When You Destroy the Tools of Creativity

Kyla Scanlon is, in her own words, an educator, creator and author, and in my words she is one of the most interesting fresh voices in finance today. Please take a look at kyla’s Newsletter on Substack, because it’s really good, and @kylascan is an instafollow on Twitter (or whatever you want to call that platform). You can contact Kyla directly via email at [email protected].

As with all of our guest contributors, Kyla’s post may not represent the views of Epsilon Theory or Second Foundation Partners, and should not be construed as advice to purchase or sell any security.

Oh, Apple

Apple released an ad to highlight their new iPad Pro with the M4 chip. That’s fine. Great, even. New technology is phenomenal! But what Apple also did in this ad was use a hydraulic press to crush musical instruments. It was meant to show how skinny-coded their new iPad is, but if anything, it just felt sad. Like oh gosh, they just crushed creativity? Culture? Of course, if their goal was to get people talking, they achieved that.

It was an accidental metaphor^[1] that hit a little bit too close to home (as Leiris wrote, it’s hard to know where metaphor begins and where it ends). A absolute smushing of things that people love to make another little screen that we stare into. People are comparing it to Apple’s 1984 advert, where the opposite happened – a hammer breaks a TV, turning the world into color, in this ad, the color is stamped out by industrial machinery. Ben Mullin:

In “1984,” a dissident throws a hammer through a TV screen, symbolizing humanity’s power to conquer technology. In this ad, a hydraulic press crushes beloved cultural artifacts, symbolizing technology’s power to conquer humanity.

Oh, Apple. We are in an age of tremendous uncertainty. Trust has evaporated, something I wrote about in my last newsletter. But agency, the individual expression of trust, has declined too – and it’s because of things like this accidentally completely horrific Apple ad. 

Agency as a Function of Trust

There are all sorts of studies talking about how people don’t trust anything anymore. We don’t trust the government, the media, Wall Street, the President, the military, or each other. And of course, one could point a finger to bipartisanship and polarization, city design and car culture, rage bait and algorithmic incentives as reasons for the decline in trust.

But trust is very big. It happens on a large scale, a somewhat liquid expression of the confidence that people have in institutions, systems, other people. Trust is everything – it’s the foundation for public health, voter turnout, policy preferences, etc. But because we’ve evolved into this strange low-trust high-stakes no-action society, we’ve lost an element of agency, or the individual expression of trust.  

Agency is sort of an ephemeral term, one that could fit perhaps uncomfortably well in a conversation at Burning Man. It wades a little bit into the free will debate and determinism and the idea that maybe everything is random anyway and we just fit our internal models to the world around us. But for these purposes, agency, or how people feel about their ability to make decisions, is an expression of trust in the world around them.

And to be fair, we seem to have an element of agency. There are studies showing that people feel fine about their personal financial situation but completely terrible about the national financial situation and showing that people love their congressman but hate Congress (Fenno’s paradox). A perfect petri dish of individual expectations and national outcomes.

And we’ve seen an interesting amount of what seems to be the expression of agency with the rise of things like ‘quiet quitting’ or ‘the Great Resignation’ (which to be fair, could be more an expression of economic strength than individual freedom).

Types of Agency

But there are two types of agency^[2] – an external locus of control and an internal locus of control – life happens to me (external) versus I happen to life (internal). We clearly have both. For example, people are likely to attribute wage increases to themselves (internal) but price inflation to policy (external) as Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard has documented.

But, at large, we increasingly have an external locus of control that absolves us of responsibility in decision-making around our life. 

• In her book iGen, Jean Twenge documents the shift of the youth over the past 60ish years to a more external locus of control.
• In her 2004 paper, she talks about the alienation model, how the rise of individualistic values increase egoist tendencies, or blaming bad stuff on other people and crediting good things to yourself.
• There are all sorts of negative consequences to this, like higher rates of depression and anxiety.

Everyone wants a God, and because of that, everyone needs a devil. The devil has come in the form of skepticism, the form of distrust, the immediate outrage at anything not immediately familiar. And God is nowhere to be found. 

There are the very clear visible culprits to an external locus of control, like structural affordability problems and actual institutional failure, but there are also deep undercurrents of a lack of agency. My theory is that in order to even begin thinking about rebuilding trust, we have to start by rebuilding agency.  In order to rebuild it, we have to figure out how it happened.