Machines are architectures of correlation. We are architectures of care.

This is the final installment. We have spent nine weeks moving through the foundations, the three steps, and the forces that shape creative life. This week, I want to close with two things: a clear-eyed look at AI and creativity, and then the full collection of prompts developed over five years of weekly practice in circles and the Critical Business School.

Read more

Aesthetics can’t be general, because then it would be a utility1.

Useful things are, by their nature, swappable. A hammer is a hammer for whoever picks it up. A kilowatt does the same work in any wire. A dollar is a dollar in any hand. That’s the whole point of a tool. It doesn’t care who’s holding it, and you can trade it for any other tool that does the job as well or better. Usefulness lives in the world of the interchangeable. And anything you can boil down to a rule has already moved into that world. The recipe, the spec, the formula: these are things anyone can run to get the result. They’re general because that’s what makes them useful.

The moment you write down the principle, beauty is the golden ratio, good design follows these laws, this is what converts, you’ve built a procedure. You’ve made a tool. Which means a general theory of aesthetics doesn’t explain beauty. It quietly replaces it with something useful. The generality isn’t a bug in the account. The generality is the swap.

Kant felt this two hundred years ago, though he said it more programmatically. When you call something beautiful, he noticed, you don’t mean “I happen to like it.” You mean “you should see it too.” You’re reaching for something shared. And yet you can’t prove it. There’s no rule you can point to that you can use to prove a triangle’s angles. The second a rule does settle it, it’s good because it meets the brief, you’ve stopped making an aesthetic judgment and started tabulating.

The cleanest map of that room comes from Barthes, near the end of Camera Lucida. He splits any photograph into two things. The studium: everything you can be taught to read, the coded, cultural, shareable content, the part you can discuss, catalog, and put to work. And the punctum: the small detail that pricks you, that you can’t quite explain and couldn’t have predicted and can’t hand to anyone else. The punctum isn’t really in the photo. It’s in the meeting between this photo and one particular person. “No two people see the same photograph.” The studium is general, so it’s useful. The punctum can’t be generalized, which is exactly why it can’t be sold, taught, or packaged. It requires the active openness and the creation of containers capable of transformative communication. The instant you could reproduce it in someone else on command, it would become a technique, and it would stop pricking.

Which tells you what the aesthetic actually is. Not a property sitting in objects, waiting to be measured. It’s the event of something becoming, for someone, impossible to swap out.

Sontag’s anxiety in On Photography is that the camera turns the whole world into something available, and available means tradeable. The beautiful and the terrible end up the same size on the same screen, equally collectible. Berger, in Ways of Seeing, points at the engine underneath. Looking is never innocent. It carries power and ownership, and the advertisement is the purest case: a thing made beautiful strictly in order to. But anything beautiful in-order-to isn’t really beautiful. It’s working. And you should grade it the way you grade anything that works, by results.

Almost everything sold to us as “aesthetic” now is usefulness wearing beauty’s clothes. The brand system, the preset, the theme, the optimized feed, and the vibe with a number attached. These are tools, general by design, because being general is what lets them scale. The mistake is only in the word. Most of what we now call taste is really the work of telling the tool from the thing.

There’s a complication worth naming. Seeing already follows its own rules. The eye organizes automatically, before any thought arrives. It splits a scene into a thing and its background, pulls scattered marks into groups, closes a broken circle into a whole, and reads weight and tension into a shape set off-center. None of this is chosen, and it runs the same way in everyone. By that measure, vision is general all the way down, so aesthetics should be general too.

But that generality belongs to perception, not to art. Grammar is general, and the poem isn’t. The rules are the floor everyone stands on. The aesthetic is what occurs when someone stands where no one has. A complete account of perception would not contain a single aesthetic fact, the way a full account of acoustics never once touches music.

Useful means replaceable by anything that performs as well. Beautiful means irreplaceable, valued as the one thing it is and not the job it does. Generality is the shape of exchange, and the aesthetic is the point where exchange stops and mutuality starts. This is why Barthes ends his book on death, and means it plainly. Every photograph says: this was, and will not come again. A tool is repeatable, and that is its entire promise. What pricks you is bound to the once. It matters for the same reason you do. It isn’t coming back.

This week, I invite you to keep a (running, updating) list of the general and specific in your work.

More masterclasses are coming. Follow along on Luma to catch the next one, and reach out any time if you'd like to hear more about the AI Literacy course.

Week 9 of 10. Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week.

This post is for paid subscribers.

No technology makes a meaningful exchange any better than it already is.

This week covers the most ground in the book. Three chapters on communication, marketing, and the tools we think with. They belong together because they share one question: what happens to creative surplus when it meets mediation, optimization, and scale?

Read more

Thought leadership is a media business. It runs on the economics of attention: a post, a talk, a byline, a quote in someone else’s deck. The currency is reach, the unit of exchange is the impression, and the relationship with the audience is transactional by design — you publish, they consume, the loop closes. At its best, it’s editorial work. It …

Read more

Creative surplus isn’t something you build toward or earn through years of grinding in a job you dislike. It’s the baseline condition of being a thinking, feeling, sense-making creature. The only question is whether you’re curious enough about yourself to recognize it and articulate it into the world.

Most economic thinking about creative work star…

Read more

Week 8 of 10. Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week

This post is for paid subscribers.

A circle is a band practice for solo artists.

In 2019, I set out to build an intentional co-creation space: a place where people could show up with their creative surplus and use it. Not a networking group or a community in the LinkedIn sense. Not a mastermind or an accountability circle, but a space where communication and discourse come before roles and transactions, where people arrive as persons rather than personas.

I called it Circles, distinctly not a community.

That space has been running continuously since 2019, through a pandemic, through the rise of remote work, through the arrival of generative AI, through the slow disillusionment with online community that has defined the last half-decade of the internet. What we learned in that time changed how I think about gathering, belonging, and creative collaboration.

Read more

Some follow-up thoughts from the discussion at the second AI Literacy salon that took place at Index Chinatown on May 13th1.

Read more

Integration is not monetization. It is alignment.

Integration is the third movement: folding what you have discovered and articulated back into your life and work. It is the most difficult of the three, because it asks you to change. Not just what you think, but how you show up.

Read more

Self-leadership begins when we learn to draw a frame without drawing a picture. Every other mode of communication is, in effect, telling people what to do rather than enabling them to be themselves.

Frame and picture

All mental frames are constellations of ideas, interpretive tools that create a way to see the world. A picture is a snapshot, disembo…

Read more

Integration is not monetization. It is the act grounded in one’s creativity.

Integration is the third movement: folding what you have discovered and articulated back into your life and work. It is the most difficult of the three, because it asks you to change. Not just what you think, but how you show up.

Read more

CBS is opening an AI Literacy school in Brooklyn. Learn more →

Read more

I recently met myself. Or something that was supposed to be me. Delphi had been trained on my content. ElevenLabs had been trained on my voice. By any reasonable technical standard, the result was impressive. The cadence was right. The vocabulary was plausible. And yet the moment I heard it, I knew something was off. Not broken. Off. The simulatio…

Read more

Week 6 of 10 – Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week

This post is for paid subscribers.

The act of writing and rewriting is creativity. Total clarity is production.

Articulation is the second movement: putting language on what you have discovered. If discovery is about paying attention, articulation is about giving form. It is the bridge between the internal and the external, between the intuition and the conversation, between the surplus and the world.

Read more

In the early 2000s, researchers studying epilepsy patients identified a single neuron in one patient’s brain that fired only when she encountered Jennifer Aniston. Her photograph, her name in text, even a stylized cartoon drawing — the same cell, every time. That is how human cognition organizes meaning: symbolically.

Large language models work dif…

Read more

AI has inverted the economic logic of the twentieth century. For a hundred years, the market rewarded conformity. Standardization. The ability to fit into systems, follow protocols, and produce consistent output that matched specifications. The person who could subordinate their particularity to organizational demands thrived.

That era is ending.

AI…

Read more

Week 5 of 10 – Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week

This post is for paid subscribers.

In abundance, all we have is philosophy.

Discovery is the first movement of creative surplus: paying attention to what is already present but unacknowledged. It sounds simple. It is not.

We are trained to look outward – at the market, at competitors, at trends, at data. The entire apparatus of professional life is oriented toward external signals. What does the customer want? What is the industry doing? Where is the opportunity? These are important questions. But they are not the questions that lead to creative surplus. They are the questions that lead to optimization.

Read more

Not literally. Metaphorically. A project that's quietly over. A role you've outgrown. A relationship that's already changed but hasn't been named. A version of yourself that's still hanging around, taking up space. A belief you stopped believing months ago but haven't gotten around to burying.

Endings are everywhere. We're just avoiding meeting them. We treat them as failures instead of thresholds. We rush past them, or pretend they aren't happening, or quietly grieve them alone in the middle of a Tuesday. We almost never give them the attention they're actually asking for.

That cost is an opportunity. Unfinished endings have a way of crowding out whatever wants to come next. You can't make room for a new thing while you're still secretly hosting the old one.

That’s the premise of A Little Death, a new elective at Critical Business School, hosted by The voice notes above are from an exchange Danya and I had while building this.

Over four Thursdays in May, we'll move through pleasure, avoidance, ritual, and action. We'll tell stories. We'll make things. We'll sit with what's unfinished.

What if an ending were a climax rather than a collapse?

Why don't we prepare for the end — personally, institutionally, at all?

What's dying in or around you right now, and what might that be making room for?

Some of it will be uncomfortable. A lot of it will feel surprisingly alive. You won't be doing it alone, which turns out to matter more than you'd think.

Electives seek movement. You won't leave fixed. You'll leave a little more open — and a little more ready for whatever's been waiting on the other side of the thing you haven't let go of yet.

Four sessions. May 1, 8, 15, 22. 1 pm ET. 60 minutes. On Zoom. $200 for the whole arc.

If something in you just nodded, that's the part to listen to.

Sign up: https://luma.com/a-little-death

You can listen to Danya and Alma in conversation on episode 7 of the podcast.

There is a particular kind of overwhelm that doesn’t feel like being stuck. It feels like the opposite. You’re flooded with energy, with ideas, with urgency. You want to move, you feel like you should move, and everything around you seems to be asking you to. The pressure builds. So you move.

And then you move again. And then again.

And somehow, thr…

Read more

A note before we begin. Next week's post opens Part II of this series—the transition from ideas to practice. It begins with the first of three movements: discovery, the art of paying attention to what is already present in your work but unacknowledged.

Paid subscribers will receive the full chapter – subscribe here.

Aesthetics is what does not fit in your job description.

That is the whole argument. But let me unfold it, because this simple idea has consequences that reach into how we think about creativity, identity, and professional life.

Subject and Object

Consider two dimensions. The first is the subject: the person—designer, accountant, gardener, teacher, engineer, nurse. The question is whether they can use whatever does not fit their professional role. That is the measure of their creativity. Not their skill within the role, but their capacity to exceed it.

The second is the object: the things they make. Do those things carry a quality that exceeds their function? Do they have aesthetics? A report that is not just clear but beautiful. A garden that is not just productive but strange. A lesson that is not just effective but memorable in a way that has nothing to do with the curriculum.

Your job description is your “cutout” in the world: the shape the market gives you, the professional archetype you occupy. Periodically, you peek out behind it. Aesthetics is the pun a barista writes on a coffee cup. It is the quirky hat a professor wears on the first day of fall. It is the hand-drawn diagram that the engineer leaves on the whiteboard. It is the human leaking through the professional.

These moments are not trivial. They are the visible evidence of a person’s creative surplus finding its way into the world. They are the places where someone is more than their role, and where their work is more than its function.

Ambiguity as Aesthetic

When we confuse people, something interesting happens. We ask them to restructure their values and ways of being in the world. We force them to reach for a new frame, a new category, a new way of understanding what they are encountering. This is uncomfortable. It is also one of the most powerful things a creative person can do.

Confusion–or more precisely, constructive miscommunication–is a prompt for creativity. Not the confusion of incompetence, but the confusion of encountering something that does not fit. The more we can place ourselves in a safe and generous space of misunderstanding, the more we discover what we actually believe. Constructive miscommunications ask you to understand your own values by forcing you to articulate them in response to something unexpected.

This interest in exploration can become a habit: a cycle of questioning, articulation, and integration. The act of writing and rewriting is creativity. Total clarity is production, and production is never creative. Creativity always carries some ambiguity – some residue of the unknown that survives the articulation.

I am not arguing for obscurity. Obscurity is a failure of communication. I am arguing for high-context confusion—the kind that creates space for the other person to bring their own meaning, interpretation, and surplus to the encounter. When both people in a conversation are working at the edge of what they know how to say, something new can emerge that neither of them brought into the room.

That something is thirdness. We will return to it in Week 9.

Read more

PSA: There is a new place for this community to connect

Read more