Hi,

This past week I was watching an interview from The Breach about Medical Assistance in Dying (oh, heads up, this newsletter probably won’t be super fun). One of the things that really jumped out to me was how their guest, Megan Linton, was able to so easily sum-up the growing problem with MAiD in Canada: it represents a systemic lack of imagination.

I’m not really here to outline the pros and cons of MAiD, but to understand this idea, we do need to unpack the issue a bit. In my opinion it’s an important topic to discuss primarily because it makes us incredibly uncomfortable while also having literal life-or-death consequences. While I obviously can’t go into every argument and precise detail here, I think everyone in Canada should learn more about it and understand how it is impacting people’s lives right now.

MAiD, in an ideal world, feels like a pretty clear-cut good thing. Barring some particularly dogmatic religious or political beliefs, I think most people see the move to alleviate unnecessary suffering as an ethical decision. Euthanasia feels like a dehumanizing word, but the fact that we felt able to help end the suffering of animals through euthanasia earlier than we felt we could do that for humans makes me think the dehumanization was happening the other way around. Forcing people to live through prolonged pain when we can’t do anything else to help them isn’t somehow purer than letting them take control of when their lives end.

For a long time, I was staunchly (dogmatically, even) pro-MAiD, and I still feel somewhat proud that the obvious arguments against it in Canada have been overcome. It’s not really taboo anymore. While it’s not fun to think about, it’s better that we do allow it, right?

But then the government went and made it fucking weird, which is where a new push-back against MAiD from the disability community comes from.

Originally in Canada, MAiD was only available to people who had some condition that was declared terminal and that there was little to no hope for recovering from. If your death is near and inevitable, and you’re suffering while you wait, then MAiD is a choice you’re given to avoid the unnecessary pain. Along the way, though, we started to explore non-terminal conditions. Maybe you live a life that is excruciating for one reason or another, but your condition doesn’t seem like it will lead to your death. You can live a long life, but it just might be horribly uncomfortable. Should MAiD be accessible then? The Canadian government said that maybe it should. After some push back, we’re currently on hold for including mental conditions under that banner, too, where we would potentially offer MAiD to someone who is otherwise physically well, but has a chronic mental condition causing them sufficient harm.

Starting to feel uncomfortable?

The reason I’m bringing all this up is to highlight the problem that this expansion of MAiD acts as a case-study for. We had a problem (people with terminal illness suffering unnecessarily) and found a policy-based solution to it (allowing MAiD). The reality is that a DIY form of MAiD was always available, but it was our laws that were perpetuating the problem. So we rewrote them to get out of the way (with guidance and guard-rails, of course).

Policy-based problem, policy-based solution.

The issue that we’re seeing now through the expansion of MAiD is that, due to a lack of imagination, this new solution we have is being applied to other problems that feel similar. Are there people living with chronic conditions whose lives are harder than we’d like them to be? Well, great! We actually just came up with a solution to something very similar! Let’s use that!

What we aren’t doing at this stage, though, is asking if that’s the right solution to the problem. What’s causing the problem? With a terminal illness, the problem is pretty clear and the solutions are limited, but with chronic pain and disabilities, the problems are complex and unique. Add in the case of chronic mental health issues, and we’ve added layers of complexity to the point that the solution we’re trying to use is questionable, at best.

It’s starting to feel like MAiD is the hammer and we’re just pretending everything else are nails.

It’s not hard to imagine how MAiD could be used to avoid addressing deeper societal issues. Poverty and disability make life difficult and can lead to chronic mental and physical health issues. If the root cause of these issues isn’t addressed and instead we use MAiD as a solution, then we’re really just creating a meat-grinder for eliminating poor and disabled people instead of trying to help make their lives better and more tolerable.

What we’re looking at now are dozens of policy-based problems and one single policy-based solution. Is this really the best idea we have?

That’s why this interview caught my attention so deeply. The idea that a lack of imagination at a policy level could be leading to people’s deaths, when we can’t be sure that it has to, feels irresponsible. And yet, I do believe that this is an aspect of what’s happening, largely because we see that same lack of imagination in so many levels of government. Citizens aren’t innocent either, often asking for the most obvious solutions to complex problems, leading us to elect unimaginative politicians who do unimaginative things and continually fail to solve anything at all.

I live in Hamilton, Ontario. It’s a city with a lot of issues that have been deferred, studied and reported on, but never truly addressed. Now, many things in our city are reaching their breaking points. Recently, the public library in Hamilton has been dealing with ongoing issues related to the safety and accessibility of the Central branch. The Central branch of the Hamilton Public Library is located directly in the heart of the city, just a few blocks from City Hall, connected to a large shopping centre and the Hamilton Farmer’s Market. The library isn’t just a place to get books, it’s a community hub. It provides classes and workshops to help people write resumes and find jobs, it has computers and internet access, a local archive where you can find historical materials on our city, and a fantastic Maker Space with 3D printers, large-format printers, vinyl sticker printers and more. It’s also a big, warm building that anyone can go into without needing to spend money or get kicked out for loitering. That’s where this problem starts.

The library, being located downtown and across the street from a shelter, sees a lot of unhoused people using its space. As poverty and addiction have become a bigger issue in our country, we’re seeing more and more problems emerge with the day-to-day realities of having a large population of vulnerable people living in your city with nowhere else to go. The problem isn’t fun to think or talk about. People use drugs in or outside of the library, there are inevitable emergencies relating to the drugs, violence and, frankly, poor people just making people uncomfortable. If you hadn’t bathed in a long time, hadn’t slept indoors for just as long, and were struggling with addiction or your mental health, you probably wouldn’t be particularly presentable, either. All this causes people to avoid the area, complain about it online, and the problem just sits unaddressed.

After increasing issues relating to the unhoused population around the library, it was reported that the library board was considering closing the central branch entirely. They say that would be temporary while they consider changing the layout of the library, but the plan is about as detailed as that. We have a problem, and the solution we’ve come up with is just to lock up this public space, this community hub, and take it away entirely. Unfortunately for the library, that’s basically the only option they have.

How could we avoid this? What are other solutions? Our provincial (conservative) government seems to think harsher penalties and stricter enforcement of drug laws are the solution. The same government killed safe-consumption sites (places where people could safely take drugs in private while monitored by healthcare staff) in our province not too long ago, replacing them with nothing (to be more specific, they replaced them with “heart hubs” that either don’t exist yet or aren’t doing anything effective). That same government, when they were first elected, also killed a UBI pilot program in Ontario which could have been a solution to poverty and housing in our province (we’ll never know because they stopped it before it had accumulated much data), and they have also told municipalities that they won’t be allowed to reduce police budgets, which could free up huge amounts of resources for other solutions, too.

All I see when I look at this problem, manifesting with our local library, but a problem that runs deeper in our city, province and country, is a failure to imagine any new solutions at all. It’s that lack of imagination that is killing people and closing our public spaces. When I see people who are frustrated and saying we should just arrest people with addictions, using drugs in public or camping on the streets, I see people unwilling to admit that we’ve tried that for years and the problem hasn’t gone anywhere. The solutions on offer aren’t helping, and they’re all anyone seems willing to try. How does this change?

We Need More Space for Ideas in Politics

In my mind, the thing we should be looking for in political policy is exactly what Megan Linton identified as an issue with the expansion of MAiD. We really just need more imagination, more ideas, and more creativity in our institutions. But that isn’t something you can ask for in a vacuum, because all the best ideas in the world ultimately mean nothing if you just keep them in your head.

I define creativity as the capacity humans have to create things. Creativity is the follow-through of imagination combined with action. That’s the solution we need to advocate for in our governments: Don’t just try the same things over and over. Come up with new ideas. Don’t just point out what’s wrong.Make things happen.

The issue plaguing this kind of action in the public sector seems to be fear. Because politics can be so volatile, there’s a lack of action and accountability taken on big problems to avoid making mistakes and getting called out for it. In Hamilton we tried a new idea when the city decided to build tiny shelters to help bolster our strained shelter system, but layers of incompetence and mismanagement meant the project was delayed and came in way over budget. The blowback at this is exactly why politicians and public servants don’t try new ideas. When you fuck up, you get yelled at a lot. On the other hand, when you do nothing, people sometimes forget you’re even there.

So what’s the takeaway? Should we try nothing but the status-quo because otherwise we’ll get in trouble? How can we build up systems to be more nimble and decisive without causing huge amounts of damage if something goes wrong?

How can politics be more imaginative and creative unless our governments are empowered to try things out? And if we give them that kind of leeway, how do we hold them accountable?

Collaboration and Iteration

In creative industries like mine, you don’t dive into finished work from the beginning of a project. If you’re making an illustration or a logo for someone, you start with a brief, understanding the goals and ideas behind the project, then work through rounds of rough ideas, feedback and revisions until you have a concept that is confidently in-line with your client’s imagined solution. Only then do you invest the time it takes to finish the work. Crucially, though, the brief is the end of the speculation phase. After that, all the roughs, the revisions and the final work involve actually doing things. You can’t just brainstorm your way to a finished design. The sooner you get to work, the better.

That’s what I think is missing from creativity in politics. The middle of the process: the iteration and actual making of things.

We see a lot of briefs in the public sector. Studies and consultations and revisions to proposals and public input and delegations and deferrals on votes to authorise impact assessments... it’s no wonder we all have a conservative uncle who just wants small government and low taxes! Government’s inefficiencies that people complain about are, in my experience, typically rooted in a lack of decision making, initiative and fear about taking a first real step.

Occasionally, we see the end of the creative process in government work. Things do eventually happen. Laws pass. Permits are issued. Things get built or money gets spent and the machine keeps churning. Most of the time, the things that happen make you question why all that consultation and meeting was even necessary, because of how underwhelming, mundane or even incompetent the work is. Sometimes we get lucky and good things happen, which is how we end up with things like our public healthcare system in Canada. Or libraries.

But where are all the middle parts of the process? Why do we expect new laws and services to be passed and implemented in finished form all in one go? Why do we fund programs in their entirety before we know if they’ll do what we want? Why do we treat small expenses the same as monumental ones, requiring acres of red tape for any decision, no matter how small? Why do we let big mistakes happen in the first place, instead of course-correcting before the entire thing is done?

When I think about creativity in political, legislative or policy-based spaces, I think about how much more collaborative and iterative we could be. Especially at small scales, we could try things out and slowly modify and work on the ideas over time, arriving at solutions that actually deliver on the problems we’re trying to solve.

As citizens, I think we need to better understand our role in decision making and participate more in the process. Too many people think their part in politics begins and ends when they cast their ballot in an election. Too many more of us fail to cast a ballot at all. Our role is to force politicians and governments to collaborate with us and to make our ideas heard. We have tools to do that, but most of us don’t use them or feel like we don’t have the time. As long as we maintain this attitude, we shouldn’t expect things to change.

Our elected politicians and the many more government staffers should embrace an attitude of imagination and creativity in their work. We should demand more, better ideas from our institutions and leaders and we should push harder to help the best ones rise to the top. Internally, staff shouldn’t be used as scapegoats, should be empowered and encouraged to share ideas and try new things, and we should anticipate problems and try to fix them before big waste or damage happens, instead of freaking out and scaring people out of trying anything at all.

All of this obviously needs to be done within reason. The red-tape and bureaucracy of governments exists for a reason, in theory. We need to study new ideas enough to try things safely, but we also need to be realistic and know when the risks are low and the cost of not trying something is greater than just giving it a shot. I still want building standards and safety rules, but we’ve reached a point where people want to study the effects of bike lanes on individual roads before we put a barrier up on a street, or where we spend more money on consultants than we do on services. That much institutional bloat makes our governments less inspiring to work within, leading to less motivation and creativity at a cultural level. The people working on these problems need to feel like something can actually happen if they try.

A big part of this issue comes back to one of the problems with MAiD: we don’t like thinking about it. In politics, whether a problem is divisive, upsetting or simply boring, our reluctance to engage with the ideas leaves us with a deficit of solutions. I try to highlight that everyone is creative for this exact reason. You have the capacity to imagine a better world and just as much of a right to try to manifest it with the rest of us. But you need to show up and participate. You can’t ignore the problems and you can’t rely on uninspired solutions.

I struggled a lot with what the point of this piece was. It’s way longer than I wanted, and I’m realizing that part of what I’m struggling with is bringing up all these problems when I don’t have neat and tidy solutions for them. I don’t know what the answer to MAiD in Canada is, because I still believe in it in principle but I’m afraid of what it could mean when it’s the only tool we have in an under-resourced system that lacks compassion for people unless that compassion comes in the form of death. I can’t think clearly when I talk about how messy and frustrating the problems in my city are because the problems are so acute, people’s feelings about them are so strong, and the real solutions feel impossible in the face of an uncaring conservative province and an austerity-obsessed federal government.

I don’t like just ranting about how bad things are, and I don’t want to spread negativity, but the only way to come up with good, functional solutions is to truly understand the problem at hand. I think the point of all this is to say that we have a deep problem in our society, rooted in self-preservation, fear, greed and a lack of imagination. I don’t see a way out until we understand that what we really need, from each individual person and every institution, is a willingness to imagine how things can be better and to do our best to make that happen.

Right now we’re really trying nothing, and it seems like we’re all out of ideas. We need to try something else.

What do you think we should do?

Love,
Simon 🐒

I made a video about Everyone’s Creative to try to open this up to a wider audience and restate my general thesis for this project. If you’ve been reading my work here for a while, it will be mostly familiar ideas, but in a new flashy format! A moving picture!

Give it a watch and let me know what you think!

I have been avoiding turning a camera on and recording myself talking into it for years. I like writing, but it never really feels like the final form of my work. This newsletter/blog has always had a bit of an unrealized form that I always imagined it taking but avoided, because, honestly, it’s a bit embarrassing.

It’s easy to write things and publish them semi-anonymously, even if you use your name and photo. There’s an undeniable vulnerability to being on camera that I have found hard to overcome. But why is that? I think, honestly, for me it’s because you don’t turn a camera on and talk into it for hours and then edit it for hours and then put it on the internet unless you want people to see it. By putting it out there, you’re admitting that you want something to happen. You have an ambition. What if it sucks? What if people perceive you?

Years of writing have led me to the realization that I don’t feel fulfilled by only writing, and so I’m trying to get over myself and make my work in a form I enjoy. I love making movies, editing, animating (and, yes, writing) and I actually do feel like I’m good at talking. So, I’m going to try this out for a bit.

Everyone’s Creative will still be a written newsletter, too, but I’ll be trying to make more videos for my bigger ideas and when the format suits it. Writing a newsletter is obviously much faster than making a video, so quick, time-sensitive ideas will likely always be written going forward.

Thanks for following along! If you think anyone who doesn’t know about my work would like it, please share it!

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Video Credits

All work used in this video is either public domain or shared under a Creative Commons license. If I’ve made a mistake and used your work incorrectly, please let me know so I can either fix the attribution or remove it from the video. You can reach me at info@everyonescreative.net

I always try to link to the source of materials used. If something from the video isn’t linked below, it is either original work or a direct link couldn’t be found. Reach out to me if you want to know more about a source.

Music & Audio

Happy Airlines by Milton Paredes
Drama Strings.mp3 by younoise
Twinkle (1) by Alexia205
bell ding 1.wav by 5ro4
Tate Britain gallery lobby ambience by Kalou
R11-44-Radiation Geiger Counter.wav by craigsmith
Improvisation with Sopranino recorder.wav by piermic
CLICK_212.wav by Jaszunio15
Vinyl SFX by Anthousai
tea_cup02-drag.wav by andre.nascimento

Video

Falling Confetti in the Room by Cup of Couple via Pexels

Typefaces

Reglo Bold
by Sebastien Sanfilippo

ANRT Baskervville
by ANRT (Atelier National de Recherche typographique)

Avara
by Raphaël Bastide, with the contribution of Wei Huang, Lucas Le Bihan, Walid Bouchouchi, Jérémy Landes

Images (in order of appearance)

Figure Studies (verso)
Perino del Vaga, c. 1530/1540 | via NGA.gov

All Gizah Pyramids
Photo by Ricardo Liberato, 2006 | via Wikimedia Commons

Abbe Breuil in Lascaux Caves at La Mouthe
wellcomecollection.org | via Wikimedia Commons
CC BY 4.0

Historisches Fahrrad
W. Bulach, 2013 | via Wikimedia Commons
CC BY-SA 4.0

Simon Bening: Self Portrait
Simon Bening, 1558 | via Wikimedia Commons

Apollo 11 Launch
NASA, 1969 | via Wikimedia Commons

Chopin Polonaise Op. 53
Sourced: Heineman Music Collection (Unbound), Pierpont Morgan Library Dept. of Music Manuscripts and Books | via Wikimedia Commons

Soldering Process
Mrshaxac, 2025 | via Wikimedia Commons

Austria - Gottweig Abbey
Photo by Jorge Royan, 2009 | via Wikimedia Commons
© Jorge Royan / www.royan.com.ar / CC BY-SA 3.0

Ai Weiwei’s Forever Bicycle at The Forks in Winnipeg
Photo by Fil.Al, 2020 | via Wikimedia Commons

Light Switch
McNairBF, 2025 | via Wikimedia Commons

Finger Engraving
Montreal Type Foundry, 1865 | via Archive.org

Merry Company on a Terrace
Dirck Hals, 1625 | via NGA.gov

Human Brain MRI
Olleyolin, 2024 | via Wikimedia Commons

The Jester
Jost Amman, 1586 | via NGA.gov

Group of Male Figures Conversing
Hubert Robert, probably c. 1754/1765 | via NGA.gov

Forging Shells, The Slaves of the Wheel
Joseph Pennell, 1917 | via NGA.gov

The Battle of Fornovo
Master of the Battle of Fornovo, 1495/1506 | via NGA.gov

The Celebrated Vincent Lunardi Esq. Accompanied by Two Friends in His Third Aerial Excursion, Taken from St. George’s Fields, in London
Francesco Bartolozzi after John Francis Rigaud, 1784 | via NGA.gov

P.S.

Here’s a little extra for anyone who reads all the way here: I noticed that my title in the video for the chapter “Creativity is Embarrassing” has a spelling error on “Embarrassing” (it’s missing an R) but I decided not to fix it because it’s a funny word to spell wrong and it’s kind of exposure therapy for my perfectionism.

Love you! Have a great day!

I should warn you that I’m starting this with a rant. But why else do you make a newsletter, if not to rant?

This morning I took my dog for a walk around the block. She’s a slow, sniffy little dog who likes to take her time examining every piece of grass on a lawn, so walks typically last a long time without going very far. During these walks, I usually listen to a podcast or listen to some music, but sometimes I’ll just raw-dog life and enjoy the ambient sounds of my quaint neighbourhood.

Other times, I’ll just get super pissed off about trucks. Like today.

I hate trucks. I hate cars, car culture in North America, the lack of viable public transit in cities with more than enough resources to build it... I hate it all so much that just the sight of the average huge pickup truck can whip me up into an internal frothing rage. Today, walking my small, excruciatingly slow dog around the block, I let that happen.

On a ten minute walk around the block, I was confronted with three different pickup trucks pulling typical truck bullshit for no reason and without consequence. One truck was parked in front of a house, completely unoccupied, idling away for no reason. Some idiot wanted to keep their oversized air-hauler warm and decided that everyone else would be happy to huff exhaust for that to happen. When I finished my walk, the truck was still there. Still unoccupied. Still idling.

Meanwhile, around the corner, another truck pulled up into the bike lane, in front of a no stopping sign, and parked. Nothing too surprising here, since it seems like most trucks in our city have an unofficial permit granted by default to just whip up anywhere with their hazards on and park without consequence. Why do we even waste money putting up no stopping signs at this point?

And to top it all off, around the next corner, another pickup truck was parked up on the sidewalk, blocking it off completely. The owner of the truck wasn’t pulled up on the sidewalk to unload building materials or block pedestrians from entering a dangerous construction project, though. They were just having a chat with someone... in their empty driveway.

Witnessing all this I was made so frustrated by how typical all this behaviour is. Seeing pointless polluting, blocking bike paths and hogging the sidewalk all in a ten-minute span is not a rare occurrence in Ontario, let alone the rest of North America. This is just how things seem to work here. It’s part of the culture that people get to own giant, dangerous, wasteful machines and put them in everyone else’s way. Pointing it out to most people will make you seem like a crank. Where else are these guys supposed to put their huge empty trucks?

Whew. Deep breath. Anyone else’s blood pressure feeling high?

After writing to my city counselor, begging for any city staff’s email address that I can bother with these rants, I calmed down and I started to think about the cultural side of things. The reality is that so much of this behaviour comes from things being seen as “normal.” It’s fine to pull your truck up on the sidewalk. We all do it! Why is your face so red, Simon?

Our social order becomes normalized in lots of ways, but a big one is through being seen in our media. We stop noticing how insane the giant cars filling our roads are because, to an extent, it’s all we see. Cars are just one example, and they aren’t alone. Family structures, social behaviour, norms around food, dating, humour, home design... all of this is shaped not only by our individual lives but, arguably more often, by the cultural products we produce. Now more than ever, we see the state of the world through movies, TV, and social media.

The idea that artists could play an active role in how these norms are established really first became clear to me when I listened to this episode of The War on Cars (do you see a theme to my values here?). In it they point out how, in Hollywood, bikes are almost always portrayed as the domain of fools and children. You typically only see bikes in movies when they’re ridden by kids, nerds, or asshole “vehicular cyclists” in lycra. As cool as Pee-Wee’s bike is to weirdos like me, the fact that he’s so attached to his bike is part of what reinforces his adult-man-child character. Adding all this up, is it any wonder so many people in North America give up riding a bike after they get their driver’s licence? In Hollywood, bikes are for fools, and cars are for action heroes, heist dudes, sexy people and, basically anyone you might generally see as “cool.”

It wasn’t until this was pointed out to me in this context that I realized how artists (in this case, screenwriters) play such an active role in upholding and even shaping cultural norms. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that it took that long to realize, but something about the mundanity of cycling advocacy took the more obvious social activism out of it (obviously plenty of art pushes norms in positive directions by increasing diversity, challenging the status-quo and telling marginalized stories) and helped me see all the smaller ways artists have a say in how we see the world.

Now, Hollywood is a juggernaut of shaping culture. The artists working on film and TV are usually making art seen by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. There is so much money invested in these projects that obviously artists aren’t the only ones steering the ship. Product placement and advertising play a role, too. This is likely the only reason anyone ever bought a Sony VAIO product in the 2000s, after they saw James Bond using one in the latest James Bond movie brought to you by Sony Pictures. But I don’t think this is the only way culture can be influenced.

Art has the obvious ability to make big statements about society. Some might argue that this is art’s greatest strength. But when we create art, and especially when we tell stories, we can also make statements that are subtler by showing things as being entirely normal. Think of how gun culture goes mostly unquestioned in American movies - where someone owning a gun doesn’t really need an explanation because it’s just totally normal. The more we see that reflected back at us, the more we normalize it. Imagine someone randomly having a gun in a movie set in basically any other country and you’ll realize how odd it is to see guns so fucking much in movies.

Part of the power artists have in shaping our culture is through normalizing things, and understanding that means we can consciously work these ideas into the mundane parts of art. Why not set a scene in your story on a bus instead of in a car? Why not imagine a world where everyone doesn’t have a gun tucked in their dresser drawer? Your art doesn’t have to be about these things for it to have an impact.

In a way, artists have a chance to do something most politicians can only dream of: we can make people want the things we want. We can show the world how things could be, and help people see value in things by making them cool, exciting, or even just normal. But to do that, we need to be aware of it, and we need to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and harmful ideas that reinforce the status-quo.

After I listened to that War on Cars podcast episode, I had this sense that artists had more of a chance of normalizing cycling than almost anyone else. Until people could see how fun, cool and normal cycling could be, the only way to push for cycling in your city would be through going to your city council, demanding safer infrastructure, trying to teach people about the merits of protected bike lanes... anyone else feeling bored?

Activism is important, but it can also be exhausting. If progressive politics face any challenges right now (a big “if,” I know), the largest one is probably just how much work it all seems to be. People may want things to be better, but if even learning how to improve things is work, I don’t know how many converts we’ll get to the cause. But what if you could convince people to get on your side by having fun? That’s where the artists come in.

Staying on theme, not long ago I played the game Wheel World, which takes the structure of your typical racing game but just replaces the supped-up cars and nitro with tricked out bikes and magical bike boost. It’s a fun, beautiful little game and it feels like a direct response to the problem of bikes in media typically being seen as lame. You can’t play this game and not want to go out for a spin on your bike after, and the biggest hazard in the game are cars, which you’ll start to wish weren’t there after they plow into you for the dozenth time.

Obviously a niche little video game like Wheel World isn’t going to change the culture overnight, but since when has the culture changed overnight? The point isn’t that artists have mind-control powers and can make people believe things they otherwise wouldn’t (that power is reserved for the oil lobbyists). The point is that we can push things in the right direction by showing people new ideas and letting them embrace them on their own. You can’t convince someone you’re cool through logic and sound rational principles... you just go out and be cool and people will notice that and follow along.

Right now I think a lot of people feel powerless and tired. There’s a ton of important work being done by activists and progressives to fight the powers that be and make things better for all of us. All of us artists have a part to play in that, beyond just designing sick branding for Zohran Mamdani (though that’s also a useful pursuit). Artists have to show up to help inspire us all into action by showing us more than just how bad things are, but also how great things could be. Artists can help reveal the absurdity of the status-quo, and can offer new ideas for people to rally behind. Ultimately, when people are jaded about the system and feel like they can’t make a difference, artists are potentially the only people who can turn that around. We can offer people a new perspective, and help change what we all think of as normal.

So when I see the giant awful trucks in my neighbourhood, while I may want to scream at the politicians to do something about it, I think I also need to work on helping people imagine something better, too. The sooner we all realize how fucking stupid these trucks are (or any other important message you may want to share), the sooner we can take action and make my boring dog walks a little less unbearable make the world a little nicer to live in.

Love,
Simon 🐒

P.S. I didn’t really know how to fit this into the main text, but when I wanted to make my “I Hate Trucks” artwork, I ripped a PNG of one of these stupid trucks off of the Ford website and found it at this URL:

https://www.ford.ca/cmslibs/content/dam/na/ford/en_ca/images/f-150/2025/jellybeans/F150_Jelly_Raptor.png

What’s up with “2025/jellybeans/F150_Jelly_Raptor”??? Do these big tough trucks secretly have cute little candy-themed code names??? Is there a line of Ford “Cotton Candy” trucks? Are the 2026 models all “jujubes?”

I just think that’s funny cause they make these things look like military vehicles, so calling them “jellybeans” feels like someone working on the site is secretly listening to The War on Cars with me. Aww, cute little jellybean truck, you tough little boy!

K. Have a nice day!

Happy Halloween!!! I’ve got a scary story for you today. It’s about... corporate market capture?

Affinity is Free Now

Great news everyone! Yesterday Canva announced that Affinity (the design software originally developed by Serif, who Canva bought last year for AU$582 Million) is now totally free!

This is big news, and before I shit all over it I thought I’d at least share my most optimistic thoughts about it. Here goes.

Good News?

Making Affinity, a fully-featured design suite, cost zero dollars to access is absolutely an improvement in terms of increasing accessibility of professional creative software. I think this will be a great boon for a lot of artists who are struggling to afford an expensive Adobe subscription, and, having used Affinity’s Version 2 suite since it launched in 2022, I do believe that for most Adobe users it can be a complete replacement for Adobe products.

So, more money stays in the pockets of artists, and a professional suite of design tools gets to become a new entry point for people who want to use them. As someone who has complained before about Adobe being the standard for so many creative industries, which forces students to learn these tools and become locked into their ecosystem, anything that can start to chip away at Adobe’s monopoly is a welcome change.

So why am I having to re-write this section so much to try to keep it “optimistic?”

What’s the catch?

That’s the obvious question, right? What’t the catch? Canva spent half-a-billion (aussie) bucks on Affinity just to give it all away? That’s not how capitalism is supposed to work.

But the thing is, that’s how capitalism has been working for the last few decades. As tech companies have grown to become the most valuable companies in the world, a pretty standard practice for getting there has been to offer free services to people as a way of capturing markets and establishing global monopolies. Facebook, Instagram, Fortnite, TikTok, ChatGPT... all these services lure you in with the lowest possible barrier-to-entry: they’re free*.

*…in theory. For now.

Why this is so spooky

So why make this my Halloween post? What’s so scary about some free software? I think the main reason I find this news to be so disappointing and spooky is how it fits so perfectly into the trends of the last several years. We’re watching companies lobying for less regulation, rewrite the terms of sale after the fact and challenge the very definition of ownership in the digital age. There’s a reason that Cory Doctorow’s term “Enshittification” caught on: we all get it because we’ve all lived it.

Canva making Affinity free sounds great on paper, but it sends a chill up my spine. It gives me déjà vu. There’s something about the intense positive language and BOLD STATEMENTS ABOUT FREEDOM from Canva that make the whole thing feel off.

So I thought I’d dig into a bit of that language, share my thoughts about this news and what it could mean, and hopefully help clarify why so many people aren’t excited about this mythical free lunch.

Backstory

In 2022, Adobe announced their intention to acquire Figma for twenty BILLION dollars. This ended up triggering some much-needed anti-trust investigation from the EU, delaying the sale and eventually causing Adobe and Figma to call the deal off altogether. It was clear that Adobe, already a monopoly in the creative software industry, was simply too powerful to be allowed to absorb another platform as big as Figma.

At the time the purchase was announced, the Affinity twitter account posted this:

This smug statement was a savvy little way of highlighting the main value that Affinity had been nurturing in its customer base: they weren’t like Adobe. Affinity spent years positioning their products as being the “good guys” of design software. As people became more and more frustrated with Adobe for their price-gouging through ever-increasing subscription costs, Affinity gained a following for offering a one-time payment for a perpetual license for their software. You’d pay once, and the program was yours to use. Sounds crazy, right?

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, without Adobe pushing people so hard with their predatory pricing and anti-competitive business tactics, Affinity would have never grown the customer base that it did. Affinity’s tools are at the top of most lists when you search for “alternative to Adobe.” If you use Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, Affinity had a near one-to-one replacement for you at a fraction of the cost and without the subscription-based business model that basically nobody is a fan of except for investors and executives.

And so, Affinity grew. And merely two years after Affinity smugly declared “ain’t nobody acquiring us,” they announced that they had in fact been acquired by Canva in 2024.

The Price of Free

So Canva announced that Affinity is now a single application (Affinity “Studio”) and that it is 100% free for everyone, forever, no strings attached.

…Except for all the strings attached, of course.

What are the strings? The first is that you can end up paying for tools within Affinity Studio, if you want to use Canva AI in the application. That requires a subscription to Canva Pro. So... not free, but not a big deal since I doubt many people want or care about Canva AI tools.

The other strings? These are more ethereal and hard to describe. It’s difficult to put your finger on them. But digging into a bit of how Canva are talking about this move helps us understand things a bit better.

There’s no catch, no stripped-back version, and no gotchas. The same precise, high-performance tools that professionals rely on every day are now open to all, because creative freedom shouldn’t come with a cost.

~ via Canva’s Press Release

This kind of confident statement is exactly what I’m suspicious of, because you don’t buy a company for half a billion (Australian) dollars and then just give it all away for free. The most obvious string attached to this “freedom” is that this is clearly meant to make Affinity into a loss-leader to trap people in Canva’s ecosystem.

To say that Affinity now comes at no cost is to ignore the less tangible costs we’re all well acquainted with as users of tech products for the last twenty years. Does using Facebook or Instagram come “without a cost?” Sure, it seems that way monetarily, but we all now have an intuitive sense that this fails to capture the full picture. These companies use their platforms to lure you in, trap you and extract data, attention and, yes, even money from you once you feel invested and unable to leave.

Canva’s language around this news feels a lot like we’re mice being directed to “free cheese” by an altruistic cat.

“While our last decade at Canva has focused heavily on the 99% of knowledge workers without design training, truly empowering the world to design includes empowering professional designers too,” Canva said in a blog post. “By joining forces with Affinity, we’re excited to unlock the full spectrum of designers at every level and stage of the design journey.”

~ via Forbes.com.au (emphasis mine)

This quote comes from Canva’s original announcement of the acquisition of Affinity, and reveals another angle we can use to understand this new model.

Canva has an undeniable stigma attached to it on the part of legacy design professionals. Crusty old designers seem to see Canva as being the Microsoft Word-Art of the modern era, and I can speak from personal experience in saying that trying to use Canva when you’re used to professional design tools is extremely frustrating and off-putting. If Canva want to take on Adobe in the mortal combat of corporate stock value, then they do likely need to find a way to capture (or, in their words, “unlock”) the larger professional industry as part of their user base.

This duopolistic bickering isn’t one-sided either. I think Adobe validate Canva’s goals quite a lot here with their Adobe Express tools, which seem to be an attempt at the reverse of Canva’s switcheroo, to get non-designers to use simpler, lower-barrier-of-entry Adobe tools for their social media graphics and basic design jobs.

So Canva and Adobe are fighting for the same customer base, and Canva have specifically acquired Affinity in an attempt to expand their appeal for professional designers. If only they could come up with a way to make every Affinity user (people who have effectively self-identified as disliking Adobe) sign up for a Canva account...

There’s the other string attached. If you want to use the new Affinity app, you need to sign up for a Canva account if you don’t already have one. Why not, right? It’s free! And just like that, Canva has created a pipeline to onboard a whole suite of users who otherwise might be likely to shun their services as being too basic. New customers “unlocked.”

The AI Elephant in the Room

We know that transparency around AI use and data handling is essential, and your creative work will always remain yours. Canva AI features are built with privacy and control in mind, ensuring that your creative work in Affinity stays secure and is not used to train AI features.

~ via Canva’s Press Release

Then there’s the AI of it all. We all know that “AI” has essential just become executive-speak for “please invest more money,” and so Canva’s insistence that AI be front-and-centre in the new Affinity program makes a lot of sense. I can accept that some selection of people may actually like and use these tools, and it’s nice that they let you toggle them off from the UI if you are uninterested. However, for the vast majority of people this kind of AI is a nuisance being forced into every corner of our digital lives by companies desperately trying to seem on top of the latest trend.

All this AI isn’t packed into Affinity for you, it’s there for investors.

So Affinity is full of Canva AI now. But don’t worry, they know that “transparency” around AI is “essential.” So how transparent is it? Well, Canva have a big page about “AI Safety,” where, interestingly, they lead off on their commitments to safety with corporate indemnification. Surely that’s exactly the thing Affinity users are concerned about most, right?

Imagine if, before a project started, a designer told a client that they would indemnify them against any “accidental copyright infringement” they did in the work. Would that inspire confidence? Is it a good sign that this even needs to be said?

Canva’s language in their press release doesn’t really tell the whole story in terms of how they use your data to train their AI. While they say it’s not used, their actual AI policy statements make it clear that they’ve given themselves wiggle room, and there are settings you have to turn off to ensure they don’t use your data.

They specifically say this when they explain where their training data comes from (emphasis mine):

...Content from creators that are part of the Canva Creators program who have not opted out of their content improving our AI-powered features.

and imply it here, saying they do train their AI on:

User content where this is consistent with their Privacy Settings for improving Canva’s AI-powered features.

We know from what happened to Facebook when Apple made detailed tracking an “opt-in or out” prompt that when users have a clear option to avoid this kind of data harvesting, they take it. How much data do you think Canva would collect if all of this was opt-in? Would anyone help them out if you needed to dig through menus to turn it all on?

If Canva using your data to train AI doesn’t bother you, that’s fine, but that is another cost added to their “free” product. They’re getting something from you.

That isn’t “free.”

Privacy as Currency

So if Affinity is free, but you need to sign up for a Canva account to use it, there must be something about that account that adds value for Canva. The obvious thing is that it gets you in their ecosystem. They get your email, they get to talk to you and they get to try to make you feel great about their company. But what else do they do with that account?

To learn how these companies use the data we give them, especially for “free” services, it can be useful to actually look at their Privacy Policies and Terms of Service. I know. The Halloween theme continues. Reading the ToS? Terrifying.

In terms of actual Privacy Policies, Canva’s is just under 10,000 words (and their “Data Processing Addendum“ adds another 3,000), meaning it’s probably a bit more complex than they make it seem when they say “Canva AI features are built with privacy and control in mind.” Their human-readable statements on privacy really just amount to “trust us,” while their actual Privacy Policy is no more transparent than any other corporation’s. Do you think most Canva users will actually read this?

Thankfully, actual privacy-focused services exist like ToS;DR (Terms of Service, Didn’t Read), who crowd-source reviews of these gargantuan terms and policies from companies and grade them on a simple letter scale based on how much unnecessary, privacy-violating information they require. Facebook, Amazon and YouTube, for example, get graded E (very bad) whereas Wikipedia has a B and alternative search engine Startpage gets an A.

Canva gets a D. So, not as bad as the worst but not much better. Interestingly, reviewing Canva’s policies here reveals that, for some reason, using Canva services (like the new Affinity)...

• tracks your physical location, even though it doesn’t need it for the services they provide

• sets cookies for tracking you outside of providing their services (like saving you as logged in)

• reserves the right to block any user-generated content (so they have the right to censor your work on their platform)

• can delete your account at any time without notice (like, say, they don’t like the things you’re making on their platform)

• tracks you via social media cookies

• blocking cookies may limit your use of the service (so, blocking cookies that aren’t required for the service they provide can limit your use of the service)

• posting of pornographic content is prohibited (and what is considered “pornographic” is obviously defined by them)

• They may stop providing the service at any time

So, in reading all that, how “free” does it feel?

Now, to be fair to Canva, on this scale Adobe get an E. But, again, if we’re arguing between last place and second-last place, we need to recognize how pathetic this “privacy” commitment is.

The fact is that, to use Affinity’s new app, you need to sign in with a Canva account. And because of that, you need to agree to these D-Grade terms of service. That gives them in theory the ability to track your location for no reason, block or limit your use of the app if you try to block advertising and social media cookies, police the work you create with the app and put on their servers, delete your account for any reason, without notice, and completely stop providing the service at any time.

The Horror of a Services-Based Economy

The reality of this announcement is that, it’s a mixed bag. I really do find it hard to be excited about this, but then again, I have plenty of resources and access to creative software and have for all of my life. I can’t honestly say that people won’t benefit from this move, but I’m also unwilling to applaud anything a company like Canva does when they preach “freedom” at the same time as they force you to sign up for their accounts and lock up your work in proprietary file formats.

There are truly free alternatives to Canva and Adobe products, but they come with plenty of baggage, too. Open Source tools like Blender set the standard: they fund-raise well enough to build industry-leading tools that are actually free (no account required) and anyone can contribute to. But other open source tools like Inkscape, Gimp and Kdenlive are buggy, unintuitive and missing key features for a lot of professional work. Open Source could be a solution, but it isn’t a magic bullet and it requires people actually funding and supporting to tools they use.

Other free and cheap tools exist. Photopea is free but runs ads, which you can pay to remove. Procreate is a small enough team making a specific enough project that they can apparently afford to sell one-time licenses to their app for anyone with an iPad. In these cases, not being tied to a gigantic, multi-national corporation that’s eagerly anticipating their IPO seems to be a good way to make useful creative tools accessible to artists.

My point is simply that, despite what they say, we need to understand that using the new Affinity isn’t free. It just doesn’t cost you money. But it is definitely not free in the sense that it provides you with some kind of revolutionary freedom of access to or use of the app. The freedom Canva is offering is tangled in barely visible strings like cobwebs. They may not seem like much, but they stick to you and get in your mouth, and before you know it you’re covered in spiders trying to suck you blood.

Maybe I’m just being paranoid. Maybe I’ve become an overly eager luddite, trying to smash machines that aren’t harming anyone at all. We won’t actually know until some time passes what Canva will do, but don’t fall for their PR when they try to convince you that they’re just doing this for the good of humanity.

Ultimately, this is just another platform trying to capture market share, and the easiest way to do that is to lower the cost of entry. That’s really all this is. Just make sure that, if you venture into the trap, you have an escape plan in mind so you don’t get eaten.

Happy Halloween

Simon 🎃

This is the fourth part of my series on the dark side of creativity. You can read them all at Everyone’s Creative.

Making things that unmake things.

When I talk about creativity, I’m being very literal about the word. Creativity is our capacity to create things: art, engineering, relationships, ideas, etc. I’m deliberately being broad with this definition because I think narrowing the definition of creativity only serves to increase gatekeeping and isolate us from one another.

But there is one line I constantly want to draw, and that’s between things we create which are a net-gain in overall creation, and the things we create which destroy. Things that we create that ultimately take away more than they add feel very different from any other forms of creativity, and yet I’m not willing to label them as something else entirely. They’re still acts of creativity.

The most simple and blunt example of this is the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb is inarguably a significant effort of human creativity. The creation of that weapon took the collaboration of hundreds of extremely smart people, working in different fields and coming together to create something that had never existed before. It pushed the boundaries of our understanding of physics, engineering and changed the course of geo-politics forever.

It also killed an unimaginable number of civilians, destroyed cities and left generations of trauma and fallout in its wake. So, was the creation of the nuclear bomb a net-gain of creation or a loss?

This is a pretty morbid and inhuman question to ask. I don’t think a reasonable person can entertain the idea that there is something positive about the detonation of two nuclear bombs in Japan that ultimately made it worth the cost. It was a horrifying decision and the acts of creativity that led to the bomb’s creation are ultimately a loss for humanity. It was anti-creativity, but still a form of creativity that we need to reckon with.

This idea will largely make the most sense with the discussion of weapons and tools of modern warfare. We’ve reached a creative capacity to make things so unimaginably efficient at killing people and destroying things that any argument for their usefulness outside of these horrors is absurd. I wouldn’t necessarily say the the creation of the first bow and arrow is the same, but remote operated drones and increasingly efficient automatic rifles feel like another net-loss for humanity in terms of our capacity to create. And yet, making these things still requires creativity. It requires intelligence, planning, brilliant minds and a creative will to make something exist that didn’t exist before. That’s a capacity that all of us carry with us into the world. These are things that people (people just like you) create.

But this isn’t just about weaponry and war. Humans have used our capacity for creativity to come up with less tangible tools that have destroyed less obvious parts of our world. The creation of the factory and the ideas behind Taylorism led to the destruction of cottage industries, the destruction of lives through child labour, and increased the suffering of working people in ways we still feel to this day. The creation of social media and 24-hour news have obviously destroyed our social cohesion, eroded trust in media and wreaked havoc on our grasp of the truth. The creation of the internal combustion engine and refined petroleum products are leading directly to the destruction of our very planet (at least, the version of our planet that is habitable to us).

The problem with this concept of anti-creativity is that if you let it fill your mind too deeply you can start to see it everywhere. As you follow this train of thought, you can get caught in a retroactive cost-benefit calculation going back to the invention of the first tools and the beginning of human society. Was it all just a big mistake? Would we be better off if we had never made anything at all?

But all of that misses the point. I don’t think there’s value in trying to point a finger at one particular creative act to discover the catalyst of all of the world’s problems. My point with this idea of anti-creativity is to challenge us all to be more careful in how we think about creativity and making things. I’ve discussed this before, but I think creativity is one of the most powerful aspects of being human, and that means it’s our job to be sure we use that power responsibly (thanks, Uncle Ben!). The most dangerous thing you can do is pretend that creativity is somehow neutral or that the act of creating something can be separated from the impact that thing has on the world. We’re all responsible for our creativity and what we do with it, and we should try to make sure that we at least don’t make the world worse with the things we make.

People always come before things. That’s how I justify some acts of destruction being outside of this definition of anti-creativity. The artist Ai Weiwei famously photographed himself destroying a “priceless” Han Dynasty urn, similarly “ruining” others by dipping them in bright paint and putting them on display in art galleries. To some, this was a selfish and horrific act of vandalism, but to me it is a sensitive way of pointing out how easily we value objects over people. In a way, it’s a performance of the exact boundary I’m trying to find between creativity and anti-creativity.

Another artist would go on to smash one of Ai Weiwei’s painted vases in one of the galleries displaying the work as an act of protest about international artists getting favoured over local artists in these establishment spaces. He was arrested. Ai Weiwei’s destruction was creative enough for the gallery to approve of but this artist’s destruction was a crime.

Somewhat hilariously, about this artist’s protest, Ai Weiwei said “You cannot stand in front of a classical painting and kill somebody and say that you are inspired by [the artist].” To me, even Ai doesn’t seem to see destruction as a medium of creation here, instead seeing it as the subject matter. But that doesn’t really track, does it? Caravaggio didn’t have to behead someone in order to depict Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, but Ai Weiwei did have to destroy a vase in order to photograph its destruction. This seems like a double standard to me. I think both artists smashing vases were painting with the same brush of destruction, even if each performance had a different impact.

So how do we measure if an act of destruction creates enough value to be permissible? I know the atomic bomb went too far and that Duchamp’s waste of a urinal is fine. I guess the answer is somewhere in between the two.

The brightest part of the line always has to do with other people. Your creativity only exists in relation to others, even if it is in spite of them, and so I can’t abide by creative acts that actually harm other people. The kind of abuse that people like Stanley Kubrick put his actors through in order to make “masterpieces” is, to me, not worth the finished result and we’d be better off as a culture with a less intense performance from an untraumatized actor.

But the destruction of objects, property or ideas feel fair game. Ai Weiwei’s destruction transforms symbols and objects rather than removing them from the world. The same way that making paper for a drawing destroys trees, there is always going to be some cycle of consumption and destruction going on when we make things, but we should try to aim to be intentional or at least considerate of that cost as a part of what goes into our creative acts.

The world is feeling particularly destructive at the moment. We’re witnessing in real-time as some world leaders argue that the world they are trying to create is worth the amount of suffering and destruction it will take to bring into fruition. For Israel, the destruction of an entire people seems to be worth it to create their vision of what the world should be. For the U.S. Republican party, the destruction of American democracy seems to be worth it to create their vision of what the world should be. In Canada, our government seems to think creating economic growth and increased national “security” is worth destroying the environment and our civil rights. At one time, the creation of the atomic bomb and the destruction it would create was deemed worth it to win a war.

What do you think? Are these positive creative pursuits? Are these things worth making?

Anti-creativity isn’t separate from creativity. It is just another way of being creative. It’s all on the same spectrum of our human capacity to do things with our ideas and manifest them in the world. Once you accept this, you realize how responsible we all are for the things we create and how no act of creativity is neutral. I don’t know about you, but I want to make things that make the world better, or at least not actively worse.

Love,
Simon 🐒

🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠

You know that the world is kind of fucked right now. I don’t need to link you to a bunch of news about that. I do think it’s worth engaging in the real world, though. Check in on people close to you. Do things to help out where you can. Also, do some things that you enjoy and remind yourself that two opposites can exist at once and that this world is awful but also wonderful and worth living in. Make something that makes the world a bit better, even in a small way. Have you looked at the moon recently? It’s fucking amazing!

For my part, I’m still working on getting the hell off of Substack. Abiding the platform that abides Nazis is feeling less and less viable for me and if I want to keep creating Everyone’s Creative then I need to feel like it isn’t contributing to a platform that facilitates harm.

To that end, I’m working on moving Everyone’s Creative over to a much smaller, niche little platform called micro.blog. It’s where I host my personal website and it gives me a lot of flexibility to customize the theme and play with the back-end of the site to make something exactly the way I want it. It’s probably not the best platform for most people moving off of Substack, but it’s cheaper than Ghost and more customizable than Buttondown and, frankly, I’ve just really been having fun learning more about Hugo, HTML and CSS to get things set up there.

You can see the work-in-progress site at ec-test.micro.blog and, if you’re interested, the theme can be found on my Github. My short-term goal is to have that site ready enough in the near-term to move over to entirely. For my 90 or so existing email subscribers, you won’t need to do anything to follow me there. I’ll let you know once I’m making the shift and you’ll still receive Everyone’s Creative in your inbox whenever I publish. For any Substack followers, I’ll still share links to new posts through Substack Notes, but I’ll probably engage with Substack a lot less (that’s the goal, at least).

You can still subscribe here and come along with me to Everyone’s Creative’s new home when it's ready.

Subscribe now

If you publish on Substack, I’d encourage you to look into alternatives that fit your needs but also know that I don’t really believe being on a platform equates to supporting everything it does. Your voice still matters, though, and you can let , , , and know that Nazis are fucking lame by telling them directly. Substack has a lot of VC debt and needs to figure out how to make money, so telling them that being chill about Nazis is making you want to leave may make them reconsider things.

The banner image for this post uses six photos.

The bottom three of them are the photos from Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn by Ai Weiwei.

The top-left image is of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The top-centre image is of a “Little Boy” atomic bomb.

The final image, top right, is of the mushroom cloud above Nagasaki after an atomic bomb was dropped by the United States on August 9, 1945. It’s estimated that 60,000 people were killed by that bomb and, combined with Hiroshima, “the bombings killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people, most of whom were civilians.”

This is part three of the Dark Side of Creativity. You can read the first two parts at Everyone's Creative.

Why do we gatekeep creativity?

I'm pretty up front with my belief that creativity is important but that it's ultimately nothing special. That is to say, it's not unique or something that anyone should feel they have a monopoly over. That's because Everyone's Creative. It's just one of the ways humans are.

Unfortunately, I don't think I'm in the majority with this opinion (hence, this whole endeavour) and nowhere is this more evident than with Creative Gatekeeping. This is the practice of trying to put walls up around creativity and establish some sort of restriction on who gets to be thought of as creative. It's something I dip into when I talk about demystifying the process, but it's deeper than just obscuring the way you work or pretending that you have some special skill that others don't. Creative gatekeeping is darker than that, because it's a more active attack on other people's creativity in an attempt to keep them from expressing themselves.

The irony is that Creative Gatekeepers see themselves as protectors of creativity, when they're more likely to do harm to creativity as a whole than anyone else.

Why Artists are the Worst Gatekeepers

I've talked before about how artists (especially professional artists) have a deep scarcity complex. Art is increasingly undervalued, and so those of us who create art for a living are feeling a growing pressure to validate and justify our work in order to survive.

One of the ways you can make your work seem important is to demonstrate that importance. But that's hard to do with art. You need to make the art, build an audience and have your work connect with people who then become supporters, patrons and champions of what you do. It takes time and success isn't guaranteed. All the while, you're investing money, energy and emotion into something with no guarantee that you'll see anything for it.

What if there was a easier way? What if you could just tell people that your work is important? That's the core idea behind the Creative Gatekeeper's mindset: it's a commandment stating that the Gatekeeper understands something that others don't, and that their authority is what justifies the value they proclaim. It's a circular argument, but for some people it works. People buy it. It starts to reinforce itself. But it isn't sustainable.

Artists become gatekeepers to justify their existence. Just like how a corporation may buy out all their competitors so they can restrict the supply of their product and artificially increase prices, gatekeepers want to restrict the supply of artists to increase demand for their own work. It makes sense, in some twisted way, especially if you do believe everyone's creative. If everyone could do what you do, then why would anyone pay you to do it? Why would anyone value your work over someone else's?

That insecurity and scarcity mindset is where so much gatekeeping comes from. It's an attempt to control the perceived value of creative work by constraining what qualifies as sanctioned creativity to begin with. But more often than not it becomes the cause of increased resentment that chips away at the perceived value of creativity at a deeper cultural level.

The Dark Prince of Creative Gatekeeping

Meet Anish Kapoor. He's the Bean Man. The man who made the big shiny bean in Chicago (and the smaller, but equally shiny bean in New York). Kapoor is an internationally acclaimed fine artist who has received the opportunity to work on many extremely high-profile (and high-value) projects which in turn, increase his profile (and his net-worth). Kapoor is also the dark prince of Creative Gatekeeping.

Most famously, Anish Kapoor acquired an exclusive license to Vanta Black (the blackest black). It was an absurd idea to think that one artist could somehow be the only person allowed to use a colour, not because they were the only person skilled enough to mix it, or the only person who could paint in a particular way to make us see it, but because it would be against the law for anyone else to do it. Kapoor used the very heavy-handed barrier of actual legal exclusivity rights to establish a boundary between who could and couldn't use a certain material.

Taking this to a logical extreme, Kapoor might envision a world where he should be the only person allowed to work with clay or the only person allowed to draw on paper. In this world, the definition of a drawing or a sculpture isn't something created by an artist to express something, but something created by Anish Kapoor, full stop. This kind of approach to gatekeeping is very helpful for us, because it's so insane and so extreme that we can't help but see the evidence of the insecurity and the scarcity mindset in stark relief: Kapoor wants to be the only person who can use certain paints because that's the only way he can be sure people will value what he makes.

If anyone had "the blackest black" paint, then why would anyone care about Kapoor?

The Gatekeepers of Opportunity

Kapoor's career is illustrative of another kind of gatekeeping: the gatekeeping of opportunity. When we look at art and creative work, we typically consider it at face value. We examine the text in front of us, and respond to it in various ways (emotionally, intellectually, subconsciously) but we don't always consider the surrounding circumstances of the art at the same time.

Why is one painting hanging in a gallery instead of another? Why is one song the top of a Spotify playlist instead of another? Why does Zack Snyder keep getting to make movies? The work that makes it through the filters of funding, editorialization, legal and corporate scrutiny and government regulation is not all the art that exists. But it's all the art we (most of us) get to see. Who decides what makes it through?

Kapoor comes up again here because so much of his work is high-profile public art. This kind of work isn't installed like graffiti in the cover of night (Kapoor isn't running around in a black hoodie at four in the morning planting shiny beans around the worlds largest cities). This work is commissioned either directly or through big open application processes. For most public art, work is proposed by artists and these proposals are reviewed by committees who select the "winning" proposal. These opportunities aren't given out equally, and it's interesting that people who make high-profile art tend to get more high-profile opportunities, isn't it?

You may see the same thing in your local environment with architectural firms or developers constantly winning bids more than anyone else, or on Netflix, where a few show-runners seem to get endless renewals and new contracts while your favourite little show is cancelled after a single season. This isn't proof of some chosen geniuses continually proving their worth in an objective meritocracy, it's a perpetuation of privilege that builds the walls around art higher and higher.

The Gatekeepers of Opportunity get to control what art gets made by manipulating the levers of funding, commissioning and judgement. It just so happens that the people who benefit from this are often well connected to decision makers and have had lots of opportunities in the past.

The Gatekeepers of Economics

A subset of opportunity, when we live in a capitalist society, is the opportunity afforded to you by money. Creative gatekeeping is especially insidious when it comes to money, because of how accessible and free our creativity should be.

But when you start to dig into the creative world, it starts to become clear that it's hard to make anything happen if you don't have a lot of cash. Paint is expensive, sure, but so is a fine-arts education that you likely need to be considered by those public art committees we discussed. On the commercial side, it's no different. Before you can finish paying for an increasingly expensive art education, you need to shell out for an expensive computer (probably and increasingly expensive Mac, because Apple computers are the "standard" in creative industries) and an increasingly expensive subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud. Then you'll need an expensive subscription to Squarespace to host your portfolio, where you apply for jobs that require masters degrees for companies that will lay you off after every major project you work on.

The cycle of "making it" in art starts with an extremely high economic barrier, whether you want to be a poet, a painter or make Instagram posts for Wendy's. Like most industries, if you don't have the money (or can't take on the debt) then you're better off forgetting about it entirely. And just like that, the filter makes things a bit easier for those of us lucky enough to be born on the inside of the economic walls.

The Gatekeeper's Paradox

When I say Creative Gatekeepers are operating from a sense of scarcity, it's important to acknowledge what the goal of the gatekeeping is then meant to be: to increase the value of the creativity of the gatekeepers. All that effort that goes into justifying the place the gatekeepers occupy, and all those people who are rejected by them, is meant to make people believe that there's something special about the people manning the gates.

The problem is that, since everyone is creative, you can only establish this dynamic by excluding most people. And people generally don't like being excluded.

This is where the artistic resentment comes from. This is why people turn on the arts entirely. We're all, at some point in our lives, uninhibited in our creativity. But at some point, I believe most of us are made to feel inadequate and like we aren't "allowed" to be creative. That, if our creativity isn't profound, revolutionary or of the highest objective standard, that it is something to be ashamed of. For most people this probably happens as a youth, and the resentment starts to brew from that moment on.

The Gatekeeper's paradox is that, you need to man the gate to maintain your status, but by excluding most people and acting like your position is a divine right, eventually people will stop caring about what is beyond the gates.

When people talk about using generative AI as a way of "democratizing" art and creativity, I see this as the ultimate response to Creative Gatekeeping. We're all inherently creative, and nobody needs to give you permission to make art, but gatekeepers have been so successful at distorting this truth that people have started to believe they need a machine to help them access "creativity." It's a fundamental erosion of a part of our humanity, sure, but it's also a perversion of the very thing the gatekeepers are trying to elevate. Soon, we won't need Anish Kapoor to design another bean because a public art committee could just generate some ideas for installations. And most people wont mind because, to them, Kapoor and the institutes of art have done nothing but reject them and talk down to them since they were children.

When you alienate people from your art in an attempt to make it seem special, all you're doing is alienating yourself from the only thing that makes your art matter: other people.

Accept that Creativity is Average

The only antidote to Creative Gatekeeping is to accept that creativity is nothing special. You need to block out all your instincts pushing you towards scarcity, and push back on people if they claim you're doing something they can't do. Creativity has to belong to everyone, because otherwise we'll find that one day, we've lost the ability to be creative altogether.

There's a humbling that I think "creative" people (people who consider themselves to be artists, work in creative industries, etc.) need to try to internalize. We need to accept that everyone's creative, but that also means that you need to accept that you aren't special for being creative. I know that, personally, I used to feel like a lot of my value came from my creativity. That I was unique and interesting because I could draw, make art, and come up with ideas. But that is actually one of the most average things about me. I'm no more interesting for that than I am for having skin, hair or bones.

The thing that makes us interesting isn't that we are creative. It's what we do with it.

Love,
Simon 🐒

🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠

I couldn't figure out a smooth way to include it in the actual text, but any discussion of the Bean Man would be incomplete without mentioning the protest work of Stuart Semple, who is hilariously petty and fighting back against people like Kapoor in the name of truly democratizing art. Stuart's brilliant protests (like the Pinkest Pink, a colour anyone but Anish Kapoor are allowed to buy) point out just how petty a guy like Kapoor is, and I'm here for all of it.

His work also intersects with Creative Monopolies, when he created the Freetone colour palette for Adobe software after Pantone and Adobe pulled the colours from Adobe programs (and, effectively, censored people's existing artwork).

Also, speaking of Creative Monopolies and the enshittification of online platforms, I feel like I should mention that, while this newsletter is still currently hosted on Substack, I'm feeling a stronger and stronger pull away from the platform. People I admire a lot like David Farrier and Paris Marx have both made the leap from Substack over to Ghost, but I feel like we're missing a viable, smaller, less expensive (i.e. lower economic barrier) option for people with little newsletters like mine. Ghost is cool, but it isn't cheap, and the other "free" or cheap newsletter tools are just as jacked up on enshittification and startup bullshit as Substack.

All that is just to say that I'm exploring my options and that at some point in the near future, you may be receiving Everyone's Creative from a less Nazi-infested hellhole, which feels like a positive change to look forward to. In the meantime, subscribing by email here means you can seamlessly migrate somewhere else with me in the future. You can also follow my personal site for updates, or check me out on Mastodon instead of Substack Notes.

Subscribe now

Finally, as I consider migrating off Substack, I wanted to share this blog post about blog posts. If you're a small, independent artist (writer, illustrator, video maker, etc.) publishing things online, I would urge you to give it a read and to consider disabling or even just looking at analytics less.

The banner image for this post uses this photo of the Bean man, taken by Vogler. That image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, and so the artwork from this post is, too.

It also uses the image View of the Gothaer Castle with ground plans of the pleasure garden. by Georg Andreas Böckler, c. 1664. Sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive.

Meanwhile, I thought it'd be fun to use an image of the bean itself, but instead I thought it illustrative to include the "Other Information" text from the Wikimedia Commons image of the bean, justifying it's existence on Wikimedia and preemptively defending it from Bean Man, who has demonstrated his litigiousness in the past.

The sculptor, Anish Kapoor, is known to be highly litigious and once sued the NRA for including a shot of Cloud Gate in a video. It is therefore reasonable to assume that no permission to publish a photograph of Cloud Gate under a free license will be granted.

1. Use of this image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute his original work.

2. Both readers and the copyright holder(s) will benefit significantly from readers being able to identify the art visually when reading the cited articles.

3. This is an image in Cloud Gate, which is an article that entirely consists of analysis, commentary and criticism of the Cloud Gate.

4. The image is only being used for informational purposes to depict the most important feature of the art work in the article.

5. Its inclusion in the article adds significantly to the article because it exemplifies an important topic from this article.

6. copies made from a half megapixel image will be of very inferior quality to the tall sculpture

7. the image is only being used for the purpose of analysis or criticism,

8. there is no alternative, public domain or free-copyrighted replacement available.

Don't be like the Bean Man.

I’ve noticed that some people seem to have a problem with freedom. Especially when it comes to business, there's an undeniable draw towards wanting power and control in order to guarantee your success. It makes sense! Making things of value that people want to support is hard, especially when your goal isn't to actually make anything other than profit. Instead, wouldn't it be nice if people didn't have a choice and they were simply forced to be your customer?

I've been reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao and early on she identifies this monopolistic desire for money and power over everything else with this choice quote from notable monopolist Peter Thiel (mentor of monopolist Sam Altman) in a lecture transparently titled "Competition Is for Losers."

Monopolies are good, Thiel said, because "they are much more stable, longer-term businesses, you have capital, and...it's symptomatic of having created something really valuable…"
"There are all these areas of innovation where there was tremendous innovation but no one made any money…"
"If you have a structure of the future where there's a lot of innovation and other people will come up with new things in the thing you're working on," he concluded, "that's great for society. It's actually not that good for your business."

Monopolies are nothing new in society, but their growing hold on our global economy is really starting to show us just how damaging this can be. Nowhere is this a clearer conflict of values than when people (companies are run by people, so lets not let them off the hook by pretending corporations are autonomous beings) want control over your creativity. As Thiel said himself, creativity and innovation are actually bad for business, so why not get a stranglehold on the very essence of competition?

Creativity is infinite. Isn't that inconvenient?

The central problem for anyone wanting to profit off of other people's creativity is that, fundamentally, creativity is infinite and impossible to limit. If you ever feel stuck in the way you make things, there's nothing stopping you from doing things in a different way. The history of art and creativity is essentially just an ongoing process of reinvention and discovery, where generations of artists reject norms or build on fundamental ideas and come up with new ways of expressing thoughts and emotions.

Remember this: you can always be creative in another way. That doesn't mean it will be easy, but it will always be true.

That's pretty fucking annoying if you want to limit people's creativity to working within the boundaries of your business model.

The first step of building a creative monopoly is in fooling us into thinking we can't make things in other ways. If you can successfully convince someone that they need you in order to do their work or to express themselves, then they will see immense value in what you have to offer. That is the ultimate goal of creative monopolies: to propose limits on our ability to create, and to make us believe that these limitations actually exist.

Creativity is all tangled up in capitalism.

When you paint something because you're moved to, you'll paint with whatever you have on hand. You can write a poem in your head, without pen, paper or publishing advance. But when you rely on your creativity to put food on the table, you start to have more constraints on what you make and how you make it.

This isn't our fault. It's the world we live in. The reality is that money has become the key to life's necessities, and work has become the thing that takes up the majority of our waking time on this earth. Many of us see this as an existential problem with a solution: if you have to work for most of your life because you need money to be alive, then why not make your work something you value? Why not use your creativity and self-expression to earn a living?

I'd argue that no matter what your job is, you're being creative. Creativity is just how we do things. We solve problems. We space out to get through boring work. We come up with shortcuts or systems to make things go faster. Creativity isn't a commodity to be sold, but we do treat it that way in commercial art industries and that makes us vulnerable.

You need to eat, and food costs money. Now imagine that your art is how you get paid. What happens when you start to rely heavily on a tool to make that art? Just like how a manufacturer is vulnerable to limited supply chains, if someone can cut off your access to your creativity then you're fucked. So you swallow the increasing monthly Adobe subscription fee, buy the official Pantone colour book, and consider splurging on the premium ChatGPT tier since they've all become essential parts of your workflow. And just like that, the monopolies have dug in a little deeper.

The Power of Tools

Tools are, in many ways, what make us human. We started using tools waaaaaaay back in the cave-man days, and that simple technology of a sharpened stone literally got us to having people on the moon, curing disease and having highly advanced computers in our pockets. Tools made it all happen.

When you rely on tools, it's useful to be able to make them yourself or to repair them when they break. But since computers and digital technology have become core to how most of us interface with our work, that understanding of our own tools has become less and less common. How many people with iPhones really understand how they work? Could you write your own program to help you with a specific task? If Adobe vanished off of the face of the earth (I can dream, can't I?) how many artists do you think could turn around and write their own version of Photoshop to keep their business running?

We've given tech companies a monopoly not just on how we work, but on the ability to create the tools we work with. Now, with generative AI being pushed as a new paradigm for all workers, we're even offloading the ability to run the software that we rely on to remote servers and proprietary systems. All of this takes power out of our hands and puts it into the hands of the kinds of people who don't want to make things, they want to make money. Why did we let this happen?

The Boiled Frog is Starting to Burn

Most of us don't start using a new tool because it's expensive, inconvenient and unhelpful. We adopt new technology into our work because it's interesting, novel or helpful in some way. That's where creative monopolies begin. They offer you a way in: a new way to express yourself, to be heard or to simplify a laborious task. At this stage it's often cheap or even free to try, and you immediately notice the benefit. The sneaky thing about this stage of a monopoly is that it's the same as someone offering a genuinely useful tool that may not change or devolve at all.

It's exciting to feel empowered. There's a rush to making something in a new way and immediately seeing a result. I was just a kid when I started using Photoshop to draw, and it was amazing to be able to draw, colour and print out a picture faster than it would take me to simply go set up some paints and a canvas. Technological innovation often emphasizes speed and "efficiency" when it invades an existing workflow. Eventually, we start to wonder how we ever inked a drawing by hand or mixed our own paint or copied our notes with paper and pen. It all feels so slow. How could you ever go back to doing it the old way?

Once you realize the monopoly has power over you, it's too late. You typically don't notice until you suddenly wonder why you're paying so much for a particular program or you become frustrated with a persistent bug in a tool that hasn't been fixed for years. You might think "maybe I should try a different tool" only to realize that the learning curve will be too steep or that "another tool" simply doesn't exist.

Often, while we aren't watching, monopolists buy up competitors and either absorb them or simply shut them down. While you were busy working away with your head down, your other options were being taken off the table without you even realizing it. Suddenly there’s nowhere to go… I guess we’re stuck?

And here we are. Our creativity held hostage by a handful of companies that few of us actually like and that most of us are afraid to leave. Sounds pretty inspiring, doesn't it?

Can we notice it before it's too late?

If noticing you're stuck under a monopoly happens after it's too late, then are we just doomed to be at the mercy of giant companies in every domain of our work? I hope not. One way we can try to avoid this is by embracing a mentality of prevention.

What are the signs we ignore or miss about monopolization that could be a warning for us?

Any time one company tries to buy another for insane amounts of money, you should assume they're monopolists.

Adobe tried to buy Figma in 2023 for $20 Billion. In a rare case of antitrust law (kind of) doing its job, the merger wasn't legally blocked but was made annoying enough that the acquisition was eventually cancelled. This is rare for Adobe, considering most of their popular tools (including Photoshop) weren't actually originally developed by them, instead being brought in by buying another company (i.e. monopolising the industry). That's just how Adobe works.

What could this signal? The obvious sign is that companies trying to exchange huge sums of money like this is never a benefit to the customers of these companies. If you rely on tools from a company that regularly buys competitors in this way, you should be weary and look for ways out of relying on tools from that company (e.g. Adobe, Microsoft, Apple).

As an example, I'm currently using the Affinity suite of tools a lot in my work, but I'm trying out a lot of alternatives at the same time precisely because Serif (the company that makes Affinity) was bought by Canva in 2024. This hasn't affected the tools very much at all at this point, but it's a signal that this tool is being folded into a monopolistic enterprise and I don't want to be stuck relying on it once I realize its too late.

Any time you lose value with nothing in return, you should assume you're dealing with monopolies.

Most businesses are afraid of scaring away their customers, but monopolies aren't. They know you have nowhere else to go. That's why the Adobe/Pantone drama from 2021 was so revealing. Up to this point, the cost of licensing Pantone's colour system in the Adobe suite was included with your subscription fee. But when Adobe and Pantone couldn't come up with a deal to satisfy eachother's bottom lines, they both opted for the choice that made things worse for people relying on their tools (the colours were stripped from the programs, including from your existing work, unless you started paying Pantone a subscription on top of your Adobe subscription fee). In a normal business situation, this should have lead to both companies losing a huge amount of their customers, but Adobe has a monopoly on creative software and Pantone has a monopoly on print colour matching, so they knew there was no other game in town and nothing really happened. That should scare you and prompt you to look for a way out.

As an aside, I'll have a rant about Pantone existing at all on another day, I'm sure. But suffice to say we shouldn't be fine with a company that wants to copyright colour. They're one of the worst creative monopolies around and we shouldn’t be reinforcing that by insisting that their products are “necessary.” They just aren’t anymore.

Any time there's a gatekeeper on your access to an audience, you should consider them a monopoly.

Creative work doesn't really work without an audience. Especially in entertainment, your access to an audience is the key to your ability to do what you do. So what if the audience could be held hostage?

This is the reality of YouTube for artists who making videos on the internet for a living. There's no way to export your subscriber list from YouTube and bring them to another platform, and there's no way to fight back if YouTube decides you've violated their terms of service and shuts down your channel. Even when you’re getting started, there isn't a real viable alternative to build a new audience on. You're entirely at their mercy.

Similarly, for almost a hundred years, there's been a near monopoly on larger-scale entertainment like film, television and music. The internet offered a chance to break free of these studio gatekeepers but instead we've swapped them out for a new set of monopolies. Now a musician needs to be on Spotify to find success, a filmmaker is essentially at the mercy of streaming companies like Netflix, who don’t share much information about their audience with them, and the audiences of all of these artists are somehow less aware of who makes all of this work than they were in the 1950s.

Gatekeeping is key to what Cory Doctorow calls "Chokepoint Capitalism," and that middle-man position between artists and their audiences is a golden opportunity for any aspiring creative monopolist.

What can we do about it?

The problem with everything I've just described is that it fits firmly in the "too late to do anything about it" side of things... so, is that it? Are we just fucked?

Other than, going forward, resisting monopolies before they happen, the first step in resisting the existing monopolies is identifying and acknowledging the problem. Especially with creative monopolies, I think there's a tendency to treat the tools we become stuck with almost like a part of who we are. We identify strongly with our tools because they become essential to how we work. That means it can be hard to admit that they're doing us harm. People still stand by Adobe, Microsoft and (especially right now) OpenAI, despite the fact that they are so transparently acting against our best interests. Admitting that we're being taken advantage of by these companies makes it easier to talk about finding a solution.

Beyond that, a healthy dose of luddism will go a long way towards making change in this area. We need to fight back and undermine the power of these monopolies. In the 19th-century, that was done through machine breaking. In the 21st-century, that can be as simple as through reputational sabotage and bad PR. Talk about how scummy these companies are being and undermine their marketing efforts. You don't need a giant platform to do this, either. Talk to your family, colleagues and neighbours about it. Spread the word.

Reject these tools when you can and do your best to make it socially unacceptable to uncritically support these companies (without causing collateral damage to your comrades. Be nice, compassionate, and don't mistake fellow victims for enemies). And, if you're technically minded or feeling destructive, a bit of 21st-century machine breaking is welcome, too.

Ultimately, though, creative monopolies are a symptom of the same systems that create any monopoly. It's a political issue, and the strongest tool we have to fight back against monopolies in politics is in regulating and dismantling them. If you care about this issue, you should vote with that in mind and pressure your government to step up anti-trust enforcement. Here in Canada, we've become pathetically gentle with tech giants and monopolies, including scrapping something as minor as a Digital Services Tax that could have helped bring in more money and (even better) encourage people to move away from US tech monopolies and towards supporting our own tech industry here in Canada. If that annoys you, talk to your MP or send Mark Carney a letter (but be kind, 'cause he's turning out to be a bit of a coward and we don't want to scare him). If you're not Canadian, then engage in your own country's version of these kinds of advocacy and protest.

At the end of the day, creative monopolies are just monopolies. But they're extra insidious because they seek to control one of the most fundamental ways we can connect and empathise with each other. Wanting that kind of control over anything is wrong, but wanting to control how people express themselves is particularly dark. The monopolists don't care about making anything of actual value (remember, "Competition Is for Losers"), and so we need to be sure we protect our creativity from their decidedly uncreative ideals.

Love,
Simon 🐒

🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠

The illustrations in this piece are from Ernst Haeckel’s “Bats” c. 1904.

The fonts used in the images are Avara and Reglo Bold

Linked throughout the article but worth highlighting here:

Empire of AI by Karen Hao is incredibly revealing. If you use any products from OpenAI, you should take the time to understand the people behind this company before you make their tools an important part of your work. This interview with Karen on Blood in the Machine is a good starting point, if you don't want to read a whole book (which isn't that hard, don't sell yourself short) as well as this interview with her, too.

Speaking of Blood in the Machine, will once again get a shout out on Everyone's Creative. His work bringing the story of the Luddites into the modern zeitgeist is incredibly important, and you should follow his newsletter to learn how tech companies want to get more control and how people are fighting back.

In addition to those links:

This post from is a good example of how you can start to pivot away from relying on tools and products from a particular area you don't want to support. In this case, Paris is exploring getting out from under the thumb of the larger monopoly of US tech in general. How much US-based technology do you use in a day? No wonder they have so much power, right? This is a good place to start chipping away at that.

I want to shout out Pivot to AI as a great example of the reputational luddism I was talking about above. In a world dominated by people (including journalists) echoing the marketing talking points of tech companies, this represents an effort to undermine that messaging. If AI is really as good as AI companies say it is, then Pivot to AI shouldn't be able to publish refutations to that almost daily.

This is the start of a new, brooding series of posts I'm calling The Dark Side of Creativity. After finishing the Everyone's Creative Manifesto, where I dig into how I believe we should use our creativity, it felt like a good idea to highlight some of the ways creativity is misused. Unfortunately, this comes in a lot of different forms.

As I've said before, creativity isn't good or bad. It just is. Creativity is humanity's way of building and growing. Everything we deliberately make or move towards is, in a way, an act of creativity. Some creativity is more or less deliberate and some creativity is more or less moral. But it's all creativity.

So what happens when we pretend that our creativity is special in some way? What happens when we try to make ourselves feel more important than others or want to try to justify our work on more than its actual merits? And what's the harm in talking a bit of bullshit every once in a while?

When I talk about "creative bullshit," I want to be clear that I mean talking bullshit about creativity. It's a more vulgar way of saying "creative mumbo-jumbo." I'm not digging into the art of bullshitting in general (though, in a way maybe I am).

It's hard to talk about in abstract so let's dig into the shit. And what better place to start than by looking at one of the greatest examples of creative bullshitting in human history.

Most of my examples of creative bullshitting are going to be from my areas of expertise, because the best way to know if someone is bullshitting is to know as much or more about the topic as they do. I just happen to be lucky that I work in marketing and branding, an industry that is fertile ground for people who make up hilarious nonsense to justify their output.

And no brand has ever been so fully filled to the brim with BS than the mid-2000s rebrand of Pepsi.

I'm not the first person to share this magnificent and borderline-incomprehensible document, but if you've somehow never experienced it before, you're in for a treat. This is a leaked internal document from Pepsi's rebranding process that is so crazy that a lot of people don't even believe that its real. Fortunately, whether its real or not, it's extreme, mind-boggling bullshittery makes for a useful case-study of a phenomenon that is often subtler and harder to notice.

In the document, we're treated to many different examinations of the design rationale behind the then-proposed logo revision. The curvature and geometry of the logo is connected to seemingly everything that's ever existed: Hindu numerical harmonies, the Vitruvian Man, Mobius Strips and, of course, the golden section. But this is just the beginning.

There is then an extended process of drawing the same shapes over all the different Pepsi logos of history in order to find the "DNA" of Pepsi(?), as though we're pretending that basic geometric shapes can't be found in ... everything.

After we learn about how the aesthetics of the logo's curves are connected to a deep and rational design structure, and how to draw the logo in 8 stages, connecting and overlapping circles to fit within the logical order defined by the golden section (but not the Vitruvian Man?), we're treated to a lesson in the magnetic dynamics of earth. Because we're calling this logo "the globe," of course the shape and colour is also defined by the "geodynamo" of the earth's core and the magnetic field it creates.

And it continues. The logo also expresses a variety of cursed human emotions before generating its own gravitational pull. The only reason I don't believe this is hoax is the sheer amount of effort that went into creating these graphical depictions of things like the "Pepsi Galaxy" and the "Pepsi Universe". It's a long, fascinating and ultimately meaningless exercise in justifying the design of a circle that is supposed to represent sugary water.

And yet, surprisingly, I think there's some value to this document. It just isn't found in the text of the document, but instead in what it represents.

When you look at the diagram defining the geometry of the "Pepsi Universe," you may chuckle to yourself and think "how silly!" Unfortunately, though, this document represents something more consequential: it's evidence. Evidence for everyone skeptical of creativity and artistic labour, proving that artists really are full of shit and that this work is really just a scam.

The problem with bullshitting about creative work is that, surprisingly to some, creativity isn't all bullshit. This can be hard for some people to believe but a lot of designers and artists really do put a lot of thought and care into making things, and they often have meaning in mind when they do. The difference between what we see in the Pepsi document (and in many, less notorious places) compared with the ideas driving most creative work is that an honest person creating something doesn't pretend that the meaning is going to be universal.

When creative work is justified by appealing to objectivity and universal truths it is almost immediately refutable. When you say that a colour makes people feel a certain way, you just need one person to feel differently and everything you built your idea on falls apart. For a lot of reasons (connected to the root of Everyone's Creative), many people feel at odds with creative work and the people that do it. They may feel judged, alienated, confused, foolish; all things that are going to make you feel like creativity and art are a net negative or something you want to reject. The appeal to objectivity in order to justify creative work, to these people, is proof that it's all just a facade. That it's all a scam. And the stink of that bullshit ends up getting stuck on the rest of us, becoming something we have to actively work against.

The truth has always been that there's no objectivity here. It may sound counter-intuitive but often things are only true about creative work because we say they are. A colour can represent a feeling if that's our intention, but only if we accept that it won't be true for everyone. And it only works if we're being honest about it.

Be Honest, We're Just Making it All Up

The problem with creative bullshit is that it pretends there's a truth to creativity that existed before we all showed up. It points to justifications for decisions that, often, are made intuitively or in ways that may seem shallow, derivative or false. Artists are typically just as oblivious of the impact of their work as their audience, only seeing and understanding how their intentions combine with what they were expressing after the fact. But all of that sounds a bit weak, doesn't it?

If bullshitting is meant to make our work seem more meaningful, then it fails and ultimately has the opposite effect. Instead, in my experience, talking about how loose the boundaries of meaning can be is a much better way to get skeptics on board. When we're honest about the way we get ideas or develop work (in other words, Demystify the Process) we open the door for people to see themselves as creative agents again (because they always were). Instead of saying there is meaning where there is none, saying where you hope there is meaning can help people create that meaning with you.

Practically speaking, I do this every day in my work. I make presentations a lot like that Pepsi one, with annotations on logos trying to demonstrate the intentions behind the design. The difference is that I try to make it clear that you can push back against my ideas. If I say "this colour is meant to represent growth," you're welcome to disagree. What colour would represent it better? Why is that more true for you? This is where we can start to define meaning together. But if I say something like "this colour universally represents financial opportunity" then I'm putting up a wall and saying "either you're too dumb to get this or I'm full of shit." No wonder people are skeptical of creative work.

The other reason people bullshit is to make themselves feel better. It can be scary to share your ideas and your work if you aren't sure they have merit. How nice would it be if you could say "this is why I did it this way" and nobody could argue with you? The laws of universal design bcome your scapegoat, and you can even make other people question their instincts by appealing to a higher power.

But bullshitting like this doesn't work, even if you really want to believe it. If you're worried about the thought that went into your work, you should think about it more. If you feel your ideas are too shallow, dig deeper. If you worry your decisions are arbitrary, then give yourself structure to help you make them. Don't try to come up with justifications after the fact, because that makes people distrust creative workers and ultimately makes things harder for all of us.

One of the germs of this idea came to me when a local institution, the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG) rebranded several years ago . I really didn't like the rebrand, partly because it replaced a brand that was already very strong and that I had personally grown to feel positively about, and partly because I thought it wasn't very good.

Along with the new logo came, of course, some bullshit. The logo was presented as better representing so many things that mattered to the RBG and their community. The wispy, generic line drawings were actually a "meaningful" way of presenting the values at the core of the organization. And they shared this bullshit proudly! While they slowly had this ineffective brand trickle out and replace the old branding in the wild, their website prominently shared the intention behind the rebrand, what the logo represented, and how all the money and creative energy that went into the process would lead the RBG confidently into the future.

Then, only a few years after the rebranding launched, the old logo was suddenly back without any fanfare. It felt like a real “Mandella Effect” moment for me. Had I slipped into another universe where this trendy, ineffective brand never existed?

To further cement my dimension-hopping experience, the old rebrand and all the bullshit behind it was scrubbed from history. Obviously it might be hard to put PR spin on undoing a large rebrand so quickly, but isn’t this a chance to be honest, when the rebrand instead seemed so dishonest? What happened to this new logo representing the organizations's new direction better than the old logo? What happened to all that meaning? Were you just lying to us?

Not only does this kind of reversal betray the bullshittery and lack of actual thought that went into the work, it wastes a lot of time and money. When a large, public-facing waste of money happens like this it cements a connection in people's minds between creative work and bullshit, inefficient wastefulness. When we look at it this way, we can start to see why people might believe "Creative Work = Waste of Money."

I believe that creative work can bring immense value (deeper than monetary value) to people's lives and their work. But that argument gets harder to make when more and more evidence piles up pointing to the opposite. Add to that the mountains of hollow slop coming from gig-work platforms like Fiverr, not to mention generative AI, and it starts to feel like the foundation of one of humanity's core experiences is being eroded out from under us.

I don't like that at all.

Call Out the Bullshit

The only way I can think to fight back against this is to call it out. Don't be a dick about it, but don't let people get away with it, either.

If you see someone pretending the ideas behind their work are divinely ordained, call them out or challenge them on it. If you see someone saying that their way is the one true way thing should be done, call them out. We need to make it morally unacceptable to erode public trust in creativity, just like how we need to fight back against people eroding the trust in medicine, science and truth.

And if you're out there spreading the bullshit, go take a long look in the mirror. Then, cut it out. It's not cool, and it isn't helping anyone. Resist the feeling that your work is somehow not enough, because bullshitting about it only makes it worse.

We need to be honest and transparent about how we work. Obscuring or mystifying creativity only gives people more ways to poke holes in it. If you're worried people won't value what you do if they know how it really works, imagine how much they'd value it if they think its all bullshit!

Sorry for writing "bullshit" so many times. I’m gonna go wash my mouth out with soap.

Lots of love,
Simon 🐒

The artwork used throughout this piece is from a series of illuminations depicting Dante's Divine Comedy. Sourced from the Public Domain Review, these works were created between 1444 and 1450. "The first two sections of Inferno and Purgatorio [were] drawn by the lesser known Priamo della Quercia (active 1426-1467), while the Paradiso section was illustrated by Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia (ca. 1403-1482)."

The font used in the images is Avara from the Velvetyne font collective. I really like it.

You can see the old RBG rebranding announcement near the end of this video, which is still live on the RBG site.

I love astronomy. There's something so mind boggling about the universe that just never gets old to me, especially as we learn more and more about everything that's out there with more advanced equipment and techniques. It reminds me how we're all so small and brief. It can freak some people out, but to me it is freeing.

One thing I find fascinating about astronomy is how light appears so different to us depending on its wavelength. The biggest telescopes on earth don't see light that is anything like the light we see with our eyes, instead detecting the giant waves of photons we call radio waves to help us see and understand things no human eye could ever perceive on its own. It's odd to think about, but we're all walking around every day in an electromagnetic soup of particles that we're completely unaware of. That's how your wi-fi works, and that's how telescopes can help us see things in the infrared, ultraviolet or even radio wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

When I first learned about the different wavelengths of light in the context of astronomy, and how astrophotographers use colour overlays to represent this light we can't see, I felt a bit disappointed. It made me feel like the photos we see of nebulae, galaxies and even our neighbouring planets are artificial in some way. That they're a lie, like an over-airbrushed model on a magazine cover or the shiny, glycerin-drenched burger on a fast food menu. When you see an image from NASA of a constellation of colours and a dazzling array of stars, is it all just some trick to make you think things are more majestic than they are? What does it really look like?

The problem, despite my initial impression, isn't that these images are lies. The problem is that our eyes only see a tiny sliver of the spectrum of light in the universe. We can't augment our eyes, and so instead we need to translate light that our telescopes can see into colours our eyes and our brains can perceive. This isn't just to make pretty pictures, though, since this is actually how astronomers can discover new things about the universe.

I love this because what we're doing is using technology (a human creation) to reveal new ways of understanding the world around us. It's a tangible expression of our creativity being used to move things forward in a new direction.

It's a trick we can use to discover a truth.

I don't know about you, but when I'm in a bad mood I can find a way to tinge everything around me with that feeling, even if it's incredibly benign. My therapist first helped me realize when I’m doing this and taught me to describe this experience as having my "shit covered glasses" on. It's a pungent metaphor.

I'm sure you've had this experience, too. You might have had a bad sleep, or your anxious about work or something entirely unrelated to your life (the world, politics, something a stranger said online) and suddenly, that vibe appears everywhere you look. Your dog is suddenly the most frustrating thing in your life. A person cuts you off and you're ready to take them down in a fiery car crash. Your partner of friend interrupts your miserable train of thought to tell you something they're excited about and all you can feel is frustration and rage. With your shit covered glasses on, everything around you starts to look like a big pile of shit.

The trick is to notice when the glasses are on (which can be tough! You'd think you'd be able to smell them), and to try to force yourself to take them off and see things as they really are. I find this metaphor so helpful because it reminds us of our subjectivity. It reminds us that the way we see things isn't the objective truth of how things really are.

This is a trick we can use to remind ourselves of the truth.

When we try to decode or examine anything around us, it's worth considering if the lens you're looking through reveals something you otherwise couldn't see or if it covers everything in its own haze. Are you applying a lens that helps you see things in a new way? Or are you only forcing things to fit into a point of view that you're committed to? Are you translating something to understand it better or over-simplifying the world so you don't need to understand anything at all?

I think of this any time I see people arguing about if something is "political" or not. It's a debate that I don't really understand, but that this framing around lenses might help us figure out.

One side will point out that "something is political because something about politics occurs around that thing." They apply a political lens to something (a work of art, a philosophy, a behaviour, a social group, etc.) and try to show how that lens reveals something about the thing they're examining. This is usually done to try to address an issue or to understand something better.

The other side of the debate rejects this. They don't think that the lens being applied is revealing something. They say that it's just wearing "politics covered glasses" so that everything you look at has this political edge to it that isn't always actually there. There's usually frustration, exasperation and a bit of condescension in these replies, too, but we'll leave that to the side for now.

I saw this happen recently here on Substack, where someone () made an observation about the unexamined politics around running, arguing that there's a privilege to being able to go run safely in your neighbourhood that many people who do it don't consider. I saw so many replies that rejected the idea. "Running is just running." "Not everything needs to be political." "You're not special. Stop trying to be a victim." Those replies were what inspired this post (I would link back to the more “inspiring” ones, but it seems like many of those replies have been deleted).

So, who's right? Is the "political" lens one that, like a telescope, can reveal things we otherwise wouldn't see? Or is it just a political-shit-covered pair of glasses we use to justify feeling disgruntled and at-odds with the world?

Is this question even worth asking? I don't really think it is.

The Chinese political activist and artist Ai Weiwei said "Everything is Art. Everything is Politics." This has become my favourite quote about art and politics. It's concise. It's easy to remember. It pisses people off. It, originally, made me laugh because of how broad it was (and how incurious I was about it at the time). What I love most about it is how it uses this intense certainty and all-encompassing definition to, at first, appear to oversimplify something when, the more you think about it, it actually allows for way more depth and thought to take place by getting past the surface-level definitions of things.

I've talked about this before, but I think the key to this argument around if things are or aren't "art" or "politics" is largely a waste of time. When we get into these debates, we're rarely in a philosophy classroom talking about the abstract concepts of art or politics. This is usually brought up while we're talking about something else. A disingenuous politician might say that it's not appropriate to "politicize" an issue (as though it's possible for a politician to do anything without it being political). In another case, a frustrated artist might declare that something isn't "art" because it's so derivative, unimaginative or shallow (especially if it's also very popular, successful or acclaimed). In both these cases, the conversation is being shifted away from the subject being examined and instead into the world of taxonomy and definitions. It's an avoidance tactic and I don't think most of us are aware of it when we do it.

In our debate about if something is or isn't political, the person saying some things just exist with no political context are saying there's a limit to what we can know about something. Their telescopes have seen as deeply into the sky as you can, and they know there's nothing else to be found there. It's a fundamentally incurious position, and it limits what we can do. If cars, policing, food, sports, dance or video games aren't political, then what are they? Similarly, if those things aren't art... what else is there? This position always seems to want things to be simple. Sometimes a chair is just a chair. Or is it?

When someone tries to point out the artistry of something, or the political underpinnings of another, they're trying to understand something more deeply. To reject that is simply lazy. It's an ostrich sticking their head in the ground and pretending something isn't there. You might not like that everything is art and everything is politics, but that doesn't mean they aren't.

Next time you feel this way, ask yourself why you want that to be true. Maybe the better response to someone saying "running is political” is to say "I don't like how that makes me feel," instead of saying "you just want everything to be political." You can do something with one of those responses. The other just shuts everything down.

That's what I love about Ai Weiwei's statement. If we simply define everything as both Art and Politics, then we side-step that distraction or denial and get to the actual issue at hand. We get to examine things through these lenses and dig deeper into things instead of circling around the same pedantic point to avoid the actual issues.

Art and Politics are the same thing. They're human creations that are rooted in the very core of our society. The earliest things we did as humans was organize and express ourselves. We painted cave walls and we formed groups. We created tools and we collaborated on using those tools to be more successful as a species. I don't think anything we've ever done isn't political and I don't think anything we've ever made isn't art. What else is there?

It's like trying to see colours you can't see with the human eye. No matter how hard you try, you can’t just see new colours. You have to translate them into the colours we can see.

With love, politically,
Simon 🐒

This is the ninth (and final) piece in a series of deep dives into the Everyone's Creative Manifesto. This series has been a fun (more on that below) and challenging thing to write. It's interesting to dig deeper into the things you say you value and discover what is hiding there. If you haven't read them all, you can read the other parts by following the linked headings here.

I'd also love to hear what you think about the manifesto and how these ideas land for you. Leave a comment!

Leave a comment

Now, the conclusion of the manifesto.

Have Fun

We have an incredible capacity to remove joy from the most important things in our lives. Never forget that, as important as it might be, it should also be fun.

Let's all take a deep breath.

Things are pretty heavy out there, aren't they? It can feel like the walls are closing in on you from every direction. There are global issues of massive, society-moving scales that are being piped into the core of our lives and that most of us feel we have little power over. It can all make things seem a bit bleak.

What to do? I'd argue that you should do something with that energy. You should make something. Unsurprisingly, I believe our creativity is the way we can affect change and move things in a better direction for all. But it all feels a bit intense, doesn't it?

When you work on something that is important to you, it can feel right to take it very seriously. When things hold great meaning for us, we treat them with reverence, severity and respect. Interestingly, though, we don't always realize how that can tip over from being a humble emotion into being a distracting and negative one. I can't be the only person who has snapped out of a frustrated moment of work to ask myself "Wait, isn't this supposed to be something I like to do?"

The reality is that we have an incredible capacity to rob ourselves of joy. Especially when we're working on things that matter (something that I've spent eight other manifesto pieces arguing that you should be doing), we can trick ourselves into thinking that cold dispassion is the same thing as taking something seriously (or, conversely, that treating something with levity means it doesn't matter to you). This is a really big problem, because if you're going to do something that requires thought, focus or care, then you need to want to do it. It needs to, on some basic level, be at least a little bit fun.

My Personal Discovery of the Power of Novelty and Fun

In 2022, I realized that I have ADHD. That may have been obvious to literally everyone else in my life, but it came as a bit of a shock to me and led to a lot of introspection (and a decent amount of existentially spacing out while staring at the ceiling dramatically). Eventually, this led me trying to understand more of how my brain works and how I can work with it to do the things that matter to me.

Enter: novelty and fun.

I'm a fun guy! Trust me! But I can also be an incredibly intense and serious guy, too. The dissonance of this duality is most obvious when I become humourless and frustrated about something like a cartoon I'm making, or have a tantrum because the fun little project I'm doing because I want to hits an unexpected bump in the road. This manifests most often, though, in my ability to lose interest entirely in things that I know I actually really enjoy and want to do.

Through learning about how my brain works, I've come to realize the value of novelty and fun in the work that I do. That means that when I start to feel the joy draining out of something that is meant to energize me, I now try to ask myself what would make it more interesting. That can mean trying a new tool, changing up my workspace, taking an extended break to do something inspiring, or even just reminding myself that every one of us is mortal and that our planet will eventually be consumed by the expanding sun and that ultimately, none of this matters and so there's no reason to worry (maybe that last one isn't energizing to everyone).

The point is that it's all about framing. Telling yourself a different story about the things you're working on can entirely change to way you feel about the work. That, in turn, can make the work more interesting and, crucially, more fun.

Why Fun Matters

Some people's work is decidedly un-fun. Sometimes you can't do anything about that. But, if you're honest with yourself, does that always apply to you? Is there nothing you enjoy about the way you have chosen to spend your days?

I imagine that we all have this internal force of joy-entropy. Unless we are actively putting energy into keeping the fun front of mind, things start to sort of bleed out into a diffuse grey mush, leaving us feeling more or less neutral about what we're doing. When you add in other external stresses to that feeling (time stress, financial stress, interpersonal stress, political stress, global-collapse-of-environment-and-civilization stress, etc.) then it's hard to maintain that neutrality and we end up feeling bad about something that we started out feeling happy about.

This is important because fun is energizing while despair, depression, anger and fear are not. Especially when it comes to our creativity, if we don't find a way to enjoy the moment-to-moment of what we're doing, then we're simply not going to do it (or, in the case of work, we will come to resent that we need to do it despite not wanting to). That negativity is corrosive. It can't help you create anything of value.

Negative Inspiration is Different than Negative Energy

I don't want to conflate negative feelings in general with negative energy surrounding your creative work. There is tremendous value in embracing the full spectrum of your emotional experience and using all of that to fuel your creativity. You can harness great creative energy from anger or frustration or sadness, but if you allow that emotion to take over how you see and experience everything then you're simply not likely to do anything with it.

I try very hard to both embrace my emotions and allow myself to be separate from them. This is easier said than done, but it's the key to having fun when you make something, even if that something is about a negative feeling. This is the difference between enjoying making a work of art about a bad experience (maybe even finding catharsis in redirecting that energy) and becoming so depressed or enraged by that experience that you can't create anything at all. One of these uses that energy, while the other lets it fester and rot.

Letting Go of Your Ego

I think the key to having more fun with your creative work has a lot to do with taking yourself less seriously.

When I think back to times when I've robbed myself of the joy of a creative project, instead becoming consumed by frustration, depression or boredom, it typically happened when I was too focused on myself and not on the experience or the work itself.

One simple example that comes to mind is the difference between my experience early on in art school compared to my final year. When I started my university Illustration program, I fancied myself quite the clever artistic mind. This resulted in me suffering through almost every project because I was so concerned with how interesting my ideas were, how advanced my technique was or how novel my combination of disciplines could be. Ultimately, I realize now how little I was actually thinking about learning, experimenting, playing and having fun while I was immersed in this very rare opportunity of spending years focused on my own ideas and work.

Luckily, I came (mostly) to my senses in my last year of university, when we began our fourth-year "thesis" assignment. This year-long project was incredibly daunting and represented a huge commitment to both a body of work and an idea that connected the work together. I watched a lot of people over-think this assignment and heard about just how stressful and tiring it was.

I don't know how it happened, but I'm really grateful that I realized that I didn't need to feel that way about it. Instead, I set the goal of making the project about something I could have fun with. I liked robots, I liked drawing robots, so why not just figure out a gimmick so I could spend the year drawing robots?

When I look back at that project and the core thematic message of the "thesis" (something about "true artificial intelligence would be just as silly as human intelligence, 'cause that's just what being alive is all about") I don't see that as being what the body of work was "about." Instead, I see it as actually being about finding the fun in my work and letting go of my ego. From that perspective, I think it was a huge success. That year, I created some work that I'm still incredibly proud of and I also created (and presented to my class for critique) some of the worst art I've ever made in my life. But I don't regret any of it because the point of it wasn't the output, the portfolio of work or the demonstration of my talent and brilliant thinking; it was about the experience of making something because I wanted to.

I look back on this work fondly because I had a fun time making it. I learned a lot that year because I was engaged in the process. The finished product isn't really that important to me. I got more out of it than you can see hanging on a wall, and I use that every day.

You Deserve to Enjoy Your Life

The burden of serious, important work often falls on the people who have no choice but to work on it. Meanwhile, in my experience, people with the most resources to enjoy every moment of their work and their lives still manage to find ways to convince themselves that they have something to be upset about. That means that people who are affected by injustice and inequality have less fun because they end up stuck doing the important but unpleasant work of trying to make things better, while the privileged people who benefit from our social imbalance also aren't having fun because it somehow makes them feel like their lives have more meaning if they're suffering.

That's a lot of negativity for a bunch of people who only get to be alive for a few decades.

Have Fun is the conclusion of the manifesto because it is a reminder that, no matter your situation and no matter what you do, you can try to enjoy something about the doing. All of this depends on a certain level of life's necessities being met, however, and so this idea only really works if we're all also trying to alleviate the suffering of others so that we all have the chance to enjoy our brief, temporary existence. Rising fun-tides should lift all party-boats...or something like that.

All that is to say that I'm aware of how naive this last part of the manifesto can seem. But that's kind of the point. Our lives are already bombarded with challenges and difficulties, and our ability to see the vast amount of suffering happening on a global scale can make our own positive experiences seem trivial, blasphemous or offensive. But remember that fun isn't the same thing as "manic, delusional joy." "Have Fun" isn't a call to deny the reality of the world and pretend everything is great so that you can have a nice day. We use the fun found in creativity to do something. Your creativity can make great change and have an effect on the world in unimaginable ways. But you need to actually do it if you want anything to happen. And you need to want to do it if you're actually going to show up and make it happen.

Life needs to be fun. Otherwise, what's the point of being here?

Have fun!
Simon 🐒

🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠

An aside to this idea that didn't quite fit in above is that making fun things can make life more fun for others. That's why I see value in cartoons, comedy and other seemingly apolitical and "meaningless" art (key word is “seemingly”). If your work allows others to access fun, they may then go on to make more of the same for others. I don't think it works the other way around. If your work depresses the shit out of everyone, then you may be creating a leak in our collective creative bucket. You may want to ask if you're Creating with Care.

To that end, here are some fun things people have created that, in turn, make me want to create things and have fun:

• Whenever there's a new Captain Disillusion video

• The Present and Correct blog

• Everything ever made by Keita Takahashi

• Pee-Wee's Playhouse

• The wonderful videos by Posy

What about you? What fun things make you want to make and have fun? Spread the fun-love! Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

The banner image for this piece uses images and artwork from the following sources:

Vaught's Practical Character Reader, L. A. Vaught, 1902 - via The Public Domain Image Archive

Untitled, Aoki Shukuya, 1772 - via The Public Domain Image Archive

Charle's Babbage's Brain, from "Description of the Brain of Mr. Charles Babbage, F.R.S", V. Horsley, 1909 - via The Public Domain Image Archive

The Lower Side of the Brain, Christopher Wren, 1664 - via The Public Domain Image Archive

Brain, Anatomical, Burt G. Wilder, 1901 - via Archive.org

This is the eighth piece in a series of deep dives into the Everyone's Creative Manifesto. You can read the other parts by following the linked headings here.

Create with Care

Recognize that creativity is neither good nor evil - but that it is powerful. You are responsible for your ideas and for what you create. Remember that you can cause great harm - by accident or by choice. You need to choose not to.

How much harm can your creativity really do?

Creativity and art are often associated with progressive ideas and politics. This makes sense, because many of the most notable works of art and the communities that form around artistic practices often are progressive. Art is powerful and effective at challenging norms, disrupting the status-quo and turning society's eye in on itself to question why things are the way that they are. This can all be good and helpful, but none of this is inherent to creativity in general.

If we want to accept that everyone is creative, then we need to accept that this idea really does include everyone. That means everyone. Yes. Even them.

If we come to accept that even horrible people are creative, then it stands to reason that creativity can be used to cause harm. When you start to think about it, a lot of the most horrible things humans have done to each other are incredibly imaginative.

It can be easy to accidentally assume that you are somehow safe from using creativity in this way. You may mistakenly consider that creativity used for evil is a misuse of the creative energy and not merely a way it can be used. The truth is that creativity is powerful and wonderful and awful, and it's ultimately up to each of us to decide how we want to use that power in the things that we make.

Opting Out of Causing Harm

The first way to do this is to consciously decide not to do harm with the things you create. Like how doctors take an oath to "do no harm," I believe artists and professional creative workers should do the same. Ultimately, it makes sense to me that everyone should hold themselves to this standard.

This includes avoiding direct harms like making things that hurt people, that are malicious in their intent and that you want to cause harm with. The people designing and manufacturing weaponry may have the most obvious introspection to do here, but this goes all the way down to creating something because you want someone to feel bad. That's more of an inner journey and a decision to make any time you sit down to make something.

This also includes the unforeseen, indirect harms. The collateral damage of making things without considering how they may affect others. This might be reducing the environmental impact of your work, or actively trying to learn how you may be inadvertently sharing ideas that influence other people to become more antisocial or harmful themselves. The artist who "accidentally" radicalizes someone with their words may have been able to avoid that if they had tried to anticipate what harms their ideas could inspire.

All of this is an active decision. It's a choice you can make to try to ensure that the things you make and the way you make them don't cause the world to become worse off than it was before. I believe the decision is a moral one, and one that we all have a responsibility to commit to if we believe in making the world a better place.

The Negative Effect of (Artificial) Neutrality

One of the most dangerous ways people can create is by pretending their creativity is neutral. The things that we create are steeped in our cultural moment and all of the circumstances of their creation. That means that your idea of "neutrality" represents an agreement with everything going on around you. It's an endorsement of the status-quo. It is a reinforcement of both the good and the bad in the world. It is also creating an opportunity for others to co-opt your work and fill it with meaning where you left a void.

Sitting things out isn't a moral position. Everyone is equally creative, with the same capacity for empathy and understanding. We all arrive with the same ability to make a statement and choosing not to (especially with your creativity) says something about what you think is important in the world.

This doesn't mean that everyone needs to make protest art or they're a bad person, but it does mean that you should be intentional in the things you create and reject the idea that you can make anything that is neutral. Neutrality doesn't really exist. So what matters to you? Why are you here? What are you contributing? Where do you want things to move and how do you think we should get there?

Not doing harm doesn't equal doing good (but it's a good place to start).

There's a difference between making the world a better place and simply not making it worse. A lot of what we create maintains our situation, while some people work actively on moving things in a particular direction. We can't all be revolutionaries all of the time, but you should try not to make things worse.

This is a call to action to reject complacency and to try to incrementally improve the state of things in everything that you do. Start from where we are and ask yourself what's important to you and how you can nudge things in that direction. You don't need to burn it all down to get there. In fact, that might inadvertently make things worse.

People talk about wanting to have a clean slate, a fresh start. They say things are too far gone and the only path forward is to raze everything to the ground and build anew. I think this represents an indulgence in despair and a lack of imagination. This idea isn't just dangerous... it's lazy.

Creativity is about making, building, adding on. It's about taking the things we have and doing something with them to arrive at something new. Some people want to create things that are destructive and that erode the things others have built. However, we need to remember that the net-output of your creativity matters.

Just because you made something doesn't mean you made something good. If you need to burn the world to the ground in order to make something, then you'll be hard pressed to make something good enough to make up for all of that destruction. If you need to exploit, abuse or take advantage of people to create something, then it's likely that your creation is a net-negative on society and isn't worth making in the first place.

Nobody's perfect. And you should still try anyways.

If there is a secondary mandate to this part of the manifesto it is to resist despair. Despair is the lazy, self-indulgent emotion that gives us an easy way out. It's individualism at its finest and it is a slap in the face of all the people who came before you to give you everything you have.

Things may be bad at times, but they've definitely been worse. We can maintain a trajectory towards more flourishing and prosperity for everyone, but only if we all try. You should Create with Care and understand that you will fail to be perfect at this. It's the trying that matters. Keep trying. Keep going.

I'll keep trying with you.

Love,
Simon 🐒

🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠

There are many things I could share to help you see how to create with care. I think it's important to highlight how we can do that in the smaller, incremental ways so that we come to believe that this is actually possible. Not everything needs to be a revolution. Things don't usually change overnight.

Here are some recent examples that are top of mind:

Things like taking criticism and turning it into a way to spread awareness and destigmatize autism (instead of responding with anger or denial and doubling-down on his mistakes). This feels like a net-positive to me.

Or how you can debunk scam ideas by recreating them yourself to help people understand how they're actually done. Putting energy into helping people avoid being deceived can take a lot of the negative energy out of the efforts of those trying to deceive people. Also, I appreciate the compassion that is seen in this video, too, in trying to understand why someone would make a video trying to deceive people.

And while I'm linking YouTube videos, I think one way more online creators can create with care is to consider how they advertise, who they take money from, and how that can deceive their audience. This is one of those active decisions you can make when you have a bit more opportunity and reach.

I'm also interested in what comes to mind for you when you consider creating with care. Who does this well? Who's missing the mark? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Leave a comment

The photos and artwork featured in this post’s banner image and throughout the piece are from the following sources:

Gymnastics safety manual : the official manual of the United States Gymnastics Safety Association, United States Gymnastics Safety Association, 1979

Laboratory safety at the National Institutes of health, National Institutes of Health (U.S.), Division of Safety, 1980

National Safety News 1952-03: Vol 65 Iss 3, 1952

Public Safety 1951-09: Vol 40 Iss 3, 1951

1982 Job Safety Analysis Instructors Manual, The National Safety Council, 1982

“The Priest becomes a form; the attorney a Statute Book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of a ship”, C. P. Cranch, ca. 1837-9

Supervisors safety manual better production without injury and waste from accidents, National Safety Council, 1973

Hi,

It's election day in Canada, and to celebrate I thought it would be fun to look at how political parties communicate to understand a bit more about how they operate, what they value and what they think of you. This was inspired by the Conservative Party of Canada releasing their platform incredibly late into this election cycle and seeing people covering everything about their policy. It made me curious – what about how they present their policy?

This is what I do every day. As a (graphic, brand, communication) designer my job is to help figure out how to communicate things what matters most to communicating an idea. How do you present ideas to an audience to help them understand it? How do you avoid confusing or obscuring the point? Ideally, how do you avoid being manipulative or misleading? But also how do you communicate ideas in a way that helps people understand who you are? All of these things are things I think about every day, and I think slide under the radar for a lot of other people.

So, I went a little nuts, and I reviewed the election platforms of the six most commonly discussed political parties in Canada to see not what they say they'll do if they're elected, but how they say what they say they'll do... if that makes any sense. It was immediately illuminating and while I don't think it will sway any votes (hence this coming out on election day, not before it), I'm hoping that it will help you see how people in power communicate ideas (or fail to) and that in the future you will consider how the effort someone does or doesn't put into communicating with you may hint at how much they actually care about you.

This became a real deep dive, so I'll try to make it as consumable as possible. However, if you'd like to review my insane conspiracy board instead, you can feel free to enjoy it here. Links to all the things I’m referencing can be found in there, and a lot more fun visual samples!

The Parties

Let's start with a high-level overview of the parties and what my major takeaways of their platforms were.

Liberal Party of Canada

The Liberal Party's platform looks like a strategic plan document for a for-profit hospital. It's slick, technically well designed and competent throughout. But it is also the only platform that makes a point of putting a copyright notice on it, and it seems more concerned with itself that with communicating its ideas. It doesn't feel badly designed but it doesn't feel designed to be read, either.

Conservative Party of Canada

The Conservative Party's platform is a fucking mess. First of all, it's huge considering what's actually inside it, and that's mostly because of all the giant, uncompressed photos of Pierre Poilievre they filled it with. The actual design is haphazard and unappealing. It looks almost like it's just using the default text stying of an InDesign document, but then someone did enough to it to start messing things up. It feels rushed and like nobody cared about the presentation of the actual platform.

NDP

The NDP's platform is such a perfect metaphor for the NDP. Putting aside the actual content of the platform, the way it is presented just feels like nobody had the time, resources or energy to consider anything going into it. It's only available on their website (which is probably fine) but the majority of the platform content is displayed in white text on the eye-searing NDP-brand orange. Just like the NDP makes it feel hard to vote for them, they're also making it hard to even read if you should vote for them. It's embarrassing.

Green Party

The Greens are, as they tend to do with their place in politics in general, seemingly the most competent platform that nobody is going to read. They recently rebranded and it really shows on their website – the design is really consistent, appealing and presents their ideas in a digestible way. They don't lean on the persona of their party leaders at all, and they seem to actually care about communicating clearly and concisely.

Bloc Québécois

Like the Bloc's unique position in Canadian politics, their platform is unlike anyone else's. They don't have any of their platform on their website – it only leads to a PDF download – and the PDF of the platform is easily the slickest, most professional looking of the parties. It looks more like an in-flight magazine than a party platform which, honestly, says a lot about the energy they put into hoping someone might actually read this thing.

People's Party of Canada

This thing is insane. It's the digital document version of talking to a conspiracy nut by accident. It's long, rambling, incoherent – and I'm only talking about the design. On their website, it has the insidious visual styling of a charity with this weird, overly-optimistic aesthetic while they talk about some of the most vile things. Top to bottom, the whole thing feels psychopathic – so it's very on-brand for the PPC! Well done!

Deeper Dives

Here are the deeper dives into the platforms where I'll share some of my favourite tidbits about their design. Each platform was very different and so it's hard to compare them evenly, but I think it's fun to see how they all seem to mess up simple things and, especially with the major parties, you get the impression that none of the parties actually expect anyone to read these things.

Liberal Party of Canada

Key Takeaways:

• Entire platform is on their website

• Their platform leans heavily into the branding "Canada Strong" and the face of the party leader

• Couldn't find the PDF of platform on their site – had to search for it – but the content is the same as the content on the website

• Well designed (both site and PDF), but pretty generic and boring

• The whole thing feels more like a corporate annual report than an inspiring message of change

• The most successful use of graphs, diagrams and design elements of all the parties

• Decent hierarchy and breakdown of information

PDF Stats

• PDF Platform: 67 Pages, 2 MB

• The only platform with a distinct copyright notice on it

• No alt text on graphs and figures, meaning the data within isn't available to people with accessibility needs

The Liberal Party's platform is totally competent. It's visually clear, doesn't create design issue and it fails to inspire in any way whatsoever. In that way, I think it's very on-brand for the liberals and its actually a fairly authentic representation of the party and their platform.

They don't overuse photos of Mark Carney – but they don't not use photos of him either.

It feels like the visual style is meant to be one of Carney's boring suits. You won't really consider it when it's in front of you and you certainly won't remember it once you look away. That isn't a criticism, either. They seem to have really taken the approach of being very safe (conservative?) with the design so that it isn't challenging the reader and isn't getting in the way.

Overall, this feels like the stock political platform. It's what you'd imagine every party would do. It's plain and uninspiring and also not dangerous or frighteningly incompetent.

...speaking of frighteningly incompetent...

Conservative Party of Canada

Key Takeaways

• the PDF of the platform is clearly an afterthought

• the website doesn't lead you to the PDF, it leads you to little propaganda videos of their top-line issues

• the actual presentation of the platform is a mess

• this is the party leaning most into the identity of their leader

• the platform is cynical in its design – it looks like something you rush because you don't give a shit about the person you're presenting it to

PDF Stats

• 30 pages, 12.9 MB

• shitty file name for a public-facing document

• no alt text, no title, no heading tags, bookmarks... basically no modern PDF technology that could help someone read this document

• surprisingly – designed on a Mac!

The Conservative Party's platform is aesthetically offensive. It's so clearly not a priority of the party that it has ended up looking like the rushed homework of a high-school communications student that forgot they had a project due and doesn't really care about the class beyond getting a 51. It looks rushed because it likely was, but that is all given a strange feeling because the horrible design is juxtaposed against so many (too many) glossy, professional photographs of Pierre Poilievre smiling like a lunatic.

There's a clear distribution of energy in the design where we see the content of the platform being rushed and treated like an afterthought, while the representation of the party and the party leader are given budget and resources.

The document design is a total failure. It's visually cluttered and messy and not really worth talking about. The most notable thing about this document is that you can pull out some funny photos of Pierre Poilievre with a transparent background – but then you realize he is so uncharismatic that it isn't even really much fun to do anything with those photos.

If you could design a document that perfectly encapsulates feeling entitled to someone's vote, this would be it.

NDP

Key Takeaways

• this thing is so lame

• the NDP are perfectly presenting their ability to drop the ball with this platform

• it's so hard to read

• it's so boring

PDF Stats

• none

The NDP don't have a PDF of their platform (that I could find). The entire thing is on their website and it is never referred to as their platform. That means that I didn't even realize it was their platform at first, because they decided to name the page "commitments" instead. However, it should be said that they clearly knew it was their platform because the images are tagged that way in the CSS. I don't understand why you would obscure this basic information.

The actual design of the platform is both boring and amazingly incompetent. It consists mainly of text – lots of text – with a very basic structure breaking each section of the platform into chunks. However, the actual content of the platform is presented entirely in bold, condensed white text on either NDP-orange or some intense bright blue. This has the effect of making the content of the platform both visually cluttered, boring and physically hard to read. A real achievement!

I can't think of a better way for the party of missed-opportunities to further cement themselves as unable to do simple things.

Green Party

Key Takeaways

• The most different feeling platform and party

• Very friendly and appealing design

• Nicely presented online, and maybe overly presented in their PDF

• The only party offering an audio version of the platform (though it is just read by a robot)

PDF Stats

• 124 Pages (!), 1 MB

• Almost entirely text

The Green Party rebranded recently and it is treating them well with this platform. It looks fresh, well put together and is very inviting. This feels like something they expect you to read, and so they present the ideas in an appealing and interesting way (online, at least).

You can download both a PDF and an audio version of the platform, which is unique to all the parties. However, the audio version is just a multi-hour file of a text-to-speech bot reading the platform (it's no Andy Serkis reading The Fellowship of the Ring).

I imagine they did this because nobody had time to sit and read the entire platform into a mic, and I don't blame them because the platform is long as fuck. Part of how you present ideas is how you curate ideas and the Green party seems incapable of editing themselves down. Their platform PDF is the longest of all the parties, and it very notable doesn't use any images, even though the website has some nice illustrations paired to the party platform that could have been sprinkled in.

This feels like the platform is designed to start online and only be read by the most dedicated of followers, whereas the other parties treat the PDF as an option for consuming the same content as they have on the website. I don't actually mind this approach, but it isn't presented clearly enough and I can imagine some people downloading the PDF before they read much on the site and being turned off by how long-winded it is.

Bloc Québécois

Key Takeaways

• the most polished PDF design

• feels like a magazine (not a cool one) more than a platform

• lots of generic images, not a lot of informative images

• prepared much earlier than the other parties

• the only platform with a "conclusion" that tries to end the platform with some kind of final idea

PDF Stats

• 34 Pages, 2 MB

• No alt text or other PDF features

• Main fonts used are from dafont.com???

The Bloc's platform is notable for being only available as a PDF. When you click "Plateforme politique" on their website navigation you just get a download of the PDF.

The PDF itself make a good first impression, especially compared to the competition. It's the most "designed" of the documents and feels like a print design file more that a digital policy document. The more you look at it, though, the more it feels like a stock template or a placeholder layout for something else. The images aren't very additive and the layouts just add design to the page, not understanding. It's all a bit "style over substance."

People's Party of Canada

Key Takeaways

• I probably should have used a VPN before I went to this site

• This platform is the most vile in terms of policy, and so while I'm not talking about policy here I do think it should be called out how awful these ideas are

• Juxtaposing the nastiness of this party against the presentation of the ideas makes it all feel very bizzaro and confusing

• The PDF of the platform looks like the ramblings of a madman

PDF Stats

• 43 Pages, 9 MB

• Just a bunch of different PDFs glued together

The PPC is a bad party. They do a fine job reflecting this in the design of their party platform.

Honestly, I dug more into it in my research but I don't really think they're worth the energy to dig deeper into.

What we can learn from this

How people present ideas says a lot about what they think of both their ideas and the people they are presenting them to. It also says a lot about the care they put into things – design isn't simple and it requires detail-oriented thinking or a certain degree of thought to present ideas clearly and interestingly.

Looking at how political parties present their platforms says a lot about the parties, but also about our system. In theory, these documents should be the most important thing the parties produce. This is the entire plan they have for how they want to govern. This is what they actually say they will do. And yet, for most of the parties, this seems like an afterthought or a box to check and I don't imagine they're wrong about that.

The fact that the Conservatives could release their platform after the advance polls closed and less than a week before the election should mean that they've completely dropped the ball and nobody will vote for them. Instead, they have a decent shot at forming government. Imagine that in any other context – a business presenting their plan after getting the loan, or a person handing in their resume after getting hired for the job – and you start to see how absurd this is.

The way these parties present their ideas says so much about who they are, but the sad thing is that it probably doesn't matter. As citizens, we need to start looking more closely at what and how politicians communicate and be more critical of these things if we ever want to have politics that are driven by anything deeper that partisanship or personality cults.

Don't forget to go vote today if you haven't already!

Love,
Simon 🐒

Hi,

This is the seventh piece in a series of deep dives into the Everyone's Creative Manifesto. You can read the other parts by following the linked headings here.

Empower Each Other

Working alone can be wonderful. Existing alone is a nightmare. Empower, teach, uplift - whatever you have to provide, someone else likely needs. We're all stronger when we all help in our way.

Reject Individualism

The biggest swindle of late-capitalism and the entrenchment of power in tech companies has been in convincing us all that we're individuals first and most importantly. Our atomization hasn't just made us more polarized and lonely, it's made us vulnerable. The truth is that we all have far more in common than not, especially if you are part of the increasingly disadvantaged 99% of the population that doesn't control immense amounts of capital.

All of this is to say that our power doesn't lie in our individual freedoms (rights aren't power, that's kind of the point) or our unique, special little thoughts. Our power lies in our collective identity and in our community. We're stronger together, and we need to embrace and accept that idea in everything we do – especially in creativity and making things.

The serenity of being alone.

I'm writing this while I'm shut away in my studio, completely alone. I like working alone. I get distracted easily – especially by other people – and I like having the freedom that being alone affords me. I can pace, mumble to myself, stare into space, take breaks, lie on the floor... all of that feels like it gives me some ability to better access my creative energy and to focus on my work.

There's value in having privacy, both to be who you are without judgement and to protect yourself from the increasingly prying eyes of tech companies and the state. It's important to recognize that we're giving away a huge amount of our private, individual information to monoliths and that it gives value to them. Value, under capitalism, is power. So embracing the idea of protecting your privacy shouldn't be just because you're worried someone will find something out about you, it should also be in the spirit of denying the powers that be the value that your data provides them. It takes (in small amounts) power away from them and returns it to you.

All this is to say that I recognize the different ways that your individuality can have value. But liking being alone or wanting to protect your privacy shouldn't mean becoming a hermit. We need to be careful to recognize when our individuality is empowering to us and when it tips over into making us all more vulnerable.

Putting the collective first.

We have to stay connected. We need to share our ideas and the things we create with one another. We need to build community and networks, not just for our own benefit but for the benefit of each other. This requires a change in attitude which may feel uncomfortable at first. We've been taught that selflessness is morally laudable, but ultimately creates little value for the person being selfless. You can volunteer or donate money if you have the time or the means, but because we've become so hyper-individualized, we rarely have spare time or spare money to give. When we reposition ourselves and start focusing on the collective, we will realize that all that struggle isn't necessary. Sacrificing a bit of your individualism means everyone has a bit more help, which in turn means they have a bit more to give.

This impacts creativity greatly, and not just in the obvious ways. Sure, collaboration and sharing ideas can lead to amazing things. There are works of art, engineering and science that simply cannot be accomplished by a single individual. This is the simplest form of collective creation – collaborating on a film, a movement, a product or a new scientific discovery.

But embracing a collective mindset in everything you do also means asking yourself how your work can help others – even when you're making it on your own. It gives your creativity a higher purpose and it reminds us of what the point of art and creativity is all about. It isn't about personal gain, acclaim or legacy – many people think it is, but they've clearly lost their way. The point of our creativity is connection. It's to share ideas, experiences, resources, emotion and humanity with one another. When you hold that idea close in everything you create, then you're never really working alone. Even when you're shut into a studio by yourself.

Whatever you have, someone else likely needs.

None of us can provide everything we need for ourselves entirely on our own. This is the myth of individualism we've all been sold and we can see the lie crumbling around us every day. We're all ultimately just people struggling to find, afford and maintain shelter. We're people trying to balance work and caring for those dependent on us completely alone. We're people trying to stay healthy, make ends meet, stay informed, rest, be social, be courteous, be on time, be mindful, be productive, be organized... trying to do everything completely on our own because we see some virtue in our individuality or because we can't see another way.

But this is such a waste of energy. Most of us have a surplus of something and a deficit of another. Not just in material ways, either. Some people are just more organized than others, and find planning projects easier than others. That's a simple, intangible thing that can be easy to share wit someone else. Similarly, some people have more compassion, more free time, more education, more money, more friends, more connections, more tools, more books, more space, more anything – and that's something they can use to fill a gap for someone else.

Anything you have a bit more of than someone else is something they may be lacking in, and that's what the idea of empowering each other comes into play.

This idea isn't about shedding our individual identities for some spiritual reason, or just to appeal to some moral ideal. This is a political statement, and it's about pushing back on the people trying to push us all apart before they crush us. Embracing our collective identity is about spreading power around and lifting everyone up together. I have a surplus of time and ideas, which manifest in this newsletter you're reading right now. It's not meant to be a monologue but a conversation – even if you only reply in your head – because I believe that sharing ideas helps other people form their own thoughts and opinions. I've experienced that from others and see that as something I can do, too. I don't want to be heard. I want others to realize they are creative and have something to offer, too.

You shouldn't need to deprive yourself in order to benefit your fellow humans. We shouldn't see compassion and support as a luxury we can only afford once we've hoarded enough resources for ourselves. The point is that, no matter what you make, you can make it with others in mind. If we all do that, then imagine how much more power all of us would have. Imagine what we could do together instead of all trying to do it on our own.

Stay connected.

Love,
Simon 🐒

This is the sixth piece in a series of deep dives into the Everyone's Creative Manifesto. You can read the other parts by following the linked headings here.

Share as Much as You Can

Don't hoard ideas or resources. Make things other people can use.

Demystifying the Process, part 5 of the Everyone's Creative Manifesto is about embracing the idea that what you do isn't magic. It's about sharing how you work, so we can all benefit from realizing that creativity really is universal – that it's just something people do.

Hand-in-hand with Demystifying the Process is sharing. Sharing how you work is one thing you can share, but this is about more than that – it's about embracing sharing as a fundamental value in everything you do creatively. It's about creating for more that just yourself.

Creativity is Selfish

Nobody asked to be born. That means creating someone can't be for their benefit, so... it must be for you?

Building on that simple, fundamental truth, I'd argue that all creation is ultimately a self-indulgence. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that, but acknowledging it means that all our further impulses toward self-indulgence in the things we make are compounding on the selfishness inherent to making things. Basically, making something is already kind of selfish, so why be extra selfish on top of that?

Creativity takes up resources. It uses energy or material, your attention and time. What we do with that material says something about how we value those resources. Now, I'm not saying you should do a cost-benefit analysis before you use up a scrap of paper to draw a picture for the love of your life. That would be a bit intense. Instead, I think we could all stand to embrace a more collectively oriented view of creativity – of who we create for – if we're going to choose to create at all. That's what sharing is all about.

One way we over-indulge our selfishness is in our refusal to show anyone our work. That's part of what Demystifying the Process is about – it's about taking the ideas, lessons, methods and techniques that contribute to your work and giving other people access to it. But what point is there in sharing your process if you're barely even sharing your work?

Bring it Home

Andy J. Pizza of the Creative Pep Talk podcast talks about this idea when he talks about art making being like the Hero's Journey – your creative hero's journey. The key part of the journey isn't just the adventure – it's the return home. When the hero goes out, has an adventure, overcomes adversity and ultimately claims their prize, they need to finish the cycle. They need to bring it home. Otherwise what was the journey for?

This is the main way creative people indulge their selfishness. It's a self-conscious indulgence that keeps us from completing the loop – we have to share what we make because making things needs to be about more that yourself. You use up resources to create things, so you have to give it back when you're done. You have to share it with the world.

Don't get me wrong, though, there's plenty of space for you to be selective about what you make and how you share it. This isn't a declaration that you should live-stream every second of your life and publish every thought that comes into your head. But too many of us (myself included) allow ourselves to hide away and protect our egos from scrutiny while we work on our little ideas, hoarding them for ourselves. The problem with this is that we don't exist in a vacuum. Your creativity doesn't just use physical resources – it uses creative ones, too.

The Cycle of Inspiration

A lot has been discussed since the rise of Generative AI on the difference between human "inspiration" and training machine learning algorithms. I'm acknowledging this now because I don't actually think it's relevant to what I'm discussing – this isn't about "intellectual property" or copyright law or even the underlying mechanics of cognition and inspiration. This is about energy. The energy you get when you see someone else make anything.

The cycle of inspiration in creativity is how any of us are motivated to make anything in the first place. We see great works of art – listen to music, watch a movie, read a book, whatever – and we know someone (or many someones) created that thing. Regardless of how we feel about the work, the fact of the creation means something to us. I can't be the only person who's seen a movie or read something and immediately wanted to go make something myself. That's what the cycle is about, and it only works if the work is shared with the world.

I can't tell you when the cycle started, but it needs people to participate in it or it will run out of momentum. Every artist, crafts-person, journalist, computer programmer, scientist – anyone – was motivated to create something because of something someone created before them. It can't happen on its own (or if it can, it's extremely rare). That means that when you see something someone created and that energy pours into you, you have the chance to move it forward into someone else. Your creativity comes from someone else, and it can move into another, too.

When we indulge in our selfish self-consciousness and hide those ideas away, we're disrupting that cycle. We're taking energy in but we aren't letting it back out. It just dissipates. It isn't being used for anything. That's why sharing is so important.

Sharing what you can.

I'm not saying you owe anyone anything. I am saying that your work has value beyond its own goals and purpose as a mere act of creation. Part of that is as a perpetuation of this creative energy, but maybe it's also as a more practical tool that can be used by someone else.

Software developers are great at this. The entire concept of open-source software embodies what I'm trying to express. Open-source software is transparent and, depending on the licensing, free to use. That doesn't just mean free to use as intended, either. It's free to be dismantled, taken apart, and repurposed for something else. What I love about this mentality is how honest it is – nobody can just create everything they need to finish a complicated project. But if someone shares something they made with you, maybe you'll be a bit closer to finishing an idea.

Visual artists are not always great at this. Especially because of the financial predicament most artists find themselves in – we've been scared into protecting every little idea we have just in case someone else might be able to make money off of it. This has caused us to hoard ideas, only sharing them once we've made sure to lock them down with watermarks and trademarks and copyright. This is understandable, but it's not ideal. You can't copyright the creative energy someone might get from your work, but if we can't use each other's work for anything else, then we'll always be stuck starting from scratch.

Share as Much as You Can means asking what you can provide to people. Maybe you've created a tool that others can use, or a shortcut that might save others time. Maybe you can compel others to make something just by sharing your work and the fact that you made something at all. Maybe you can create something specifically to give it away, and so then you don't need to worry about someone stealing it. All of this depends on you having enough to share, which means the burden of this idea rests on those of us who are stable, secure and likely already have enough for ourselves.

The energy you get from sharing.

The funny thing about this idea is that it defies logic a bit. If you share your breakfast with someone, then you'll have less breakfast. If you share your money with someone, you'll have less money. But if you share your creativity with someone, and they use it, you're more likely to end up with more creativity in return.

I experienced this very strongly when I taught. Sharing my methods, ideas, processes and the lessons I was taught in school was incredibly energizing. When I saw students using what I had shared with them – especially when it was just that energy, and I could tell they were enthusiastic about creating something because of what I had shared – I was energized in return. It's not something that's easy to describe, but it's powerful and I think it's one of the most important things we can do as creative people. It's why I'm writing this right now.

I hope you get some energy from this (from everything I do here) and use it to make something for yourself. But I also hope you share that thing – whatever it is and however you are able. I guarantee you'll get something out of it – even if it's just a bit more energy to create some more.

Have a wonderful day!

Love,
Simon 🐒

Hi,

I've taken a little break from writing here but I wanted to come back and write something honest. I tried that, and I really didn't like what came out. It was angry and mean. It wasn't very helpful. I'm not thrilled about it, but what else are we supposed to do with all this bad energy?

Venting can be helpful. It's useful to get your thoughts down on paper (or screens) so they aren't swirling around in your head and infecting everything you do. If you don't have an outlet, it can start to colour everything and, personally, it makes me a less pleasant person to be around.

But there's a reason you aren't actually supposed to send the letters your therapist tells you to write to your family or friends or past versions of yourself. That kind of venting is just therapeutic. It's personal. It's just for you. If you vent that way publicly, it goes from you working a thing out for yourself and becomes you foisting your problems onto others. It perpetuates the negativity. It lets it spread.

Maybe I'm nuts, but I feel like the world doesn't need one more dude writing about how awful things are. It's coming at us from every angle - bad energy is flowing in like a shit dam gave way and we're all suddenly buried in it. It stinks. It's not pleasant. Why add to the shit? Who does that help?

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But I don't feel like pretending things are great, either. I just got back from voting in my province's election, called early by an opportunistic goon who wants to manipulate our democracy to gain as much power and wealth as he can at the expense of everyone else - and he stands a good chance of winning again, despite demonstrating how corrupt he is. Down south, our biggest global ally, our closest geographic neighbour and our largest economic partner is threatening to take over our country in a way that feels less and less impossible every day. Globally, things don't seem much better. While I don't want to add to the shit, I also don't want to pretend it smells like roses.

So what are we supposed to do with all this bad energy?

That's not a rhetorical question. I'm actually asking it. It feels like we have a surplus of bad energy and nothing to do with it. We can't burn it without spreading it around and poisoning the environment, and it doesn't feel like it can be used for anything productive. You can't ignore it, but you can't engage with it too deeply or it will take root in your mind and it won’t let you go.

I don't want to say we should "focus on the positives" because that feels irresponsible.

I don't want to say we should just give up, because that feels defeatist and lazy.

I don't want to say things will get better, because I honestly don't know if that's true.

I don't want to say things will only get worse, because that scares me.

All I can think to do is to keep creating things. Creating things that are meaningful and that connect with other people. I can't change the course of humanity but I can write something or draw something or sing something or just do something. If enough of us do that then I believe things will change. We can't all do something without it having an impact of some kind. It's doing nothing that's the problem.

There's so much bad news, and not enough denial to cover it up. Instead I think making things, using the negative energy to motivate ourselves into motion, at the very least, can prove that there's still a reason to care. The negativity overwhelms you when you stop imagining. Making something - anything - shows you how you can influence a small part of the world. That helps. It's small, but it's not nothing.

I wrote about 2,000 words about how frustrated I was and I'm not going to share any of it because it wouldn’t do good. I created something that wouldn't help you or anyone else. All it would do is just spread my frustration around. That's a bad use of the bad energy. So now I'm trying to use it for something else.

Creativity is powerful, but it isn't inherently good. We need to remember that the things we create can move people but that they don't always move us in the right direction. Your ideas have impact and you should try to do good with them. Whatever you believe, when you make things you should try to make things better. I think a lot of people have forgotten that, if they knew it at all. I almost did.

If I can answer my own question at all then I think that's my answer.

What do we do with all this bad energy?

I'm not sure, but just make sure you don't do harm.

We're all getting a lot of negative energy thrust upon us. If we don't have any say in that - if we can't refuse it or ignore it, let's at least try not to amplify it or spread it around. Write out your frustrations and them throw them away. Take that momentum and create something else. Something good. Something that you can share. Something that builds connections, inspires people or at least gives them a break. Something that helps, even in a small way.

Take care. I'm going to go draw something, I think. What are you going to do?

Lots of love,
Simon 🐒

🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠

If you're based in Ontario, like me, you should make time to go vote. Election day is on Thursday, February 27th and you can figure out everything you need to vote here. Just like being creative, try to vote in a way that won't cause harm. That basically means not voting conservative.

I don't think we should ignore the shit, but that doesn't mean we can't also enjoy nice things. I've been enjoying lots of little games recently that I'd like to recommend.

I was recently reminded of the joys of SPL-T, an old iPhone game that is amazingly simple and deviously addictive.

If you like the New York Times games, I'd highly recommend checking out Puzzmo - they're similar but more inventive and interesting.

I've spent an absurd amount of time with Balatro and that isn't changing any time soon. If you haven't, be warned, it may consume your life (in a nice way).

Lastly, just want to call out Sokoban games in general. Specifically, I've been playing a ton of Soko on my Playdate (another thing that brings me a lot of simple joy), but I've just been enjoying the simplicity of these block-pushing puzzles in general.

This is the fifth piece in a series of deep dives into the Everyone's Creative Manifesto. You can read the other parts by following the linked headings here.

Demystify the Process

Remember that how you work is not what gives you value - your value is inherent to your being. Secrecy leads us into obscurity and isolation. When we're separated, we're vulnerable.

Seeing how things are done lowers barriers and opens doors - that's the life cycle of art. Creativity isn't magic, so don't treat it that way. Let others in.

I'm most frustrated with creative professionals when they pretend that there's something special about their creativity. We all tend to chafe at big egos, but I find it simply wrong to claim that there's ever something unique about being a creative person. Everyone's Creative. So why do we lie about this?

There's an insidious feeling of scarcity that can creep in when you make "making things" your profession. The work of artists is often seen as a luxury - a "nice to have" - that is the first thing to be cut or streamlined when the budget doesn't add up. That leaves a lot of working artists wondering when the well will run dry. Sure, you have some work today, but how long until the phone stops ringing and you need to give up the dream?

Fear and impostor syndrome drive us to make ourselves seem essential, and the easiest way to do that is to claim you have something special that nobody else has. Your secret recipe means that while other people may fry chicken, only you know the 11 herbs and spices of your trade that will yield the work people really want. How could they work with anyone else now?

This obviously completely ignores the reality of how creativity and making things works. There is no secret recipe, only smoke and mirrors. And while some artists may outwardly claim that they have something nobody else does, the more common form of elevating yourself against your peers is through obfuscation and obscurity. Rather than saying you can do things no one else can, you can just feel that way by developing methods that you keep for yourself.

When we let ourselves get overcome by this fear of scarcity and we try to hide the way we work, we isolate ourselves from the people we should be building community with. To take it to the extreme, you can become someone like Anish Kapoor, who will go so far as exclusively licensing pigments to attempt to preserve his elevated status in the arts. Demystifying process is about community and mutual benefit. Creating legal barriers against other people's creativity is the antithesis of that.

Not everyone is a self-centred, egotistical piece of shit, though. Many artists "mystify" their practice for the exact opposite reason. Their fear may partially emerge from worries of scarcity, but it's also motivated by a deep, ever-present self-consciousness. Impostor-syndrome that has consumed them to the point that the only thing they're willing to share is the finished product. I've been in this position myself, where any hint of how I was creating something felt like a risk of being found out. While we may grow confident enough to share what we create, how we create is always subject to being "wrong" or "unprofessional" or "cheating."

This fear of being found out manifests itself in artists who never show you the reference they use, the artwork they're inspired by, the tools that streamline their process or the systems they have built to automate repetitive tasks. All we get to see as the audience is a finished product, with the implied story behind it being one of divine inspiration and miraculous creation.

Fear perpetuates fear. When we give in to our fear of being revealed to be a fraud, or of losing all our work, we create new structures to offload that fear onto others around us. Younger, less experienced people who want to do what we do can easily become discouraged if they come to believe that there's something you have that they don't - whether that's because you pretend you're a creative genius or you fucking license paint colours so no one else can use them. Validating our own fears by perpetuating them does nothing to make the world better for artists, and makes creativity more and more alienating to people who think they aren't creative.

On the other hand, demystifying process means resisting your fears. It means believing that your value is inherent to your being and not to some trick you have for painting or playing your instrument. When we share how we do what we do, we bring our work back down to earth - our common humanity can be seen. Others can relate to who we are and what we do, and understand it more completely.

The ironic thing is that this approach often creates more admiration for the creator than in obscuring what we do. I'm personally more impressed when Penn and Teller show me how much effort goes into a trick than when Chris Angel pretends he can actually fly like a freaky goth Christ. Similarly, when I see the time and energy that goes into hand-crafted furniture, I tend to value it more than when two tables sit next to each other, one from IKEA and one made by hand, and I can only compare their price.

Demystifying the process also builds solidarity. It contradicts the fear of scarcity by creating community and support. The biggest risk to our industries isn't an oversupply of motivated, generous, collaborative creative workers - when we outnumber the corporations and elitists, we have more say in how we work, not less. But you don't build solidarity and community by isolating yourself and refusing to share with others. You might think that makes your work more valuable, but it makes you less.

Demystifying the process means elevating your creativity and thought. It highlights the idea that, no matter what you're making, you bring value to your work. If your tools or techniques are the thing that gives your work value, then what value do you bring to the table? If someone "figures it out," are you not just confirming that you aren't important to the work after all? I don't believe that's true. Do you?

Demystifying my own process.

This whole idea was the driving force behind Everyone's Creative.

I taught graphic design briefly and in that time I found it really staggering how many people who were new to creative work considered themselves lacking in some fundamental way. I would constantly be asked what tools I used, whether they could use certain digital brushes or if there were special tricks to drawing fundamental shapes or having good ideas. It all betrayed this sense that, until they had that thing, they wouldn't be able to break through and actually be creative. The truth is that we come with everything we need, everything else is just adding to the essentials.

Later, working in marketing for clients with widely varying experience doing creative work, I found the same thing. I would repeatedly have clients tell me they "aren't creative" and then, minutes later, share an idea that dwarfed everything I could have come up with for their work. That disconnect gradually made me realize that the thing people think is "creativity" is actually just a practiced skill or trade. You may not know all the shortcuts in Photoshop, but you do have ideas. You do have opinions and you can make something with them.

I also saw the way people I admired most practiced this demystification of what they do. There's a generosity to being open, offering up knowledge and answering questions. Revealing where things that seem complex are simple, and vice-versa, helps build admiration and respect that flows both ways. Sharing mistakes you've made and lessons you've learned doesn't just make you seem more humble, it takes the pressure off of the rest of us to live up to an unrealistic standard.

I've been taking notes on "demystifying the process" for the past few years now. I made a note last year called "Black boxes make people less capable of understanding" that is part of this idea, too -- how when tools we use or things we interact with hide the way they work, we all benefit from them less. It's still a fragment of an idea, but it makes me feel like part of how I want to make things is in a way that indicates that they were made. Similarly, I relate this "demystification" to the "crystal goblet" philosophy of design -- one which may occasionally have merit but that, when we treat it as dogma, alienates us from the creator behind creative work.

When I write a piece like this, I try to give myself a structure to follow. For this post, I reviewed my previous notes on the subject and gave myself these points to build the final piece out of:

- In a way, demystifying the process takes the "magic" out of our work, but by doing that we *humanize* it.
- But these all sound like rules. I hate rules. Especially around art. So I think the better question is *why* demistify the process? Other than "because it's a moral imperative."
-  It's such a unhelpful instinct and it even perpetuates these unrealistic standards - I imagine some artists do this to "protect their IP," sure, but I'd be willing to bet that a bigger part of the motivation comes from being self-conscious and having an imposter-syndrome instinct to hide their mess.

What's my point?
- our instinct to hide our process comes from fear -- fear of being found out, questioned, copied or put-down. It's self-conscious and it's antagonistic. Artists are some of the *worst* offenders for lacking in solidarity with each other when we try to lean into artificial scarcity by hiding how we do what we do.
- When we share our process, we both remove the "magic" from it, but also elevate everything that is a part of it. If anything, it adds perceived value to what you do to show someone how its done.
- Sharing process gives you the chance to learn new things, too.
- Growing the community of people who do what you do is beneficial, not a risk. Your comrades in creativity aren't competitors, they're supporters and champions for your value. Sharing how you do what you do increases the likelihood that more people will want to do it.
- Atomising ourselves -- splitting up and isolating ourselves -- only serves the powers that be
- Failing to demystify process elevates tools and process over humanity. If there's a "trick" to everything you do, then what value do *you* add to the work?

I'm trying really hard to share more of my work, lower my standards and avoid trying to make things "perfect." In this kind of writing, that means all I do next is start writing, and see if I can follow the structure I set out. Notice that "talk about how you wrote this" isn't in my notes... I only came up with this part near the end of writing the main portion.

My writing here tends to be like that - the first attempt at synthesising ideas that have been floating around in my head for a while. I realize lots of what I write on Everyone's Creative could be more refined or edited, and I have multiple unfinished posts where I tried to refine and edit them into something more polished, but honestly, this work isn't something that I think benefits from being perfected. I prefer it being immediate and off the top of my head, so that's the way I write it.

The hardest part is starting to do it. I've set aside most of my day on Friday to write these newsletters and, with the exception of this post (I'm writing right now on January 24th, it's 10:40 am) I have very consistently procrastinated the day away and ended up writing on Sunday or Monday instead. Once I start, though, I tend to finish the post right away. I also find it hard to pause these pieces halfway through and pick them up later. They're such a stream-of-consciousness that if I do stop, it's usually easier to just start from the beginning later, as my ideas and thoughts and feelings on the subject have usually moved on.

Writing is a weird process to "demystify." You don't really gain very much from watching a time-lapse of someone typing. It's such an internal process. I think most creative processes are internal like that, though. I appreciate watching people like Frank Howarth because, while it's fun to see the work he does and a time-lapse of wood turning is always interesting, he does such a wonderful job sharing that internal process. I particularly like when he admits that he doesn't really remember what his plan was, or that he thinks he followed-through on an idea in an unsuccessful way. It makes me feel better about the way I write.

Does anyone come to mind when you think about demystifying the process? Someone you've learned from through them sharing how they work, and not just the finished product? And how can you demystify your own process? I'm genuinely interested. That's kind of the point of this whole post, and I like when people comment on these and I feel less like I'm writing into the void (though, the void is undoubtedly one of my bigger supporters).

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful day! I hope you can take some time to make something and tell someone about how you did it.

Lots of love,
Simon 🐒

🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠

I didn't feel like it fit into the actual text above, but in the name of demystifying my process, I'll add the tools I use to write these newsletters.

I usually start an idea in my brain, just thinking about it, and then make a note on paper to capture it. After a lot of time (and money) spent trying to find the "perfect" pocket notebook, I've recently picked up these A7 sized notebooks from the great local shop, King W. Books which fit in basically all my pockets so I always have a notebook on hand. I also carry a Fisher Space Pen with that, because they're small and because I'm a space nerd. I often forget about these and make notes on my phone, too.

I make most of my digital notes and write all these newsletters in Obsidian. I've been using it for a few years, I pay for their "sync" service so I can get my notes on my PC and my iPhone, and I've liked it more as a program as I've tried to make it less complex. I don't use a ton of crazy productivity plugins, and the less YouTube videos I watch about it the more I like it. Just my two cents on that. The notes app on your phone is probably just as good. The one thing I do like about Obsidian is that I can link my notes together easily, which is how ideas like "Demystify the Process" emerged.

I use a bunch of different tools to make the artwork for the newsletter. Most recently that's been Procreate, Inkscape, Photopea and the Affinity suite. I rely a lot on Archive.org and The Public Domain Review for the art and visual assets I include in the art, too. The drawings in the banner of this post are from old magic books I found on Archive.org.

Finally, as of the time of this writing, the newsletter itself is hosted on Substack. I don't really like Substack, for a lot of reasons (more on that later, I'm sure), but it's where I thought I wanted to be at one point, and I'd rather keep writing here than repeatedly change platforms. I don't expect to be on Substack forever, and if I were setting this newsletter up from scratch today, I'd probably use something else like Ghost, ButtonDown or micro.blog.

Most importantly, none of these tools feel essential to what I do because I force myself not to think of them that way. I try to embrace experimentation and flexibility so I can change things up if I need to or want to without leaving the core of what I'm doing behind. If Fisher Space Pen refills become $200 each, I'm pretty sure I can still write with a pencil, if I need to.

Finally, if you want to see me put together the banner artwork for this piece, here’s the timelapse Procreate made:

Hi,

I've been thinking a lot about art about art.

I finished reading All Fours by Miranda July last week, which features a lot of characters who are artists - while not being directly about making a specific work of art, it is very meta and feels like a story about what living as an artist can be like. I also finished playing Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - a game that is entirely about art, expression and how even the person making the art can be unaware of what it means or represents.

I don't think I can even pretend to start to list the number of works of art that are, at their core, about making art. A big part of that is because creating anything is a statement about creation. You could have made anything, and you made this. Why? Why make anything at all? It's all pretty heady stuff.

Art about making art isn't made in a vacuum, though. It's made by artists. By people. The one true fact about every created thing's existence is that it was created by someone. It doesn't just appear spontaneously like the universe probably did. Art - as well as anything else that is created - is created by people.

And that really seems to get to us sometimes, doesn't it?

I loved the TV show Louie. I felt deeply and profoundly inspired by it. More than Louis C.K.'s stand up comedy, I thought his show captured something so honest and vulnerable about being a person and showcased it in such a refreshing, experimental way. Then we all found out that Louis C.K. is... not a great guy. And then we found out a lot of other artists aren't great guys... I'm sure I'm not the only one a bit tired of this feeling normal.

It's all a bit embarrassing, if I'm honest. Admitting what a silly show like Louie meant to me when the person who made it turned out to be a predator. It's yucky. I don't like it. But I still liked his show. Am I bad for liking it? Should I pretend I never did? What are we supposed to do about this?

This is all just to set up the debate that comes up every time another artist turns out to be a piece of shit: Should we separate the Art from the Artist? Is it ethical or moral or even just "okay" to enjoy the work of a person who you don't believe is ethical, moral or even just "okay?"

Some people believe we should discard the artist and their work - they've failed the test and everything they've done is forfeit. We don't want you or your ideas in this world anymore, thank you very much.

Others see this as an outrageous overreach. We're throwing the baby out with the (admittedly disgusting) bathwater! We don't need to hate the work just because we hate the person. I like that movie! I don't care who made it!

The debate comes up again and again and it seems to me that it varies case-by-case. Well, just how abusive was he, exactly? Could we maybe not support his writing but still watch things based on his writing? It's like some kind of social negotiation, where we're trying to both pass a purity test and hold onto some kind of contraband at the same time. It's exhausting. It's also a complete waste of time because the question is completely meaningless to begin with. Separate the art from the artist? You can't. They can't even separate it from themselves.

I feel like I always understood this, to some degree, but it became clear to me recently when I was catching up on some music. I grew up listening the Gorillaz, the fictional concept band created by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett. After some time away from their latest releases, a few years ago I caught up on their work and noticed something interesting. In their earlier albums, there was a commitment to the bit: the fact of the artists behind the music was tucked away. Not a secret, exactly, but also not up front. Now, though, the high-profile guest artists on each track are featured right in the song name. Reality is bleeding into the fiction, like Damon Albarn wants you to understand that, while it's a fun idea to pretend Gorillaz is a band of cartoon characters, he also does in fact know and work with Snoop Dogg.

When I say the artist can't even separate the art from themselves, this is what I mean. Artists are constantly pretending to be separate from their work - that it is disposable or that it doesn't matter to them as much as people think. I did this in art school to fool myself into getting through critiques with my ego intact. Commercial artists are the most guilty of this. They'll claim objectivity and detachment from their work - "I don't mind the critique, I don't take it personally, it's just part of the job" - but they'll also become frustrated with clients, celebrate winning awards and dedicate their lives to things like commercials. It seems like it might be a bit personal, doesn't it?

I don't think there's anything wrong with this, to be clear. The thing I find funny is how obvious it is that creativity is deeply intertwined with our humanity and how we still try to pretend that isn't the case. Whether you care if an artist is a predator or you don't, they're both feelings you have about the artist and your relationship to their work. You can't opt out of that part. That's all that art is.

Leave a comment

Creativity and art are, at the most basic level, ways of communicating. When you create anything, you're creating it knowing that other people will have a reaction to it. As artists, we work to learn how to curate the reactions, guiding the work to suit the intended reaction we want to create. But there isn't art without a dialogue between the creator and the audience.

To me, imagining you can separate the art from the artist is like wanting to separate speech from the speaker, touch from the toucher, or thoughts from the thinker. It’s a complete impossibility. If the sound of a tree falling in a forest rings out and nobody is there to see it, is there a tree?

The "problem" with art is that it’s incredibly effective at sharing how we feel. We can't help but connect deeply with it. In the same way we connect with art, we connect with artists. And that is where the real problem lies. Artists are human and humans are messy and awful, so no wonder we feel like it would be better to just connect with the art, the artist be dammed!

So much simpler. So much safer. So completely impossible.

Even when we encounter art by unknown artists we know the artist exists. There’s no question - where else could it have come from? Artwork deliberately created in isolation also has a relationship to its (non)audience. The same way a hermit is in relation to society by being removed from it (you can't be a hermit if society isn't down the trail from your cave), art hidden on purpose is saying something about who doesn't see it. The relationship still exists.

Art is often experienced in this way, though. Artists, for many reasons, tend to hide their role in the art's existence. The name of the artist is rarely painted in bright red across the middle of the painting, and with some exceptions most of the names of the people making movies come after the movie is over. This is how we experience so much art - in isolation from the creators, where we don't tend to think about who made it at all. Most of us don't seem to mind this. You might watch a movie and have no idea who did the VFX, or read a book and forget the author's name while you remember the story beats fondly. The art shifts into this space of just existing for you, even though we know it was made by someone.

This is why, I think, once we know more about an artist - maybe things we don’t like - we feel we can suddenly pretend the artist doesn’t exist. Because, for a lot of us, we're used to thinking that art just is.

This only seems to come up when someone has done something wrong, doesn't it?

We don’t ask to separate the artist from art we like, if we know nothing about the artist.

We don’t ask to separate the art from artists we like, if we know little about the art.

It’s only when we have a problem with one of the two that we want to split them apart. But art is an expression of humanity. The only way to separate art from artist is to dehumanize the art - to symbolically remove the humanity from it. It’s unnatural and confusing and that's why we argue about it.

I'm of the opinion that arguing about what is or isn't art is a waste of time. Ai Weiwei says "Everything is Art. Everything is Politics." I couldn't agree more. Our lives are dictated by our place in the world and everything we do or don't have access to is a part of the politics driving the society we live in. Similarly, everything we do as humans is creative at its core - we make things and fill them with meaning. That's art. Everything is art. Everything is politics. An iPhone is equal parts art and politics. So is a muffin. So is a song. Once you accept that, the idea of debating what is or isn't art feels pretty silly.

That same mentality helps me with understanding the inseparability of art from artist. Arguing about what is or isn't art is just as ridiculous to as arguing that things that were created were created by nobody, or that the fact of the creator doesn't matter. When I was a kid, the debate was around if video games are art. Before that it was Television. Before that it was film. Before that, the novel. AI Art is now the most recent conundrum entering this space.

Is AI art art? Well, yes. Because everything is art.

Given my general skepticism around generative AI, you may be surprised to have me argue that AI art is art, but that's my point about why we can't separate art from artist - it has to be art because it was created by someone. It just wasn't created by the person you think it was.

The reason AI Art is so confusing here is because the artist isn’t the person generating the art, it’s the designer(s) of the model. It’s a kind of art by proxy - someone made a tool that generates things (words, images, sounds) and other people use it to generate things. It might feel like the person clicking "generate" is the one creating the thing, but the intentions, beliefs, biases and ideas core to the creation of the model didn't come from the prompter. The prompter is a part of the audience, playing with the art to see what comes out.

This may seem like a bit of a rambling piece because this concept touches so many places. I haven't come close to exploring all the places this touches. It's a big idea. My goal with writing this is to get us to move deeper into discussions about creativity and art. We keep getting hung up on a pointless argument when it turns out someone like Neil Gaiman is probably a really bad guy. While we debate if it's still right to read his books or like them, we're avoiding discussing the real problem we're wrestling with.

What does it say about you if you connect with art made by a bad person? Does that mean part of you is bad? Or does it mean some of them is good (or, at least, that they aren't completely bad)? Forget about throwing the whole person out, because you can't. You're stuck with them. Now what?

For me, I try to dig into my feelings about bad people who make art I connect with and see what I can learn from that. Often it isn't very complex - it turns out your morals may have little bearing on how you approach making art. Other times, though, it changes the way I feel about the art. I can't watch Louie anymore without seeing that vulnerability as something different... I can't watch The Shining without thinking that the movie only exists through the harm it did to its actors - that an abusive man did a pretty good job making a movie about abuse. I can move forward and grieve the loss of something I liked - like learning something horrible about a dead relative you admired as a kid - but I can't pretend it doesn't affect me. Even if I didn't care, that says as much about me as it does the artist.

Everything is art. Everything is politics. And everything that's made is made by people, whether you like it or not.

Have a great day!

Lots of love,
Simon 🐒

Banner artwork from Giovanni Battista Bracelli’s Bizzarie di Varie Figure (1624) via The Public Domain Review

This is the fourth piece in a series of deep dives into the Everyone's Creative Manifesto. You can read the other parts by following the linked headings here.

Today I want to tell you about why I call myself a Luddite.

Remember the Luddites

Technology should empower creativity, not compel it.

Nobody should have power over what and how you create.

We need to protect that power for each other at all costs.

In the 19th-century, there was an existential threat to people who made things for a living. That threat came from industrialists and capitalists, in the form of automation and new technology that both threatened the livelihoods of those unwilling to adapt, and the quality of life of those who tried. Out of this era, a movement was born, and the Luddites formed to fight back. Luddites were cloth workers and crafts people who's way of life were being attacked by the newly forming business class. The tale of the Luddites includes vandalism, assault, riots, secret codes, espionage, political assassination and eventually the public execution of people who's only crime was damaging property.

If, like me, you weren't aware of who the Luddites actually were, you should read Brian Merchant's book, Blood in the Machine (and his newsletter, too).

Now, in the 21st century, we use the term Luddite to mean "someone who resists and fears technology." This isn't by accident, either. Just like how the term "carbon footprint" was popularized by the fossil-fuel industry to shift attention away from their responsibility for climate change, being seen as a "Luddite" has been framed as being primitive, backwards and unintelligent by the very people the Luddites fought against - the capitalist class.

But being a Luddite isn't about being stupid or fearful. Being a Luddite is about solidarity, honour and pride. It's about standing up for you and your fellow workers. Everyone who works and makes things for a living needs to be a Luddite if any of us are going to survive with our craft and our careers intact.

Embrace Luddism in Your Work

The point of being a Luddite isn't to hate technology, because ultimately, technology is human. It's an extension of ourselves - not separate from us. But as things continue to advance, technology can begin to feel like magic. We've arrived at a point where many of us have very little understanding of how the tools we use every day function or how they were built. This can make technology feel more separate from us - it makes it feel less human. Regardless of how it feels, though, the reality is that technology is deeply connected to humanity - just as creative labour is deeply entwined with technology, too.

When you embrace Luddism, you start to see that as we become dependent on proprietary tools, our work grows to be at the mercy of the people who own and sell the tools. This isn't how it should be, and right now we're seeing the impact this dynamic is having in almost every creative field. But what should we do about it? Do we reject technology altogether? Do we break our computers, burn our phones and run into the woods and make cave paintings for the rest of our lives? For some reason I don't think that's going to help.

How to Be a Luddite

For the past 40 years, professional artists' work has moved more and more into digital spaces. We use software and computers to create things that speak to people and inspire them. But software isn't why we do what we do - it's how. It's one way how.

The point of being a Luddite isn't to reject technology altogether - it's to reject the use of technology to dominate workers. Use technology. Embrace it. Apply it to your work to create even more wonderful things and to push the boundaries of what we can be. But remember who's driving the creation and honour your place in the process. Remember that tools are lifeless without people to operate them. Don't fall into the trap of believing you need the tools to be creative or to express yourself.

The more we rely on technology that we don't own or control, the more that ownership and control shifts to corporations. We can't let that happen any more than it already has.

While digital Luddites can't smash the machines of industry the way the original Luddites did, we can still fight back. The only way companies like Adobe, Apple or Microsoft have any power over us is through our dependence on their tools and services. In their ideal world, we wouldn't be able to create anything without paying them a monthly fee. We're frightfully close to their ideal world, so it's become more important than ever that we resist.

Digital Luddism is about untangling ourselves from their web.

• Try new tools.

• Support independent developers.

• Ask yourself if you depend on a program or tool, then ask yourself if that makes you feel more secure in what you do.

• When the thought that you "need" a certain program to do your work enters your mind, be fearful and do everything you can to prove that thought wrong.

• Recognise that you can't afford to depend on a tool you can't replace.

For those of us in decision making positions, we should continually question the standards of our industries and support diversification of workflows and tools used. There's an increasing entrenchment that happens when the standards people are taught are defined by what is most commonly used in industry. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle where all we learn are the standard tools because they're the standard tools, which is then what we teach new artists to learn because they're the standard tools. This only serves the companies that make the tools and traps us more in this system.

In the world of digital creative work, a lot of great progress is being made through the use of open source development. Tools like Blender have become robust and viable for professional work, while they remain open and free for anyone to learn and use. There's a growing list of great open alternatives to the programs we've become dependent on for creative work, and it seems like the desire to embrace this kind of development is growing, too. We need to support these developers and pay for the tools we use if we want to see more of them.

But beyond just hoping all the tools you use eventually have free and open source alternatives, you should practice flexibility and adaptability in your work so you have the agency and freedom to use new tools whenever you need to. You don't need to cancel your Adobe subscription to liberate yourself from Adobe. All you need to do is believe you can leave whenever you want to, so when the time comes, they have no leverage over you. I have found the best way to believe that is to practice it - by experimenting with other tools frequently and proving to myself that I can learn and adapt quickly and efficiently and make do without tools I thought I needed.

Never Forget the Luddites

Corporations are not moral actors. They're self-interested, immortal vampires - parasites that thrive on moving as much money from your pocket to theirs. Anything they produce, view it with suspicion. Bring a stake and garlic and think about what it's trying to do to drain from you what it needs to survive.

Edward Ongweso Jr., This Machine Kills, Ep. 381 (1h 14m)

History almost allowed the Luddites to be forgotten. Our popular understanding of what that word means has been corrupted, and we can't afford to let that happen again. Working people today have so much in common with the working people of the 19th century - and in the end, those workers were overpowered, indentured and many of them were killed in order to establish the economic system we live under today. How’s that working out for you?

This might sound like fear mongering - is Adobe going to round up concept artists and have them hanged for switching to a different digital painting program? But the point is that the Luddites saw what was coming, tried to resist, and the capitalists fought back to the death. They stamped it down because free and fair labour is a threat to capitalists - they can’t afford for you to have more power than they do, because then they would have no reason to exist.

Corporate and industrial interests rely on sucking more and more value away from us and hoarding it for themselves, and the only way they can do that is if we have no ability to prevent it from happening. You can't cancel a subscription to the only tool you can use to make a living any more than you could boycott a medication you need to survive - that's where the pressure comes from, and that's why we can never afford to forget about the Luddites.

Everyone’s Creative. Everyone should be a Luddite, too.

With Love & Solidarity,
Simon 🐒

🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠

There are lots of different places to find alternatives to the most popular and problematic digital art tools. This list is a good start for alternatives to Adobe products. This site is a good start for looking up everything else.

It's also a good idea to discuss and share the different tools you use - especially if they're made by small developers who can't afford to advertise. Photopea is a free, browser-based version of Photoshop that is so similar that almost all of my Photoshop instincts transfer over to it. I created the banner image for this piece using Photopea. Rough Animator on the iPad is still my favourite app to quickly rough out animation - a task I used to use Photoshop for. I've also been experimenting with Inkscape and the free version of Davinci Resolve to continue learning alternatives to Adobe apps I'm accustomed to.

Hi,

There's been a lot of talk over the last few years about generative AI and the threats it poses to creative professionals. Two prominent artist unions in Hollywood both went on strike in 2023, with one of their major demands being around setting limits and rules on how they would be expected to work with AI, and how their work could be used to train AI models. AI is becoming seen as an "existential threat" to creative professionals, but, while these issues are important and are definitely a risk to the livelihoods of many working artists, I feel like we're missing the biggest threat generative AI poses entirely.

Whenever AI comes up, there's typically some kind of acknowledgement that there are "unanswered questions" about the impacts generative AI will have on copyright, or how artists may or may not be expected to incorporate it into their workflow. You've probably heard someone say something like "you either learn to use it or you get left behind" or that it's "only going to get better every day" (in spite of the fact that this doesn't actually appear to be true). We hear more and more about AI stealing jobs, stealing intellectual property, making people redundant or trivializing once lucrative work.

We seem to be under the impression that the risks of AI all come from AI.

But I've noticed a distinct lack of discussion about one of the biggest threats I think generative AI poses to artists: it's completely skewing client expectations, and training people to be the worst kind of client possible.

In other words, AI is making it harder for us to work together.

Why do working artists always complain about clients?

I think one of the worst attitudes that permeates the professional creative mindset is this adversarial, anti-client feeling. It's so common that it's a trope. Since the beginning of blogs and online social spaces, you can see artists sharing grievances and jokes about how frustrating it can be to work with clients. "Make my logo bigger" is such a common complaint that its become a cliché. When you think about it, this attitude represents such a nasty, elitist mindset that gives no space or empathy to another person's lack of design education (or interest) and completely ignores what their priorities are for their work.

But why does this happen? Why are working artists so at odds with the people who make their careers possible? Why is there so much resentment towards the people you're meant to be helping through your work?

The obvious answer is that clients just don't "get it." They lack the formal training that we have, and when they ask for (or, more often complained about, demand) something, it betrays an ignorance and lack of respect on the client's part for the craft that the artist has honed and perfected. In commercial art, you'll often hear people compare their work to skilled trades, complaining that "you wouldn't tell a plumber how they should fix your drain!" (I'd like to note that, having worked as both an artist and a contractor, that this argument is very incorrect and people will tell a tradesperson how to do their job). There's a sense that part of being a working artist is compromising your work just enough to get approval and get paid. A great commercial artist is one that manages to get great work done without letting the client ruin it by interfering with the process.

Not too many years ago, I was right there with these artists. I hated clients about as often as I liked them. Over time, I found that this mentality is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think your clients are all idiots who are going to try to sabotage your work and undermine your craft, then you're way more likely to perceive any feedback or critique that way. What could have been a process of collaboration and respect instead becomes one of frustration and conflict - often expressed behind the scenes to colleagues or not expressed at all, instead left to fester under the surface as it erodes your love of the craft and your career entirely.

When things go on like this, the resentment builds. The attitude becomes one where both sides of the work begin to see the other as "the problem." It becomes "Artist VS Client" - a battle between the righteous and the perverse.

Wasn't this supposed to be fun? Aren't we making art here?

The fact of the matter is that there is often an aggressive, antagonistic mentality baked into a lot of creative labour, and that sets the stage perfectly for AI to swoop in and solve our client's biggest problem. Us.

When all you want is someone who does what you ask.

Everyone's Creative. That's where I begin. But the reality is that some people practice creative work more regularly than others, and they create things that require more than just creativity - they require education, knowledge and experience, too. That is why (not because some people are creative and other people aren't) contract creative work exists. Illustrators, graphic designers, writers, videographers, photographers, interior designers... all these careers are built on the idea that there is value in hiring someone to contribute their creative labour to your project or endeavour.

But what's really going on when you hire someone to work on a creative project for you?

This is an open discussion. There's no "right" answer to that question. As working artists, we often set the terms of what that means when we start the work. "How will we work together?" should be the first question asked before you commit to working with anyone. What you start to realize, after working on creative projects for different kinds of people, is that the unspoken answer to that question varies quite a lot depending on the client. When the answer is "I want you to do exactly what I tell you to." we start to see where the seeds of frustration and resentment are planted.

The value we offer is often in saying "no."

I firmly believe that it's a creative professional's responsibility to set the expectation for and teach clients how you will work together. The problem is that, most often, artists are taking work from a place of desperation and scarcity, and so their instinct is to want to make their clients happy. Nothing could make people happier than saying "yes" to everything they ask for, right?

This is another way the resentment begins to fester and take hold. You want to win jobs and be "easy" to work with, so you bend to your client’s requests. Even if you think you have a better solution or a reason why, say, making their logo bigger won't help with the design, you set that to the side. What you're doing isn't just compromising your art, though - you're training your client to expect you to do whatever they say.

When you instead set the expectation that your job is to help the client solve their problem, you take on the role of an advisor and not just a hired hand. The value you bring isn't just in doing what the client asks - it's in sharing your knowledge, experience and ideas to help make the work better for what it is they say they want it to do. That often means challenging their preconceived notions and suggesting other solutions. I've found approaching work from this angle to reveal that one of the most valuable things I offer to a client isn't in doing what they ask, but instead in saying "no" (and also explaining why).

Setting the wrong expectations at a super-human scale.

This is why generative AI is such a threat to working creatives (and collaboration, as a whole).

Think about how you use a generative AI tool: you type a request into ChatGPT or Midjourney or Adobe Firefly and you get a fully finished attempt at fulfilling your request immediately. The process of "refining" AI slop is in making additional requests: "make it sound more formal," "make the person look happier," "make it sound less like AI." These demands then result in more fully finished products and the process continues. You make a small request, the AI tool immediately fulfills it exactly as you asked, then you make more requests. It is iterative, but with a huge amount of waste and no need for up-front thought or discussion. It's a one-sided, infinitely affirming and repeatable process of figuring out what you want by creating a huge amount of things you don’t want.

Now imagine you replaced that AI tool with an illustrator or a composer or any working artist. Imagine being that artist. You've just described the worst client anyone has ever worked for - expecting immediate, finished work that you will continue to edit and refine ad infinitum until they're happy with it. It's exactly the kind of mindset I believe we need to be training people out of when they want to hire someone for creative work, and it's the way we end up with the least successful creative output.

Generative AI is a mindless yes-man. It's a desperate, obsequious worker drone that is only capable of doing things exactly how you asked. It will never push back on your ideas, never teach you something new, and never say "no." And yet, this workflow appears to be what we say we want from creative professionals. If AI can replace screenwriters, photographers, copy editors or graphic designers, then we seem to be saying that we want artists to just shut up and do whatever we ask. If we’re afraid of AI taking our jobs, then are we saying that’s all we have to offer?

If that's true, then things don't bode well for the humans who are left behind, trying to compete against AI. If there's really value in never pushing back or contributing new thoughts to a client's work, then we're going to have a hard time making the case that working with humans is somehow better than working with AI "just because."

This is the biggest risk we face: letting that lie become so accepted that we forget there was ever another way.

Why I'm not afraid of AI taking my job.

This is why I know Generative AI will never take my job. It's really all just in how you frame it for yourself and your clients. I don't see myself as a contract worker who draws or designs what people ask me to - that is a job that, it turns out, is easy for AI to take away. Instead, I see myself as a human you can work with on creative projects. Humanity is baked into what I do. I want to collaborate with clients - hear their ideas and help them express something inside their hearts. The work I do is fundamentally human. You can never hire a machine to be a human. That doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about?

Now, AI may not be able to take that newly-defined job away from me, but it could siphon all the clients away from the kind of work I want to do and leave me with a spiritually pure job description and no paying clients. That's where communication comes in.

The only way I see out of this bizarre dystopia (where we're rapidly giving all our fulfilling, creative work to machines in order to make more time for us to work menial jobs and be miserable) is if we embrace a different concept of what creative work is. We can't keep talking about our work like it’s just a product we manufacture and sell, because machines will always be able to do that faster and cheaper. The value in what working artists offer has to be in everything that happens before the finished product is created. It is in working with us that our value is made evident. Skipping over that part is where working with AI compromises the work, and that is the value AI generated work will always be missing.

We need to start talking about this more. We need to show people what they're robing themselves of when they write their website copy with ChatGPT or use AI to generate the illustrations for their children's book. It's clear that we can't force people to work with us "because it's the right thing to do," so why even try? We need another tactic.

We need to show clients that the value in working with us is in working with us, and not just in what we output at the end. We need to be honest with ourselves, and acknowledge that doing everything our clients ask often gets things approved more quickly, but that it is also robbing them of the real value we can offer. If it were only about the output, then we might as well be machines ourselves.

Obviously this dynamic - positioning yourself as a collaborator and not just a hired hand - requires more trust and mutual respect between the artist and the client. There's a privilege to being able to push back against your clients or refuse work from someone who doesn't agree to the terms you set for working together. But if AI is taking all the work for clients who just want a yes-man anyways, then there isn't really any point in trying to appease the people who don't value your humanity in the first place. It's not an ideal position to be in, but it forces all of us to raise the bar if we want the chance to get any work at all.

If nobody "has to" work with you, then you need to show them why they should want to work with you. That's what we should all be working on, if we don’t want to be made obsolete.

Have a wonderful day!

Love,
Simon 🐒

🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠

Linus Boman made a great video recently pointing out a lot of the misconceptions we have about the intention behind creative work and how "objective" standards of design ignore this. I'd love more working artists to adopt this kind of mindset - and for god's sake stop saying you're "fixing" other people's work when you have no concept of what went into it.

As I was wrapping up this post, Freya Holmér released a great and cathartic video demonstrating the rot AI is creating on the internet. It’s not a fun watch, exactly, but it feels like a perfect dive into one of the consequences of this new technology and why we should be way more skeptical of it’s use in everything.

The artwork in this essay was created using prints from Paul Nash’s 1924 series “Genesis.” Sourced from the incredible Public Domain Review. The text is set in Baskervville. I created these graphics in the open source vector design program Inkskape, as a first experiment with this free tool.

Hi,

In 2024 I killed my childhood idea, Robot Fan Club. Like a phoenix from the ashes, or a zombie from a maggot-infested grave, Everyone's Creative rose to take its place. That may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, but to me, that was a pretty big deal.

Every year, it feels like a justified reaction to the past twelve months to lament that "this year was especially horrible because..." and 2024 isn't an exception. Things aren't great globally, and honestly they weren't great personally, either. 2024 will be a year I remember with grief, fatigue, and a bit of defiance because, as difficult as it was, here we are. What else can we do but keep going?

In 2024 I published 12 posts on Everyone's Creative (including through the previous incarnation of the newsletter as Robot Fan Club). It's less than I had planned and more than I realized. I think averaging one post a month is a pretty admirable feat, considering I needed to take several months long breaks from thinking about it in order to avoid burning myself out. I'm pretty proud of what I managed to create here this year.

The things I wrote about this year shifted as my focus moved away from just examining my own work and creativity towards Everyone's. I think art and creativity are always central to the political and social moment - that's sort of the point - but I also feel like this is a truth we're acknowledging less and less. While we debate whether or not AI art is "real art" or if working artists deserve a livable wage (or even the shade of trees to picket under), I think we're often missing the clearer point that art and creativity are fundamental to what we're doing all of the time. Until we sort out that misconception, dispelling the myths that some people are creative and others aren't, that some things are art and others aren't, we're going to be stuck arguing about definitions while the bigger issues go unaddressed.

The good news is that I think things are moving in a positive direction, or at least not stagnating. There's hope in the spread of dialogue around Luddism and non-commercial approaches to making art. People are using their creativity to try to solve big issues around the world and to unpack why the status quo isn't going to do it anymore. The bad news is... well, everything else.

I'd like to share a point that I thought was well made by Louis Rossmann, a computer repair technician and right-to-repair advocate. I don't always love everything Louis has to say - he can be a bit... blunt? Direct? Maybe a bit too American for my sensitive Canadian palette? But I appreciate his point of view and I think he has strong values that guide what he does. When addressing the idea of "influencers" in the video linked above, he shares the story of his grandfather who spent his time working to fix up some of the more run-down parts of his neighbourhood. While influencers today are seen as people with reach, with a potential audience that can be leveraged to advertise to, Louis makes the argument that his grandfather, a man who did some thankless work because it aligned with what he thought mattered, is actually what an "influencer" should be. Someone you can look to to see how you could be, if you tried to follow your values, too. Someone who creates something. Even if it’s something small.

Speaking about his grandfather, Rossmann says "Until the day he died, he took pride in always cleaning up his corner of the world." It's a modest statement, but a powerful one that I think we could all stand to embrace.

The world just keeps getting bigger, and there's a lot of pressure to have an opinion or even a solution in mind for all the problems in the world. But we can't all be working on everything all the time. We need to step back and ask ourselves what matters to us, what we want to do, and how we can help. That's what Everyone's Creative means to me right now. I think creativity is the key to how each of us can work to clean up our corner of the world. When we do that collectively and collaboratively, the world will get a whole lot better. This is part of how I'm hoping to contribute.

Meanwhile, I think it's important to fill your life with art and new ideas. I encourage all of us to read more and watch more movies. Go for walks without your headphones and see what you end up thinking about. Talk to an old person in your life. Talk to a baby. Talk to yourself. I've been trying to read more, and this year managed to read more than a book per month - I wrote about it on my personal blog.

I've also made a new ritual around watching a movie on Sunday mornings. Over the past few Sundays I watched Godzilla Minus One, The Antisocial Network, The Northman, Rashomon, Kiru and Prey. All great watches for 7am on a Sunday that I recommend.

Happy New Year! Things are likely going to be difficult tomorrow, in 2025. But we'll still be here, and we'll still be making things. What will you create?

I'll see you soon.

Love,
Simon 🐒