Make Something Wonderful
And you need a human to do that.
On February 24, an email from the Steve Jobs Archive dropped into my inbox. The date’s significance is that February 24 is Job’s birthday, and this year would have been his 70th—he died on October 5, 2011. To mark the occasion, the archive took the opportunity to explain the origin of Make Something Wonderful, the title of a book filled with Jobs’ writing and speeches, and featured a short clip of Jobs at an Apple employee event in 2007 during which he said the following:
“People express their deep appreciation for their species in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful, and put it out there. And you never meet the people, you never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours, but somehow in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something's transmitted.”
A week before this email, Made by Humans for Humans Substack celebrated its own milestone: It’s been one year since I dropped the first “Is this thing on” post to launch this Substack. Seeing the clip of Jobs talking about making something wonderful reminded me again of why I’d launched MBH4H without any clear idea of what it was or was going to be: I just wanted to put something out there and see what happened. At first, nothing happened. And then something did: Three months after my first note, Ross Miller came on board as editor / sometimes columnist, and we began to write.
My first essay was about Apple’s now infamous “Crush” ad and how I’d utterly failed to grasp (at first) why so many creatives were upset about it. Back in May of 2024, I was fascinated with how AI would potentially change the creative industry and what that would mean for someone like me. Frankly, I remember being rather excited about it. Despite my misgivings about the various AI company’s cavalier attitude to using original (and copyrighted) creative work for training data without any payment or acknowledgment to the creatives whose work the AI companies were using (stealing), I thought the obvious benefits would eventually outweigh the negative to the betterment of everyone. Boy, did I get that wrong.
AI has become a backing band, in some ways, like a very good session musician who consistently delivers a skilled, technical performance when provided with good, original material—a great tool and a mediocre robot. Outside of genuinely terrifying AI-powered military drones, if AI still has the potential to harm humanity writ large, I suspect it’s by boring us all to death rather than unleashing a killer robot army to murder us in our beds.
If I sound cynical about AI, it’s because I am. I have gone from being deeply curious and mildly excited, if a little concerned, to AI being meh. I am no longer paying attention to it any more than I do to the latest trends in accountancy. I appreciate the benefits and value of using these tools—I am currently using ChatGPT as an eager-to-please research assistant, and I love my (non-generative) AI-powered smart tools in Photoshop—but I have completely given up on AI image generators like Midjourney, to say nothing of video. I have never once used Genmoji, and as soon as Apple Intelligence appeared in an iOS update, I immediately drilled down into the settings and turned it off. [Editor’s note: I keep trying to make Genmoji happen, but I also have to admit I prefer the constraints of the actual emoji library. —Ross]
Yet, I deeply appreciate this AI revolution because writing about it, even just being surrounded by it, I have rediscovered a deep appreciation and admiration for human creativity in all of its forms, from the sublime to the deeply weird. And I want to learn more about those forms of human creativity and write them more than I do about the latest LLMs or corporate structure of OpenAI. I literally couldn’t have less fucks to give.
Ross and I have been discussing this clear inflection point for MBH4H and have defined a rubric for what we're going to write (and hopefully soon talk about; yes, a podcast) in the coming months:
An old thing in a new context (Reading Neuromancer in 2025, Vinylfication)
A new thing in an old context (The Legend of Zelda and ambient perspective)
Any creative thing entirely out of context (watching Oppenheimer on a plane)
In addition to this rubric, we will change how often we publish. Up to now, we've been consistently publishing on a Thursday (you'll have noticed that today is Friday), but we're going to move to an as-and-when publishing cadence, at least for now. This is mainly because both Ross and I have other paying creative work to look after—I am working with a non-profit news organization and zero-emission hydrofoil company (it's a long story); Ross is doing design consulting under various NDAs as well as building up a media training business—but more because we love the creative outlet MBH4H has become. We want to continue to nurture and develop it. And frankly we need a little more time to do so. MBH4H is very important to both of us, and neither of us wants to fuck it up.
Modesty and a modicum of common sense prevent me from saying that with MBH4H, Ross and I have made something wonderful. But we've certainly made something fulfilling. We have published over 55 essays and created a lot of artwork. We want to do more, but we may need more time to do it. We're immensely proud of this small micro-media brand that has given us a fun sandbox to play in and helped us grow as writers and editors, find our voice, and take on human creativity. We're going to do more because we want to and because we have to; we need this.
In the words of Steve Jobs, here's to the crazy ones.