I have a half-formed half-idea that I’m not really prepared to articulate or defend well, but that runs something like this:

- Creative work keeps taking roughly the same amount of human labor / attention / care, even as new technologies accelerate or remove things that used to take time.

- This is because creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem; process is not just the means of producing output, but rather a labor vessel that holds the near-invisible work that is truly important.

- One can •feel• the care that goes into creative work without being aware of that work, or even being aware that work of that type exists at all. This feeling is approximate, loose, vague, but cumulative and eventually all-important; work with no care behind it wears thin and tends to fade as people live with it over time.

@inthehands

The compression of care.

@inthehands there’s some people (musicians mostly spring to mind) that knock out low effort works and it’s still amazing. There’s albums that were deliberately phoned in as a fuck-you to a record label who required the album and gave them a bad deal or limited their creative freedom too much or whatever and they still are good because some folks just can’t help it.

@aubilenon

Sometimes the labor is not specific to the work; being ready to spontaneously create something wonderful takes •extraordinary• work. There are some wonderful apocryphal quotes on this point: Someone asked [Miles Davis, I think?] how long it took him to make a particular album, and he said, “My whole life.” Charlie Parker said something to the effect of “you practice and practice and practice, and then you throw it all away and just play.” The Beatles famously recorded their first album in one day, but that’s only because they’d spent years playing that music in night clubs hundreds, probably thousands of times; the album was a one bucket drawn quickly from a well that took years to fill.

@aubilenon @inthehands

The old "knowing where to tap" part.