Dan Holloway - Our Dreams Make Different Shapes: How Your Creativity can Make the World a Better Place and why the World Will Try to Stop you

Our Dreams Make Different Shapes:

How Your Creativity Could Make the World a Better Place and Why the World Will Try to Stop You

Dan Holloway

copyright Dan Holloway 2020

Published by Rogue Interrobang Press

You ought to be asking yourself all the time, What is the most important thing I could be working on right now? If youre not doing it why arent you? (Aaron Swartz)

Chapters and Chunks

Coronavirus and the Crisis of Creativity

I f Id got my act together and written this book six months ago when I meant to, it would have been out of date by now. Coronavirus has changed the world completely and as I write and beyond it will keep on changing the world.

One thing we should have learned from this crisis is just how important creativity is in forging a better future. But in the UK we have seen something different. We have seen a crisis of creativity. And this has happened because we have seen the championing of the most disastrous kind of creativity from Dominic Cummings and his coterie of special advisors. We have seen what it means to be original for originalitys sake.

Cummings is worthy of much study his blog in particular illustrates so many points about creativity, its fascination, its importance, and how it can go catastrophically wrong if it is seen as an end in itself. He is a devotee of a very particular way of approaching problems the small, agile team with all the money they need at their disposal (which, given the size of the team, isnt much in relation to its potential impact) led by scientists and assorted weirdos as his notorious blog post in January 2020 put it. Like much of Silicon Valley, he idolises the frontierspeople of DARPA (the USs Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency which emerged during the Cold War) and the seeming magic that behavioural scientists are able to conjure with.

In casting himself as the creative alternative to an inexpert and moribund decision-making establishment led by career civil servants he has engineered a crisis of creativity. Because his failure has become identified as a failure of creativity. It is not. Because what Cummings misunderstands or misrepresents is the role that creativity can and should play in tackling our most pressing problems.

Where Cummings is right is that when a problem arises that cannot be solved within an existing paradigm, the only hope lies in a new one. Where he is catastrophically wrong is in believing that the paradigm failure is one of science. It is not, it is a moral one. Creativity is a tool a means of achieving a vision of the kind of world we want to live in, and its an incredibly powerful one. Without that vision, though, it is more like a sea of downed power lines writhing and sparking without direction. Remarkable things may have come from DARPA, but DARPA was established in the same environment and to serve the same aims as the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, devised by John von Neumann and the game theorists Cummings also idolises, to avoid a nuclear war by brute fear. Cummings is in love with the bunker mentality almost a prepper mentality of the brilliant few not having to worry about the ludicrous or horrific ends to which their brilliance might be put, just being free to be brilliant.

He is also in love with government by expert managers. Expertise, like creativity, he believes will ensure good decision making. It wont. It will ensure efficient implementation of an agenda that can pretend it isnt there, hiding behind creativity and expertise. Through these category mistakes, Cummings is responsible for the demise of expertise and creativity. It is one of our most important tasks to reclaim them.

Introduction

A lot of people, when they think of creativity, think of creative arts like storytelling. So its surprising that it is actually really hard to write a story *about* creativity. Its the creative equivalent of the moment in a horror film where you have to show the monster. You can spend of the film murmuring, whispering, building a mythology, alluding to nightmares, reimagining the terror of a cousin of a cousin of the pub landlord, embroidering the tale with ever more elaborate and nightmarish details to give you a reason to stay for one more. But at some point we need to see the damn thing.

A few years ago I was commissioned by the Oxford Playhouse to write what they called an adult fairytale. I didnt set out to write a story about creativity. It just sort of arrived, in the corner of my eye, as I was doing something else. I wanted to retell the greatest ghost story of them all, The Monkeys Paw. And I wanted to do it in a world Id been exploring in short stories and novellas for several years, a world set in the tunnels under Oxford, on its rooftops and in its abandoned warehouses, a world of vast and intricate connections between the lost, abandoned, and forgotten souls not just from Oxford but from anywhere who found themselves part of an invisible self-teaching, free running, skateboarding, poeting, coding parallel university, one that was free to roam not only the books that lined the buildings above but adopted techniques and methods and ideas and ways of collaborating and experimenting not possible within the confines of those or any walls. It was unseen less because of its stealth and more because no one cared to look, but for those who went after it, it left scratches on the surface of the regular world stickers and street art, QR codes and rumours, and bootlegs of fragments of poems and fly posters for gigs that never happened.

Scratches on the surface scratch marks you could follow if you were curious enough. That metaphor had intrigued me for years and finally the commission to write a fairytale enabled it to find its form.

The focus of the story was a character called Stitch, who lived by twilight and by night in the gutters between the bases of the citys rooves and their parapets and by day retreated to the safety of the labyrinthine structures where this community hung out, learning, sharing, training, thinking, doing, building. Stitch would scour the city from their perch, watching for the misfits and the malcontents, identifying souls in the process of being lost, the ones being slowly failed by the nightmaring spires of a city built on dreams too rigid to ever feel like home.

It was Stitchs power (this was a work of magic realism) to see and to record peoples dreams as they slept, so once these souls in the process of being lost had been identified, Stitch would follow them, settle onto the roof of their dwelling, and experience their dreams while they slept, not simply the images being played out in their heads but the aspirations behind them, the hopes, the better futures they connected to, the part the dreamer would play in bringing those better worlds to pass.