86 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
86 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
[1]Tom MacWright
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2025@macwright.com
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[2]Tom MacWright
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• [3]Writing
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• [4]Reading
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• [5]Photos
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• [6]Projects
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• [7]Drawings
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• [8]Micro⇠
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• [9]About
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What if people don't want to create things
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2025-10-21
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Almost my whole career distills down to ‘making creative tools’ of one sort or
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another: [10]visualizations, [11]maps, [12]code, [13]hardware. I try to live a
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creative life too - between music, photos, drawing, writing, and [14]sewing I
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have some output. Never enough, but it’s something.
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When I look back on [15]TileMill in 2010, [16]Mapbox Studio, Observable, the
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whole arc: I can’t help but worry about the supply of creativity in society. In
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particular:
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If we give everyone the tools to build their dreams, very few people will use
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them.
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That’s it. Only tools that are both free, easy to learn, and ideally profitable
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really take off and become commonplace: TikTok has a lot of ‘creators’ because
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the learning curve is shallow and making videos is socially and economically
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beneficial.
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But few people want to make maps. Few people even think about the fact that
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anyone makes maps. The same goes for so much in society: the tools for making
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[17]fonts are free and learnable, but to use them you need time and effort.
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Beautiful data visualizations are free to make, with lots of resources and
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opportunities, but the supply of people who really love and know [18]D3 is a
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lot lower than I expected it would be.
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I worry about this when it comes to software, too. I love [19]home cooked apps
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and [20]malleable software but I have a gnawing feeling that I’m in a bubble
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when I think about them. Most people’s lives are split into the things that
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they affect & create, and the things that already exist and they want to tune
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out and automate, and our lives might be tilting more toward the latter than
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ever before. It’s so possible to live without understanding much of the built
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environment or learning to build anything.
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It’s not a personal issue: surely this comes downstream from a lack of free
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time, a cutthroat economic system, and companies that intentionally lock down
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their products - operating systems that only run approved software, coffee
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machines that only accept [21]proprietary coffee pods.
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But some of it is a personal inclination: the hesitance to share one’s art or
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writing or to tinker. It’s a shift of values from what you can make to [22]what
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you can own. It’s a bigger cultural thing that I could ever wrap my head
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around, but I do think about it a lot.
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References:
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[1] https://macwright.com/
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[2] https://macwright.com/
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[3] https://macwright.com/writing
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[4] https://macwright.com/reading/
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[5] https://macwright.com/photos/
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[6] https://macwright.com/projects/
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[7] https://macwright.com/drawings/
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[8] https://macwright.com/micro/
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[9] https://macwright.com/about/
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[10] https://observablehq.com/
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[11] https://www.mapbox.com/
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[12] http://val.town/
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[13] https://config.com/
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[14] https://macwright.com/2025/09/27/porteur-bag-2
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[15] https://tilemill-project.github.io/tilemill/
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[16] https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-studio
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[17] https://fontforge.org/en-US/
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[18] https://d3js.org/
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[19] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
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[20] https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/
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[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keurig
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[22] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/oct/21/why-the-manosphere-clicked-for-young-men-a-visual-deep-dive
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