Social media and the way the internet allows us to share ideas is having a profound effect on the way many of us see the world, myself included. Through the internet, I’ve been introduced to whole new areas and ways of thinking. My politics lean left and so in my social accounts I’ve accumulated an array of interesting progressive and left wing voices, and learned a lot from them. I’ve been reading more of Ray Dalio’s book ‘Principles’ that I wrote about a few days ago, and he places a great emphasis on exposing yourself to people you can disagree with in a constructive way and using these exchanges to seek out truth and deepen your understanding of reality. This is something that ‘the discourse’ on social is unfortunately very poorly suited to. The combination of relative anonymity, a premium on ‘infotainment’ in which people distill any thought down to a clever one liner and the strange mob dynamics of viral anger make the seeking of nuance, complexity and ambiguity more and more difficult, if not impossible. Dissenting voices are glibly ‘dunked on’ and worse, sometimes mobbed for harassment. This creates an environment of intellectual intolerance in which point scoring and rising follower counts defeat mutual understanding.

In Dalio’s book he writes a fair amount about the distinction between behaviors which we consciously engage in, governed by the rational neocortex and those we unconsciously engage in, governed by the lizard like amygdala which controls emotion. The social media stream of outrage, algorithmically manipulated dopamine hits and self-righteous group think seems to me to be heavily lead by lizard brain dynamics. There’s a part of the mind that enjoys lashing out verbally, or solidifying group identity by mocking and excluding others. These feelings are atavistically pleasurable and satisfying, even if our rational mind is somewhat ashamed to be participating in them. The fact that social media can feel like a consequence free zone in which we can let the lizard brain out to bite people and strut around additionally supports this dynamic. The fact that we can engage in these behaviors with a feeling of self-righteousness is one reason people are drawn to ‘internet activism’. When you feel morally justified to engage and let loose the nastiest part of your personality that otherwise needs to be controlled and contained in polite society, the appeal is understandable. The result is an enforcement of a kind of brittle ideological purity in which people become afraid to dissent, knowing that someone may take the opportunity to make an example of them and self-righteously lead a campaign against them. Mob leaders will be rewarded with a feeling of self-righteousness, and gain social exposure and followers on the platform, which can be translated into money and social influence. So we see a dynamic in which being outraged has become a kind of cottage industry in which large groups of people get to indulge their worst impulses while feeling protected by membership in the mob and assured of their rightness by the fact that others are participating.

I won’t venture an opinion as to how evenly distributed this dynamic is across the ideological spectrum. I observe a great deal of this coming from contemporary right wing reactionary movements online, and think they are probably disproportionately represented, but I am not unbiased in this regard. Notably however this has lead to a self-identified group of right leaning thinkers who have created their own industry out of debunking what they call ‘political correctness’. Generally speaking their interpretation of political correctness is any situation in which a marginalized group of people demands respect and equity from the dominant mainstream. This requires a degree of nuance in my opinion because while I think that this group is more or less a reactionary vanguard attempting to make it seem edgy and original to defend the status quo and existing power dynamics under the guise of ‘traditional values’ the dynamic that they are pointing to is real. There is a stifling of intellectual dissent going on, they are just incorrectly conflating it with a rejection of their personal ideology. I think there’s a danger here because we on the left should not be tricked into becoming the defenders of group think and ideological conformity. One of the great values of progressivism is strength in diversity, embrace of complexity, dissent and heterodoxy. Respect for authority is a rightwing aesthetic. Right wing ideological conformity organizes itself on hierarchical lines. On the left we are seeing a dynamic in which people are self-censoring and attempting to conform to the constantly shifting ideology of a viral swarm of angry internet activists. There is a time for actively seeking group consensus, but this is not the dynamic I see emergent on social media. The descent of some voices in the progressive movement into a singleminded focus on point scoring, calling one another out and enforcing ideological purity risks us destroying one of the great strengths of our system of values: our capacity to tolerate ambiguity and disagree constructively.

If we are looking for evidence that the algorithmic machine agents that we spend so much time with on social platforms are modifying our behavior and taste, look at the emergence of the ‘lofi hiphop beats to study to’ sub-genre. In New York city about 2 years ago when I was teaching a Unity class, I had a young twenty something student tell me that this was his new favorite genre of music. This is not a musical subculture that exists offline as far as I’m aware, although I am nowadays probably a little too disconnected to detect it if it were. Instead it seems to be a genre which has arisen in response to two phenomena: the need for contemporary feeling background music (maybe we could rename the genre nu-elevator?) and YouTube search engine optimization.

If we peruse this category on YouTube we find a myriad of clips with tasteful short looping anime animations of someone relaxing or studying, a cat looking out the window and a girl with headphones on, along with a few hours of non-descript, smooth and melodic instrumental hiphop beats. The music is mid-90s hiphop with the edges and serial numbers filed off, buffed and massaged to a warm shine. No vocals, no samples, no black or latino people in sight and instead a long smooth sequence of anonymous pianos, pads and boom bap beats. All very cozy and non-threatening. Some of the rhythms flirt with a post-Dilla, post-LA-beat-scene off kilter swing but never venture far enough into rhythmic edginess for you to notice. Samples of Black American soul, funk or jazz music (or any samples besides drum hits, to my ears) are absent. Ahistorical smoothening in which vaseline is rubbed on the lens until everything is a pleasant blur.

Fundamentally the contemporary boom-bap make-hiphop-90s-again movement within the broader contemporary hiphop scene is a reactionary and conservative movement in which one hearkens back to a golden age in which hiphop was artistic, lyrics were meaningful and everyone took everything VERY seriously. In fact this imagined golden era 90s never existed, I was there in New York as a teenager and instead we were listening to a lot of weird stuff like the Fu-schnickens rapping backwards, Nice and Smooth and their often non-sensical sing-rapping (which I love endlessly) along with our Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang, Public Enemy and Gang Starr. The imagined 90s is particularly persistent here in Europe in which serious minded young whites impose their ‘modernist artist’ ethos on the blueprint of rap and frown disapprovingly at a great deal of what made the culture so vivid, playful, experimental and full of joy and energy. While the main-line of hiphop culture has moved on to the decadent and woozy autotuned exclamations of Young Thug and Travis Scott, ‘Lofi hiphop Beats to Relax/Study to’ emerges as a pale and ghostly SEO and AI empowered similacrum of a past moment in the culture. Engaging with an idea of ‘hiphop’ so far removed from contemporary black American aesthetics is safe, since the black people in question are now in the distant and respectable past, or even more conveniently forgotten entirely. We are provided with a view of what might have happened if PM Dawn had emerged as the dominant cultural force of that era of rap, and ushered in 30 years of toothless, denatured new age boom-bappifying.

Note: I mean no disrespect to PM Dawn, who were great, and a great example of how much weird stuff was actually going on in NY rap in the 90s.

Image: My Devil Daggers High Score, Matt Schell 2016

When does it make sense to persist and when does it make sense to give up? The concept of sunk costs tells us that we should not “throw good money after bad”. This means that it doesn’t make sense to push further in the wrong direction, just because we’ve gone a long way in the wrong direction already. On the other hand we have anecdotes like the person who swam halfway across the river, got tired and swam back. Knowing when to persist and when to cut losses seems important and is also incredibly hard, especially in the moment of struggle. As we encounter difficulties, our fear of failure (or success) whispers to us that it’s too hard, we won’t make it, no one will care, so just give up. It is wise to ignore these voices when we can identify them. But sometimes the voice is real-world feedback. We published our thing and no one bought it, or people disliked it, or it was met with indifference. The heroic biographies of our favorite creatives tell the tale of the ones who never gave up in the face of adversity, who laughed in the faces of their detractors and pushed through to success. But of course a significant part of this is confirmation bias. No one champions the story of the one who wisely quit and cut her losses while she was behind, before digging a deeper hole. Or the one who heroically pushed forward in the wrong direction, got lost and never came back. Everyone loves the story of victory against all odds, but sometimes it is wise to quit when the odds are against you. But those stories are quiet and often private.

It’s a gray, rainy morning here in Berlin and I had a difficult day of work yesterday focusing on my projects because my back and shoulders are hurting. I spent a lot of time rolling around on a tennis ball trying to get the knot out of a muscle in my trapezius muscle (thanks doctor on YouTube for the tip) while listening to YouTube videos of Seth Godin and Ray Dalio. Today, I have questions but no answers. At the very least, here I am showing up for you, doing my best to take care of myself, to continue thinking and trying hard to maintain momentum. Small victories.

Last night on my flight home to Berlin from Copenhagen I started reading “Principles” by Ray Dalio. Holy shit, it’s incredible. Dalio’s thinking is original, incisive and relentless. I don’t want to get too breathless but for a certain type of person at a certain moment this book is like a bomb going off in your head. Some context: over the past year I have been trying to learn about finance and investing. Money is obviously a topic that’s important to many of us but growing up in a liberal, bourgeois and waspy intellectual family it was a topic that was actively not discussed. Whatever the social mores that encourages people to not think about discuss or take seriously the topic of money and finance, I see it as a serious disadvantage. I try to be very transparent with my kids about money and discuss it in clear terms with them so they see at as a tool and means to an end, rather than as something tied up in all these ideas of class, propriety, self-worth and whatever complex emotions and social customs lead people to not want to talk about it. Honestly even writing about the topic here I feel a bit uncomfortable, a strange, and probably un-useful dynamic. I read Tony Robbin’s “Money: Master The Game” and from there moved on to reading Warren Buffet’s “The Essays of Warren Buffet”. Robbin’s made reference to Dalio who came across as interesting and so I bought “Principles” as well, but sat on it and didn’t read it. After reading the Buffet book I was ready for a break from reading about financial instruments, which while I’m interested to understand, I find dry.

I expected Dalio’s book to continue in the same vein and so put off reading it for a while. Last night I needed something for my flight and it was the book I had unread on my Kindle app on my phone, so I gave it a try. I really wish I had started earlier. Firstly, although Dalio is clearly a brilliant financier, this is really not a finance book. For those unfamiliar with Dalio, he grew up in Long Island, NY. His father was a jazz musician and mother a home-maker. He became interested in the markets at a young age, went to Harvard Business School and then after working various Wall Street jobs started Bridgewater associates as a research firm in a two bedroom apartment, before growing it into one of the world’s largest and most successful hedge funds with tens of billions under management. He has actively not sought the spotlight which may be why many, including myself haven’t heard of him, but after tremendous success in what he describes as the ‘third stage’ of his life he has shifted his focus to giving back. He’s signed the giving pledge along with Gates and Buffett and will gives a significant percentage of his wealth to charity, and has undertaken to distill and codify his learning in the process. This is where we arrive at “Principles”.

Dalio is a systems thinker par excellence. His primary mode of operation is to gather and record data, process it with algorithms (systems or formulas) and then reflect on what that processed output reveals in order to make informed decisions. Very early on he realized that he could analyze all of the inputs to a system, distill them into a set of rules and then model that system with various inputs. He initially did this with commodities markets, learning how the production of meat was informed by grain prices, how fast the various meat animals put on weight and how the various prices and inputs interacted with one another. He built this into a model using early personal computers and was able to make informed decisions about the prices of corn, meat and soy in the commodities markets to great success. He embraced digital technology and modeling early and has kept pace and extended his use as computing power increased exponentially. This is where this concept of cyborg decision making arises. Dalio guides the investment process at Bridgewater using a massive array of digital models of millions of data points, processed using artificial intelligence techniques which he then compares to the decision making arrived at by the human agents of the firm, including himself. The result is a kind of mental scaffolding in which the humans compare their intuitive and analytical understandings and beliefs about how markets will behave against the more objective and emotionless logic of the machine agents. This cyborg process of decision making allows for both agents in the process to play from their strengths. Humans have powerful intuition and ability to see gestalts, but can be blinded by bias or emotion, whereas machines have the incredible ability to compute and objectively score data. The results in terms of the financial performance of Bridgewater have been astounding.

Dalio advocates in his book for us all to encode and externalize our decision making in a set of principles which we write down and evaluate our intuition against. He obviously also is a great believer in data, and using data to inform decision making. Dalio is in my opinion a genius of process and systems. His powerful insight is that he on his own is incapable of making the most optimal decisions. He has therefore sought to support his decision making process with a powerful scaffolding of machine intelligence and also collaborative human intelligence in the form of his team. Dalio’s focus on radical open mindedness and radical transparency as it’s practiced in the company culture of Bridgewater is a whole additional topic worth discussion on it’s own, and you’ll probably be hearing more about it in these pages as the shockwaves of this book ripple through my brain. To get an idea for how radical his approach to managing people is he has been described in the press as a ‘hedge fund cult leader’. For me, the story and thinking of Dalio feels like a direct challenge that needs to be responded to. How do I incorporate this into what I do? In a sense I feel envious because the playing field he chose on which to deploy his brilliance, the financial markets, is one with such a clear scoring mechanism. Every idea you try has a clear goal, to earn financial profits and to protect against losses. So he has a wonderfully direct way to evaluate the validity of his ideas.

For those of us who choose other areas in which to play, like the arts, how can we incorporate this kind of thinking? I think this kind of cyborg relationship to technology is already upon us in many areas of our lives, with so much of what we do mediated by software. For Dalio he has used it to incredible effect. What is the equivalent of this for artists? Steve Jobs famously called the computer a bicycle for the mind. Incidentally Dalio was a great fan of Jobs and spent significant time trying to understand and model his thinking after his death, seeing parallels between their worldviews. I think the full Jobs quote is a good way to end this piece.

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” ~ Steve Jobs (via brainpickings)

Still from “An Otter Eating A Pumpkin”, Matt Schell 2017

Today I’m feeling a lot of resistance to write. The term resistance is one I find useful in terms of the creative process, as conceived by Stephen Pressfield’s “The War of Art” and “Do The Work”. Pressfield writes eloquently about the mental struggles of being creative, in his case from a writer’s perspective. He writes:

“Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. resistance is the enemy within.” – Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

I feel that in fact most of the struggles and battles I experience in the creative process, and to a large extent the rest of life, are struggles with the enemy within. With fear, ego, self-doubt, inertia, loss of momentum. I know that I have the capacity to work, I believe that I have interesting things to say, but sometimes they are overcome by static and lost.

Momentum is a useful way for me to think about this. When I have momentum, when I’m being consistent, working and moving forward a kind of positive inertia can kick in. Yesterday it felt good to work and so tomorrow I look forward to working again. Today I’m tired and I can feel my momentum dip, but with the experience of years I know how important it is to expend effort to maintain it. To stick to my creative routine and pour energy into carrying the heavy canoe from one river to the next. If I don’t, I won’t get to the next smooth downstream flow. After doing this for a while it’s possible to build up hope and faith that easier times are in fact ahead, if we can just make it through this current patch of thorns.

Free things have become a bigger part of our lives, and to an extent we’ve grown to expect them in certain areas. New websites, online services and tools nowadays are often free. This introduces strange dynamics much of the time, in which for example on social media, the user becomes the product and the customer becomes the advertiser, the data miner, the eye of surveillance and tracking. This introduces dynamics which can create negative outcomes for users in which they are subjected to behavior modification techniques designed to maximize attention and engagement, in order to drive ad views or data generation, to the detriment of the user’s experience of using the platform. Social media is particularly guilty of this but there are others, like finance platform Mint, which provides financial analytics in exchange for sharing your data with third parties.

Jaron Lanier has written and spoken eloquently about these dynamics, how the algorithms which run these platforms often come into adversarial relationships with the users given their business model. He’s written several books and given numerous talks and interviews in which he advises people to delete their social media accounts. I’m inclined to agree with him although my response has been instead to limit and shrink my use of social media and confine it instead to only Twitter and YouTube. I’ve removed myself from Facebook and Instagram as I find Facebook and their ‘growth at any cost’ mentality to be particularly egregious in these regards.

Part of what is interesting and novel about these struggles for attention is the fact that we enter a domain where we are struggling only indirectly against other humans, and more directly with algorithms and machine learning models. The tools which are used to track and modify the behavior of millions of users concurrently, like for example on YouTube, grow more complex all the time, to the point where they become to a degree opaque to their creators. To automate this type of behavior at

scale

it’s impossible to use human labor and so machine learning, neural networks, and self-adjusting algorithms are required. This means that even the people running these platforms do not directly control or explicitly understand what’s happening. Particularly on the larger platforms in which many algorithms and processes are happeningsimultaneously, this is true. In the case of YouTube those of us who do work on the platform talk and think about ‘the algorithm’ all the time but in

fact

there are many algorithms all interacting concurrently with the single goal of maximizing attention-spend on the platform and thereby maximizing ad revenue generated.

I am not an apocalyptic techno alarmist who would cry ‘Skynet!’ in the face of this development. For example, YouTube’s algorithm has led me into some wonderful corners musically and helped me to discover a wealth of for example 80s Japanese Ambient music that my life is very much enriched by (see my post on Music, Design and Mastery for an example). There’s also a terrific community of people posting wonderful, creative house music that YouTube’s algorithm has discovered I like, and started serving me more of. I’ve discovered the work of So Inagawa this way, who I’ll probably write about soon.

But whether we find this alarming or amazing we must acknowledge that something new is happening. We are in an evolving feedback loop with complex software entities which are concurrently modifying themselves and their own view of the world and simultaneously modifying our behavior, taste and worldview. There’s a a rapid evolutionary aspect to this and it is something new and worth paying attention to.

Image: Some Airport Sunrise, Matt Schell 2018

Waking up in Copenhagen to the American election results, I feel very mixed feelings. I wanted to see a crushing, decisive repudiation of Trump and his racist, fascist policies. Instead we saw a valuable victory for the left in taking the US house of representatives, but not a decisive one. Certain candidates I had high hopes for did not win, candidates who embraced a bolder progressive platform like Andrew Gillum and Beto O’Rourke. Stacy Abrams seems destined for a runoff or recount so fingers still crossed there. So I’m hopeful, but also disappointed.

Hope and disappointment are inextricably intertwined. To dare to hope is to risk disappointment, and so we need to welcome it when it comes, knowing we took a risk to hope, as we should have. There’s a quote that comes to mind from Gandhi, which I’ll quote at length here because the context is interesting. In “For Pacifists” he’s writing about a riot in Bombay:

“My reply is that a satyagrahi may never run away from danger, irrespective of whether he is alone or in the company of many. He will have fully performed his duty if he dies fighting. The same holds good in armed warfare. It applies with greater force in Satyagraha. Moreover, the sacrifice of one will evoke the sacrifice of many and may possibly produce big results. There is always this possibility. But one must scrupulously avoid the temptation of a desire for results.”

I believe that I first read this quote in a piece by Arundhati Roy but I couldn’t place it and only found the source via Google books (read here) This concept of avoiding the tempation of a desire for results is a powerful one. As I interpret it, and as Gandhi has been quoted elsewhere “The path is the goal.” Action is the goal, struggle is the goal, continuing is the goal. Placing the focus on continuing on the path instead of achieving an end point or result means that while we may experience set back, disappointment and friction, we have an achievable goal, to continue on the path.

I think this path orientation or process orientation is valuable in virtually all contexts. It’s valuable for the struggle to create and to be an artist and also for the struggle to resist the rising tide of global fascism. All we need to do is to push forward, slowly, gently and inexorably, forever. Results will be achieved along the way.

Image: Still from Dead Cities 001 by Matt Schell 2018

A lot of my personal work explores concepts of generativity, procedural content generation and various forms of indirect or chaotic art creation. For many creators of procedural content, we are looking for moments of surprise and revelation, that 1+1=3 moment where through juxtaposition, coincidence or chance our generator throws up something beautiful or interesting. In a way I think of this process as analogous to exploring a natural landscape, and some of the sense of beauty we experience in that. The natural landscape is complex, shaped by chaotic forces yet also follows a set of underlying rules. Rivers do not flow through the air and trees are usually perpendicular to the ground. When they’re uprooted on their side, crawling around in or on their roots and the resulting small cave can be fascinating. We love waterfalls because the juxtaposition of cliff, river and gravity produces the beautiful emergent phenomena of water falling through the air. Working with, experiencing and exploring generative art has a similar feeling for me. The experience can be interesting on the superficial level, in which interesting immediate forms are thrown up, but also gives us an opportunity to practice systems thinking. How did this get here? What factors lead to this arising?

The moments of discovery we feel in the natural landscape are more exciting to us when they feel unplanned. There is a major difference in feeling when we hold onto a guardrail and follow the well lit path down into a cave, and when we discover a cave in the forest with no signs and no safety barriers. Derek Yu, in his wonderful book Spelunky, about the creative process behind the game of the same title, talks about the concept of ‘indifference’. In this case he refers to a rejection of the theme park approach to level design, in which every rock and shrub is carefully arranged and colored to lead you down the path to the next crafted set piece. Many level designers discuss the value in studying the work of the Disney corporation in laying out it’s theme parks, and there is no doubt that they are masterpieces of sight lines, spatial planning and careful, subliminal guidance. Like reading a great novel, swept up in the flow, we are effortless guided from one delightful experience to the next. But we cannot honestly call this an experience of exploration. At best this is an exploration on an invisible cognitive leash.

I had an early memorable experience playing Minecraft with my two sons, who were probably 4 and 5 at the time. We were building a house by the beach, and digging a moat around it, to fill with water and keep out zombies. In the process of digging out the moat around the house, suddenly my screen went black. What had happened? I had accidentally broken through into a cave. When I managed to bring some light into the cave I discovered a canyon like underground cavern system filled with skeletons and lava. The experience was memorable because of it’s surprising nature and the very real feeling that this space had been there beneath my feet, but no one had led me there, yet I had discovered it. I remember it now well enough to recount it, and that’s not something I can say about many video games. In this generated, indifferent environment I had an experience worth describing in a few sentences. It felt real to me in the way that no carefully crafted climactic set piece in a game has.

As computers become more powerful and our facility with procedural tools increases I hope that this is a thread we continue to explore. Indeed given the multi-billion dollar success of Minecraft I hope that it’s lessons of complex, indifferent, procedural worlds are absorbed and developed further.

Image: Surprise Eggs From The Dumpster, Mat Schell 2015

Some days sitting down to write these is easy and some days it’s not. Today is a non-easy day, for some reason my neck and shoulders are super tense and painful. I went swimming yesterday and did a dive off a diving block (slightly showing off for my sons) and somehow in the process of jumping in both calves totally seized up and went into cramps, and I hit the bottom of the pool with my fingers, having dove too deep. This is what I get for showing off. So everything hurts today. Not badly, but enough to make me grouchy.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how artists can make a living in our current late capitalist system and survive. I think about it for myself, but also in a broader sense. Art is valuable, but not useful. It’s rare that we urgently need to buy a piece of art. It’s almost always a kind of indulgence or tertiary concern. Many of us feel an urgent need to make art and so as a result there is art getting made but in my opinion not a great framework for supporting it in the market. To be clear, when I refer to art, I’m thinking about stuff that explicitly does not fit into traditional ideas of usefulness. For example a tastefully composed black and white photo of a pier can be hung in a hotel room as decoration. It’s serving a purpose there and making the hotel feel different than if it had Ikea commodity paintings on the wall. But it’s not particularly expressing anything for us, and thereby I’d say in that context isn’t really serving as art. Art, in my opinion is useless in day to day life. It serves as a mirror for us to reflect on, allows us to feel connected to it’s creator and maybe shows us a new perspective. These outcomes are valuable, in my opinion, but not useful in a straightforward sense.

Capitalism and modern economics with it’s myth of the ‘rational economic actor’ basically has no support for or understanding of art. Rational economic beings do not have souls that sing in the presence of art, and art is difficult to quantify, categorize and put in economic boxes. And it suffers for that. Entertainment has understandable economic value, clearly, serving as a kind of mental vacation or decoration for otherwise boring lives. Sometimes entertainment slips into art territory but often the two values are opposed. The fact that all human cultures have some kind of practice of art making and that we’ve done it for thousands of years suggests that this is something important for humans, but I believe the current system still fails to understand that or perhaps subverts it. Mostly art in the current system exists as a kind of surplus activity which exists outside of or beside capitalism, funded by government cultural grants, non-profits and bourgeois generosity.

One might think that because art prompts introspection and can provoke complex feelings it is seen as subversive to the contemporary economic model. The industrialization of human life called for a machine like human, standardized via the public education process with predictable competencies. These machine like humans need to tolerate a great deal of unpleasantness including life in the cramped quarters of cities and factories, extremes of boredom and alienation from their labor (and thereby huge tracts of their life). It’s possible that during the construction of the machine like human model it was realized that provocation and introspection were vectors for chaos and change, and therefore were discouraged. Instead the primary purpose of art-like activities was replaced with distracting entertainments and superficial decorations. These do serve a valuable purpose for the machine like human, allowing us to longer tolerate the conditions under which we are required to labor. I doubt that any shadowy cabal sat down and articulated this as an agenda, but as it is in the nature of complex systems to optimize for certain outcomes, I belive that this is one of the outcomes we are seeing. It’s worth noting that as we exit the industrial era into the information/internet era with it’s accompanying explosion of complexity and creativity, other ways of living may be possible.

Image: Dawn in Mexico City 2017, Matt Schell

I am always working and making stuff, but it’s not always visible. That’s because a lot of the work I do gets discarded at some point because it doesn’t work out or go anywhere, experiments, prototypes, small ideas. In a way it’s a shame because just as I learn things from those experiments, others might as well. So I am trying to get better at being more transparent and documenting my process. Of course this is a bit scary, the ego doesn’t really want to let people into it’s secret lair and show the outside world the mess. But I think overcoming that is worthwhile and bringing people into your work is worth it. This blog is an attempt in that direction, though it’s focus is more holistic and less on the individual projects etc that I’m working on. For the more granular technical details, I have my YouTube channel which I’ve restarted and tried to be more consistent on. Again, I am resisting the desire there to make perfectly packaged content (for example nice concise tutorials) and instead just bring people into my process and showing them what’s being worked on. It started with the release of my procedural generation asset Strata, and still circles around that a lot since that’s my main current released project, but it also shows some of the other small experiments I’m working on and making as well.

The value of creating this kind of secondary documentation work (which takes work and effort, to be sure) is that it crystallizes the process and creates a secondary product that will survive and be valuable (hopefully) even if the main project / product turns out to be unsuccessful. In fact it’s probably particularly interesting to see the process go wrong for others, from a learning perspective. “Learn from other people’s mistakes” as they say. In a sense documenting your process can serve as a kind of hedge against the risk of an unsuccessful project. If the project itself is unsuccessful, there is at least some useful learning that may come out of it for others. I think creating process documentation also encourages reflection during work, and therefore probably helps one to digest and perhaps reveal additional insights, both during the creation process and after the fact. Writing this blog and making YouTube videos about my recent stuff has been useful in that sense.

Importantly in both cases the documentation is public. This has an additional value of creating a degree of accountability in which I am publicly promising and committing to do work, and therefore feel I will disappoint some people if I give in to the temptation to give up. We all respond differently to this kind of social perspective but I know for me the idea of missing deadlines or having projects collapse publicly stings much more than silently and privately giving up on stuff. So for solo practitioners like myself, this kind of public blogging or video creation is a way to create some degree of public social accountability, which you may also find valuable.