What the Machine Can't Reach

I built part of the thing that's doing this. This year I built a workflow that replaces work several people used to do. Leadership can point at it and say look, one person did this, we can hit the number. The number is a percentage. The percentage is people.

This is happening everywhere. I know because I'm inside it, and because friends of mine watched their freelance work dry up for reasons they didn't understand at first and understand now.

The floor is collapsing under any work that can be scraped, trained on, and regenerated. Anything that exists as a file is in that category. The collapse will be faster and more total than the people inside it are ready for.

What sits outside that category is the physical object. A painting with weight. A sculpture in a room. Steel you can walk around. You cannot download a sculpture. You cannot stream a painting. The object has to be in the room with you, and getting into the room takes travel and attention. Those frictions are becoming the scarcity the machine erased everywhere else.

The value of a physical object is going to be tied to the verifiability of its making. In a world where anyone can generate anything, the thing that cannot be generated is footage of a specific person in a specific room on a specific day making the specific thing that now exists. That footage is chain of custody. It is what makes the object unfakeable later. If you make music, record yourself making it. The song in the room, the take, the hands on the instrument. That is the receipt.

I am saying this as one of the people reluctantly building the pressure. I am telling you where it is going because I can see the shape of it from inside.

If your work lives as files, start thinking about what of it could exist as objects. The ground is moving. The people who move first will be the ones standing when it settles.

The people in the machine and pushing the machine don't give a shit about you or the quality of what gets generated. They see a line item on a spreadsheet. Remove the line item. Remove yourself. Make something real. Become a thing that cannot be replicated. Because you can't be. You're an artist.