Convention Collapse

Conventions are responses to constraints. When the constraint changes, the convention loses its rationale. Becker observed this pattern across every art world transition he studied: new technologies do not merely add capability to existing convention sets; they destabilize the conventions themselves. Photography destabilized portrait-painting conventions not because photographers were better painters but because the constraint that painting addressed — the absence of other means of realistic likeness — was eliminated. The conventions that had organized portrait painting did not survive unchanged. They transformed, gradually and contentiously, into something different. The AI world is in the early stages of an equivalent transformation. The convention collapse that occurred in Segal's Trivandrum training is the paradigmatic AI-era instance: the frontend/backend division of labor dissolved in five days because the translation cost it addressed no longer existed.