[ recap ]

Two weeks ago we looked at post-war Italian design (Testa, Munari, Nizzoli, Carboni) and Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay on mechanical reproduction. Benjamin argued that when something can be reproduced easily, it loses its aura. He meant the sense that it exists in one place and one time. In 2026, that loss has scaled.

[ thoughts ]

Benjamin diagnosed what reproduction takes away. He said less about what makes something exist as a distinct thing in the first place. Thirty-four years later, a different book answered that question.

In 1969, an English polymath named George Spencer-Brown published a strange book called Laws of Form. The book is mathematics and philosophy at once.

Its opening axiom is one sentence:
we cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction.

Before logic, before language, before meaning, there is the line:

• this / not this.
• inside / outside.
• self / world.
• signal / noise.

Every act of thought begins by marking one thing off from another.

Benjamin and Spencer-Brown are two halves of the same problem. Benjamin asks what is lost when reproduction becomes effortless. Spencer-Brown asks how anything comes to exist as a distinct thing at all.

The Italian designers from issue thirty answered both at once: Pintori at Olivetti, Munari at Campari, Carboni at RAI, each one was drawing a distinction that hadn't existed before they drew it. Each piece of work was singular because somebody decided what it was and what it wasn't.

In 2026, drawing the distinction is the rare act. Most commercial output skips the step: the brief arrives, the prompt is typed, the output is published. Nobody draws the line between the work that should exist and the work that shouldn't.

The result is bang average and indistinguishable from the next thing.

This is what slop is.

[ creativity ]

Seven years before Laws of Form, James Baldwin published a short essay called The Creative Process in a 1962 anthology titled Creative America. Baldwin was thirty-eight, one year past Nobody Knows My Name and one year before The Fire Next Time.

The essay is the strongest articulation I have found of what the "creative act" is.

Baldwin opens:
Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

The word distinction appears in the first sentence. Baldwin and Spencer-Brown were working in different fields, on different continents, in adjacent years. They never met, yet they reached the same place:
The artist's first act is to draw a line that other people would rather leave undrawn.

Baldwin states the role directly:
The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

The artist makes visible the lines that the society around them has agreed not to see.

This is the creative act, and it is the same act in 1962, 1969, and 2026. Technology may change, but the artist’s position does not.

[ making ]

Inspired by the last edition’s post-war Italian design theme, I created Print Ephemera.

It is an archive of pre-internet advertising.

The first ones available are from Olivetti. Magazine ads from the years when an Italian typewriter company employed designers like Giovanni Pintori and Marcello Nizzoli, and treated commercial print as a work of art.

The point of looking at Olivetti's pre-internet ads is to see what commercial communication looked like when somebody had to make every decision deliberately.

The typeface, the images, the headlines, the colour palettes. None of it generated. All of it drawn, in the Spencer-Brown sense and the literal one. Each ad is a record of distinctions made.

While you look, name three distinctions the designer made: Why this typeface? Why this composition? Why this headline?

You will not know the right answers and the point is not to guess correctly.

Every element of the ad was a choice. Feel the difference between work where every choice was made and work where most choices were defaulted.

Then look at the most recent piece of work you produced or published. Ask the same three questions of your own work. If you cannot find three distinctions you made, name what you would have had to do differently to make them.

[ sign off ]

Artificial Milieu is the new name for my project. I’m moving away from Palpable Vision, which began as a way to express the idea of helping people turn ideas into reality.

I think Artificial Milieu better reflects the world I’m exploring: design, art, media, philosophy, emerging technologies, and the creative process.

The project sits at the intersection of creativity and technology, but it also asks a more important question:
How do artificial systems shape the environments we live, think, create, and make meaning within?

Creativity.sh is the first project.
Print Ephemera is the newest.

The rebrand seems like the moment for a reintroduction:

I'm Steve, a self-proclaimed internet tastemaker. I started my professional experience in financial services in the UK. I then moved to Nairobi, where I set up a blockchain-based social impact organisation focusing on two of the largest informal settlements in Africa, Mathare and Kibera, and an art-tech project with local artists. Now living in NYC, strategy and innovation consulting: creative direction, knowledge architecture, helping organisations and people think more clearly about what they are doing and why.

I have travelled extensively, lived on three continents, and spend a lot of time in Ecuador, where I invested in a social entrepreneurship fund.

I connect ideas across emerging technology, design, media, and philosophy. This newsletter is where that habit gets published. The new name fits the work better than the old one did.

Thanks for sticking around.

See you next week, anonymous reader behind the screen.