Lo-Fi Beats for Studying
How to push more through the human attention bottleneck
A recent installment of Kyle Chayka’s New Yorker column, “A Lo-Fi Rebellion Against AI,” documents a contemporary turn in visual design toward the janky, the obviously handmade, and the typo-ridden, framing this as a reaction to the glossy synthetic perfection of AI-generated imagery, or as a pursuit of authenticity that grows more desperate each day. “What these creations have in common are elements of deliberate casualness, accident, even confusion—qualities that an AI tool, trying to satisfy users with clean efficiency, would typically avoid,” Chayka writes. You could call this a trend, or you could interpret it as another footnote to the broader existential crisis that AI has induced, a challenge that continuously forces humans to assert our enduring relevance as our specific skills and roles feel like they’re being undermined.
The problem for the makers of lo-fi imagery is that this existential crisis, if it is indeed what motivates them, can’t be resolved at the level of aesthetics. AI can emulate most legible aesthetic styles easily enough; embedding any sort of recognizable pattern in digital content seems like one of the worst ways to prove your humanity, and if that pattern appears more “human” it just implies that the machines are just getting better at making us dance for them. As Venkatesh Rao has written, “Everything is now about AI except AI. AI is about the shapes of human beings.” Producing intentionally flawed content to assert one’s humanity is like solving an elaborate CAPTCHA.
Anyway, janky is often just a straightforward transformation of smooth, as illustrated by “lo-fi” being the name of an Instagram filter, as well as a keyword signifying the authorless sonic filler that populates lifeless Spotify playlists. Similarly, intentional typos and all-lowercase writing are transparent gimmicks which, as they become more recognizable, feel a bit tryhard, as does so much of what we encounter online, due to users’ growing ability to recognize cultural patterns and cheaply copy them, or wear them like Halloween costumes. Most people understand that smoking a cigarette is a way to look cool, and a multitude of such signifiers are now close at hand; digital posturing, unlike its physical counterpart, usually costs nothing. The term “tryhard” doesn’t deride effort itself, but rather a contextual dissonance, a clueless misplacement of that effort—and the worst kind of tryhard is one who is just savvy enough to think they’ve concealed their intentions: the lo-fi tryhard.
This is what Emily Segal’s essay on tasteslop recently articulated: the glib exploitation of legible cultural symbols in digital space. “Tasteslop is what happens when the classifying function is automated, overly explicit, or reduced to spitting out rote taste tokens,” Segal writes, describing its production as a mechanical process of copying and pasting. “Tasteslop is cultural capital after extraction, after it’s been through the blender.” Chayka’s piece on lo-fi aesthetics cites this essay, equating tasteslop with “instantaneous slickness,” but tasteslop’s definition doesn’t require it to be high-resolution, and tasteslop doesn’t need to be AI-generated either (an “influencer dinner for Claude at a classy restaurant” fits the definition). Tasteslop probably just happens to be glossy as a result of who’s using it and what they think is “tasteful”—a long hangover from the 2010s millennial aesthetic, which furnished much of tasteslop’s raw material.
REVOLT AGAINST THE MILLENNIAL AESTHETIC
The millennial aesthetic, as described by Molly Fischer in this piece from March 2020 (the very final days of the “long 2010s”), is a useful reference point for Chayka’s lo-fi thesis as well as tasteslop, both of which point to the fallout from digitally-induced cultural legibility. The millennial aesthetic wasn’t just a visual style—pastel colors, sans serif fonts, hard edges, flat design—but a structural product of Instagram and other social media that defined the decade. Fischer writes,
“‘Instagrammable’ is a term that does not mean ‘beautiful’ or even quite ‘photogenic’; it means something more like ‘readable.’ The viewer could scroll past an image and still grasp its meaning, e.g., ‘I saw fireworks,’ ‘I am on vacation,’ or ‘I have friends.’”