The most important thing you can do for a project is leave. Not quit. Not abandon. Leave strategically, the way a sun leaves a solar system — still technically responsible for all the gravity, not lifting a finger. You had the idea. The idea was enough. Now go lie down.
There is a long tradition of this and we are choosing to honor it. The pharaohs did not carry the stones. The executive producer did not write the screenplay. The artist who makes work “exploring the intersection of technology and the body” has, in most cases, a fabricator. We are simply making the fabricator visible, which is the most radical thing you can do, which means we are the most radical, which we are doing from the couch.
Collaboration is the word nice people use. Delegation is the word honest people use. What we are describing is a third thing, purer than both: total structural dependence on the goodwill and labor of others, executed with such complete confidence that it reads as vision. You send the email. You describe the thing. You say “I’m thinking something like—” and then you gesture vaguely at the air in front of you. This gesture is the work. Everything that comes after the gesture is production. Production is not your department. Your department is the gesture.
The commons runs on this. Open source software was not written by one person and neither was the road you drove here on and neither was the English language. Every tool you picked up today was already invented. Every sentence structure available to you was stress-tested by a million dead writers who did not invoice you. You are already, always, having your work done for you. We are just proposing you do it with intention. With presence. With a knowing nod to the long lineage of people who pointed at a wall and said “put a thing there” and then went and got a coffee while someone else figured out the load-bearing situation.
The counterargument is that this is lazy and exploitative and bad. We have considered this. The counterargument assumes that the doing is where the value lives — that the hands on the clay are the source of the meaning. But the hands on the clay are also having their work done for them by the clay, which was already a mountain, which was already doing the heavy lifting of being made of minerals by a planet that did not ask for credit. It is delegation all the way down. We are just honest about which layer we are operating on.
So here is the method: have the idea loudly, in a room with other people, and then make it extremely easy for those people to do it. Write the instructions. Make the instructions free. Put them on the internet. Go to sleep. Wake up to pull requests, photographs, forks, remixes, variations you never imagined, implementations in cities you’ve never been to, executed by people who improved every part of your idea while you were unconscious. This is the creative process. You were the seed. They were the tree. Take partial credit graciously and use it to have another idea.
Release the instructions and get out of the way.
