Why I draw outside the lines
As I plan ways to support my daughter's art, I'm frequently sucked into using templates, or following advice from the "influencer" marketing managers who use social media platforms to drive awareness.
Not once have I ever heard them say the most important thing.
"Be yourself. Everyone else is taken."
Instagram and TikTok... have scaled, metastasized, and gamified conformity to a whole new level. The grey-beige aesthetic is what gets distribution. Color, weirdness, genuine imagination get algorithmically ignored. Match whatever narrow aesthetic the platform currently amplifies, or else move on to the backwaters. Those who think they’re being creative because they’re “creating content” are just living at the whims and fancies of the algorithm, painting by numbers in templates already defined.
Om Malik
January 16, 2026
Our Algorithmic Grey-Beige World
I start my morning going through nearly 250 feeds that flow into my “reader” app. Today, two quotes stood out in my early morning reading. “The main purpose of my work is to provo…
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