As a child, I dreamed of becoming an artist. I would hone my skills, and spend my life creating things for others to enjoy, and in doing so, make a living.

For reasons I won’t go into here, I instead became an engineer. Instead of working alone, I learned to work in teams. Instead of artistic vision, I learned compromise. Instead of ideas, I worked on “systems”.

I started to see the world as 1s and 0s, like a man with malfunctioning X-ray vision.

Play a movie on a computer and I see data flowing from the video card buffer, electrons firing across microscopic wires, in and out of registers. The chip clock stomps in a loop, biasing logic gates to swing open and shut, Morse-coding out the next frame of the film, two pixels at a time.

Later, as I transitioned from engineer to manager, more of the world became systems – workflows, process, metrics.

One day, I found myself taken aback by a new hire who told me: “I don’t like how you use that word.”

“What word?” I asked.

“You call people ‘resources’. You should call them ‘people’.”

He was right. I was only a couple years out of college, and Microsoft had indoctrinated me so deeply with corporate-drone speak I couldn’t even detect it in myself.

I think when you’re taught to think in systems, you see people differently. You make assumptions about what people can do, how they behave and how they should be treated. These assumptions are needed for systems to work – for any technology to “work”.

I realize that I was wrong as a child – it’s not the role of an artist to make things for society to enjoy. That’s the role of the engineer, and of the systems thinker. It’s systems – software and organizations – that make life more convenient.

The role of the artist is to BREAK the system.

As Picasso broke the photograph, and as Rodin breathed life into metal, so it is the role of the artist to break our assumptions [1]. In a popular arts context, we look to our superheroes – Ironman, Spiderman, Batman – to perma-stretch our imaginations from the routine to the fantastical.

Art is the ultimate broken assumption. It can’t be measured, can’t be defined, can’t be agreed upon. To celebrate art is to acknowledge the infinite tastes and diversity of humanity, that no system can ever capture.

Art frees us.

That’s not to say technology is a prison. However, if one day you wake up with the same phone as everyone else, visit the same websites as everyone else and order the same food as everyone else, perhaps art is a way to keep our brief lives from becoming an assumption.

[1] By “break our assumptions” I don’t mean it in the context of malicious computer hacking, which I consider more systems thinking than artistic.