The Process is the Product
Anyone who wants to be creative will find themselves dreading the blank page. A literal blank page when you are a writer. Or an empty timeline as an editor or a blank project on your audio software. It can take many shapes, that black hole of uncertainty that comes before making something. A part of us wants to create yet longs for structure. A predetermined process that can help us feel less overwhelmed with our projects. Templates.
But structure can be a trap.
The Industrial Era was an era of big processes and big structures that allowed for gigantic levels of consistent production output. These structures required large amounts of capital to be set up, and because of that, they were only possible to set up for big businesses and governments. The size of these structures and the requirements of their processes could feel dehumanising for the people who participate in them: they were just cogs in a machine, very deliberately so, and in plenty of situations, this is still how things work.
For a very long time, that was the only avenue to participate in the economy, given how risky going on your own was.
This was true for cultural work as well: in order to reach a wide audience, authors had to rely on big publishing houses. Filmmaking, in its inception, was a process made with big, expensive machines and expensive processes. To record music, one could not do without a large music studio equipped with large mixers and recording devices.
On top of that, distribution and publicity were, across industries, controlled by a very closed-off system of advertisers and publishers that had impossible barriers of entry for most people.
But that has changed radically.
What we are living in right now is a radical transition away from that time, even if it’s happening so quickly that many are not realising this. Thanks to new technologies and much better ways to instantly communicate across large distances, smaller groups can organise powerful structures and design new kinds of processes that allow for models tailored to the needs of those who create and use them.
Writing has been democratised for a long time. Now anyone has had the tools to craft any kind of publishing product for decades now from the comfort of their home. Some of the biggest musical acts in the world produce their albums from their bedroom, from start to finish. Filmmaking is still a big, complex commitment, but the industrial nature of it is not even remotely as necessary as it used to be.
And distribution, thanks to the web, has been completely revolutionised. Anybody can build a website with little money, set up a Patreon account to collect funding from fans, distribute regular updates on free social media platforms with massive potential audiences, and keep in touch with their closest fans with free newsletters.
These tools give way to new processes. In the above from Adam Conover’s YouTube channel with video essay phenom Natalie Wynn, when talking about the kind of editorial work Wynn does, they underline how her videos are a product of her work and interests, but also of the kind of toolset that YouTube offers her and the ways that she has found to adapt to it in a way that allows her to find an effective and inspiring workflow.
The Product is the Process, as they say, wisely.
What Winn and Conover talk about in their video is true for video making, but it’s also true for other enterprises. Music making today is an enterprise that can be completely run by the artists themselves; it’s hard work, and the major labels still have a leg up in promotion, but to be a working musician and exist as a completely independent entity is very much possible. Craftspeople, fashion designers and tailors can also produce and advertise the entire collection independently, and sell them online, and they do. The possibilities are massive.
This video from Rick Beato is quite good for understanding just the size of this new cultural industry, and this is just focusing on YouTube, a massive platform, but not the only platform: the amount of people who are engaging with independently created culture has never been higher.
The playground is wide open, and confusing.
The Friction against the processes (multi-player)
So even if going on your own has never been easier, that does not make it easy. Some issues:
The beauty of using current tools to find your unique way to work takes a great amount of iteration. It takes self-awareness, testing what works and what doesn’t. This can take years.
This is tricky, yet beautiful. Tricky because we spend our formative years learning in institutions that, in the great majority of cases, just don’t even try to give us the kind of tools that are required to figure out our workflow. Schools teach us to complete tasks and follow guidelines, rules and orders, but unless you’re lucky enough to have spent time in a Montessori school or a similar structure, you might have been actively discouraged from finding your path, your process. It takes quite a lot of strength and determination to embark on a path this unclear and open ended.
But it is beautiful because there is a sense of satisfaction that comes from finding what works best for you, in designing your way. You get to know yourself a lot better, in some ways, it’s almost a form of therapy. It makes you engage with the world around you more deeply: you can’t build your process unless you stop taking for granted the way things work. And it can lead to insights that make your personal life way better.
Most countries allow for freelance work, but not all of them make it cheap. This is not new, but given that new media work has little history, it can be hard to monetise in a way that is compatible with more strict tax systems.
This is sort of inevitable, and it requires careful planning and understanding of how the tax system in your country works to make sure that you find the right level of income to live a decent life. This is work in itself, unpaid. But often, all you need to do is to work on this once.
Unless you work completely by yourself, you will have to get people to collaborate with a system that they have no familiarity with. This means that you will have to be as good at explaining your process as you are at using it.
This can be an opportunity of sorts: figuring out how to coordinate your work with others is a fantastic way to learn just how good your systems are. By explaining what you do, you will have a better sense of it, and be able to see cracks in the process and make it better.
The tricky part is that, as it happens, some people will just ask you - why don’t you just do what you do more traditionally? A way that others understand, one that has already a solid track record? Sometimes, they might have a point. Other times, they might not yet have understood what you’re going for, and if you’re not confident about it, it will be easy to just let go of your vision. That is what every creative deals with: writers, artists, filmmakers, and photographers… this extends the creative process to planning and organising, and it requires the same amount of stubbornness and determination.
The key to this is to embrace the differences in your styleì If the process is the product, it’s key to remember that who creates the process defines the shape of it.
Questlove and his record collection.
Exception as a rule
Why is it that when reading the news, it seems like the world is stuck, if we indeed have just so many options and possibilities? Why there is such little sense of possibility in news media, even the ones who are more forward-looking, and focused on finding solutions to problems that threaten our future?
A lot of it is simply because it’s very hard to narrate what is happening without using the language of how things have happened. Most of us read the present by using the parameters of the past. But this is just not doable anymore: things are too fast. Life is too fast. The gap between creating and understanding and coordinating is just too small for the news media to act as a tool to understand the world using tools of the past.
Reality is an emergent phenomenon that is constantly evolving; it’s too hard to tell its story because it’s a lot of stories converging together. Understanding this means building bridges between disparate realities; it means first of all focusing on finding a shared language to allow that bridge-building.
But there is no financial incentive to this: large media platforms are funded by large financial entities, they are just not interested in investigating models that don’t play the same game. Not necessarily because they see them as a threat to their models, but because they are never creating enough revenue to make it interesting for them.
But, most of all, there is also a tendency to not point to exceptions as a path to follow.
Patagonia is a wildly successful company that is built around respecting its mission as a responsible actor in the environment, not to any shareholder. Valve is one of the most successful video game companies in the world and one that has avoided scandals and shake-ups in large part because they never decided to be publicly traded.
But they are exceptions, and one of the most noxious concepts that has permeated culture is that *the exception proves the rule*, which is a lot of bull. As Amhir “Questlove” Thompson wonderfully put it,
Exceptions don't prove the rule. They shame it. They banish it.
To dismiss exceptions is like being inside a dark tunnel, seeing a light, and dismissing that as a useless anomaly. In a world that's changing a lot, all the time, the ability to find new processes to adapt to new technologies, as a way to use them better and more crucially to *understand* them better is fundamental to having the ability to make a dent in, or living becomes just a passive deal.
Schools don’t teach that. At least this has been my experience in Italian schools: they focused on giving you information but they seldom thought it was worth it to make you think of how to digest the way this information worked as a system. It’s curious that once you start to think in that way, you realise that the school system is, to be polite, a mess of catastrophic proportions, which is ironic from a country that gave birth to Maria Montessori, an educator who understood the importance of letting children learn how to solve problems on their terms.
That said, there is an appealing quality to being a part of a system, following templates, and letting go of having responsibilities over every possible aspect of your life. The good thing is, that is how most people live most of the time; even as a freelancer, you alternate periods of learning and experimenting with using routines and templates for many parts of your day-to-day life. Not doing that is basically impossible.
Agnès Varda
From Varda to Dogma to Chris Marker - when a style and approach to making shapes the product enough to blur the line between the two completely.
Many people have built their own processes and thrived doing so. Few have done it better than Agnès Varda, who, in my book is one of the most successful filmmakers of all time. And that even if very few of her movies have been commercial successes.
But she has worked for over sixty years, she has kept ownership of her work, and she has had complete control over the way that she approached her filmmaking. She has explored fiction, documentaries, film essays, and combinations of all of these forms. She embraced digital as more than just a replacement for film, but as a completely new medium, when she was in her sixties. Exploring her filmography is an education in not taking anything for granted: each one of her movies is clearly hers, but they are radically different from one another. She was redefining her process almost every time she embarked on a new project, and that made them all excitingly unique.
She is considered the grandmother of the French New Wave and that movement has very often embraced the idea of adopting new processes as a way to evolve cinematic language. But what is even more interesting is the way that she has taken charge of her own career: she owned the prints of her own films and restored them to pristine condition later in her life. She chronicled her career recording introductions for every movie she has crafted. In her twilight years, she directed a documentary that is a mix between a career retrospective and a film school. The Criterion box set for her entire filmography is incredible thanks to the curators who assembled it, but it has also been possible because Varda has made a point to be relentlessly intentional about each step in her career, and what each one meant.
The examples of artists who embraced the challenge of taking charge of their craft to similar levels are not rare, luckily. Fellow French New Wave staple Chris Marker has decided to avoid the spotlight almost completely, but he often built movies around structures that had never quite been attempted before or since, as we can see in La Jetée or Sans Soleil. Jean Luc Godard has walked across the lines of filmmaking, criticism and performance art for his whole life. The Dogma movement in the ‘90s took digital cameras and created an artistic game around its limitations. Kevin Smith has turned his life into movies and movies into life and life into podcasts and podcasts into movies and still does that now. Questlove, mentioned before, has shown how powerful it is to embrace your role as both an artist and curator of art, something that Martin Scorsese has also done for his entire life.
The key to studying these careers is that you can’t imitate anything these people have produced without being nothing but a pale copy. The only things that make any sense to take inspiration from are their attitude, spirit, and defiance. The way you turn into something completely yours is how you find a voice; and how you might end up inspiring someone else who follows.
