today’s rant is about why algae exists, and the whole capsule mechanism, and why i keep choosing to make what i make.
for one, i named the entity algae because it’s meant to make software that works in creative ecosystems the way algae does. a simple organism meant to quietly power the ecosystems that it exists in.
+ from a bird’s eye perspective: we’re entering a phase of boutique software. it’s easier now for one person to make a tool built for a specific purpose, a tool that previously had no reason to exist because the thing it would cost to build was wildly out of proportion to the thing you were trying to make. the math never worked. a single weird useful idea wasn’t worth a team and a year. so it didn’t get built, and you just lived without it.
now code and graphic design now kind of run parallel to each other. if you can design, and you have an eye/feel for how something should feel and function and be used, you can make things that simply weren’t makeable before. the gap between “i can see it” and “i can make it” got shorter.
i’ve written about this before, and about how these models are basically what fl studio and a usb mic (and autotune, etc…) were to music. a non-singer with melodic ideas finds autotune and suddenly they can track their ideas out. and to be fair, a lot of the time you run into people who are tone deaf and out of pitch, and the tool just makes that louder…. if you truly have no business making music… like… you truly suck at it….the tools that exist won’t really help you much…. but every so often you run into someone who genuinely has the ideas, and now nothing’s in their way. the tool is neutral. it is exactly as good as the person making it. that’s the whole thing, honestly. it was never “look what this software can do.” it’s “look what discernment does with it.”
the 808 is the cleanest proof of this. it flopped on release because it didn’t sound like a real drummer. the fidelity was wrong. that exact failure is the reason it became the foundation of hip-hop and electro. the limitation became the sound. same machine, two completely different verdicts, and the only variable was who picked it up and what they heard in it.
so the question stops being “can a regular person make software now” and becomes “who’s making it?” and “do they have a unique point of view?” i wrote about danger testing a couple weeks ago. they just dropped another one, elonsiphone.com, and the level of attention and polish was the kind of thing where a normal person feels it immediately. they know what they’re doing. and it reads that way because it’s made by people who love internet culture and streetwear culture.
supreme made thursday’s a ritual. fixed day/real scarcity/the line around the store becomes the event. mschf turned the numbered drop into cultural commentary you can buy, on a clock. neal.fun is the same instinct pointed at the open web: one person, one idea per thing, enough polish to get the point, and end result as an experience you can hold in your head as a single object. the deep sea, spend bill gates’ money, none of it needed to exist and all of it translates well, because somebody with good discernment cared about exactly one thing all the way down. teenage engineering is the hardware version of this: focused tools that are also cultural objects, made by people whose idea and discernment is the product.
i look at all of this the way i look at a rollout. coming from music, you put together a rollout. same in film (if you have a marketing team beyond “run ads and do a pr tour”). you have all these cool rollout ideas, the staging, the reveal, the thing that makes people lean in. except now none of it has to be for music. iceman is the most recent example i keep coming back to. drake basically made a performance art piece, dropped a literal block of ice with a release date inside it, and it went viral because people were live streaming themselves picking at the ice trying to figure out when the album was coming. the rollout was the art. not the marketing for the art, the art. another example “endless” by frank ocean. a 7 day livestream event of a dude….making a staircase…. just trying to get to the next level.
i lean mostly towards the tool side. the thing that's distinctly mine is the focused tool for a creative who doesn't speak the domain language of some other art form, the one that closes the fidelity gap between what they can imagine and what they can actually execute. that's the center of gravity. the experience drops, the cultural objects, i want to make too, but in the way an artist works in a genre.
we’re in a genuinely weird spot right now where it feels like our humanity is getting stripped away and somehow extended back to us at the same time. i don’t know what to make of it and i don’t know how to fully feel about it. but the version of it i believe in is the version where the gap closes between idea → thing and more people get to make the thing they actually heard in their head.
that’s the whole philosophy, in a nutshell. the rest is just more of that, every other wednesday.