Blog on Jay Mollica

Habsburg Frogs

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the ancient Greek play The Frogs by Aristophanes, the god Dionysus decides there has been a decline in good theater, so he endeavors to retrieve the late playwright Euripides from Hades and bring him back to Athens. On his way he must cross Lake Acheron in a boat guided by Charon, where he is antagonized by a chorus of frogs. The god of excess arguing with a bunch of frogs on his way to hell seems like an apropos symbol for the times, so I decided to make a project around it.

New Literalism Comes for Museums

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last year The New Yorker published “The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies,” an essay by Namwali Serpell regarding the simplification of movie plots. This simplification emerged from the assumption that most people are looking at their phones while the movie plays, so themes need to feel familiar and dialogue needs to be redundant in order to make the viewer feel like they are not straining to keep up with the plot. The result is unchallenging works that are either sequels or rehashes of familiar fairy tales. The author laments that New Literalism is a sign of declining media literacy and an emergent cultural aversion to ambiguity.

Keeping the Cultural Uplands Alive

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sam Altman doesn’t understand the technology he’s building. In a recent New Yorker profile, neither he nor anyone else interviewed could quite explain how large language models produce what they produce, or what they’ll do next, or whether they pose an existential threat to the species. Altman holds this opacity up as a reason he should be the one in control of it. The move should be familiar to anyone who has watched an institution justify its authority by pointing to the complexity of what it manages and it is the latest, most aggressive instance of a much older pattern of governance, one that is also reshaping cultural institutions in ways the AI conversation may have missed.

The Post-Internet Museum

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2006 a new facet of art history was identified called “post-internet”, signifying art that has been made within the native context of the internet. That is, the internet is no longer regarded as a separate entity to daily life, it represents ideas and art that is made in a society fully saturated by connectivity and mass media the internet provides. Art made in this context interfaces with social media, web cams, video games, memes, corporate branding, and appropriation. The assumption was, we are all online first and going out into the world is secondary to our online lives.

A New Kind of Museum Guide

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An unacknowledged truth in museums is that you are either an audio tour person or not an audio tour person and no amount of persuading can convince you otherwise. This is a fixed part of your identity that you’re born with like your innate fear of snakes or preference for chocolate over vanilla. Furthermore, only a vanishingly small number of people are audio guide people. This stat will vary from museum to museum, but in aggregate it holds true. A recent study by a leading provider of audio guide technology, Nubart, estimated that only 2.47% of visitors engage with audio guide apps.

The Future of Museum Technology

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most people’s associations with technology come from media narratives about Silicon Valley. Teams of software engineers working at an accelerated pace, pumping out new software, new features, new designs. Museums on the other hand, work at an entirely different cadence. As the cost of technical labor skyrocketed in the 2010s, museum budgets failed to keep up. The result is an increasing gap between the public’s expectations of user experience and what a museum could reasonably provide. However, in the age of AI enabled software engineering, it is museums that perhaps have the most to gain.

Good Enough: Design In The Age of AI

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With the proliferation of AI there’s been a lot of concern that certain professions may be rendered obsolete. I would argue, the consolidation of web design by AI is a signal of what we think the internet is for rather than what design does. Today I’d like to take a look at the implications this technology has on the field of design.

Early web design was defined by free form aesthetics of Geocities and MySpace. In this era it was the job of the webmaster to handle design, development, and IT needs around an organization’s internet presence. The earliest websites were made before JavaScript, which meant there were no hidden menus, animations, or click events. All the information of the website had to be laid out in plain sight. This is the web people remember with nostalgia: A time before best practices, before JavaScript, before commercialization when one person could manage the presence for an entire Fortune 1000 organization.

Vibe Coding and the New IDE

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re following AI trends, you’ve seen the profession of software engineering change overnight. One veteran engineer after another has been saying they haven’t written any code in months, but rather rely purely on AI to produce work (aka vibe coding). In this year alone we are already seeing pure vibe coded apps get acquired. For instance, OpenClaw, an AI assistant, was bought by OpenAI and Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, by Meta. A friend of mine described a process where he has a plethora of terminal windows open with AI working on different tasks that brought to mind internet poker set ups I had seen where players rapidly flit through dozens of games at a time with their attention darting from one hand to the next making split second choices.