SOUL — emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance.
Tech doesn’t have a soul anymore.
Or does it?
Being often at the intersection of both art and tech, I always wondered why art distinctly feels more human than tech these days. Is it because different forms of art have been around for centuries? Is it because there is much more variety?
Ironic thing is that tech might have altered our daily lives more than any piece of art ever produced. And yet, we connect with music, tv, movies, and games at a much much deeper personal level.
So what’s the problem?
Tech’s evolution made it seem like an obvious, ordinary, and utility-focused substance. It’s by design trying to be bigger, more helpful, more useful, more… sterile.
There is no need to make tech ‘look’ cool anymore. It just needs to solve some ‘kinda’ problem, and if the problem is big enough you could raise ‘capital’ to build that.
It’s an unstoppable loop that results in stagnation of what ‘tech’ is and how it makes people feel. What’s cool today was already cool 10 years ago. And anything new just seems to try to replicate the glory of the old days, feeling like another cookie-cutter company funded by YC.
The truth I recently embraced is that the only way to move forward and create something truly special is to go back to these days when creating a new piece of tech, whether it’s hardware or software, would require designing something that first seems absurd, but then only over time, become a standard.
Embrace creativity. Embrace doing something that feels weird. Embrace that tech is not just a substance, it’s a form of art — form that has been lost and needs to be rediscovered.