And so I always think about the millions of pieces that are locked in billions of heads.

And not just animation, and not just art, but: all kinds of ideas. All kinds of ideas. Including critically important ideas, world changing inventions, life-saving scientific discoveries. These are all ideas that must be grown. And without an environment in which they can grow, where their creator can nurture them with this immediate connection, many of these ideas will not emerge, or they’ll emerge stunted. And so I have this principle that creators need an immediate connection.

And, all of those demos that I just showed you, simply came from me looking around, noticing places where this principle was violated and then trying to fix that. It’s really all I did. I just followed this guiding principle and it guided me to what I had to do.

But I haven’t said much about the most important part of this story which is why? Why I have this principle? Why I do this? When I see a violation of this principle I don’t think of that as an opportunity. When I see creators constrained by their tools and their ideas compromised I don’t say “Oh good, an opportunity to make a product, or an opportunity to start a business, or an opportunity to do research or contribute to a field.” I’m not excited by finding a problem to solve, I’m not in this for the joy of making things.

Ideas are very precious to me. And when I see ideas dying, it hurts. I see a tragedy. To me it feels like a moral wrong. It feels like an injustice. So if I think there’s anything I can do about it, I feel like it’s my responsibility to do so. Not opportunity but responsibility.

Now, this is just my thing, I’m not asking you to believe in this in the way I do. My point here is that these words that I’m using: injustice, responsibility, moral wrong. These aren’t the words we normally here in a technical field. We do hear these words in association with social causes. So things like: censorship, gender discrimination, environment destruction. We all recognise these things as moral wrongs. Most of us wouldn’t witness a civil right’s violation and think “Oh good, an opportunity”, I hope not! Instead we’ve been very fortunate to have had people through out history, who recognised these social wrongs and saw it as their responsibility to address them. And so there’s this activist lifestyle where a person dedicates themselves to fighting for a cause that they believe in.

And the purpose of this talk is to tell you that this activist lifestyle is not just for social activism. As a technologist you can recognise a wrong in the world. You can have a vision for what a better world could be. And you can dedicate yourself to fighting for principle. Social activists typically fight by organising, but you can fight by inventing.