25 DAYS AGO • 8 MIN READ

Your Weekly Dose of Creative Tech News — Building with creativity and leading innovation in an uncertain world.

profile

TheTechMargin

TheTechMargin is your trusted guide to navigating the intersection of technology, creativity, and personal growth. Join the creative tech revolution!

Welcome, innovator.

Your Weekly Digest:

  1. Brain Food
  2. Creative Applications
  3. AI Safety Bites
  4. Friends of TheTechMargin
  5. New From TheTechMargin

Brain Food

The Ikea Effect: Labor, Love, and Valuation

AI and the Power of Personalization

I forget that not everyone wants to customize everything because, as long as I can remember, that is precisely what I have done.

From changing the browser to a non-default option on my computers and devices to changing the color, font, and sounds of any app or piece of tech gear, customizing is not only enjoyable but also a necessary part of my process.

Super-customizers like to change their hair, reveal their personality through style and clothing, and are not afraid to differentiate themselves, even if that means others won't "get it."

My creative coders and engineering friends who love to build assume everyone wants the same level of control. We crave creativity because we live and breathe customization. The reality of most of your customers, however, will fall somewhere in between accepting the defaults and desiring complete creative freedom.

What Is the IKEA Effect?

The IKEA Effect is a cognitive bias where people place a disproportionately high value on products they help create themselves.

Named after the Swedish furniture giant whose customers assemble their purchases, researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely first identified this psychological phenomenon.

Their studies found that people were willing to pay 63% more for furniture they assembled compared to identical pre-built pieces.

The core principle is that "labor leads to love." When we invest effort into creating something—even just following assembly instructions—we develop stronger emotional attachments and perceive higher value.

But this goes far beyond furniture assembly...

Observe how people use your product to understand your customer threshold for creative exploration.

Humans explore creative freedom in different ways, but research shows there are distinct categories of customizers and creators...

Creative Applications

The Outsiders Who Wrote Themselves Into History

It always begins the same way: a group on the edges is judged strange, dangerous, and unfit to belong.

The dominant powers—political, religious, and cultural—tighten their grip, labeling these people unnatural, corrupting, and a threat to the order of things.

The powerful call them sinners, heretics, and abominations—

Pushed into the margins, shadows, and "othered" by the mainstream.

But these communities refuse to vanish.

Instead, they innovate—they build secret networks, invent new languages, and protect their knowledge like a precious flame in a storm.

They become archivists of their existence, embedding their truths into scrolls, coded messages, and whispered stories—hoping that someone will find them and know they were here.

Centuries later, we do.

The Dead Sea Scrolls—written by an ancient sect viewed as odd and radical by their peers—emerged from caves to astonish the modern world.

And today, queer communities still fight for their stories, often in the face of governments that would rather erase their histories, strip their rights, and legislate their very identities out of existence—all while wrapping that cruelty in the language of morality, as though faith were best expressed through exclusion.

Here lies the bitter irony of our moment: the same advanced technologies that governments are quietly using to censor, erase, and surveil queer and marginalized communities today are also being used to decipher, restore, and honor the stories of other once-marginalized people from the distant past.

One hand deletes; the other preserves. And both call themselves righteous.

Within this paradox lies a profound creative opportunity—for the first time in history, marginalized communities possess powerful tools to author their real-life narratives.

Artificial intelligence can help unearth lost histories, analyze forgotten texts, and reconstruct broken lineages.

Blockchain technologies can create tamper-proof archives, ensuring no authority can rewrite or erase what has been preserved.

Decentralized platforms allow artists, writers, musicians, and activists to share their work without gatekeepers—embedding their culture directly into the fabric of the digital world.

Generative models can recreate lost languages, simulate vanished voices, and offer immersive experiences that bring invisible histories to life.

This is not simply preservation—it is a creative renaissance.

The same innovations that threaten can also liberate if held in the right hands. Technology, wielded with intention and vision, can expand the boundaries of cultural memory, allowing communities to survive history and actively remake it.

If we're willing to listen, history teaches us that the most dangerous thing isn't the existence of difference but the persistence of ideas that challenge the status quo.

Dangerous ideas contain the same stubborn refusal of the marginalized to be forgotten and the quiet revolution of those who insist: We were here, we are here, and we will remain.

Because, in the end, the bookshelf of time does not belong to empires.

It belongs to those who never stopped writing, singing, dancing, creating, and innovating with ever—more—powerful tools in their hands.

sources

Walsh, Savannah. “Trump’s Administration Wants to Erase Queer History. An Unconventional Book Club Is Fighting Back.” Wired, 1 June 2025, https://www.wired.com/story/trump-wants-to-erase-queer-history-this-unconventional-book-club-is-fighting-back/.
Sharma, Anurag. “Biblical Bombshell: Mysterious Dead Sea Scrolls Decrypted with AI to Reveal Accurate Date.” Interesting Engineering, 1 June 2025, https://interestingengineering.com/science/ai-dead-sea-scrolls-decrypted.

AI Safety Bites

The Game Changed While We Were Debating the Rules

While we've been having philosophical debates about whether AI will replace human intelligence, autonomous systems have quietly begun executing cyberattacks, managing security operations, and making decisions without human oversight.

The cybersecurity experts aren't mincing words: 2025 is the year of "agent swarms"—teams of AI systems working together to accomplish tasks no single human could handle. Some are protecting us, and others are targeting us.

The real-time displacement of human intelligence as the singular authority in critical systems begs the question: Do we remain observers of philosophical change or transform into active participants in technological creation?

The cybersecurity research makes clear that traditional methods of distinguishing between human and machine behavior are becoming obsolete.

The old rules don't apply when your opponent can think, adapt, and act at machine speed.

Every time we've faced a fundamental shift in authority—from divine decree to human reason, from craft to industry, from analog to digital—the humans who thrived were those who consciously shaped their relationship with the new reality.

Whether you'll approach these systems as co-conspirators in human advancement or surrender your decision-making and creativity to the machine.

The pool table is set. The balls are in motion.

Your shot.

Read enough to scare yourself at Wired. Their excellent reporting has become the gold standard in tech writing and philosophical questions of the present day.

sources

Knight, Will, et al. “Trump’s Crackdown on Foreign Student Visas Could Derail Critical AI Research.” Gault, Matthew. "The Rise of 'Vibe Hacking' Is the Next AI Nightmare." WIRED, 4 June 2025, https://www.wired.com/story/youre-not-ready-for-ai-hacker-agents/

Friends of TheTechMargin


We asked documentary photographer Stephen Kennedy four questions about his practice.

1. What’s a creative ritual or practice that grounds your work?

I commit to a regular output of work, not so much on a strict schedule but with a systemic approach to creating new things. To me, work is like medicine. If I don’t take it, I suffer needlessly.

2. What does “good work” mean to you at this stage in your career?

To me, “good work” is simply any work. In my case, I strive to create a lot of work. Out of that volume comes the occasional gem.

3. If you weren’t a photographer, what else might you be doing?

For better or for worse, I knew by age 15 that I would be a photographer. I’ve never connected, visualized, or even dreamed of doing something else. As long as I’m physically able to be a photographer, I will.

4. Looking ahead, what questions—creative, personal, or cultural—are you most curious to explore through your photography?

I’m most attracted to photography projects involving people I haven’t met or places I haven’t yet seen. The combination of both is the most intoxicating cocktail that I can consume, and my thirst for it is unquenchable.

Listen to our recent conversation with Stephen on TheTechMargin Podcast:

show
Exploring the Creative Proce...
Jun 2 · TheTechMargin — Creativi...
68:50
Spotify Logo
 

New From TheTechMargin


College & University Professors

In an era defined by artificial intelligence and uncertainty, understanding and leveraging AI is essential to staying at the forefront of academic innovation.

As a professor, your research and teaching shape the future of knowledge. Learn AI Tools and Strategies to Advance Your Scholarly Work.

Artists & Creators

What is holding you back from your next creative breakthrough?

The future of creative work is being written now, and your name belongs on that list...

TheTechMargin Studio

⚡️ New Animation - Watch Now on YouTube⚡️

video preview

63 Federal Street, Portland, ME 04101
Unsubscribe · Preferences

TheTechMargin

TheTechMargin is your trusted guide to navigating the intersection of technology, creativity, and personal growth. Join the creative tech revolution!