Recreating the Renaissance Through Digital Time-Out
A little forced introspection never hurt anyone, right?
This is in response to Elle Griffin’s writing prompt on her Substack Publication, The Elysian. In this writing challenge, she asks her readers ”How can we fund the next Renaissance? How can we create a world where artists are better funded and thus create more art?”
The digital economy has lowered the barrier to the production of art to an astounding degree. Any passionate artist anywhere in the world can create, edit, and share their art with a global audience all from the comfort of their own. It has truly never been easier to get your stuff out there, regardless of your niche.
The same digital economy has also lowered a separate, equally important barrier: the barrier to consumption. As easy as it is now to put out a divinely-inspired invocation of the Muse for the world to see, it is just as easy to get sucked into the endless rabbit hole of Twitter arguments, cat videos, and Instagram thirst traps that are now available at the simple touch of a button. This hurts the creation of art to the same degree that the lowered barrier to production helps it.
Creating art requires discipline, introspection, prolonged periods of focus, and boredom; the lowered barrier to consumption all but removes these things from the lives of people who don’t seek them out. Many people around the world begin consuming the second they wake up in the morning and keep the fire-hose of stimulation going until their brain shuts down for the night midway through their Tik-Tok doomscrolling extravaganza.
Creating the next Renaissance would require building up this barrier to consumption just enough to give prospective artists the space to sit back with their thoughts and get some creative juices flowing.
How would we do this, you ask? Simple! A draconian policy of digital authoritarianism that locks people out of all social media and entertainment devices until they submit three pages of uninterrupted longhand writing in the morning. Picture a North Korea-esque regime where the glorious leader is not Kim Jong Un but, in fact, Julia Cameron.
If you aren’t familiar with the concept of Morning Pages as presented in the book The Artists’ Way, here’s a quick run-down; first thing in the morning you get out a notebook and you write down three pages of whatever you want. The only rule is that the pen can’t stop moving. This uninterrupted stream-of-consciousness writing is great for any artistic pursuit; it allows the artist to uncover both terrible ideas and great ideas and gives them time to just sit and witness their thoughts flow out onto the paper. I have recently implemented the practice in my own life and have found a myriad of benefits; it’s like the lovechild between brainstorming and meditation, allowing the generation of ideas in a judgment-free zone while also allowing you to clearly observe the contents of your own mind.
How would this policy of Mandatory Morning Pages pan out in practice? A very impractical, ideal implementation (in my view) would be something like this:
Every device in the world has a software blocker that locks the user out of entertainment and social media websites and applications
The user uploads a scan of their three pages to a central database where an AI algorithm verifies that the user actually wrote the pages (and isn’t uploading some blank pieces of paper)
Once it has verified that the user completed the pages, the software unblocks the user’s social media and entertainment for the day. It then deletes the morning pages from the database to avoid them being accessed by any unwelcome entities.
At 11 PM or so, the blocker resets and everybody has to do the same thing the next morning.
Would this policy be so easily implementable in reality? Definitely not, and a slew of ethical and privacy concerns would certainly arise from it… but in this fantasyland, things operate just as I would like them to. The only difference from current life would be a bit of mandatory creation before your consumption. Essentially, you can’t eat your cake until you down those Brussels sprouts.
Instituting this practice into everybody’s life would be greatly beneficial to the output of beautiful art in the world. Not only would current artists gain the benefit of improved production from this, but it could also uncover artistic potential in those who wouldn’t have discovered it otherwise because they never gave themselves the space to try. And in the inevitable cases where it doesn’t uncover some deeply buried artistic passion, at the very least it’ll force people to sit with their own thoughts for a little bit before getting sucked into the digital matrix we all live in today.
Ha! You might be able to force everyone to write, but can you force everyone to read? 😆