I got my hair cut yesterday, and my stylist Dawn mentioned an outdoor local arts festival happening over the weekend. She started talking about some of the fun things she found there last time, including these strange little “fidgets” that were like cute little plastic animals, made by 3D printers.
Turns out, I know all about these things because my youngest daughter loves them — her brilliant, light-speed ADHD brain thrives on fidgets, so I get to see all the latest models.
Dawn then made a joke about 3D printing houses, so I, nerdy futurist that I am, kindly informed her that this is already happening. If you haven’t yet seen it, it’s quite something — here’s a video from just a few months ago about a whole 3D printed neighborhood near Austin, Texas.
Let’s be honest: a 3D printed house is pretty badass. What a cool idea! Makes me picture the moment some “crazy” person said, “What if we could 3D print a whole building?”
Like everything, it’s crazy… until someone does it.
This conversation got me thinking about humans and how we thrive on creativity, and how I’m pretty sure the default state of “human” is to make stuff.
You know this is true if you’ve ever seen a tiny human, of course… they build with pretty much anything they can touch: blocks, bricks, paper, glue, tape, logs, legos, whatever… it doesn’t matter. If a thing can connect to another thing, something new gets made from it.
This is just how we humans roll.
So then I thought about our current state of reality, and A.I., and work, and business, and capitalism, of course — my brain apparently needs to make everything as existential as possible, including 3D printed toys. 🙄
And I thought… “So, if we humans are naturally creative, what are we being creative FOR?”
Immediately I felt a disturbance in my personal force… I didn’t like the answer that came up for me.
After my haircut, my mentor Terry sent me an email, and turned me on to a fabulous word I didn’t know much about: teleology.
If you’re in the boat I was in, this word essentially means explaining things according to their purpose. There’s a lot of angles to a potent philosophical construct like this, of course, but what interested me immediately was its connection to my thoughts earlier that day.
Because, put another way, my question was…
What is the teleology of human creativity?
What is our creativity FOR?
And my dark thoughts returned.
These days, it’s remarkably easy to get dystopian with this question, and I think, justifiably so.
When I look at the news, what I see are plenty of examples of human creativity being used in highly anti-future ways. Meaning, if we were to look back at today from the perspective of the future, it seems clear that there are MUCH better ends for human ingenuity than things like gerrymandering voting maps, creating more abstract financial instruments, and fabricating more useless crap at a global scale (as a few examples).
Obviously we can exclude 3D printed fidgets from this list as they are very helpful for our ADHD friends…! 😉
But honestly… what is all of our creativity FOR?
Are we using our inherent, beautiful, amazing human creativity to do something good?
Are we using our vast imagination powers do things that create a future we actually want?
If I answer this question honestly, I think my answer is currently no.
At least not at a large scale, or when it comes to what our current systems reinforce as the “normal” path.
When I look at it, so much our collective creativity is being used FOR just one purpose: making a very small handful of white dudes richer than they already are.
We could be doing really cool sh*t like coming up with new ways to 3D print ourselves out of homelessness, or bioengineer ourselves out of cancer, or making fresh food accessible to everyone on earth… and while I understand there are small pockets of people doing exactly these things, doing them at scale is almost entirely de-incentivized.
And this, my friends, is inherently anti-future.
It’s also deeply anti-human.
I guess what I’m trying to tell you today is there is a rebellion forming.
If you don’t feel it yet, you will soon. (If you get Disney+, go watch Andor and you’ll definitely feel it.)
I bet you’ve noticed the flickers of rebellion, even if you haven’t yet put that word on it.
Because in addition to creativity, there’s another innately human trait: our desire for liberty and autonomy. We don’t deal well with oppressive empires.
The arc of humanity strives to be free.
And more creativity, more freedom… these are the things a better future is made of.
