I WAS POSTMODERN BEFORE I KNEW THE WORD

A Signal Note from the Operator — By Hoang-Dan Pham

Hoang-Dan Pham — the originator of Algorithmic Postmodernism with Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Deleuze. AI-generated image.

I posted a note about Algorithmic Postmodernism on r/CriticalTheory, to see what real readers of this stuff would do to it. Most of it was what I expected, a couple of comments waving it off as AI-written and moving on. But one reply actually engaged, someone who knew Lyotard and Baudrillard well and pushed back on the term directly, and that exchange made the idea better. Thread’s here if you want it →

Backstory, for anyone wondering how an artist ends up quoting French theorists. I’m not an academic. I make things with my hands, that’s grown into running HFP and, apparently, coining theory terms too. Truth is, Southeast Asian artists tend to be pretty pure people, mostly because we haven’t been poisoned by Western elitism yet. Most of us grew up believing good art is art that looks good. But, if that were actually how it worked I should’ve been famous a long time ago. So at some point I stopped trusting any “grand narrative” about what makes work valuable, mine or anyone else’s. That distrust was already in place before I had a word for it. Years later “postmodernism” showed up on some Reddit thread I was scrolling through, I looked it up out of curiosity, and there was a whole shelf of French theorists who’d written my exact suspicion down decades earlier and given it a name.

So I went and read into it properly. AI did most of the heavy lifting getting me through Lyotard and Baudrillard, and I don’t feel weird about that, that’s a door that used to be locked. Real reason I leaned on it: those guys are bloated writers, and I don’t have the patience to wade through three hundred pages to get one idea that could’ve been a paragraph. I respect the thinking, not the word count, and I’m not going to pretend a text is smarter for being harder to get through. But reading the theory was never the point. Algorithmic Postmodernism isn’t something I observe from a distance or feel cynical about, it’s something I operate inside of. Understanding a system isn’t submission to it. That’s the whole framework, and the actual argument for it lives in the Playbook, not here: Where Algorithmic Postmodernism Departs From Its Own Ancestors →