Nathaniel+R’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2017

= American Creativity and Innovation = Who here has an apple iPhone? If you do pull it out. I ironically have one too. This is what I would like to give my speech on. An America without these. I don’t mean an America where we get rid of our phones and are all more social or some philosophical BS like that. No, I am not hating new technologies, and I truly believe that computing, GUI, and the internet are the greatest inventions by mankind of all time, and I want to live in an America that embraces these gains and leads the world towards collective innovation. The reason I hate this hunk of metal in my hand is not because of what it is, but because of this little icon on the back of every one of these. An apple with a bite out of it. The symbol for the company that single-handedly destroyed our nation's progress in open sourcing handheld portable computers. I don’t want to live in a nation without smartphones. I want to live in a nation without companies like Apple. Now first of all, the Apple iPhones aren’t horrendously terrible, they perform simple functions with ease, and when they were released in 2007 they were a great idea and incredibly innovative. My problem is the fact that Apple lacks vision for anything besides the direction of their stocks. Each new iPhone is just a repackaging of the last, and the last is programmed to slowly self destruct in order to force you to buy the next one. Rather than releasing updates just to improve their OS, they include code to target their older phones and slow them down making people feel the need to upgrade. They have no trust in their customers, and not enough self confidence to make their product open source. They monopolize the market by making their programs incompatible with other companies phones. This makes customers stuck in a buying loop where they are only getting marginal improvements with each new and expensive purchase. Overall I am not mad at apple for making a terrible product because this is by no means terrible. This is a good smartphone, it is still better than its competition however slightly, and it will always be good enough. This could be amazing, yet instead they make this slick, paper thin, smartphone with great aesthetics that looks like it stepped out of a futuristic sci-fi movie even though it really came from 2007. This is the phone that sells, the one that keeps the investors happy, the one that looks good in an advertisement. This is the antithesis of flawed brilliance, and the incarnation of perfect mediocrity. Now many of you will disagree with me on this and feel that Apple is a great company, and yes I may be over exaggerating their weaknesses, but the gist of my criticisms remain and they are prevalent in many other places in america. Activision releases the same Call of Duty game every year, they take the last one, tweak it just enough so it has a selling point, make millions on its sales then go home content with the fact that they just made the same exact video game for the 15th time. EA Games works in the same way, recreating the same Madden, 2K, or FIFA game year after year. Let alone imagine how many home appliance companies there are out there that make the same model of the same toaster for 5 years straight before minutely improving a small aspect of it. Next think to school, we all have written an essay that while on a new topic, fits the same cookie cutter as your last 5 essays. We get a thesis some evidence, a small but controlled side rant, then come to our conclusion on locavores, libraries, the post office, or whatever other topic we are writing on. We spend too much time in math memorizing formulas, we spend too much time in english analyzing stuff we don’t enjoy, we spend too much time in history learning about events that never effected modern day, we spend too much time in sciences memorizing names of things we don’t need to know. Yet when was the last time you wrote something that you would have enjoyed reading, or the last time you made a cool contraption with your bare hands, or the last time you wrote a piece of code because it fascinated you, or the last time you found out something about history that nobody else knew. For an enormous number of Americans that may be never. Honestly, has america lost its creativity? Now for my largest criticism of apple, their closed source operating system. For those who do not know what this is, open source is where the entirety of the files and code is available to the user and can be edited and changed, Closed source is where all of this is completely locked away and unreachable. Why I hate apple being closed source is because this is just another example of dumbing down technology, and stifling America’s creativity. This infuriates me because of how much our modern education already smothers creativity, now we see a leading tech company jumping on this train. Apple, and countless other companies and organizations do not realize how dangerous it is to consistently smother the creativity of each generation of Americans. Creativity is one of the most important aspects of our nation, yet is increasingly becoming the most undermined and overlooked. Especially in our education system. As Ken Robinson said in his TED talk, “Creativity is as important as literacy.” So honestly, why is it stressed so little, not only in our education but also in the economy of our nation? It’s not a secret that our education system isn’t the best at fostering creativity. It focuses on raw knowledge that you probably won’t use. It makes it hard for you to follow your real passion, every time you want to specialize your classes it throws another general education requirement at you. What I want is an America where people make things. I don’t care if it's painting, writing, music, drawing, programming, woodworking, designing, or simply making interesting paper airplanes. I want an america that focusses on ideas and innovation above anything else. An America where companies stop playing it safe and try to please their investors, and instead they simply make something that they feel passionate about. I’m talking a national economy run on kickstarter campaigns, with TED talks showing up on top trending on youtube, where students go to school in order to complete their visions not be forced into the school's vision for them. If creativity never entered the human mind, we would still be eating animals with our bare hands and would never have thought of fire. Fire was not discovered using math, it was not discovered using english, nor history, nor science, It was simply human ingenuity. If the sole reason that we can stand in a class today, surrounded by inventions, wearing clothes, and speaking in a common and shared language about highly complex topics is all a product of creativity and ideas then why is that not the most encouraged part of education. Currently we look at our grading system and it makes sense, we are graded as the percent of times we succeed, or didn’t fail. Yet if we were to look at history by these systems then we truly see how ridiculous this system is. Since it took Thomas Edison 1000 tries to make a lightbulb, by our standards he would get a .1% and an F- in light bulb making. In Nasa’s first year they had about twice as many rockets explode as ones that successfully flew, they would get a 33% and an F. The record for the highest batting average of all time is 36% also an F. Doctor Seuss went through 27 different publishers before he found one that would publish a book of his, that's a 3% and also an F-. My point is this, despite the fact that systems are against you, that education doesn’t let your true talents show, and the American consumerist economy consistently dumbs down its products and tries to get away with remaking the same product, despite all that, make something. It doesn’t have to be great, or even good, it just has to be your own. Draw something, write something, build something, code something, compose something, wherever your talents lie, use them and encourage others to use their talents. Because the one thing that is yours more than anything else is your ideas, and it’s up to every single one of us to decide whether or not the ideas of our fellow Americans are worth it. I think they are. I think my ideas are worth it. I think your ideas are worth it. I think the ideas of those outside of America are worth it. So what worth is the American dream if we all stop dreaming. Start dreaming… Thank You.