Marshall McLuhan told us the medium is the message fifty years ago and we all nodded along without truly absorbing what he meant. Now we're living it every day, in ways he could never have predicted, and we're still not paying attention. Every time you choose a tool, you're choosing a worldview. You're not just deciding how to work - you're deciding how to think.
Start with something simple. Open Google Docs and start writing. Now open Notion and start writing the same thing. The words might be identical, but they won't be. Google Docs is a page. It wants you to write linearly, start at the top, fill the space. Notion is blocks. It wants you to think in modules, in toggles, in databases. The same thought, expressed in each tool, will take a different shape. Not because you decided to shape it differently, but because the container shapes the contents.
The Pinterest problem
I've been thinking about this since I started building Trove, my bookmarking and taste-mapping tool. The entire premise was born from a frustration with existing tools - not because they didn't work, but because they shaped the act of saving things in ways that didn't match how I actually think about what I collect.
Pinterest is the obvious example. It's the world's biggest visual curation platform, and its design decisions have shaped an entire generation's relationship with collecting. The infinite scroll. The waterfall grid. The "Pin it" button that makes saving frictionless. Every design choice optimises for volume. Pin more. Save more. Create more boards. The result is that most people's Pinterest accounts are digital landfills - thousands of pins, no curation, no meaning, no real signal about who that person is or what they actually care about.
Compare that with Are.na. Similar concept - save things, organise them visually. But the interface is sparse. Almost austere. There's no infinite scroll pushing you to add more. The grid is calm. The act of adding something feels deliberate, like placing a book on a shelf rather than tossing it into a pile. You think before you save. And because you think before you save, what you save ends up meaning more.
Same user. Same intention. Different tool. Completely different output. The tool had taste, and that taste shaped yours.
Writing tools and thinking tools
This extends far beyond visual curation. Think about how different writing tools produce different kinds of thinking. Twitter's 280-character limit compressed an entire generation's writing style. Even when those people wrote elsewhere - blog posts, essays, articles - you could feel the Twitter cadence. Short sentences. Sharp observations. The hot take as a genre of thought.
Substack's long-form format and email delivery model produced a different kind of writing. More considered, more personal, more structured. The newsletter-as-essay became a form because the tool encouraged it. Medium's clean typography and estimated reading time created a world where every post felt like it needed to be a polished 7-minute read.
None of these are neutral platforms. They all have taste baked into their DNA, and that taste is contagious. Use them long enough and you start thinking in their rhythms. Your ideas start fitting their containers before you've even begun to express them.
The Figma effect
In my advertising days, we'd notice something similar with presentation tools. A team working in Keynote produced different pitches than a team working in PowerPoint. Not just visually different - structurally different. Keynote's slide-transition polish and emphasis on visual simplicity nudged people towards cleaner, more theatrical presentations. PowerPoint's bullet-point defaults and template library nudged people towards information-dense, corporate-structured decks.
The same dynamic plays out with design tools. Figma's component system and auto-layout have been brilliant for design consistency, but they've also homogenised what gets designed. When your tool thinks in 8px grids and nested frames, your designs start thinking that way too. The designs that break out of Figma's defaults often feel more interesting precisely because they resist the tool's gravitational pull.
Canva, by contrast, produces a very specific aesthetic - one that's recognisable from across a room. It's not bad, necessarily. But it's Canva. The templates are so strongly flavoured that most things made in Canva end up tasting like the tool rather than the person who used it.
Choosing deliberately
This isn't an argument against using popular tools. It's an argument for choosing them deliberately, with an awareness of what they're doing to your thinking. If you want to write with focus, don't open a tool that's designed for collaboration. If you want to curate with intention, don't use a platform that optimises for volume. If you want to design with character, understand where your tool's defaults end and your own decisions begin.
I use Claude Code to build things. That's a tool choice that shapes what I make in fundamental ways. The conversational interface, the iterative process, the way you describe what you want rather than directly constructing it - these aren't neutral. They produce a specific kind of product. One that's shaped by natural language more than visual mockups. One that iterates faster in some directions than others. One where the builder's taste is expressed through descriptions and reactions rather than through direct manipulation.
Being aware of this doesn't eliminate the influence - you can't step outside your tools entirely. But it gives you the ability to push against the defaults. To recognise when the tool is thinking for you and to intervene with your own judgment. To choose the tool that amplifies the kind of thinking you want to do, rather than accepting whatever cognitive shape the most convenient option imposes.
Tools as taste signals
There's a reason people in creative industries care so much about their tools. It's not just productivity optimisation or workflow preference. It's because your tools are taste signals. They reveal what you value. Someone who writes in iA Writer values focus and typography. Someone who takes notes in Obsidian values connections and systems thinking. Someone who designs in Figma values collaboration and consistency. Someone who still keeps a physical notebook values slowness and tactility.
None of these are right or wrong. But they're all saying something. And the people who are most interesting - the ones whose work has the most character - tend to be the ones who've chosen their tools with the same care they bring to every other creative decision. Not the most popular tools. Not the most powerful tools. The right tools for the kind of thinking they want to do.
The medium is still the message. It always was. We just forgot to keep paying attention.
