when are we going to see the new renaissance

intro

We are in the age of Blobism.

Most of what you can physically possess takes on the exact same shape, one not too far away from a bar of soap. Most software is similar: blobs and sidebars with blobs inside them.

Why?

There's an obvious answer. It's safe. And safe is all that we are allowed.

I can't make a daring ad campaign tomorrow (something along the lines of late 90s to early 00s PlayStation ads). Every single person above and below, to my left and to my right is going to protest, then capture, then behead me for defying the Blob.

You want to make a car that doesn't have all the unnecessary "lines of aggression", but also doesn't look like a bar of soap? You want to make a square-ish car?! Beheaded!

You want to make an app without a sidebar? You want to make a device for what you can do on a phone or a laptop? You want to do anything remotely novel or beyond what the Blob deems to be the standard? Beheaded, beheaded, beheaded!

The Blob overlord will keep you at bay because it's safe. We don't try or dare anymore. Anyone who does gets ridiculed by those who supposedly are all for getting outside of the norm.

This essay is an emotional hit piece, inspired by a PS Vita I had when I didn't have an addiction to twitter, was still in school, and recently got back into my hands. My hope is - a renaissance will come, and it will feel like my PS Vita.

the golden ages of purpose

Renaissance workshops, mid-century cars, dedicated devices of the early 00s. Most of them had a thing in common: the feedback loop was small. A small number of patrons (if not just one) and a team composed of a visionary and the followers. One Michelangelo, 15 students. He had a vision, they were the executors. Even larger workshops, like Raphael's were no more than 50 people.

Their work was judged by their patron, it was ordered based on what they could create following loose guidelines. Taste (together with care) was the main differentiator. Students were encouraged to inherit ability and general judgement equally with taste.

The result of such work is profound. Look at pre 2010s Porsches and Jaguars, look at the Sistine Chapel, look at Braun of the early ages. Their beauty is not inherently in their design, but in the soul of their creators.

Butzi Porsche designed the first 911 (and the 904) essentially alone. And the shape survived now without much change for 60+ years. It's one of the most profound car designs existing in such a form for this long. Why? He cared. He didn't have people nagging him on to optimize. Just imagine if he was pushed to move the engine from the very back of the car... Tragic!

Malcolm Sayer was the sole creator of Jaguar E-Type's shape. He wasn't even a designer, rather, he was an aerodynamicist. The E-Type's curves were mathematically, meticulously (this is a profound example of where using this word is most appropriate), carefully derived from airflow formulas. No wonder it's "the most beautiful car ever made", according to Enzo Ferrari. Its beauty was born from Sayer's expertise, not a bunch of committees.

Dieter Rams's design team was about 10 people. And his works look modern to this day, with profound designers taking direct inspiration from them even now, in 2026. Jony Ive famously scaled this design language to become truly global and inescapable, but the inspiration was a man making clocks and record players among other stuff.

Toyota (even with how big they were) gave chief engineers dictatorial rule over their projects and teams. The "shusa" system is the best example of a giant company scaling care and operating like a small workshop (at least back then). It worked because they were trusted to wrap their taste with enough care to produce a wonderful outcome. By contrast, GM even back then was already bloated.

When we create, we leave a mark on our work. Even if it's the most benign, simple, and stupid ad campaign ever. The copy you write has a part of your soul.

Even the constraints they were within acted in their favor: they were constraints not built around safety, but around the vision. For Butzi it was the engine in the rear, for Sayer it was physics and "by-hand CAD", for Rams it was "less, but better"...

Your established corporate branding is very much secondary to the trust put into the executor. Rome needed a fresco. They had a theme they were going for. Pope Julius II didn't hand Michelangelo a mood board for the Sistine ceiling.

As an aside, of course not all teams of the past worked in this manner. Just as not all modern teams bear the sin I'm going to discuss further. Nevertheless, after looking at the issue for multiple years, I believe this to be the most thorough explanation of why products that survived (ones we are nostalgic for) are so good.

Now, towards the issues of modernity.

convergence

You come to work. It's winter, the holidays are coming up. You are in a good mood, as your friends already planned a week-long ski trip you've been waiting for so eagerly. What could possibly ruin your mood? Well...

The project you've been working for tirelessly for the last 6 months, the one you've poured your blood, sweat, tears, heart, and soul into got cancelled. The project you were told your giant department had "Complete creative freedom" over. And now, you are reassigned, your team is no more, and the result of your work is at best going to see the light of day malformed by a team closer aligned with corporate safety. At worst - it's just dead.

Thousands of lines of code, countless hours, meetings, and evening outings with the team thinking of how to make it even better by launch time. All gone. Why?

At some point, someone in the pipeline decided that your creative freedom is no longer trusted, the guy who gave it to you hadn't played corporate politics well and is no longer there for you.

This doesn't happen every time. Hell, most of the time creative freedom would probably rather be given to ChatGPT since it speaks like an HR manager or a LinkedIn influencer. "Head of strategy" approves. But, just by looking at Google's graveyard, tell me if this isn't the case. Most corporations' internal lists are likely bigger. And smaller companies don't always have the budgets to experiment.

Most buyers want to stand out, but when push comes to shove, they start asking if this is going to blend in with the industry. "Are we going to be seen as serious?"

They yearn for safety and seriousness, when neither brought them any meaningful results prior. Yet, they'd rather stay within that status quo.

Why wouldn't you then, as a freelancer making websites, just prompt Claude Opus to one-shot this boring ass project, get paid, and go spend more time with a friend. I'm sure you'd love to showcase your skill, I'm sure you'd love to pride yourself on building by hand. But, it doesn't make any monetary (nor mental health) sense.

This is what convergence looks like. Corporate kills off anything of interest because: every department now has to take a look at what you did -> it gets sanitized to oblivion -> comes out to hundreds of millions -> culture is shaped to look like a Blob -> Blobism becomes the status quo.

There might be another reason, but for me this one seems plausible enough. Of course, there are thousands more factors at play. Currently I just believe them all to be secondary (besides greed-based motivations, which cause the situation in the first place). And what do we gain?

loss

Another glass sandwich. "Oh, look! That glass sandwich folds! WOOOW!" Yeah... wow.

What's interesting is that Blobism became such a norm, that people go mad after seeing a thinner than usual Blob. One that is realistically perfectly fine for their needs, incredible compared to what they already have. "But, it's a thin Blob, not a regular one! Unusable!"

Daring designs are generally also safe now. Look at modern sports cars. They are all aggressive, colorful, etc. But all those unnecessary, weird lines that serve the design no purpose at all (most times they are actively detrimental)... they are all safe too.

No company will make a nice looking sports car, one that looks happy, or one that doesn't scream that it's an explicit sports car (I hope this is the last time I mention that I know exceptions exist). The safe option right now is aggressive and overly complicated.

What we lost isn't something specific.

It's actual differentiation.

Your dad likely had a car he would talk to so that it starts up nicely, your grandpa had a watch he wore religiously, your mom her music player she painted yellow or something when she was a bit younger.

All these items were theirs. They couldn't be taken away if your subscription ran out, wouldn't run out of charge by the end of the day, and wouldn't be on a lease. But, most importantly, they reflected who they were.

Your dad worked on and loved the shitty car, your grandpa's watch had a story, and your mom found all the music she loved by making connections with people.

Now what are your options, if you go for everything new? Well, what does your prius on a lease tell you about you? Can you really have an adventure with an Apple watch (the Whoop you don't even own, so I'll omit this question)? How often do you verbally thank the Spotify algorithm for a new album they showed you? Oh, wait, you no longer listen to albums, only AI-curated playlists.

That's what both you and I lost. Most new, proper stuff to buy, the stuff that dad would approve of, tell me no more about myself than the taxi-driver's choice of their car: "Well, it works and it's reliable." No longer can I go and buy a car that won a big race yesterday. It's now a $170,000 limited edition.

I can't even buy the stuff that will be about me!

And creating it? Well, we don't have such individual capacity at scale yet. Maybe in about 10 or 20 years we'll be a lot less limited, which is my hope. But for now...

I'm in the permanent underclass!

Jokes aside, as much as Anthropic's Opus will put me out of a job in another 10 years entirely, he might also be the creature that could save me (and about a dozen other fanatics) from never owning wonderful stuff again.

Oh robots...

love and robots

Robots have their upsides and downsides. We might end up as a "permanent underclass", but within a spacefaring civilization 🥳

But, besides from all of that, what I think robots could bring back are smaller teams. They already do that, but I wish for more. Not for more unemployment, but for more new teams to be created, having the power of larger ones. Teams that, yet again, would have one patron, one visionary, and 10-50 followers, each with immense power in their hands.

Down with the pipeline of checks and balances and billions of steps killing creative freedom! Let them iterate with extreme speeds, produce beauty that isn't safe, have the ability to run small, but standout and powerful ad campaigns, and produce the product for those that desire it at scales only possible for these teams due to advanced 3d-printing and ever evolving 3PLs!

Give a team of 3 friends with a dream the power of a corporation with 2,000 employees, sans unnecessary departments! Better yet, give that power to a million teams!

What is incredibly good about this dream is that it not only gives people with taste such power, but (more importantly) also an ability to properly exhibit care for their work.

If you can speedily iterate a billion times over the same small detail without sacrificing the quality, what is there left for you to do? If you care (I hope you do), it's the ability to show it. The deadline is the same, you don't make it extremely short on yourself, nor is it 4 years away.

Now it's a reasonable amount of "in the future", which leaves you with a copious amount of hours to care for each small detail that is important to you, and ones you won't consider important prior...

I dream of a world where these teams foster many small cultures around them, not just 5-10 big ones in SF. No, I dream of these teams all over the world.

Cultures of care, of taste, where both scale as they potentially grow. Imagine where you are pushed to obsess, not to pump out an arbitrary number based on the last performance review... Beautiful, huh?

But, so many exclamation marks warrant a question: "Aren't you a fanatic?"

Well, I hope not. Obviously there are still going to be corporations. Hell, they'll be bigger than ever. But one can dream of a team that can start a car brand in a country where that would be considered impossible without outsourcing to China.

One can dream of that car winning a race, and being affordable enough for a middle-class guy.

I dream of robots allowing us to do that...

Not most of us though. Most of us are likely just going to end up as parts of those teams. You aren't the next Dieter Rams, I'm sorry. Most of us aren't. I'd rather not be.

But, those who dare and care enough will no longer be constrained by endless meetings and lack of real, feasible opportunity. Only by their obsession.

constraints

And since I've brought up constraints, I must come back to my PS Vita.

It is an incredibly constrained device: battery, power, screen, etc. But, what it has, is dedication. Due to its constraints, the games on it (the little amount it has) are mostly special made for it. And they are, primarily, incredibly fun. Yes, game, I'd love to watch a 10 minute cutscene before making the first input. Yes, I'd love to wait an entire night for it to charge to 80% and only give me like 3-4 hours of a game. Thank you! Now I'll wait passionately for the next time I play, and in the mean time I'll read a book.

The blank slate of a phone or a laptop is unconstrained. You seldom find anything remotely resembling the creativity of old Nintendo games on them. Lack of any blinders for developers nudges them to create same Notion-looking apps all the time.

A developer must make constraints around himself, mostly crafting them based on his taste, to make a product that truly is interesting and stands out. Just look at notboring weather. It's constrained by its imaginary style-guides. That's why it's so beautiful. And these constraints are born from the taste of their creator.

Hopefully lovely robots will allow more constraints of this sort to be created, and many more we haven't thought of yet.

thank you

This is the abrupt ending of this piece. Thank you for reading. Please make something wonderful, even if just for yourself.