How Creativity Killed the New

Spotify is playing your favorite tunes before you even know they existed. Hollywood just premiered the same superhero movie you already saw five years ago. The newest iPhone is almost as thin as it was 11 generations ago. Slop is everywhere. And it is not the fault of AI (at least not entirely). But how did we get here?

It grew out of the horrors of the Second World War. The Western world as we know it. The UN, universal human rights, the welfare state and the post-war democratic order all carried the same humanistic promise: Never again should our world be torn to pieces and human lives disregarded as if they were nothing. The world was no longer for the few to fight and rule over, but for the many to explore. Human-centered. Creativity belonging to all and design in the service of mankind. In Denmark such notions grew, first through the human-centered focus of mid-century modernism, afterwards through participatory design practices that soon spread throughout the world. It morphed into design thinking and was championed by the likes of IDEO. And now, it seems, by everyone. What was from the beginning a moral project, an ideal, turned into something else.

Mid-Century Modernist Kaare Klint was one of the front runners of human-centered design designing furniture based on the measurement of himself and his students body proportions.

The tragedy is that participatory design began with friction. It was political, democratic and often difficult. It gave voice to those who had previously been designed for rather than designed with. But as it morphed into design thinking, that friction was slowly engineered away. The participant became the user. The user became a bundle of needs. Creativity became the art of mirroring desire back to itself to create endless consumption.

But even in this transformation, something older remained: the notion of consensus. The notion that it is first and foremost the number of ideas that counts rather than the quality of them. The notion that everyone is equal and that every opinion matters.

This way, the post-it note is not neutral at all. Long before the rise of machines, we were already living algorithms emulating the statistically valid over the idiosyncratic extraordinary. Design thinking knows nothing of quality, only of numbers. It has been an effective way to make sure that something worked, but in a bland and often utterly uninspiring way. Simply because its model of creativity disregards everything that isn't already known and tested. This is what has led us to today.

But before we talk about our current predicament, let us understand what we fled from. We need to go back further. To the figure that haunted the 19th century, and destroyed the 20th. The genius.

It is no coincidence that Hans Christian Andersen mythologized himself as a prophet rising out of the poverty surrounding him, or that Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment staged the morality of the genius. The 19th century saw the rise of the genius. In earlier times, inspiration was a muse that could come and go, but in the 19th century, the idea was that certain men were inherently exceptional. They were not visited by inspiration, but made of it. They became mythological. And what started as aesthetic excellence crossed over into the political. From the aesthetic genius of Beethoven, to Goethe as the universal man shaping culture by sheer visionary power, to Nietzsche's Übermensch, who dares stand beyond good and evil. And Napoleon, of course, the exceptional individual bending history to his purpose.

Different faces, but the same idea: civilization advances through the extraordinary individual. Not the collective, not the process, not the committee.

The 20th century bound the aesthetic and the philosophical as servants of the political.

And then handed that figure a state.

What followed is known. The exceptional man with the exceptional vision and the exceptional contempt for human lives. The genius as destroyer. So we fled and built something else. Human-centeredness and post-it note creativity were not naivety. It was a sound and rational response to catastrophe.

And so we built the creativity machine. Workshop by workshop, post-it note by post-it note. We refined the process. We democratized inspiration. We made creativity safe, scalable and inclusive. It worked, of a sort: reliably, predictably, without surprise, milking every drop out of everything with a semblance of originality.

What we lost in all the design engineering was the idiosyncratic. The unreasonable. The vision that could not be workshopped into existence because it did not yet exist in any form that a room full of people could recognize and vote for.

You cannot post-it note your way to Beethoven's 9th. You cannot brainstorm Kafka. The things that actually move and change us have never emerged from consensus. They emerged precisely because they came from another place, unknown to us.

What we got instead was an onslaught of products. They were not bad. In fact quite decent products. Really functional spaces. OK solutions. Just not exceptional. The catastrophe was not dramatic but gradual. A slow averaging of everything into everything else. And then one day, Spotify knew your taste before you did. Hollywood stopped trying. The iPhone got thinner, well, sort of. Our desires mirrored back in an endless loop of OKish products.

And then came AI as the ultimate continuation. The machine that produces slop non-stop. The creativity machine inherited and perfected from our own post-it note creativity. Stochastic probability is consensus as technology. The most statistically likely next word. The most statistically likely image. The most statistically likely idea. AI is the logical conclusion of participatory design. Its fullest expression. We built ourselves into algorithms long before the algorithms arrived. And now, we are neck-deep in our own averageness.

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus was the inspiration for Walter Benjamin’s Angel that sees history as a heap of ruins.

We built the machine. Then we became the machine. It is what we call progress. Walter Benjamin's Angel sees the ruins called history, and wants to go back to fix it. But the wind of progress keeps blowing us forward, always forward, into the efficiently average.

There is still hope. Not in the genius of old. Not in the shape of man. But that belongs to the next story.