adverts featuring the Apple II computer
Which was a far more budget affair than Apple’s own launch of the Machintosh.
The book goes on to cover the return of CEO Steve Jobs and the rejuvenation of Apple as a business including the iPod, iPhone and iPad through to the death of Jobs.
The hacker ethic, or hacker culture
The hacker ethic or culture, a digital equivalent of the person who tinkers away with things in a shed or garage has their own section. The section is atemporal in nature, which I can understand to a certain extent. Steve Wozniak came out of hacker culture, as have many software developers over time.
Fisher focuses on what hacker culture is, rather than what it means (both good and bad). I would recommend Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution as a companion to this chapter in Valley of Genius. The copy I read years ago was published by Penguin, but O’Reilly have re-published it as the book this is part of myth-making and cultural norming in software development teams.
The WeLL
The WeLL was the proto-online community that is still going and features first generation digerati such as journalist Wendy Grossman, the founders of Wired magazine and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling.
Stewart Brand talked about the founding of The WeLL during a Google hosted talk
The WeLL never scaled in the same way that we think about social networks now but it has quality discussions and is much kinder than Twitter or Reddit.
VPL
VPL was a failed start-up in the mid-1990s that set much of the expectations and tempo on VR to this day. You will most likely know it from the VR suit featured in The Lawnmower Man movie. I covered it in more depth in my metaverse discussion paper.
General Magic
Take a series of burnt out Apple employees and have them invent a predecessor of the net appliance or smartphone. That was General Magic and it was a glorious failure. Sarah Kerruish’s documentary on General Magic tells the story much better.
Wired magazine
Wired magazine gets its own chapter. it represented a way of melding culture and technology. I had read Wired before I had used the web, but it gave me a good idea of what to expect. But I don’t know if it is more important than ZDnet or other technology publishing houses. Valley of Genius goes on to celebrate Wired’s online endeavours including HotWired, Suck – a sarcastic version of Wired and Webmonkey – which taught a lot of people web development skills and probably doesn’t get the love it deserves in Valley of Genius. Mondo 2000, a rival to Wired in terms of setting the cultural zeitgeist for technologists also gets a chapter.
Pixar
Pixar as a Silicon Valley story is an accident due to two things
George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic being based in North California rather than in Los Angeles
Steve Jobs looking for a project post-Apple
But it didn’t necessarily move Silicon Valley forward.
Netscape
The jump to Netscape as the first commercial browser makes sense. AOL, AT&T True Experience, CompuServe and Prodigy services were all driven by businesses outside the traditional Silicon Valley space.
At the time Netscape seemed as much about the crazy public valuation of the business which was emblematic of the dot com boom, as it was about the software that would kick off the open web. These kind of valuations re-emerged with businesses like Uber and WeWork.
eBay
eBay was the standout e-commerce play for Silicon Valley. Amazon was a Seattle company and so was an outsider in a similar way that Microsoft always had been. eBay was also founded by an ex-General Magic employee and so was part of Silicon Valley’s version of ‘Rock family trees‘. We see this even now with the ‘PayPal mafia’.
Google
Google changed the web experience that Silicon Valley had pioneered via Yahoo! and Excite. Brin and Page became a key point of focus in Valley of Genius. However, this ignores the complexity both around search and the development of foundational web technologies that other companies produced. If you are interested about the nature and history of Google, Steven Levy’s In The Plex is probably a better option to read.
Google’s move to pay per click advertising gets its own chapter that greatly reduces the complexity of the real story.
Napster
Napster was the poster child of market value destruction and disruption that predated Uber and its ilk.
Dot bomb
The dot com boom can be charted from the last quarter of 1995 and reached its nadir in the last quarter of 2002.
Eric Steiner tells his tale as the CEO of Inktomi through the dot com boom and bust
Valley of Genius covers it in terms of its sociological impact on the Bay Area, as much as its economic impact. The reality is more complex, even the dot.com label attached to it is a misnomer. It encompassed telecoms, networking hardware, datacenters and more in terms of its impact rather than just e-businesses.
Facebook
While Facebook was an east coast invention, the movement of the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg west saw a cultural change in Silicon Valley that took it down a much darker patch. By comparison Twitter in its start-up phase looked more like Atari in terms of its counterculture influence.
Future gazing
At the end of the book there is a section on future gazing, which became what made Silicon Valley great. The business model was prioritised over innovation. Veteran journalist John Markoff even talked about how Salesforce had moved to a ‘vertical campus’ model with Salesforce tower. Which is how every other business in places like Singapore, Hong Kong and even Wall Street work anyway.
There was a singular lack of reflection on challenges ahead or areas of introspection by the people telling these stories. If anything, that was what concerned me the most about the book. Innovation is at a technological, scientific and socio-cultural cross-roads and the inhabitants of the Valley of Genius apparently doesn’t have a clue. More on the book here. You can find more of my book reviews here.
Extra content – Valley of Genius promotional tour interviews
Panel hosted by Adam Fisher to promote the Valley of Genius book
Leo LePort interviews Fisher on Valley of Genius at the time of its launch.
This post on AI and creativity was inspired by experiments being done at work by a member of our design department. They had been using Midjourney to create images within a minute of receiving an initial set of words as creative prompts.
For example we created this surreal image which fits somewhere between Christian kitsch familiar to catholic households around the world and a touch of Syd Mead‘s visual futurism. This comes from the prompt.
Jesus fighting alongside the US Air Force
https://flic.kr/p/2nSGwLB
Other efforts weren’t successful, we had faces featuring eyes with two pupils and when it tried to render round shapes, it didn’t know when to stop. The hands would go on and on as a twisted mass of flesh. This could be resolved by creating a human character in a service like MetaHuman and uploading that to Midjourney as a base model instead.
How neural networks drive AI and creativity?
Midjourney works using two neural networks. The first works to render an image. The second compares the processing image to exemplars from a data bank of images. There is a back and forth exchange between the two networks until a number of variants are rendered. At this point the human operator is given a choice, or they can choose to have other variations created if the originals don’t meet their requirements.
These images can be rendered in high resolution allowing for an amazing level of detail.
Dystopian vibes
The dystopian feel of the use of AI and creativity is down to a few different factors.
The first reason is that dystopia is at the centre of our cultural zeitgiest in the west. Documentary maker Adam Curtis covers it really well in this discussion with with the Joe Politics channel on YouTube. This zeitgeist affects the type of imagery that the AI has available to draw upon and the kind of prompts that people use to create AI images.
Secondly, the use of AI to ‘create’ something lacks the feeling and collective emotional experiences of a real person. Those elements can’t be captured in prompts which is why images land with the sensation of a dead fish.
What does AI and creativity mean for agencies?
Concepting
The most immediate impact could be in rapid concepting, analogous to how rapid prototyping for manufacturing design. Creative teams would still need to conceive of ideas but concepts could then be brought to live in minutes.
It’s as far away from the black marker and pad that creative directors traditionally used; as paste up graphic design techniques from the use of desktop publishing software that started to impact the design world in the mid to late 1980s.
News illustrations and graphic novels show the way
One of the first areas that is really shaken up by AI and creativity has been the world of the political cartoonist and news illustrator. At the moment newspapers and news magazines pay skilled artists to develop and conceptual designs that convey a political concept.
A good example of this is the covers of The Economist magazine. However things are starting to change. US political publication The Bulwark has already started using AI generated illustrations processed by Midjourney. Midjourney has also been used to create graphic novels.
One could easily see how this might be extended into business-to-business marketing for intangible products like software and services.
Production
The hyper-realistic effects that AI can produce is likely to inspire a desire in clients to use them more often for cost effective production costs. At the moment however, the results can be very hit and miss. There is a problem with hands, faces, interlocking round shapes and a ‘dead’ look to the work.
Social implications
At first we had a discussion about what happens to designers? Were they doomed? Should there be a universal income for them or should they march in the streets to ? How could the technology be stopped?
I wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine in this discussion. I pointed out that over the past few centuries, capital won out over labour every time. So people only kept their jobs if they cost less than the process to automate their tasks.
Globalisation versus automation
London like a few other cities have ad agency work done that is designed for global audiences. At the moment I work on campaigns designed for markets including: the UK and Ireland, Spain, Italy, the US, Vietnam and Japan. Globalisation seems to have benefited hub cities rather than moved the work to cheaper locales.
This in sharp contrast to what happened to British manufacturing. Whole sectors largely disappeared:
Steel making
Textile mills
Shipbuilding
Car manufacturing
Chemical industry
Pharmaceutical manufacturing
Engineering and fabrication
Where capacity was spared, it was largely down to the UK being a good point of entry into the European Union. As the number of countries expanded new manufacturing jobs moved east; and workers moved west to fill workforce needs in established UK factories depressing salaries.
Research shows that globalization only accounts for 13 percent of job loss in US manufacturing while 88 percent of losses were from automation including robotic manufacturing. In fact, availability of ever-cheaper automation options combined with uncertainty in the global supply chain has led to a resurgence in “onshoring” manufacturing.
Automation has been the quiet destructor of roles. During the 1960s businesses had typing pools and secretaries. Many of these roles disappeared due to desktop computers, office productivity software and the democratisation of touch typing as a skill.
The Technium
Even if labour won out over capital in the UK, there is no guarantee that they would be able to stop the march of technology. Kevin Kelly in his book What Technology Wants shares the idea of ‘The Technium’. The idea behind The Technium is that technology has a momentum of its own building on previous progress. Kelly goes as far to describe it as a super organism of technology. He believes that it exerts a force that is partly cultural with technology influencing and being in turn being influenced by technology. All of which means adaption and accommodation are likely to be the way forward for now.
Adaptation
While people don’t realise it, you’ve been using what could be termed AI for decades:
Autofocus on a camera
Losing ‘shake’ in camcorder and smartphone video
Programmes in a microwave the attempt to cook a casserole or baked potato
Predictive text (although it seems to have become more stupid over time)
Siri, Alexa and Google’s various search functions
In the case of a designer it would also include tools like the ‘lasso’ function in Photoshop that automatically cuts around objects including frizzy hair on a model. So it’s a bit late in the day for people to get squeamish about AI and creativity. Dominant creative software company Adobe sees the place of AI and creativity more as a technology to augment designers in their work rather than replace them. Much of the current Adobe focus seems to be on lowering the on-ramp for new users of their software packages.
There will be more of a challenge for supporting professions like photographers. Fashion brand Hugo Boss is looking to 3D AI powered design to aid in product design and 3D rendering threatening product photography for websites, look books and catalogues.
Limitations of AI and Creativity
One of the things that my colleagues said which really struck with me was ‘if an AI told the world’s funniest joke’ would it know that it was funny? Software is being used to track emotional response, but it wouldn’t necessarily know why something was funny.
The AI can’t be coded with a summation of life experiences, it can analyse emotions, but as far as we know doesn’t experience them yet. This probably explains why Studio Ghibli and Disney animation feels like it has much more life in it than the best AI renders.
Is it art?
Auction houses have sold works generated using AI, but is the art in the creation of the work, or in the decision to use an AI to do the work and thinking of the artist behind that idea? AI can produce works as they have existed before and mash-up genres and ideas, but it wouldn’t be able (at the moment) to create something completely novel through a leap of abstraction, such as a concept like Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture ‘Fountain‘.
AI images can be nice, but do they involve an illusion of creativity? Everything that appears in an AI image is depended on the inputs that the AI receives and the content in image banks that it uses as a reference – which is the reason why AIs often sign works with an indecipherable script.
Do artist styles have to be better protected as part of their IP as well as their works?
IP issues goes beyond artists. We created an artistic rendering of Pokemon character ‘Pikachu’ on Midjourney using the prompt
Definitely not a pikachu
In conclusion
If you’re a creative we eventually managed to get to four thoughts from the discussion:
In the grand scheme of things, change is the only constant
AI has been changing things and will continue to do so
It is inevitable that there willl be some automation and augmentation happening in the creative professions such as design
In the words of Douglas Adams book Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy ‘Don’t Panic’ – but be prepared to adapt and learn new skills and develop new areas of expertise
