I guess what you’re describing is like a tweet that hits the uncanny valley of good and bad in such a precise way, with such confidence, that it just pisses everybody off.
Because if you look at this tweet for just a second you’re like ok, that’s a fine bedroom, but then you look at it, and it starts to unravel in your mind, like trying to remember a dream after you just woke up. And you’re like “what is this?” It’s like a deepfake of a person’s face.
…Ok, I’ve got some fire for you: A bad tweet is like a deepfake of an idea.
The perfect bad tweet is like something you read and you’re like “ok yeah” but then you’re like, “wait…”, and it just starts to come apart in your mind and you’re like that makes no fucking sense, just like this photo of this incredibly bad room.
So when you have a bad take machine, you get the following processes:
They make a bad take.
People are outraged and talk about it.
The bad take machine likes it and does more of that behaviour in future.
If, on the other hand, they make a take and nobody cares, they do not get reward and the behaviour is selected against.
The behaviours drove the spread of the outrage replicator, and the outrage replicator provides the selection mechanism for the behaviours. Thus, via the spread of our outrage on Twitter, we have operant conditioned the bad take machine into producing worse takes.
Which is to say, it's bad on purpose to make you replicate it.
Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture provided seven guides, or 'lamps', for the troubled craftsman, guides for anyone who works directly on material things. These seven are:
The lamp of sacrifice: The willingness to do something well for its own sake.
The lamp of truth: The truth that 'breaks and rents continually'; Ruskin's embrace of difficulty, resistance, and ambiguity.
The lamp of power: Tempered power, guided standards other than blind will.
The lamp of beauty: Which for Ruskin is found more in the detail, the ornament—hand-sized beauty—than in the large design.
The lamp of life: Life equating with struggle and energy, death with deadly perfection.
The lamp of memory: The guidance provided by the time before machinery ruled.
The lamp of obedience: Obedience to the example set by a master's practice rather than by his particular works; otherwise put, strive to be like Stradivari but do not seek to copy his particular violins.