Today’s “creators” often romanticize rejection as if it automatically equals innovation, drawing a flattering parallel to the Impressionists, without earning it. That’s a kind of mythologized “struggle cosplay” — they imagine themselves as rebels, but often they’re not rebelling against anything substantive, and they’re certainly not bringing in new technique, ontology, or even deep formal inquiry. Just vibes.

Antiques dealer, machine psychologist. http://www.musicinphasespace.com

So maybe the more honest inversion is deep technique, then chose to deconstruct. Today, many start with deconstruction but skip the technique. Impressionists created new ontologies of seeing (light, time, perception). Today, many repeat ontologies handed to them by platform aesthetics, algorithmic bias, or superficial trend-hopping.

If anything, the new fight isn’t against an institution — it’s against entropy, against flattening by market logic (likes, views, sales), against creative illiteracy masked as punk, against the illusion that software-generated randomness = artistic risk, and for irl pollination — a deep cross-cultural, inter-temporal goo that creates new roots, not just cosplay.

Distillation does not scale— because it’s inherently anti-scale.

It’s about compressing vast, entangled knowledge into something potent, but that process requires more than a bunch of variables and context-awareness — all things that break under the weight of mass replication.

In tech and art alike, what scales is often flattened synthesis. .Every second startup uses the same stack, the same UX tropes, the same three case studies from Y Combinator. In art: You get mood boards disguised as originality. One-click nostalgia. “Vibes” curated through filters.

Real distillation  takes enormous synthesis and loses power when mass-produced. It’s non-transferable effort. You can show the output, but not the route. That’s why the deepest work now might need to be intentionally unscalable. Slower, more situated. Less visible. Something that can’t go viral, because it can’t be reprocessed without breaking.

There’s no longer a strong academic orthodoxy in art or tech to fight against.
The “institution” now is fragmentation, market capture, and noise — not a monolithic salon. So pretending to be an insurgent in a battlefield that no longer exists is pure theater. The real challenge now is not rebellion, but depth, original synthesis, and rigor in the absence of structure. Today’s problem is not rejection, it’s shallowness and lack of ontological grounding. Many artists and technologists imitate past forms (including rebellion) but haven’t created their own grammar or language of thought. They skip the distillation and internalization that allowed, say, Cézanne or even Duchamp to make radical moves from a position of proficiency