journal · °1 · essay · mmxxvi · 5 min
the last scarce thing is a person
read — generic beauty went free overnight
sometime in the last two years the price of a beautiful image fell to zero. this is what that costs, who it ruins, and the one thing it can never touch.
not the price of a good one. the price of a competent, symmetrical, tastefully-lit, on-trend, will-do-fine image. the kind that used to take a junior three days and a stock subscription. that image is now free, infinite, and available before you finish typing the sentence that describes it. a machine will hand you forty of them and forty more if you don't like those. it is genuinely good at this. we are not going to pretend otherwise — pretending is what nervous people do, and we are not nervous.
here is the part nobody wants to say out loud: most design was never more than that competent image. most logos, most sites, most brand systems were assembled from a shared library of moves everyone already knew. rounded sans, soft gradient, generous whitespace, a "bold" accent that was bold in 2019. that entire register — the safe, the pleasant, the nice — has just been commoditised down to the cost of electricity. it is over for generic beauty. it was always going to be. the machine only made it fast.
so if the thing you were selling was competence, you are now selling water by the river.
abundance kills value, always
this is not a technology story. it is an economics story wearing a technology costume. the rule is older than any of us: when the supply of a thing goes to infinity, its value goes to zero. it happened to hand-copied books. it happened to recorded sound. it happened to stock photography. the only question a maker ever has to answer is which side of the abundance they are standing on.
generic beauty is now on the wrong side. infinite supply, collapsing worth.
which means — and this is the whole essay, so read it twice — the only thing left with value is the thing the machine cannot flood the market with. a specific human. a person who spent years walking a road nobody else walked, in an order nobody else could reproduce, and came out the other end making work that is recognisably, stubbornly theirs. not better than the machine at being average. impossible for the machine to be, because being them took a life.
scarcity moved. it used to live in skill — knowing how to render, how to kern, how to build. skill is cheap now; the machine has all of it. scarcity now lives one level up, in point of view. in taste with a history behind it. in the un-copyable.
un-copyable is a biography, not a style
you cannot prompt your way to a person.
you can prompt your way to a style — "in the style of" is the most-used phrase on earth right now, and it produces exactly what you'd expect: the surface of someone, with nobody underneath. a style is a finish. a point of view is a spine. the machine copies finishes brilliantly and cannot manufacture a spine, because a spine is made of choices, and choices are made of years.
we can only speak for the two of us. one of us — rrrrip9 — makes sound, and grew one project from 0 to 280,000 and another from 10 million to 16 million doing it, which is not a vanity figure — it is proof that a specific ear moves specific people. the other — cyberbird xx — makes the body and its render: holograms, avatars, cyber-jewelry, twenty sold-out undisclosed editions across the netherlands for a night-culture that refuses to be photographed, and a residency at creative coding utrecht to keep pushing the render forward. none of that is a technique you can lift. it is a place two people arrived at by living toward it. that is the only kind of original there is now. everything else is a filter.
when the two of us make an identity, a site, a piece of moving image, you are not buying a look. you are buying the specific place we ended up. that place is the product. it is the one thing on the invoice the machine cannot regenerate at 3am for free.
we are not anti-machine, we are pro-scarce
let's kill the lazy read before it starts. this is not a manifesto against the tools. we use tools. cyberbird's whole practice is digital — code, real-time, the render as a medium, not an enemy. the machine is a fine brush. it is a catastrophic author. the distinction is everything.
the studios in real trouble are the prompt-farms: middle-layers who take your brief, feed it to the same model you could feed it yourself, and mark up the electricity as insight. that business has no floor. their scarce thing was access to competence, and competence just became a public utility. we don't compete with them and we don't fear them. we are selling the one input they don't have and can't buy — the actual people.
the smallness is not a limitation we apologise for. the smallness is the product.
this site is the argument
so, plainly, the offer. s3x is two named artists and no layer in between. rrrrip9 makes it sound. cyberbird xx makes it look and move. that is the entire org chart. there is no account manager translating your idea into a brief into a prompt into a deck. you talk to the two people whose hands are on the work, in one inbox, start to finish. the smallness is the guarantee that a specific point of view — and not a committee's average of one — reaches your project intact.
and look around this page. it is hand-built. the type, the timing, the one red, the heraldry, the pixel-3 in the corner — every decision here was made by a person who could defend it. that is on purpose, and it is the demonstration. a studio arguing that human authorship is the last scarce thing, on a site a machine could have generated, would be a joke. this site is the proof of concept for what we sell. you are standing inside the sample.
generic beauty is free now. take all of it you want. when you need the thing that isn't — the specific, the un-copyable, the two of us — the door is open.
— s3x, the house. amsterdam / arnhem, mmxxvi.
commissies open
need the un-copyable thing? tell us what it is, a rough budget and a date. one of the two of us answers.