What struck me reading this paper is that Deadmau5 might actually be the most honest person in the room. He looked at what electronic music performance structurally is, a technology of reproduction, and just said it plainly. Everyone else tends to perform spontaneity to some degree. Live coders project their screens and that gesture matters, but they are still building on pre-written libraries, familiar patterns, layers of abstraction they did not invent mid-set. The paper even admits that coding from scratch is an impossible ideal.

That is where things get interesting to me. Live coding is not trying to be Derek Bailey and deep down it knows it. A lot of live coders want the beat, want people dancing, want the same things Deadmau5 wants. The real difference is not some claim to purity but a willingness to keep the process visible and genuinely uncertain. Showing your screen is not proof that you escaped mediation. It is just an honest account of where the mediation is actually happening. And honestly that might be a more defensible and more interesting thing to offer than any romanticized idea of total freedom from the machine.