[1]Tom MacWright 2025@macwright.com [2]Tom MacWright • [3]Writing • [4]Reading • [5]Photos • [6]Projects • [7]Drawings • [8]Micro⇠ • [9]About What if people don't want to create things 2025-10-21 Almost my whole career distills down to ‘making creative tools’ of one sort or another: [10]visualizations, [11]maps, [12]code, [13]hardware. I try to live a creative life too - between music, photos, drawing, writing, and [14]sewing I have some output. Never enough, but it’s something. When I look back on [15]TileMill in 2010, [16]Mapbox Studio, Observable, the whole arc: I can’t help but worry about the supply of creativity in society. In particular: If we give everyone the tools to build their dreams, very few people will use them. That’s it. Only tools that are both free, easy to learn, and ideally profitable really take off and become commonplace: TikTok has a lot of ‘creators’ because the learning curve is shallow and making videos is socially and economically beneficial. But few people want to make maps. Few people even think about the fact that anyone makes maps. The same goes for so much in society: the tools for making [17]fonts are free and learnable, but to use them you need time and effort. Beautiful data visualizations are free to make, with lots of resources and opportunities, but the supply of people who really love and know [18]D3 is a lot lower than I expected it would be. I worry about this when it comes to software, too. I love [19]home cooked apps and [20]malleable software but I have a gnawing feeling that I’m in a bubble when I think about them. Most people’s lives are split into the things that they affect & create, and the things that already exist and they want to tune out and automate, and our lives might be tilting more toward the latter than ever before. It’s so possible to live without understanding much of the built environment or learning to build anything. It’s not a personal issue: surely this comes downstream from a lack of free time, a cutthroat economic system, and companies that intentionally lock down their products - operating systems that only run approved software, coffee machines that only accept [21]proprietary coffee pods. But some of it is a personal inclination: the hesitance to share one’s art or writing or to tinker. It’s a shift of values from what you can make to [22]what you can own. It’s a bigger cultural thing that I could ever wrap my head around, but I do think about it a lot. References: [1] https://macwright.com/ [2] https://macwright.com/ [3] https://macwright.com/writing [4] https://macwright.com/reading/ [5] https://macwright.com/photos/ [6] https://macwright.com/projects/ [7] https://macwright.com/drawings/ [8] https://macwright.com/micro/ [9] https://macwright.com/about/ [10] https://observablehq.com/ [11] https://www.mapbox.com/ [12] http://val.town/ [13] https://config.com/ [14] https://macwright.com/2025/09/27/porteur-bag-2 [15] https://tilemill-project.github.io/tilemill/ [16] https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-studio [17] https://fontforge.org/en-US/ [18] https://d3js.org/ [19] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ [20] https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/ [21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keurig [22] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/oct/21/why-the-manosphere-clicked-for-young-men-a-visual-deep-dive