"Cheap to produce, free to distribute, yet still impossible to meaningfully automate, aesthetic production is an increasingly precarious vocation. The status associated with aesthetic novelty is eroding, and novelty itself has become difficult to eke out of a system in which everything is visible, accessible, and relativized. The graphic design profession is being strangled in a race to the bottom of the market, and the distributed network topology of the internet is largely responsible; aesthetics has, simply put, been disrupted.
Usually disruptions create new markets, which generate enormous wealth and value. In the case of aesthetics, much of this value has been soaked up by the existing infrastructure providers: PC manufacturers (hardware), Adobe, (software), advertising networks and aggregators (distribution). We do see vast growth in the number of boutique agencies, design studios, and so on. But as I have argued, the forces of technology that have created these markets are simultaneously destroying the monetizable value of the entire cultural category."
—Toby Shorin
