Welcome to The Tardigrade Renaissance: Surviving everything and mocking the dinosaurs

Please create responsibly (Just kidding, do whatever you want)

Well, well, well. Would you look at that?

The dinosaurs are dead—finally. It took long enough. They clung to their fragile, pre-Ice Age bureaucracies until the very last moment, insisting that their Very Important Opinions were absolutely essential. Then reality hit like a meteor, and, oops, turns out they weren’t that essential after all. Now, as we tiptoe around their fossilized remains, the question arises. What now?

How will we ever function without panels of experts telling us what is and isn’t real art?How will we survive without academic gatekeepers granting us permission to have new ideas? How will we go on without the 16-step approval process required to do literally anything creative?

Oh, that’s right. We’ll be just fine.

Because, my friends, we have entered the Tardigrade Renaissance.

A moment of silence for our former overlords…okay, that’s enough

Before we revel in our newfound creative freedom, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the tremendous loss of institutional gatekeeping.

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." — Neil deGrasse Tyson

Gone are the days when aspiring artists had to grovel before art gallery curators who only approved works if they fit this season’s fashionable nihilism.

Gone are the days of 14 rounds of edits from a publishing house, ensuring a novel contained the exact right amount of moral absolution.

Gone are the days of crafting a brand before musicians were allowed to make a sound.

And let us not forget academia, where truly visionary ideas were buried under mountains of paperwork because Oh No, that’s not how we do things here!

Yes, it is truly a tragedy...anyway, moving on.

Welcome to the world of infinite creation, now featuring human potential

Now that the bureaucratic dinosaurs have been permanently retired, we find ourselves in a radically unregulated creative landscape—which is terrifying for people who relied on institutions to tell them what to think. The rest of us are thriving.

Want to start a magazine where you review different brands of tap water? Knock yourself out. Want to design a city powered exclusively by vibes and an approximate understanding of physics? Go for it. Want to compose a symphony based on your neighbor’s dog barking at 3 AM? No one is stopping you.

See, in this brave new world of infinite possibility, no one cares if you have an official title. No one’s asking if you have a degree in creating things that don’t exist yet. No one’s waiting for institutional approval because—fun fact—those institutions are currently busy trying to figure out what happened to their relevance.

Long live the free-spirits

Once upon a time, we lived under the rule of experts—people whose entire careers revolved around judging the work of others without ever producing anything themselves. They told creators what creation was. They told scientists what ideas were worth pursuing. They told writers what stories were “marketable.”

And what did we get for all this expert curation? Movies that feel like they were written by a boardroom of anxiety-ridden executives. Books so over-edited they read like a corporate press release. Music so calculated to sound “authentic” that it becomes indistinguishable from every other mass-produced album.

But now the experts are gone. And without them, a horrifying new reality is setting in. If you want to create something, you just…can. No application required. No committee review. No waiting period.

You don’t need a stamp of approval from people who have never created anything beyond an HR policy. You don’t need validation from people whose entire contribution to the arts was being related to someone famous.

You can just make things. It’s almost as if creativity was never supposed to be a bureaucratic process in the first place. Weird.

Create first, apologize never

Of course, not everyone is adjusting well to this lawless creative wasteland. Some people spent so many years waiting for permission that they now have no idea what to do without an approval process. For them, the transition may be difficult. For the rest of us? It’s about damn time.

So let’s set the ground rules for the Tardigrade Renaissance, shall we?

• Thinking about it? Great. That’s enough planning. Do it. Publish the book. Record the album. Build the prototype. Nobody is stopping you anymore.

• Somewhere, a panel of former institutional gatekeepers is sitting in a dimly lit conference room, deeply concerned that people are creating without their supervision. Let them be concerned. Keep creating.

• Does your creation make the Thought Police twitchy? Excellent. Did you build something the Experts said was “impossible”? Even better.

• The dinosaurs wasted decades refining their systems, making sure everything was polished, calculated, and audience-tested. Then they died. Perfection is for losers.

• The dinosaurs loved exclusivity. Their favorite trick was pretending you needed them to get through the door. But guess what? The door is gone. If you want to be part of the new creative era, you’re already in.

The future belongs to the ones who build it

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson

So go. Adapt. Make things. Build things. Write things. Forget the dinosaurs who questioned your methods. If you hear someone whining that you can’t just create without the proper credentials, politely remind them:

Oh, sorry, I don’t take feedback from fossils.