CONCEPT
Building New Conventions for a New World
The deliberate social process of establishing shared understandings that serve the full cooperative network of the AI world — the alternative to the default convention of the market that arrives when nobody builds anything better.
In the absence of deliberately established conventions, Becker observed across every art world he studied, the default convention is the convention of the market: whatever produces the most output at the lowest cost becomes the standard; whatever the most powerful participants prefer becomes the norm; whatever can be measured becomes the criterion of quality. The AI world's default conventions are already visible — sole credit to the builder, smooth fast voluminous output as quality, follower counts and revenue as evaluation, global labor arbitrage for support personnel. These are not good conventions. They are what arrives when nobody builds better. The alternative is not utopia but deliberate convention-building: the conscious, contested, imperfect social process of establishing shared understandings that serve the cooperative network as a whole rather than only its most visible nodes.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Becker would have been the first to insist this process