Creativity Is Dead

Creativity is Dead.

If you consider yourself a creative individual or a creative tech individual and utilize bluesky and/or mastodon you’ve probably read or seen in the past few days about the site “cohost” shutting down. If you’ve never heard of this site prior to the past week or so then I don’t blame you, I hadn’t heard of it either. But I looked into it and found something that reminded me of geocities, of myspace, of the days of livejournal and IRC. It was a social media platform that allowed users to edit the html and css of their posts. It allowed anonymity. It was one of the last hold outs of the old internet days of customization. And ultimately, it failed.

This is a key point, it’s failure. While it posted a peak userbase of some 50k users it wasn’t able to financially maintain itself. So why did something that appeared to be a bastion of online Creativity and expression fail? Because the modern user no longer desires a custom experience, they’d rather be told HOW to use it.

I’m going to show my age here but back in the early days of the modern internet customization and personalization on social media was key. You had sites like Geocities and Myspace, blogging platforms like livejournal. Chat rooms on IRC and messengers like AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ. All of these platforms and applications could be heavily customized to the user. It allowed the user to express themselves to others. It allowed the user to easily show their interests, their hobbies, their passions and in turn cultivate a community of similar people that shared the same interests and passions. You could customize the HTML and CSS of your myspace page to include your favorite song, your favorite hobbies with backgrounds and colors. You could express yourself by using a unique font that no one else used. Livejournal and Geocities did the same. AOL IM and ICQ allowed you custom colors and styles. Custom icons, custom fonts, and so on and so forth. It was about creativity and expression. And this even went beyond just online platforms. In the days of Windows 95 to XP you could even heavily customize your OS. Programs like Rainmeter would allow you to easily change the way your toolbar or the way your Windows looked to the point where your Windows installation could be unique to you and only you. You could literally skin your entire OS. You could download Winamp and skin the way your player looked. So what happened to this age of creativity and customization?

A controversial take but Steve Jobs happened. In the 70’s and early 80’s computing was seen as a hobby. People would take computer boards and customize them to their liking. The Apple II was essentially a hobby kit. Jobs didn’t like this. And with the introduction of the Macintosh he showed the world how much he didn’t like this. For the first time you had a closed environment PC. a box that you really couldn’t open and were actively discouraged from doing so by screws that could only be unscrewed utilizing a special screw driver that only Apple possessed. What you saw was what you got. Programs and accessories were limited only to that platform. It was closed, it prevented customization, and ultimately it failed. It was a high price point for a PC at a time where they were still considered something for hobbiests. Naturally Jobs was ousted from Apple for various reasons one of which was the failure of the Macintosh. But his vision for closed environment computing wasn’t dead, it just motivated him further. Jobs was of the mindset of telling you what you would like. When he returned to Apple in the late 90s he pushed his way of thinking much further with the introduction of the iMac, the iPod, and ultimately the iPhone.

Now this was a sort of double edged sword. While the products that Apple produced on Jobs return changed the industry and massively pushed things forward they sacrificed creativity to do so. Apple products are still to this day notoriously difficult to upgrade or even fix. When a new product is announced the previous version is suddenly obsolete or forced to be via Apple themselves with iOS or OS updates. There’s a reason you iphone suddenly appears to get slower when a new phone is announced. This is by design to force you to upgrade.

But that’s a different can of worms to potentially open and one I have no desire to do in this post. The point is Apple showed an industry that you can tell people what they like rather than allowing people to discover or even create what they like. Apple went from “Think Different” to “Think the way WE think.” Adapt to our way or die. A company that once herald creativity has now systematically sought to kill it.

And this goes beyond just one company, this applies to an entire industry. With this new renaissance of AI we’ve taken a tool that should have been utilized to make our lives easier and savagely molded it into being one to replace the creatives. Companies are now using AI not to replace positions that should be replaced like project managers or middle managers but creatives like artists, writers, musicians, developers, and thinkers. And these creatives are screaming on the highest mountain tops that their livelihoods are being replaced only to be heard by deaf ears. Why? well we all know that answer to this question so it’s silly to ask it but simply put: money. Places like the Internet Archive have even fallen into this trap of easy money while sacrificing creativity and the betterment of individuals to fuel the AI machine. IA once had the purpose of preserving media that was either abandoned or fell into the realm of public domain but instead was found to be actively “archiving” current works in order to easily allow AI to scrap modern works to grow itself. Again, primarily writers, shouted this out but mainly fell on deaf ears until finally it was deemed illegal and IA was told to stop. However now we’re finding that AI is quite literally gorging itself on it’s own waste. AI is starting to produce more garbage than normal because it’s scraping it’s own produced content. Essentially it’s using the toilet and then feasting on what’s inside. And while this sounds hilarious, and it is, the creatives continue to suffer and fight tooth and nail to bring to light that many works now online are AI generated. They need allies, they need backup, we SHOULD be fighting alongside them regardless if we’re not creative ourselves.

We should also be fighting tooth and nail to preserve our creativity with these outlets, to preserve our ideals of innovation. I’ve been in the tech industry for some 20+ years now and even in my field of development I see the lack of creativity, the lack of innovation. Websites now have the same look and feel. The same layouts, the same fonts, and any kind of deviation from this is seen as “difficult to navigate” or simply “bad design”. The days of paralax or flash are long gone. And sure writing actionscipt was a massive pain, Flash was still innovative. An entire culture spawned because of Flash. It influenced a generations worth of artists, game devs, musicians, etc. We don’t have anything like that today. Music has become a sort of paint by numbers thing. Even new genres of music like “Phonk” all sound the same all utilizing the same samples all adhering to a specific format. Taylor Swift has shown us that the most mediocre of music is the ONLY way to apparently make music. Gen Z and Alpha call those that adhere to these standards as “NPCs” or “Normies” all the while consume the same waste themselves similar to AI consuming it’s own waste. Those that are creative, innovative and more than willing to take risks for the intent of creative Art are still, to this day, seen as weird.

We’ve collectively abandoned creativity, innovation, and art overall for ease of use. Mastodon, Lemmy, and the Fediverse overall is making an attempt to put the power back to the people and allow customization of their communities and instances but are seen as an easy path to alt right ways of thinking without any fight from anyone else to prevent that from happening via utilizing the SAME methods to cultivate and innovate an environment. Many people, especially on Bluesky, see this as “too hard” and “It should just work”. These same people would have dismissed the PC in the 80s. They would have dismissed Geocities and Myspace and IRC.

We’ve become a society of “it needs to just work” and “It needs to look this way” and “It needs to adhere to my standards” while dismissing those that shout “It can! let us show you how!” We mock those that make the attempts to be creative, to be innovative. We mock people who use Linux and tinker and customize while complaining about Windows and how Microsoft demands we use their products. “I’ll stick with Windows cause it works and I’ll dismiss anyone and everyone that says otherwise”. We consume literal AI Shit because it’s easy, because it’s fast, while rolling our eyes at the artists, the writers, the musicians, the thinkers who are simply trying to keep their heads above water begging, pleading, for a hand to save them. We’ve collectively become the NPCs.

So what’s the solution? there isn’t one. At this point that ship has sailed and we’ve decided we’d much rather stand on the dock and watch the boat venture past the horizon. We’ll continue to consume the same mediocre media, wear the same knee high boots, have the same broccoli hair style, and use the same boring apps. We’ll continue to shut down places like cohost and ridicule the fediverse. We’ll complain about Windows and Reddit and continue to actively use them. We’ll complain about companies sacrificing creativity and innovation in favor of profit while we sigh, open our wallets, and pull out our credit cards.

Our bed as been made, lets go to sleep.