The Cost of Convenience: We have fallen out of love with the process

Social media and capitalist demand have destroyed the beauty of the process; personal style and development, and by decentering the pressure of output you may become a better artist or person.

In the last ten years, we have seen an immense breakdown of the traditional barriers guarding the creation of and engagement in different art forms. From music to fashion, visual art, ornamental art and literature; technology has opened up and democratised these mediums offering people beyond the elite access to the tools to “create”.

The beguiling charm of technological advancement is that it silently erodes the pillars of human processes before we realise and thus the bitter-sweet gift of convenience has undermined the fundamental tenets of creative processes and personal development. The most important, being time.

The speed of which things can now be created has reconfigured our focus from the process to instead consistent output, the expectation to always have something to show for oneself has restrained art and made the idea of being a “creative” something one reflexes to cringe at. There is no time to be original, as it would take years dedicated to learning, assimilating to a philosophy and eventually diverging from your previous paradigm in order to carve out your own. There is no time to study an art form, to submerge yourself in an archive; the search engine has eroded our skills at scavenging for information, through discographies, galleries, or libraries. Thus the part of the journey usually dedicated to development, intentional consumption and tangible engagement has been erased to make space and time for more aimless output.

The final quarter of this year saw significant criticism of how the online village-ism of social media has killed the individual experience and in turn personal style. TikTok commentators gathered their pitchforks against women buying charms to emulate a stylishly dishevelled aesthetic for their brand-new bags, without dedicating the one thing that could authentically achieve that; time and age.

The online artist

Social media has offered us access to a global audience and removed many of the glass ceilings our immediate environment limited us to. However, the strings attached to the deal were that we would be henceforth forced to curate and mold our output to be conducive to algorithms, attention spans, and repostability. No new artist can succeed without a social media account and that is heartbreaking.

The incurring consequence of this has been the significant disintegration of the“process” in artistic practice, once a prerequisite to all of these mediums. It's the hours learning to cut and sew to make a garment before ever pursuing to build a brand, or the time learning to play the piano to truly understand the sonic foundation of music production, before ever touching a mic or releasing an EP. Laid bare, the contours of this perspective may reveal an elitist underscore, because time is a luxury; the messy undefined ‘20s’ is no longer a common phenomenon as we are expected to be established by the time we are 26. However, with the acknowledged context of capitalist pressure, the argument holds significant value.

Our attempts to “make moves in silence” tend to in fact make a clumsy racket due to our discomfort with not being seen or heard. Like the register in the school morning, we feel compelled to validate and confirm our existence by staying visible in the human eye, because if you can't be seen, are you really living?

The emergence of “creative” self-proclamation that seems to grind so many people’s gears is something I would also diagnose as a by-product of these concerns. Defining yourself first instead of simply doing and letting your work speak for itself is, for me, a cry to be identifiable with something you haven’t yet spent the time to truly understand or even yet become.

In her 2013 HBO documentary, Beyoncé complained that “People don’t make albums anymore!” but it can be considered more of a critique on the dying art of bodies of work in general. People don’t have the time to step back and dedicate months just to world-building, to the curation of an ecosystem that their work can sit in, be experienced through and fine-tuned by; especially if they wish to keep up with the incessant output of small bite-sized pieces of content to satiate their hunger for validation and their audience’s thirst for stimulation.

In the light of honesty, there’s an element of procrastination in being chained to the process of learning and accumulation. At some point, you have to just do, jump, and grow your wings on the way down because you’ll never know enough, be prepared enough, or be ready for every challenge, but you have to start.

However, two things can be right at once and we should be encouraged to consistently return to the passenger seat, and re-immerse ourselves in the expansion of our remits. No one is a finished product and we have become accustomed to passive learning, taking in bites of info from advice TikToks just to save them and never go back. Although learning can be passive it also should be intentional, because as more and more processes become more and more linear, our brains will become a redundant mush.

Technology often takes the blame for many of these concerns, particularly for our waning brain power, globalisation is sometimes a bigger culprit. We no longer need people or companies to show our work to the world, we can bring the world to us and this shows up particularly in production. The diversification of the supply chain behind the face of sites such as Alibaba, and unnamed WhatsApp number manufacturers offers access to cheap production, but creates a distance between us and “the process”. We miss the increments of the development process, imperfection becomes intangible and thus we engage with art, as finished products at the point of consumption.

Returning to the “personal style” discourse, globalisation has also taken away from our ability to use style to identify environment and experience. Other than perhaps the weather, styles are no longer indicative of our environment, there is no longer an exclusive New York style, for example, because whether or not you've grown up in the projects, on food stamps, wearing beaten-up Timbs handed down from your older sibling and an oversized down coat, anyone, anywhere can emulate that aesthetic without the experience. Perhaps there is power in that, being connected to a world you may never see, and offering us self-expression that can transcend our four walls. So with that being said, how important is the personal, to the personal style, and is it something we even need anymore?

The dying breed of the Artisan

Craft is a lost art, but first was patience and time.

As the capitalist machine grew stronger and more centralised, our time grew more and more expensive and scarce.

When I talk about craftsmanship I’m speaking both literally and metaphorically, from the fact that we don’t use our hands anymore but more importantly our brains.

On the literal side; we now go to IKEA instead of a carpenter, most of our processes are automated instead of either doing it ourselves or seeking people out. We used to build a community/phone book of craftsmen, your dry cleaner, your tailor, carpenter and family photographer. However, these things are not only at a financial cost but a timely one and it’s all about time.

At a metaphorical level; we have no time to build intimate relationships with our crafts, molding them by hand to be tailored to our needs, our lifestyles, and our personal expression. To accredit a lack of patience as the utmost culprit would be ignorant as it is more so the necessary adaptation we've made to the speed that we are required to operate at in order to survive and keep up with the capitalist machine.

Peel the garlic

It's just like peeling garlic, tedious, it leaves your hands sticky and it's not completely necessary as you could just buy garlic paste. But it's intimate and makes the final product feel so much more like it’s yours.

Ease, speed, pressure and convenience, have all muddied the waters of artistic development. We have chosen short-term validation at the very expensive cost of long-term fulfillment.

You may have something to show for 2025 but what will you have to show for your life, a collection of intangible Instagram posts?

Build a relationship with your craft, one that is undetermined by whether or not anyone sees it, a relationship that is your own and can never be taken away from you.

So as a suggestive conclusion, that can be taken with a pinch of salt:

• If you’re a CD of a magazine (or anything in the CD/AD realm), have conversations with people, go to places and observe, engage with how people interact with life, publications are meant to reflect the zeitgeist, go into an archive and study old Arena, System, Wallpaper mag, i-D, Ebony etc

• If you’re a brand owner learn how to cut and sew, challenge why you’re making your product and what purpose it serves

• If you’re an artist manager, study old artist development trajectories (successful and unsuccessful)

• If you’re a writer, matter of fact, any artist, just live. Experience. Your work comes from you, what you see, and what you hear; refill your cup before you try to pour into anyone else's.

Essentially, take the time to study, to appreciate the process and you’ll make better art, be a better artist and also offer yourself an air of personal longevity.

Kisses, Nubia xx