And geeks shall inherit the earth

By Simon van Wyk

Digital technology is ruining the party for creative types. Mind you, the rot started long before that with people like Henry Ford perfecting the use of assembly lines to build uniform copies of his Model T cars 100 years ago.

Ford was the Bill Gates of his time, driving a technological trend into a society-changing phenomenon. His famous line, “They (customers) can have any colour they want, as long as it’s black” was one of the first examples of science (and commerce) triumphing over art.

That’s not a bad thing - can you imagine what cars would cost if they were all hand-crafted? But it has been a trend that has moved into most other areas of business. Think property developers and their cookie-cutter houses, IBM and computers, Microsoft and software, record companies and sausage-factory music, and film companies and blockbusters on thousands of movie screens. One notable exception to this is Apple - Steve Jobs seems to be able to hold both creativity and mass production in his hands at the very same time.