00:11:24 · Ruby Justice Thelot
If my Roku is not... My Roku homepage is not how I want it to be, and I've seen someone already do it and change it, then I can also build my own calmer interface. And when I talk about a desire for us to be more self determined and decide how we use technology, this is, I think, where we're gonna see the most, I think, let's say, individual creativity where, okay, how do I remake my home screen? How do I remake my mail app in order for it to serve me? And so this calmer interface, I think we're gonna see a lot of products come out, but I think we're gonna see a lot of tinkering, you know, a lot of homebrew software at that intersection of simplification and software. And why I think this this this intersection is the most important is because hardware is a little hard to do still to this day. Right? You you can't expect someone to build their own phone. However, the problem with just like a main bear is that you you might have different needs. Right? But the calmer interface allows you to select how you want to simplify your own relationship with your phone. And I think that's the most important part. Because if you just have a sort of blanket, calm or dumb homepage or whatever it is, that might not specifically meet your needs. What I want us to recognize, I think, is that we are all different, and we all have different needs from a technology. Sometimes I jokingly say that I think it is crazy that we all have the same phone in 2026 because we're all so different. And so if I had to bet, of course, right, we're we're we're often making predictions here at Media Studies, is that we will see the rise of calmer interfaces but made by individuals for individuals because people have specific needs as to how they want to make and design their plain, quote unquote, interfaces. So we're gonna keep an eye on PARC technology. Of course, we talked about it recently, but it is still, I think, very much on our mind as people deal and reckon with, of course, their limited attentions. The other one, I think, is super, super fun. Now if you're online, you're probably aware of the phenomenon of the Etsy witch. An Etsy witch is a person who, on Etsy, sells curses, hexes, protections, What I can only describe as a metaphysical product, protection or attack, of course. It could be, dark arts or, whatever the white arts, whatever it's called in Harry Potter.
00:14:12 · Ruby Justice Thelot
And it's very interesting because they've seen a big rise in the last, I wanna say, five years. Right? When I took a look at the Google Trends, I saw a hundred percent and fifty... A 150% increase in the popularity and search terms for Etsy witches. They're big in the news because specific political candidates or political pundits got hexed, and it seems that some of these curses may have worked, right? But let me go back a little bit. The Etsy witches are very interesting because they've been on the internet for a long time. Even on the Usenet, there were early examples of people being arcane with technology. On eBay, there was over 100,000 people selling these metaphysical products until eBay then banned them in 2012. Technically, they were also banned on Etsy in 2015, but it seems that they found some kind of workaround to still be on the platform. When I took a look at TikTok, it seemed like in spite of us having a lot of conversation... There's a there's a New York Times article run run by TM Brown. Shout out TM, Teddy, a friend of the pod, who wrote about this in 2023. Right? He said in his article, was a big biz. People were making a lot of money selling these curses and protections and hexes, in spite of it, of course, being banned on Etsy since 2015. And yet, there's a bit of a disconnect between the amount of news that I've seen and reports I've seen on Etsy witches and then the presence on some of the TikToks. So we have a couple of viral posts oftentimes, but by and large, the Etsy Witch tag itself only has 20 ks. The Witch talk itself is much larger. But it's very interesting to see whether or not people are actually buying these things. In the article, we're seeing quite a bit of revenue driven to some of these vendors. I looked at it myself and to get a career spell, it's $12.05 There's some that are a bit more expensive, 50. But, yeah, we're seeing, I think, these very interesting novel businesses based on this connection between faith, belief, witchcraft, and technology. We'll spend some time at a later time really going deep into this connection between technology and faith and religion. But I think the signal is really hot. One thing we're taking a look at right now is, the upcoming book by Laura Pitcher, of course, another friend of the pod.
00:16:55 · Ruby Justice Thelot
Laura's book is called This Message Is For You, and it studies this relationship we have with faith and algorithms. So This Message Is For You was a, it's a hook, if you will. It's the first sentence on, a lot of TikToks, which were meant to be a little esoteric. So if you encountered the specific video, the specific short form content, and it said, start with this message for you, it meant that you had been selected by the album to receive this blessing, to receive this positive message or whatnot. And so in Laura's book, think she studies the history of our ascribing of supernatural characteristics to a lot of different technologies. Oftentimes, when I talk about these topics, I like to go back to sort of early and early tech. Right? There's there's a few books on this. There's the Victorian Internet. That's a book on the topic. I'm a big fan of Haunted Media by Jeffrey Sconce. Right? And Jeffrey's premise is very interesting, that all media is haunted. My own sort of turn of phrase on this is that with every new technology, we find new ways of believing. Jeffrey's example is the spiritualists who, upon the invention of the telegraph, sought to use it to speak to the netherworlds. Right? Because it had wireless communication, I guess they assumed that it could connect to the heavens, the dead people, it was used in a lot of these supernatural, procedures in which people were contacting the lost loved ones, or even try to predict the future. And with each new technological innovation, I think we often see this, right, with the radio. There was radio surfing, the ability to hear coded messages in the radio signals. Same thing with TD static. People often saw and heard specific messages or codes or signals in the TD static. And so do I think that the algorithm is different right now? I think that the technology is different, right? But I think our impulse to ascribe these supernatural capabilities are still the same that we had in Victorian England with radio, with TV. It is now just with the algorithm. So in other words, right, this whole thing on the Etsy witch. With each new technology we have new ways of believing.
00:19:27 · Ruby Justice Thelot
So why are Etsy witches potentially popular, it's because we have now the ability to connect to a whole new set of vendors or people who are providing these services, but they are no different than the phone book mediums which were very popular also in the 80s and 90s. I think T. M. Brown writes about this in his article. So there's a bit of a continuation of an existing behavior here. Will they be debunked? Will they be taken off the platforms? Who knows? Right? They might start using coded language. They might start finding other ways of selling their wares outside of Etsy, outside of eBay. But mind you, it was 100,000 vendors at the time. So I think there's a lot of supply for this, and we're still doing some more research to actually assess the true demand for some of these services. We are very lucky today because we are here in person. And here in person, we will have an amazing guest, Puccini, who's going to join us in about ten or so minutes, where we will talk about the rise of the creative technologist. As I said before, I'm here in San Francisco. It's amazing to be here. It is, in many ways, like, a hotbed for this intersection between creativity and tech. But before we jump into the actual conversation, I did want to talk about, like, what is this thing called a creative technologist? Right? It's a bit of a niche term. It's a bit of a misunderstood term. By and large, my sense, that is a person who is making creative projects, sometimes art with technology. But that is not... That did not start in the nineties. That did not start in the thousands. There's a rich history of collaborations between engineering and artists. This history is, you know, super well documented. I will name three groups, three labs that were very, very big on pushing the collaboration between technologists and artists. The first one you may know, of course, is Bell Labs, right? Whether it be Herbert Franke or Vera Bonnar, A lot of people worked with Bell Labs. They had access to the latest and frontier tech of the time, and they got some resources and some help to then go and work and use these tools. The Bell Labs model was extremely interesting because they essentially opened up doors of their labs and allowed the artist to work there on a daily basis, a salary, get some resources, get some help, and then just go make and create.
00:22:13 · Ruby Justice Thelot
Similarly, right, there's also Xerox PARC. Right? Xerox PARC was another one of these hubs, skunk works, there's lot of collaboration between artists and engineers. These would be in the sixties and seventies, of course. Another group that I would be remiss not to mention is EAT, Experiments in Art and Technology, started in part by Robert Rauschenberg. There were... Once again, this idea is spent in... At the time in New York on how do you facilitate collaboration between engineers and artists. And so to me, the field of creative technology is a... You know, it has inherited the philosophy of a lot of these collaboration spaces, of Xerox PARC, of EAT, of Bell Labs. And so when Google, you know, starts its creative lab, to me, it is continuing the age old tradition of seeing what artists can do with front... Frontier tech. Because, you know, quite frankly, a lot of these users are transgressive. A lot of them break the the tools. Right? And the artist expands the possibility of what can be made with the device, with the technology, with the tool. I think a lot about the Xerox machine in my own research on the work of, say, a Norman Shapiro or even how Sol LeWitt used the Xerox machine. A photocopier seems like a very banal instrument, but in the in the hands of Norman Shapiro, in the hands of Sol LeWitt, right, who are these two amazing artists, they become just like fountains of of of possibility, of potential. Sol LeWitt actually makes a book with the Xerox machine. He invites a bunch of his friends. They all use a photocopier, and they make this amazing zine that you can actually probably still find online as a PDF. Norman Shapiro is a book artist, and so he's making all these zines in these books. He's a gay man, and so he uses it to tell his own unique stories that potentially would not be published elsewhere. And so the Center for Book Arts in New York has a great collection of Shapiro's work, and I'm currently doing a fellowship there, researching his work. So that's why this interest in technology and art is very, interesting to me. And so I wanted to see how hot is the term to creative technologists? How popular is it really? One of the sort of big mentions, of course, was the the start of the role of creative technologists at Google in 2014.
00:24:55 · Ruby Justice Thelot
The first uses, I think, date technically from the mid-1900s, but the actual job title, prop 2005, in the mid aughts. Google makes it more popular, of course, with its own title in 2014. And then one thing we'll post for sure is the graph of the Google Trends. So you can see that there was a steady sort of interest in the field, but it really jumped in 2025. And I think in part this is due to the unlock of creativity led by artificial intelligence. If people had ideas for, like, novel interfaces, novel things to do with the computer, their limitation was in part due to their technical ability. I was recently talking to Robert Gallardo, who perhaps you'll hear about very, very soon. And it is truly a large unlock for a creative to be able to do their own work, specifically on the computer, and not have to deal with an agency or a third party that actually makes the code. And so I think the big jump we are seeing here in creative technology is because it is easier to code now. And so creatives, artists, people who are just tinkering, I think are at a point in time where they are having these ideas that were previously very hard to bring to fruition. And now armed with the latest large language models, armed with the latest coding implements, they find themselves in Bell Labs, in Xerox PARC, working with EAT, but in the comfort of their own bedrooms. And so what once required the buy in from a large corporation to give you access to compute, to give you access to tools and devices, I think now is made much easier by the broadening of possibility, by the broadening of accessibility that is led by AI, specifically in the field of creative technology. In parts because AI is just very good at coding, so we have an idea of that sort. It becomes much easier to bring it to fruition, to bring it to life. Now, one thing that's interesting is that there's a newer term also that's often used in the tech industry, design engineer. That term is actually much more popular than creative technologists. So creative technologists still remains a little bit marginal. And though there are some labs across different companies, big tech companies, design engineer has really jumped up in popularity over and above creative technologists. So, one of the things me and Sofia want to talk about is what actually is the role of the creative technologist in the tech industry? Right?