An open letter to my fellow creatives in a dark hour.
Image source: Thomas Dekker, 1625
Seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza makes a kind of ontological argument around the state of being that was both obvious and radical at the time–essentially, that which is made (everything) is divine by the fact that it is made. It’s the type of statement that seems both obvious and puzzling when one takes a moment to think on it. Taking at face value that the divine is “good”, then that which is made, and hence the act of making, is also always a net good.
Context is important. The era which Spinoza was living was a fairly dangerous time. Spinoza’s Jewish grandparents faced brutal persecution at the hands of the Portuguese Inquisition. We often think of The Enlightenment as a period of robust intellectual growth in which the thinkers won the day, but that’s not exactly true. In periods of new awakening many people, especially those in power, don’t really like new ideas, it turns out. For every new idea, there were imprisonments, fines, banishments, and executions. At the same time of the Portuguese Inquisition, around the world we can clock the Yangzhou massacre, the atrocities of the first English Civil War, to say nothing of the knee-jerk reactions of most common people to the radical ideas forming at the time. The human story may look like an upward swing from far away, but there are a lot of very steep downward swoops along the path.
We may be in the middle of one now, a period of change and awakening. And like previous periods of same, there are so many things to be currently worried about — potential authoritarianism, genocide, religious fanaticism, climate change, uncontrolled AGI, unleashed nativism — that a period of change is handmaid with a period of struggle again. We’ve made a queer mess of life, it seems.
In uncomplicated times, it is easy to dismiss creativity as unserious. In the hardest times, it’s everything there is.
Creativity is risk. To do something different, or meaningful, or human, is messy. Creativity is accessing the part of the brain adjacent to emotions, and emotions are the opposite of rationality. It doesn’t fit neatly into an ideal customer profile. You can’t attach quarterly goals to it.
I often talk about “design” on this blog, but the word “design” is kind of a stalking horse for me. By “design”, I mean creativity on a mass scale. I do not mean non-creative “design”, as so popularized by mercantile bozos in the modern era, a role akin to following the directions in a Lego booklet. For the past twenty years, creativity, art, and philosophical musing have gotten in the way of “design” (read: making money). We were told it was the era of Big Data. Let the data make decisions. It will not lead us astray. For ease of reference, let’s call this the numbers game.
Here’s a truth: the numbers game is intimately related to hard times. Any time the wrinkled tapestry of humanity has been put into the narrow strictures of a system, the system drives the humanity out of it, and all that is left is the system itself. It has happened time and time and time again. Hell, several middling movies were made about it. On a long enough timeline, systems applied to humans always end up proving their worth on the disruption of the ordinary human to demonstrate value. I’m not exactly sure why every generation needs to learn this lesson on it’s own.
If you’ve made it this far, now here comes the part where I level with you and tell you the bad news: the Bad Guys are kind of winning right now. This iteration of the numbers game is wildly successful. If you are a young person reading this, you have my empathy, as you maybe only have a distant memory of time when all the most abysmally awful people were not continually rewarded with riches. By giving our internal thoughts and yearnings over to digital buckets, we commoditized the very weird and wild humanity that made us as a species so successful. Maybe the most appalling part is that, for at least a small period of time, we did it willingly. I was a part of that generation, and I admit it: I was wrong. I fucked up. I thought it would be like Star Trek. I don’t know what what to say.
Now that the world is falling apart and everyone is out of a job, it might be time to take that dusty old creativity out of the box and look at it again.
There is a term of art in the business of making things called “neutralization.” In neutralization, you look at whoever is the leader of whatever you’re trying to make, and you copy all the parts that work. It makes sense — if you’re going to beat them at their game, you want to make it as easy as possible for someone to switch to your thing. Give the people your competitor’s thing, plus something else (“differentiation”). This is the basic construct. So neutralization + differentiation = maybe a new thing people want. Maybe.
Image Source: Telegurus
This may in fact lead to success, a kind of evolutionary feedback loop that creates a timeworn shape. So it is with nature, as well: a single form takes hold in a system, and evolution refines that form. But that’s only true if the environment is static. When the environment changes, the traits rewarded change as well. This is the fundamental truth of evolution: traits are only as valuable as the environment which rewards them. Dinosaurs varied in all different shapes and approaches, and were a radically successful species. But when Chicxulub came knocking, the environment no long rewarded those massive calorie monsters anymore. The environment changed, and the new environment was one that rewarded small, scavenger mammals.
The environment has again changed, and I say hello to my fellow rodent weirdos. 👋
Here’s how I know artistic creativity is a powerful spell that those in power can’t subvert easily: there’s no fucking money in it.
If you’re interested in learning about what a society values, look at what their education system focuses on. Here in America at least, the love with data and rote computation begins early. We require our students learn to take tests, to compete for spots in meritocratic schools, and finally, to fill the ranks of the upper-middle class set of strivers, who will beget their own little striver offspring. A student that has outre views or is unwilling to settle down to the task at hand at their desks is branded as trouble-maker, or worse. There’s a very simple reason for that: the educational system is by and large designed to reward conformist, data-driven thinking. Our factories and data centers demand bodies to operate the switches, because there is money to be made in the operation of switches.
By happenstance, we find ourselves now at a time when the value of the human worker — the switch operator — is being challenged. We don’t need to wait for AGI to threaten this base societal valuation: it is here now. As I outlined in a previous piece, the commodified creative is already a lost battle. Finding yourself in a digital creativity space these days is finding yourself asked to perform pattern-matching, and not much more. How to increase views. How to get more likes. Strategies for maximizing subscriber tiers. The miasma is filled with strategies to find a way to adapt to this era, and most of them are depressing and stupid. I propose an entirely different and mostly irrational alternative strategy: giving up and retreating to our humans roots.
I think this current modality we are living in has reached the end state. I think the changes that will happen in the next ten years will be so radically contra to what you know now, that investing in anything that approaches your current life or understanding of the world will be useless. And in this moment, the fool of the class becomes the star student.
The final disruption is of the system itself. And radical creative humanness is the sword we can wield.
I am not going to insult you, reader, and propose that hard times cause good work: for every breakup or bubonic plague that makes a good sad song or Decameron, there’s millions of other awful events that yield nothing but pain and misery. Instead, I suggest we flip the conceit on it’s head. For every wonderful piece of work, there’s usually a seed of introspection that reveals a deeper truth.
In dark times, the things that were fluff become the things that people need and hold on to, tightly. To paraphrase Tolstoy, everyone’s unhappiness is unique, but there are things that join us, and the the things that join us are the things that give people purpose — faith, insight into their fellow humans, and strength to get on with the ordinary business of living. As a creative person, you are uniquely positioned to be doing those things.
Suffering is a part of life, but suffering does not have to be the end state. Making something important to you is an expression of what is inside you. The form is immaterial, whether an app or poem. But the creation of something for an audience of one is so in opposition to what we’ve have been told is important — the revenue, the likes, the audience — that it feels radical in it’s lack of supervision.
Indulge me in a mild thought experiment. Pretend, for a moment, you are the only person on the planet. No one will ever see your work. No compliments or awards will ever come. No critique or canceling will ever occur. You don’t have to worry about approval from an app store, or going viral, or whether it gets picked up by Netflix. There is no audience, at all. What would you make?
If you’re anything like me, so poisoned by the internet, to actually consider this is a little bit jarring. It is in this moment, you see how truly captured we are by the current numbers game. This is how the forces of darkness win — they convince you that what you make is only important in how it is related to what they want: more power, more money, more attention.
But it is not so. You do not have to play their game, really. You may have to work their jobs, you may have to exist in their world, but you don’t have to care what they think. It’s not your fault.
This is what you must do: you must think and sit and consider what value you bring to the world. You are free, if you want.
Creativity is the only thing was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
