Every year I eagerly await tom7's video for SIGBOVIK. He is such a brilliant and funny person, and everything he shares is such a treat. I love his work and his play, and I think most folks on HN will too.
The best way I've come to describe glitch art in my papers or talks with peers is that a "glitch" in the context of glitch art is the deliberate abuse of a format of media, taking advantage of either noise, compression schemes, or undefined behavior to produce media that would otherwise not exist (due to contraints of, say, a compression algorithm and a binary format like JPEG), or to reproduce media that is discarded by these (and other) mechanisms of the format (The Ghost in the MP3[0] is a fantastic, and arguably the pioneering work in this regard).
Formats such as circuitbending are alien to me, as I primarily work with digital and occasionally analog photos and videos, but generally follow the same principles of breaking away from intended use of some set of rules to express illegal states.
Plenty of incredible works of art and story telling use glitch art to evoke feelings and notions of "brokenness" or surreality. Some pieces that come to mind are Adventure Time S5E15: A Glitch is a Glitch, created by artist David OReilly[0] and the music video for A$AP Mob - Yamborghini High made by editor Uncle Luc[1].
This of course doesnt even begin to touch on the influences glitch art has had on music and audio - it's arguable that glitch art has its origins in printing, photography/film, and in electronic music, but most deliberate uses of "glitches" as artistic vehicles tended to arise during the early eras of electronic music production. Rosa Menkman speaks in depth about the origins of glitch art in the music scene in her paper The Glitch Moment(um)[2].
The quintessential example of glitch art, imo, is Adult Swim's Off the Air, which compiles various short animations and music cut together with various datamoshed transitions. While the glitch stuff isn't always the central focus it definitely goes a long way towards setting the trippy vibe they're going for.
There are too many excellent episodes to list but Animals is a great one to get a feel:
https://youtu.be/59QBOO6m210
And the Dan Deacon USA special episode might be peak Off The Air:
I can't imagine that the absurd number of greenhorns entering the industry due to their "vibecoding prowess", or the inevitable number of people in management that perpetuate this fantasy of nocoder devs has anything to do with it. Surely not.
People under age can obtain fake IDs, all over the world. This is illegal, but it still happens. At some point, it is ultimatey a parents responsibility to prevent their children from doing so by acting as a parent to their child and preventing them from engaging in destructive behavior. This is established law, even, in many countries, where a parent can be held accountable for the criminal actions of their children for failing to prevent it.
And frankly, I don't give enough of a shit about other peoples' kids to believe that internet usage should require identification like is being pushed by major governments. I want good things for these kids, I want them to grow up in a good society and a good world, and I dont want harm to come to them. But I recognize that a "good society" and a "good world" and one that minimizes harm to people is one where information is available without restrictions and without censorship and without the risk of a government that might decide it wants to commit genocide against you in the not-so-distant future using your search history to persecute you. Pardon my riffing off Flowbots' Handlebars there, but this really is the world that people live in today; powerful world-stage governments want to restrict information about topics they do not like, and are persecuting people who posess this information; the next steps are very, very well documented.
Creating the monster we are watching grow is not worth anything anyone could ever promise you.
This reminds me of a piece on folklore.org by Andy Hertzfeld[0], regarding Bill Atkinson. A "KPI" was introduced at Apple in which engineers were required to report how many lines of code they had written over the week. Bill (allegedly) claimed "-2000" (a completely, astonishingly negative report), and supposedly the managers reconsidered the validity of the "KPI" and stopped using it.
I don't know how true this is in fact, but I do know how true this is in my work - you cannot apply some arbitrary "make the number bigger" goal to everything and expect it to improve anything. It feels a bit weird seeing "write more lines of code" becoming a key metric again. It never worked, and is damn-near provably never going to work. The value of source code is not in any way tied to its quantity, but value still proves hard to quantify, 40 years later.
More tradespeople don't make more housing, capital and legislation do. Both capital and legislators (a disturbing number of whom are either landlords or realestate tycoons) are perversely incentivised to keep housing supplies low because that creates a market in which housing appreciates and generates more income than a market in which housing is plentiful.
