Punk wasn’t particularly interested in being good.
At least not by the standards of what had come before it.
By the mid-seventies, rock had become enormous. Elaborate. Technical. Expensive. Songs stretched past ten minutes. Solos got longer. Stages got bigger. Musicianship became something to admire from a distance.
Then a bunch of people picked up guitars and made noise.
Three chords.
Two minutes.
No permission required.
Punk wasn’t a technological revolution.
It was a reaction to one.
I’ve been wondering what our version of that might be.
I was at a Digital Summit in Minneapolis this week. There was the expected appetite for new tools, new capabilities, new ways to make things faster.
But something else was happening in the room.
People seemed to be cherishing the room itself.
The conversations between things. Hanging around afterwards. Dinner. Disagreement. Running into somebody you hadn’t seen for years and losing half an hour.
Actual human mess.
I’ve noticed it more and more recently.
As our digital world becomes increasingly synthetic, being physically together seems to be gaining value.
Maybe that’s not a coincidence.
Because right now we are experiencing an extraordinary expansion in what is possible to make.
Images that once required photographers, lighting, locations, retouching and days of production can appear in seconds.
Films can be imagined without cameras.
Music without instruments.
Ideas can move from someone’s head into something that looks remarkably finished before they’ve had time to make a coffee.
It’s incredible.
And it’s beginning to look the same.
Not literally the same.
Something stranger.
The polish is becoming recognizable.
You can feel when something has been optimized within an inch of its life. The lighting is perfect. The language lands exactly where it should. The image has precisely the right amount of weirdness.
Everything is possible.
Everything is polished.
Everything is content.
And somewhere in the middle of all that possibility, I think we’re going to start craving things that aren’t.
Every abundance creates a new scarcity.
When information became abundant, attention became scarce.
When content became abundant, taste became scarce.
And when perfection becomes abundant, I wonder if imperfection starts becoming valuable.
Not manufactured imperfection.
That’s coming too.
Brands will add grain. Creators will prompt for mistakes. Fonts will become wonky. Images will look like film again. We’ll manufacture authenticity at industrial scale and call it handmade.
That’s not what I mean.
I’m interested in the stuff that genuinely can’t be cleaned up.
A live voice cracking.
A drawing with the wrong line.
A conversation where nobody knows the answer.
Something made slowly when it could have been made quickly.
Something that happened once and wasn’t captured.
Years ago, when I was a designer, I remember hearing variations of the same prediction.
The tools were becoming easier.
Anyone could design.
The profession was changing.
The old skills wouldn’t matter.
Some of that was true.
But the tools didn’t suddenly make everyone creative.
They made execution easier.
What happened next was much more interesting.
People used that new capability to make things we hadn’t imagined when we were busy arguing about what it was going to destroy.
New formats appeared. New disciplines. New aesthetics. New kinds of creative people.
For a while we mostly used the new tools to imitate what we’d been doing with the old ones.
Then we stopped.
I think we’re in that strange period again.
We have almost unimaginable capability, and much of our imagination is still occupied with making the things we already know how to make.
Faster.
That’s useful.
But it isn’t the interesting bit.
The interesting bit is what happens when a generation grows up finding all of this completely ordinary.
They won’t be impressed that something can be generated instantly.
Why would they be?
They won’t remember when it couldn’t.
And that’s when I suspect things get weird.
Someone will reject the polish.
Someone will decide instant is boring.
Someone will make something unnecessarily difficult.
Someone will create an aesthetic that looks wrong to everyone who spent the previous decade learning how to make things look right.
And we’ll probably hate it.
Good.
That’s usually a clue.
What does punk look like when everyone has access to perfection?
Which brings me back to the guitar.
Three chords sounds like simplicity.
But anyone who has picked up a guitar knows there is something that comes before the chords.
You have to tune the thing.
I’ve always loved that.
Before the noise, you listen.
You make tiny adjustments.
Too sharp.
Too flat.
Again.
Until somehow it feels right.
The technology can give us more strings. More pedals. More amplifiers. It can probably play the bloody thing for us.
But there’s still something about knowing when you’re in tune.
Maybe that’s where creativity goes next.
Not more.
Not faster.
Not even necessarily better.
More sensitive to what feels right.
Because new tools don’t just give us new things to make.
They give us something new to push against.
And right now, there is an awful lot to push against.
Maybe the next interesting creative movement won’t be defined by what technology allows us to do.
Maybe it will be defined by somebody listening closely enough to know what they don’t want to do with it.
Three chords.
A room.
A mistake.
But first, tune the guitar.