Inventing on Principle
The video is of a talk in a dark room, but listen and you’ll hear conviction. Bret Victor is a crusader; his cause is giving creators an immediate connection with their work. This talk is about crusades, causes, responsibilities: urgent, vital imperatives; darker language than I’m used to. So often we talk about discrete problems as “opportunities,” injustices as “challenges”—reframings that, perhaps, makes our imperfect world feel less grim. But if everything is an opportunity or a challenge, then how do we decide which ones to face down? Better to find a cause, a principle, and invent in a direction that brings the world closer to what it should be. Let’s find preoccupations that can last our whole lives.
with thanks to Erik, who had an inkling of how much this would mean to me
