High Output, Low Imprint
The great depression of craftsmanship
I can barely recall what the biggest content creators in my country shared last week.
They generate content regularly to continue building their audience on their platform of choice. If they stop, then their relevance might dwindle.
They suffer a similar fate to scientists who have the hanging sword of Damocles over their neck if they don’t publish. Publish or perish. For the content creators, they either create or perish.
The common narrative for those who don’t understand the lives of influencers is that they make a lot of money from doing very little. This could never be far from the truth.
My cousin is an influencer. She has garnered various partnerships with global brands. She has featured in numerous music videos of international artists and has even had her own billboard at some point. And she works so damn hard all the while juggling her further studies.
I know of another who does body art on herself. She recently did a painting of the main characters in Moana, starting at around 2 p.m. and finishing the following day, a few minutes before 7 a.m. These people work hard to preserve their brand or maintain their influence.
However, it might also work against them. I recently realized this when I sought help to market a festival I founded — Funkie Fest. As
puts it, they too want to help build something big and make something heavy.Skill and time
A content creator and persistent posting are never parted. Emphasis — persistent. They are also held under the tight leash of the platform’s algorithm.
A few weeks back, TikTok almost shut down in the USA, which came as a rude awakening for TikTok influencers. They did not own their audiences. TikTok did.
It takes time to build an audience. It takes skill to keep them coming back. It takes luck to achieve both. But to maintain a huge following over time, it largely takes both skill and time.
Michelangelo took his time to carve out the David and the Pieta. Da Vinci spent countless hours understanding animal anatomy. Darwin took over 20 years to amass the evidence in favour of his theory of Natural Selection.
Time and skill are necessary to build something heavy. Thus, when I reached out to a friend with the suggestion of leveraging the reach of the influencers, he told me one thing I never considered — they may feel used.
Nobody likes being used, even a small child when they are sent to the shop. I know there were times I disliked it when I was younger. Influencers, too, never like being used.
They want to take part in building an idea and bringing it to life. Think of Michael Jordan. He revolutionized the NBA after the classic signing with Nike. Today, Air Jordans are a different subset of Nike sneakers. He helped build the brand without feeling like he was being used.
Like founders of a start-up, builders would want to have a share of the profits or revenue. Jordan did. Today, most NBA players are doing the same.
Jordan’s example is monumental because it harnessed one’s skill and took time for it to have an impact. By aiming to become the greatest of all time, he had to fight for the ring season after season. He had to break records on the court.
He even quit basketball, then came back and still proved that he could get three consecutive rings despite the hiatus. His impact was legendary and heavy.
You know you’re a major hit when you leave and everyone feels your absence. What’s more, when you come back, everybody notices your return.
Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole have this habit of dropping classics, then dropping off into oblivion. And when they come back, it’s evident. We know they are back.
Kanye says it best:
We major (come on, homie, we major)
Nas took a while from hip-hop, and when he came back, dropped three albums to remind the industry who he was at fifty, earning himself a Grammy. When your work is dense, it creates impact.
Dense matter curves the spacetime fabric. Jordan’s legacy is dense. It left an imprint in NBA history. And it takes time to build. Time and skill.
In contrast, high output runs the risk of having a shallow, fleeting imprint. It is light enough to be consumed and forgotten the next day, if at all it will be consumed.
High output has a short half-life. Its products are often light. But everyone who creates aims at creating something heavy, dense, that will curve spacetime. The same applies to influencers.
I can hardly recall what I wrote last week, day after day. But I can remember the article that took the most of my time to write. It was the longest I have ever written.
It was heavy enough to create a big dent in my memory. I enjoyed writing it. I hoped everyone who read it would have enjoyed it, but dense does not always mean you will have gravity, but it is essential for it to have the gravitational pull (even though Einstein showed that gravity is not a pull so much as a fall).
Craftsmanship
Timothee Chalamet’s speech was viral because he echoed what most want to do with their lives — create something big. To leave an imprint in their field.
Since it takes time and skill, high-output creators keep doing the reps to keep their skills nimble. But they hope to make one banger of a masterpiece that will have people talking for years.
Recently, George Mack finished a piece he has been working on for over 7 months. His idea is to have a single imprint he will be remembered for, despite the valuable essays he shares with his subscribers.
When I saw the email, I sighed in relief:
Finally!
I hadn’t received his weeklies in a while and, in classic doctor’s fashion, wondered if he had fallen sick. Yes, he was sick. More like possessed. He wanted to be remembered for what he considers the biggest idea of the 21st century — agency.
I stayed up late consuming it. It was a change from the weekly essays. This one took 7 months. Time and skill. The result was that my space and time were curved. It drew me in.
Just as I did when I came across Charlie Munger’s transcript on the Psychology of Human Misjudgement.
The goal is to distort spacetime with a heavy, creative masterpiece.
Consider two gifts — a success card sent with the printed writing, and another where you have written a small handwritten message on the side. This message bears more weight than the printed sentences.
Human craftsmanship holds weight. A table that was built by the roughened hands of a skilled carpenter is more valuable than one manufactured by a furniture company. The magic of making something out of nothing using human hands imbues a density to a creation that can never be compared.
Ground-breaking, earth-shattering, impactful. These words connote density, something heavy.
Now that AI has changed the landscape, it takes away this density, the heaviness we all cherish from an artisan.
I attended the Safaricom Jazz fest for the first time in Kasarani while I was still a campus student. I figured, why not try this genre of music that I’ve never sampled? Marcus Miller was the guest artist.
When he walked on that stage, rocking that bass, my cervical vertebrae got rearranged. He was magical. He took the classical hits and converted them into his puppets, pulling the strings as they bent to his every pull and tug.
His band was just as gifted. The drums and percussionists were spectacular. Each of them had a few minutes to flex their dazzling creativity. They were so good that they arrested whatever precipitation that was bound to fall that evening.
By the time I was leaving, I felt I could now die in peace, because I had witnessed a world-class, once-in-a-lifetime performance of arguably the best bass player alive.
That’s density.
AI strips that of a craftsman’s work. High output has been sampled and used to create a windmill of content. It deprives content of its gravitas.
By taking away the human touch, the imprint is gone.
Competing creators then end up creating high-output content with low imprint. The time they could have taken to do the reps becomes consumed by AI. The density goes with all the other creators doing the same thing.
Value is lost.
Little is left to imprint. What’s left is just print. No colour. No aesthetic pull.
The ship has sailed. The craft has been replaced. The man is no longer the man but the AI. Crafts-man-ship is cast asunder.
When humans developed the bipedal gait, it freed their hands to carry more weight. This, perhaps, is the reason our hands have the magical touch, blessing our creations and innovations with an immeasurable but evident weight.
And as long as we continue to walk upright, we can still preserve our craftsmanship. But it will require time and skill. And that is where the skilled can use AI to their advantage.
What I’m trying to say is…
Skill and time are the primary elements of monumental creations.
Skill is borne of talent and dedication. These can be shaped by the creative utility of tools, and AI can be used as a tool. The pencil replaced the chisel. But there still exist among us those who are masters of both.
Craftsmanship does not work as science does. It can be explored and exploited to one’s whim. Skill and time, in the right hands, create that dense star that produces a loud bang and resonates by sending gravitational waves into the universe.
AI might have stolen the show, but may we never forget craftsmanship.
If we do, it would be a major loss. Because, as Nas and Kanye reiterate:
We major
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube