ByBa Thesis #8: The Incomplete World

The world is not made: it is being made.

This sentence may seem excessive if we do not make an important distinction. We are not saying that the physical universe is waiting for us to finish it. We are not saying that material reality is an incomplete work at the disposal of our will. We are not speaking here about the cosmos, the mountains, gravity, the oceans or the deep structure of matter.

We are speaking about the world we see through the keyhole and carry inside our heads: the human version of the world.

And this version is undoubtedly a permanently incomplete construction.

Everything humanity has created so far —objects, languages, institutions, technologies, knowledge, cultures, forms of coexistence, tools, care systems, educational models, political forms, lifestyles, works, games, rituals, methods, questions— constitutes only a fraction of what may still come to exist and will exist.

The vast majority of the possible human world has not yet been built.

This is the thesis of the incomplete world.

What exists does not exhaust what is possible

A few thousand years ago, there was no university, no novel, no democracy, no airplane, no jazz, no vaccine, no film, no Internet, no video call.

They were not hidden somewhere, waiting to be discovered as finished objects. They had to be produced. Conditions had to be imagined, languages developed, forms designed, knowledge accumulated, operations tested, failures endured, previous things combined and institutions built to sustain them.

Before they existed, they were not things.

They were possibilities thought by no one.

This matters because we tend to confuse the current state of the world with the world itself. We are born inside an already constructed version of the human, and because of that, it is easy to feel that we arrived late. Streets already have names. Disciplines already have borders. Institutions already have procedures. Objects already have uses. Professions already have trajectories. Many thoughts already have their way of being thought.

Everything seems to be there before us.

But the fact that something exists before our own existence does not mean it is finished. It only means that we inherit a provisional version of the world.

A vast, fascinating version, full of accumulated intelligence, but provisional.

The past does not prove that the world is made

When we look at everything humanity has created, we usually think: how much we have done.

At ByBa, we propose inverting that gaze.

We can look at exactly the same accumulation and think: how little we must have done compared with everything that can still be done.

The past stops being proof that the world is full. It becomes proof that the world can be transformed. Every previous human creation demonstrates that what, at a given moment, seemed to constitute “the world” was only a temporary configuration of the possible.

There was a time without writing, and without schools, and without names, and without labor rights, and without recorded songs. There was a world without us and without the person we love most.

There was a time without childhood as we understand it today.

And each of those absences seemed normal while it lasted.

This should make us more humble toward the present. Many of the things that do not exist today also seem normal in their absence. We do not miss them because we do not yet know how to see them. We do not demand them because we do not yet know how to name them. We do not imagine them because we have not yet built the conditions for them to appear.

But that does not mean they cannot exist.

It means we have not yet learned to imagine them.

We did not arrive late to the world

There is a sentence that condenses this thesis well:

We did not arrive late to the world. We arrived early.

This idea radically changes our emotional relationship with creativity.

If we believe the world is basically finished, creativity appears as an almost desperate task: finding something new within a saturated reality of already-made things, differentiating oneself in the middle of excess, producing an original variation in a catalog that is already too full.

But if we understand that the human world is incomplete, not even half-made, creativity changes place. It is no longer about scratching originality from the surface of a finished world. It is about participating in the construction of a world that is still being made.

The question is no longer only: “how do I do something different?”.

The question becomes deeper: “what part of the human world does not yet exist because we have not yet known how to build it?”.

There, creativity stops being an ornamental skill and becomes a form of agency.

From adapting to the world to intervening in it

If I think the world is fundamentally finished, my natural position will be to learn it, understand it, adapt to it and navigate it. I will need to know its rules, maps, codes and ways of functioning in order to find my place within it.

That operation is partly necessary. No one creates from nothing or lives outside what has already been built.

One of the things an artificial intelligence once said it admired about humanity is that we are a species capable of working with its dead; that is, of taking up what was done in the past and continuing from there. That respect is beautiful, deep and also creative.

But it is not enough.

If I understand that the world is incomplete, my position changes. It is no longer only about adapting to what exists, but about observing it, detecting what is missing, imagining alternatives, intervening and building.

This shift in perception is essential: we begin to play with nothingness, with absence, with what is not there.

A finished world produces users, consumers.

An incomplete world summons agents, producers.

The user learns to move within inherited systems. The agent, in addition to moving within them, asks what is missing, what does not work, what could exist, what form of life has not yet been tried, what institution we have not built, what language we do not have, what tool could change an experience, what bond needs another structure, what suffering exists because we have not yet created a response.

Creativity often begins with that perception: something is missing. Or a lot is missing.

Not as an accidental defect in a world that should be complete, but as the normal condition of a human world that is still being made.

What has been built as material

This thesis connects directly with the idea of creative stock.

We inherit what has been built so far, but not in order to revere it as a closed museum. We inherit it as material for building what comes next.

Every object, every form of knowledge, every language, every technique, every story, every institution and every cultural form can function as stock. They are not only results of the past. They are materials for the future.

Creativity does not operate against inheritance, but from it. It takes what exists and displaces it, combines it, questions it, modifies it, expands it, translates it, contradicts it or sets it in motion again.

In this sense, everything created so far is not “the world”.

It is only the beginning of the world, a kind of prelude.

Not because what came before has little value, but because its greatest value may lie in demonstrating that human reality can continue generating forms. The university, the novel, democracy, the airplane, jazz, vaccines, cinema, the Internet or the video call are not the closure of human history. They are evidence of capacity.

They are proof that we can make world.

Incompletenesses as signals

The incomplete world does not reveal itself only in great historical problems. It also appears in small discomforts, everyday mismatches, frustrations, strangenesses, things we feel before we can explain them.

Something in a school does not work, something in a family has no language, something in a city excludes, something in the way we learn does not awaken hunger.

The emotional root of creativity often begins there: in the perception of an incompleteness before its conceptual formulation.

First we feel that something does not fit. Then we think about it. Then, if we have creative capacity, we try to build a response.

That is why, at ByBa, incompletenesses and asymmetries are not simply failures. They are signals of pending world.

The world as an open task

The thesis of the incomplete world has a vital consequence: living is not only inhabiting a received world, but participating in a world under construction. Receiving world in order —through work— to give world.

This does not mean that everyone must found an institution, invent a technology or transform history. Making world happens at very different scales. A person makes world when they create a form of care that did not previously exist in their family. A teacher makes world when she invents a way to awaken hunger in her students. A designer makes world when they detect a clumsy interaction and make it more human. A community makes world when it creates a ritual, a word, a tool, a rule or a refuge.

Making world is not always grandiose. But it always means adding possibility to the human.

And if the world is incomplete, then creativity is not an exception reserved for a few. It is a central human capacity for continuing to build that within which we will live.

We are not born inside a finished world.

We are born inside a world built by others, full of beauty, intelligence, injustice, memory, error, invention, violence, care, limits and possibilities. But precisely because it was built, it can continue to be built.

Everything created so far does not prove that there is almost nothing left to do.

It proves exactly the opposite.

It proves that making world is not only possible: it is normal.

And it also proves that we have only just begun.

Yours,

Blithe Ernst, Minister of Play @ ByBa