MBH4H 2024: Review of the Year
Our work in progress, progressed. It’s been emotional.
Made by Humans for Humans launched on Substack on February 18 this year. At the time, I wasn’t sure what the MBH4H brand was for exactly; mine was a “launch first, figure it out later” strategy.
After posting the “coming soon” announcement on Substack, I spent February and March batting around a few poorly formed ideas for how I could evolve MBH4H from a brand logo into a fully-fledged startup. I shared my thoughts with a kitchen cabinet of friends and former colleagues, all of whom were generally receptive in terms of direction, but none could see a path to the business making money. Unfortunately, I knew they weren’t wrong; I had suspected as much myself. So, I decided to solve the problem by simply ignoring it and focusing instead on the creative direction and brand voice.
Then, on a sunny early spring day in New York City, during a long and delightful lunch with Ross Miller—a great friend and former Verge and Polygon colleague—we decided to partner in this grand experiment that is MBH4H. Our strategy: To turn it into a micro-media company dedicated to exploring human creativity in the era of artificial intelligence.
Why AI, you may ask. Good question, I say. AI was exploding and dominating the headlines at the time. It was a perfect storm of a rapidly expanding nascent technology sucking in billions in investment capital while presenting a perceived threat to careers in the creative and media industries—both of which were already suffering a drought of revenue leading to widespread layoffs.
Against this backdrop, it seemed fitting that the first essay I published on MBH4H was focused on Apple’s misguided iPad Pro ad centered around “crushing” creative analog tools. It was my attempt to address the furor unleashed within the creative community by the ad and how I, like Apple, didn’t see how a beautifully lit, slow-motion shot of a hydraulic press crushing paint cans, arcade game consoles, and musical instruments, etc., could be taken as a metaphor of the threat posed by AI. Regardless of how real the danger of AI was, the perception was all that mattered.
Similarly, it’s hardly surprising that the next eight essays we published on MBH4H had AI in the title. Our editorial attitude toward AI was cynical at best, hostile at worst. For example, we wrote about OpenAI allegedly stealing ScarJo’s voice, a rather bland music video created using GenAI, Adobe’s tone-deaf “Skip the Photoshoot” ad campaign, and the launch of Apple’s Genmoji. The series culminated in our somewhat “sigh” realization that not one of the AI companies seemed to care that they were moving fast and taking things.
However, by mid-June, it became obvious that we’d become too focused on AI. It’s easy to be pessimistic, to always dunk on the new thing, even when that new thing may justify a good dunking. But that’s not who we are. Neither Ross nor I like snark because we’re both optimists at heart. We decided that moving forward; we would dial back MBH4H’s coverage of the AI industry per se and instead focus more on what we cared about most: Human creativity.
Human creativity comes in many forms and mediums. So we tried to cover more of them in a new twice-weekly format: I continued to write essays (with Ross handling editing duties), and we’d also collaborate on a Week in Review newsletter outlining the best of what we had watched, read, listened to, and played that week. In a word, we were going to blog. Well, sort of.
The Week in Review newsletters gave us the opportunity to diversify our coverage, but at a cost. The downside was that interesting evergreen ideas that warranted a deeper exploration became somewhat lost in the newsy blog post format. It was the worst of both worlds. After publishing our Week in Review on September 16, we decided to put this particular format on hold and rethink how we could incorporate short-form content (yes, blogging) in 2025.
2024: Act III
As we entered our third act of 2024, we made one other decision that we both felt we should implement immediately: Pivoting from exploring human creativity to actively celebrating it.
The more I wrote about artificial intelligence, the less interested I became in it. More importantly, writing about AI had (ironically) rekindled my interest in more analog forms of creativity, both writing about them and using them in my creative work. I used techniques I hadn’t practiced or even thought about for years, like shooting on film using a manual camera, writing more by hand and drawing in sketchbooks, even reading more hardback books—and buying some stupidly expensive but incredibly creative limited editions in the process.
This was not some late-in-life Luddite reaction to digital technology; it’s not a zero-sum game. And to Apple’s point, you really can use an iPad Pro to make music, paint pictures, and write words and, in some ways, that digital process is easier and faster than any analog technique. But faster and easier isn’t always better. Sometimes, maybe even often, the creative effort required is the entire point. Why? Because analog techniques are more likely to produce unintended consequences. In other words, you’re more inclined to make mistakes with a film camera or a paintbrush—and making mistakes is one of the most potent creative forces in the known universe.
That realization has been a momentous personal shift for me. I have always loved working with new technology. For the last 20 years, I’ve been a frequent and often early adopter; for example, when I worked as a photographer, I switched to digital as soon as possible to leave behind the stress of shooting on film and swore I would never use it again. Never say never, I guess.
So yes, it is ironic in the extreme that months of writing about cutting-edge technology would make me eat my words and start using a film camera again. But this wasn’t simply a reaction to my fears about AI eating the creative world; writing about AI made me come to terms with my wariness of nostalgia.
I am transparent about my age: I’ll be 62 next year. I generally don’t mind getting older (well, sort of). But I’ve never wanted to be one of those older creatives who bemoan that things aren’t as good as they were in the past and that nobody knows what a good photo, illustration, or design is these days. It’s not just because that way of thinking is demonstrably and profoundly wrong; it’s more because, for people of my age, it’s tempting to look back to what you know and harder to look forward to the unknown, especially regarding new technology.
Yet, writing about AI throughout 2024 has made me realize that occasionally looking backward is helpful, educational, and necessary. As AI becomes more ubiquitous—and as digital techniques become labor-saving—it’s helpful to remember that sometimes the difficulty is the point; making something creative can be as important as the end result. It’s an idea driven home by Hermès’ artistic director, Pierre-Alexis Dumas, in a recent interview on 60 Minutes. It’s not that the result is necessarily better using an analog or more labor-intensive technique. Yet, sometimes, it can be more rewarding when it informs the creative process for the future.
That’s what MBH4H has given me in 2024: a newfound interest, excitement, and regard for techniques I thought I’d left behind years ago. All it took was arguably one of the most consequential technological advances in decades to rekindle my love of various creative techniques that humans have used for centuries. Not because they’re better but because they still mean something; they require intent and experimentation, two very human qualities.
As we head into the final days of 2024, Ross and I feel incredibly grateful for what we have learned over this past year, the skills we have developed, and last, but by no means least, we are profoundly grateful to you, our audience. We love you all.
I am also pleased (and pleasantly surprised) that the most personal essays I wrote in the latter part of this year became some of the most read: I bought my first Sony PlayStation 1 just to be able to write about my excitement of finally owning one; I apologized to Hideo Kojima for not realizing that Death Stranding was one of the greatest video games ever made; and I finally had an opportunity to put years of art history lessons to use (Mr. Bugg would be so proud) by writing about the incredible use of atmospheric perspective, light and accurate color to upscale The Legend of Zelda in my mind.
Our journey this year has evolved from simply being observers and exploring to actively curating and celebrating both the mainstream and some of the newer and sometimes obscure creative work made by humans for humans. There is so much out there to find, and it’s clear that we’re just getting started.
And so as we head towards the last days of 2024, all that remains is to wish you Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year to you all.
We’re looking forward to 2025, the year of distraction. We’ll be back on Thursday, January 9, 2025.