Table of Contents
So recently I've been dipping my toes in creative communities in Melbourne and from New York City. I used to work remotely for a startup based in NYC, and then recently I attended the Verci Austria retreat hosted by Verci, a creative community of over 300 people based in New York City. Melbourne may be my home city, but I think my soul belongs across the Pacific.
I studied game design for a bit in Melbourne, and from that stemmed interactions with the local game dev scene here. Attending local IGDA meetups and demoing games for a Danish company that I worked at, participating in local Global Game Jams, and attending one of the general meetings for Sabby – a creative game coworking space in Melbourne.
I like that the game dev scene generally has a lot of multidisciplinary people. This has always been a big value of mine, alongside unschooling. In high school, we study seven subjects or so – maths, English, history/humanities, sciences (biology, chemistry, physics), as well as electives such as arts, music, design, cooking, woodwork, textiles, drama, languages and more. But suddenly when it comes to college or university, we're all just suddenly expected to pick one and forget the rest. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to keep doing seven subjects at once.
So what did I do? I decided that university wasn't really for me. I decided to go with unschooling: the philosophy that the student decides what & how they'd like to learn. Unschooling was first proposed by John Holt, a teacher who grew more and more disillusioned by the schooling system and what it does to the curiosity of children and their natural love of learning.
Young people should have the right to control and direct their own learning; that is, to decide what they want to learn, and when, where, how, how much, how fast, and with what help they want to learn it. To be still more specific, I want them to have the right to decide if, when, how much, and by whom they want to be taught and the right to decide whether they want to learn in a school and if so which one and for how much of the time.
In this essay, Holt went on to say:
No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than this. A person's freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.
We might call this the right of curiosity, the right to ask whatever questions are most important to us. As adults, we assume that we have the right to decide what does or does not interest us, what we will look into and what we will leave alone. We take this right for granted, cannot imagine that it might be taken away from us. Indeed, as far as I know, it has never been written into any body of law. Even the writers of our Constitution did not mention it. They thought it was enough to guarantee citizens the freedom of speech and the freedom to spread their ideas as widely as they wished and could. It did not occur to them that even the most tyrannical government would try to control people's minds, what they thought and knew. That idea was to come later, under the benevolent guise of compulsory universal education.
People often say to me that I'm very motivated. But in fact, the central idea that John Holt articulates above — being in charge of how I want to learn — is a huge factor in why I am so motivated, as Idzie Demerais articulates here:
"Well, it obviously works for you, but you're motivated, so you're the exception. Most people need to be forced to learn!"
Now, as much as this could be considered flattering to me in an individual sense ("you're really smart so it worked for you!"), this idea drives me absolutely crazy. Because here's the thing: unschooling does not work for motivated people. Unschooling creates people who are motivated! The act of placing the power over learning and life into the individual's hands is both empowering and motivating. What this motivation people see in unschoolers really is, is simply a joy in learning and discovery that is found far more rarely among those who are schooled.
I also agree with this famous quote:
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
Unfortunately, it seems that school and a lot of other educational institutions serve to dampen this flame rather than nurture it.
So when I find people who also thrive working across many disciplines at once, drawing amazing unique insights from across different fields and coming up with new perspectives from all of that, I really love it. That’s why I love Verci — a community of multi-disciplinary creatives — and why I would love being around multidisciplinary game developers here in Melb.
Anyway, so I’m also a bit conflicted between worlds.
In New York City, everyone seems to be about: how to get rich, fast. Raise money for your idea, turn it into a startup, then trade away your ownership as soon as possible for as much money as possible. That’s what my hyper-creative peers are doing in New York. While in Melbourne, Sabby is about being a non-profit co-op, fully owned by its members, as are some other game studios here, to the point where they spend hours during general meetings over-deliberating on the tiniest of details. That’s what my hyper-creative peers are doing in Melbourne.
The creatives within the tech startup industries of America are all about releasing as soon as possible, very minimalist UIs — and if you’re not embarrassed by it, you haven’t released it soon enough. “Move fast and break things,” goes the ethos. Meanwhile, the game dev space takes 3 years to develop a game before it’s ready for public consumption.
My hyper-creative peers in the States are AImaxxing and trying to insert as much use of genAI into everything possible, even when a simple algorithm would do the job much faster. While my hyper-creative peers Down Under are vehemently opposed to the mere mention of genAI.
in Melbourne, it's also interesting that the LGBTQ+ community has embedded itself in the creative & tech startup community with a strong focus on the trans philosophy. the men are not masculine – they dislike athleticism and many have transitioned to become trans women and embraced femininity with dresses and bold makeup. and likewise, the few women who are in these spaces have become more like tomboys, eschewing traditional feminine activities and instead go for crop-cut hairstyles. Meanwhile, the men in the US tech startup industry are very macho & masculine, hitting the gym and toning up their masculine bodies. And the women over there in the US tech industries are freely feminine – traditionally into makeup, dresses and the like.
It’s a bit weird, isn’t it, being told such strong and conflicting philosophies from both directions.
You can almost see how this trend plays out on a national scale. America may have a much higher percentage of talented and rich individuals, but also correspondingly a much higher percentage of people without: a higher ratio of poverty and lack of access to basic healthcare.
Me: I would never use AI to replace my writing or to write sentences for me. I love writing way too much to do that. But i postponed writing this piece for a while for example, because i couldn’t be bothered figuring out which of my 10 blogs this should go on. So I tried asking Dia browser to decide that for me — an unimportant decision that I couldn’t really be bothered thinking about. After that was done, I could totally focus on the writing. so I think that’s about the only good use I’ve found for AI so far — making unimportant decisions so unimportant that you can’t be bothered thinking about them. I find it weird when I see people use AI to compose boilerplate email responses. For me, it takes about 15 seconds to come up and write such a response. Meanwhile I watch people spend 30 seconds drafting up a prompt for AI to understand the context of the email and what they want to say, 10 seconds waiting for the AI to load, 10 seconds reading the response that AI wrote and then 10 seconds copying and pasting it over and tweaking to make sure that the formatting all fits and giving it another read over, lol.
I don’t really fit in either of the extremes, it seems. I think as you get older, one of the good things is that you get better at recognising what you want to take onboard vs what you don’t.
Comments