The philosophical context of font design is one of those niches of rarified contemporary hothouse cultural specialization that makes me thing, this is as far as we go, as a culture.
Reading these things I inevitably experience intellectual vertigo, the deep-zoom-into-a-fractal sense of perfectly accurate, almost totally unnecessary, precision at microscopy scale. It's more Gibson than Gibson, not least if you're aware of Douglas Hofstadter's obsession with "letter spirits" and their multidimensional relationship to GAI...
Maybe you should take a look in the mirror, we're all toiling in rarified contemporary hothouse cultural specialization.
"Hey, here's a cool article about a guy who spent a year creating another over-engineered javascript framework because he had an aesthetic dislike of semicolons. This matters! Upvote!"
I agree with your emotional reaction, but calling anything the limit as it currently appears I think is foolhardy.
Our current trajectory has long been less Keynesian feedback loop, and more zero-sum advertising-based competition between entrenched conglomerates over shrinking consumption. The recipe for vertigo in the art-design-advertising sector is the tension between bohemian ideals on one hand, and the social relations of patronage on the the other.
Unless you think collapse or equilibrium is immanent, buckle up for more of the same.
It's the same "perfectly accurate, almost totally unnecessary, precision at microscopy scale" involved in doing anything with numbers.
Ancient Babylonians were surely enthusiastic about astronomical computations, you are enthusiastic about clever fonts (and rest assured that there are much more extreme ones around), and some entirely different mathematical technology will be mind-blowing tomorrow.
Reading these things I inevitably experience intellectual vertigo, the deep-zoom-into-a-fractal sense of perfectly accurate, almost totally unnecessary, precision at microscopy scale. It's more Gibson than Gibson, not least if you're aware of Douglas Hofstadter's obsession with "letter spirits" and their multidimensional relationship to GAI...
We had a good run.