Make with Notion 2025: How to Build Tools That Shape Civilizations (Alan Kay & Ivan Zhao)

Tools don’t just help people do tasks—they reshape the environment people live in, and that environment then reshapes how people think, behave, and even what they consider “normal.” Alan Kay frames this through Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” arguing that the biggest changes come not from the tool itself but from the human accommodation to the new environment the tool creates.

Kay illustrates the mechanism with mass media. Television, for example, started as a packaged alternative to movies and radio-like programming, but it quickly became a cultural force: people watched it more than they went to theaters, and daily life adjusted around what television made available. Over time, norms shifted downward—reality television made previously “impolite” or “uncivilized” behavior feel ordinary. Kay links that cultural drift to political outcomes, suggesting that public figures can become products of the media environment that trained audiences to accept certain kinds of content.

A second example comes from scale and imitation. When new media borrows the style of older media, audiences may misread it because the scale is different. Kay points to Orson Welles’ 1938 “Martians” broadcast, which used real-time news conventions to present a hoax as if it were happening live. Millions took it seriously because it was the first time a mass medium delivered something with the immediacy of real-time radio—showing how audience interpretation depends on expectations built from earlier media.

Kay then widens the lens from media to human cognition. He argues that perception is not a direct feed from the world; people reconstruct reality from limited sensory signals and what they already know. That makes people “numb” to their environment: they notice differences, not the full structure that produces them. He describes how removing external feedback—like isolation tanks—reveals that the brain can generate experience on its own, turning everyday life into a kind of waking hallucination. The practical takeaway is that people need reminders and training to recognize what they’re accommodating to.

That leads to a key warning about tool-building. Kay credits Doug Engelbart with an early observation: a tool doesn’t teach “reasonable use” by itself. A hammer teaches hammering, and without education it can be repurposed for harmful ends. Engelbart’s concern was that powerful new computer tools, used without training and ethical education, become “formational equivalents of hydrogen bombs”—dangerous not because the tool is inherently evil, but because humans with old mental habits will use it.

Kay contrasts the original research culture at Xerox PARC and ARPA with later commercialization. In the 1980s and beyond, training and education about consequences were deprioritized, while industrial-scale distribution turned tools into environments that people acculturate into. He argues that modern abundance of media exploits human biological preferences for sweet and salty stimuli—only now applied to information and storytelling—without built-in safeguards against overconsumption.

Finally, Kay offers creativity heuristics for building better tools and ideas: protect time for generating ideas without immediately naming or solving them, use “compartmentalization” (a sane room for order and a crazy room for raw ideation), and keep ideas at arm’s length by writing them down without forcing early evaluation. He also criticizes orthodox gatekeeping, noting that progress in computing accelerated under ARPA’s funding approach that tolerated mistakes rather than relying on peer review. The central tension is clear: incentives that prioritize profit can conflict with the goal of shaping civilization responsibly.