About this episode
Angelo Sotira discusses the evolution of the internet and the challenges of creating meaningful art in a world influenced by AI.
Angelo Sotira built DeviantArt at nineteen, and then spent the next two decades watching the internet grow up, get rich, and get mean. When he joined me on Keep Going, he was not doing the victory lap thing. He was trying to name what changed, and what it means for anyone trying to build something creative right now. He described the early internet as directed. People knew what was missing. They wanted communities, comments, and places to post work, and they built them from scratch because the infrastructure did not exist yet. Now, he says, you can recreate 95 percent of those platforms in a weekend. The hard part is not building the tool, it is making it matter. That is where his argument gets uncomfortable. Virality used to ride on something raw and human, and he thinks AI breaks the default assumption that what you are seeing is real. His view is that we are moving into a world where you should assume media is inauthentic until it is proven otherwise. That shift changes what spreads, what people trust, and how creators feel about putting work into the world. Layer is his response. It is a hardware company, a digital art display built to treat generative and kinetic art like…
People in this episode
Host: John Biggs
Guest: Angelo Sotira
Topics covered
- creativity
- internet evolution
- digital art
- AI impact
- community building
Keywords
- DeviantArt
- digital art
- AI
- creativity
- community
- Layer
- virality
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: DeviantArt, Layer
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