@ewen Maybe it's a good moment to bring out some classic quotes again:

"We make our tools and then they shape us."
(not giving attribution because I've seen far too many conflicting sources for it)

"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Also this one:

"You don't need tools. You need techniques."
(here I actually don't know the source)

All of them, but especially the latter two, have been very influential on my tool-building journey and design philosophy in general. Tools are concrete instantiations of concepts, techniques, but techniques themselves are much more important, more transferable and more valuable to learn, to adopt and to internalize.

Tools are replaceable, or at least they should be.

In almost every other field of human endeavor, tools have mostly been replaceable and skills learned (aka techniques) are directly transferable. Only when it comes to software have we changed this behavior to fully bind large parts of our problem solving skills & approaches, and in many cases, our entire livelihoods, to a handful of increasingly monopolistic tool vendors, whose only interest is to extract value, bind us to their tooling, their platforms and their network effects.

I've seen this in all parts of the creative and tech industries: Help and condition people to become a power users/operators (or "thought leaders") in these insular systems, support and entice them with a few extra morsels thrown here and there to select people (e.g. sponsorship deals), dangle career opportunities, invitations to conferences/events where they sing praise to the platform lords and opportunities. In the end, this "community engagement" is all a form of marketing for these providers, platform-based nepotism, connections, revolving doors, more than about the actual work produced or transferable skills obtained.

For the longest time, I found this behavior especially predominant and so very alienating in the "creative industries", which just seemingly can't get enough of this model! Rather than investing time & effort into helping shape and co-create ownable tools and transferrable techniques themselves, to experiment and create with techniques "outside the box", for the longest time the de-facto behavior has always been to become a "company man"-type person/expert.

Narrow field experts, consultants and "platform wars" everywhere, for as long as I can remember: AtariXL vs. C64, ST vs Amiga, Flash vs. Director, Cubase vs Protools vs Ableton, Adobe vs Affinity, Houdini vs. Alias vs. Blender, Light Room vs. Dark Table, Processing vs. OpenFrameworks vs. Cinder, React vs Angular vs. Vue, C vs Rust vs Zig etc.

In some sense it doesn't even matter if these are closed or open source platforms/providers. Entire disciplines/sectors are tied up in monolithic & monopolistic tools and the streamlined visions/philosophies of their purveyors.

Every creative idea and solution is mostly approached & judged through the lenses of these tools and their capabilities. For many even only unconsciously so. Auto-pilot mode engaged.

Almost every one of these discipline-defining tools has turned into super complex bloatware, deemed necessary to establish and maintain monopoly status, cover all bases. And even though these tools have become so huge and do afford a vast spectrum of creative expressions, I've been finding it extremely disturbing and alienating that, as a social group, especially "creative" professionals are exhibiting such strong consumerist behaviors and just aren't more interested in questioning and shaping these workflows, these tools and possibilities/options themselves, seemingly unaware (or uncaring) about that second part of the first quote above:

"...and then they shape us"

#ToolMaking #Creativity #Tech #Monopolies #Platform #Behavior #Quote