The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex

The bullshit industrial complex is a pyramid of groups that goes something like this:

Group 1 : People actually shipping ideas, launching businesses, doing creative work, taking risks and sharing first-hand learnings.

Group 2 : People writing about group 1 in clear, concise, accessible language.

[And here rests the line of bullshit demarcation...]

Grou... See more

In the field of creativity, shared knowledge and wisdom have historically been hard to come by. This may be due to the house-of-cards structures upon which many creative industries are built. Or, perhaps it’s due to the fact that industries that seem to reward buttoned-up, ego-driven practices do not tend to generate great knowledge-sharing economi... See more

The calling for this new internet has never been more dire. As you're reading this, machine learning algorithms are being trained on the billions of gallons of bullshit we spew online each day.

AI-powered document editors, then, among other tools, use all that training data to make it even easier to write outcome-oriented garbage that moves us furt... See more

Howard Aiken—the inventor of the earliest general purpose computer—was never worried about people stealing his ideas. “If your ideas are any good” he’s quoted as saying, “you'll have to ram them down people's throats.” And yet, we think that the moment that we hit the dance floor, all eyes will be on us. The moment we hit publish, the world will ta... See more

algorithms of the online world are pushing creators and creatives towards quantity and formulas and away from quality or creativity.