11 CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY: THE SWEET SPOT There was a time in the pre-digital world when the phrase “creative technology” would have seemed like the most grotesque oxymoron. It’s not necessarily a mainstream thought even now. Artists versus geeks, technophobes versus technophiles, “right” brain versus “left” brain … the clashes run on, but with, I think, decreasing intensity. For this is one of the biggest “ands” of the Age of And: the convergence between creativity and technology makes for a transformative sweet spot. It Starts With Code We all use code even if we don’t know our Java from our PHP, our C++ from our Ruby – even if we have never heard of Unix or Lisp. Code is everywhere. Code, as much as electricity itself, powers the electric grid that keeps our society operating. It also runs like an underground river through every system in our lives. It is all over our homes, governing our washing machines, playing our music and refrigerating our food. It runs our economy, often through fast but ancient (in computer terms) systems built on early languages such as Cobol and Fortran. It has long been in our cars, so much so that today’s mechanics are as much computer engineers as they are grease monkeys, and it is even creeping into the humble light bulb. Simply put, code is a set of instructions for a computer, encoded in a language humans can make sense of and manipulate, that the computer can then translate into its own machine language. That language instructs the computer to configure its logic gates in such a way as to produce the result the coder desires. You may very well come into advertising explicitly to avoid having to understand code, but just as code makes the world operate, it lies behind advertising, too. If you really want to know how to code, find a few hours and read Paul Ford’s magnificent essay, “What is Code” (2015).