Creativity is the new moat. That is the argument the writer makes, looking back at the era of Flash to explain why inventing new things matters more than ever for businesses today.
The writer, who worked at a small Manhattan creative agency called Mutant Media in 2006, built websites, motion graphics, print design, and something called microsites. Those microsites often involved a link labeled “Launch Experience >>>” or “Enter Flash Site,” which opened a fixed 640×480 popup window running a Flash app.
The apps were eye-catching but limited. One project involved a Bacardi game where users mixed Mojitos by dragging and dropping ingredients, with a voice actor saying lines like “Nice” and “It’s pronounced mo-hee-to.” The writer admits the joke falls flat without a screenshot.
The Flash Boom
Flash enabled a creative boom, the writer argues. In 1996, FutureSplash became Macromedia Flash. By 2006, Flash Player was installed on almost 98% of web-connected PCs. ActionScript 3 arrived with Flash Player 9.
Newgrounds created its Flash Portal in 2000. PrayStation, an experimental net art site, launched the same year. The Favourite Website Awards (FWA) started specifically to recognize innovative Flash websites. PrayStation won the Prix Ars Electronica in 2001. Les Manovich wrote Generation Flash in 2002. Wired covered a working Flash simulation of a Mac System 7 machine in 2004. Flash became the standard delivery mechanism for web video by 2008.
Flash was officially discontinued in 2020. Today, the Flashpoint archive catalogs 157,509 Flash works. The writer hopes someone has backed up the data from Born Magazine, a site pairing writers and artists with designers and programmers.
The Case for Creative Failure
Flash objectively sucked, the writer concedes. It had accessibility problems. Unskippable intro animations. A broken browser back button. Everyone hated it even while using it everywhere.
But the tool enabled experimentation. Synthesizers becoming cheaper and more portable in the late 70s led to new genres like New Wave and Synthpop. Giving the world a new way to make animations, interactive graphics, and clickable elements produced a generation of designers, artists, and ordinary people experimenting with new ideas.
People invented autoplayed music, animated menus, loading screens as a creative medium, product configurators, and a million other things JavaScript could not do at the time. Much of it sucked. But the writer argues you do not get new good ideas without sifting through piles of bad ones.
The Boring Present
Today’s web is standardized, functional, accessible, and fast-loading. But it is also boring, the writer argues. A visit to nike.com shows a little carousel, quick page loads, and fine design.
AI-designed sites are now common. LLMs can generate a website in minutes, producing something technically fine and ordinary. These systems are trained on the vast internet of banality, so their output naturally reflects that.
An April 2026 study found that by mid-2025, around 35% of newly published websites were AI-generated.
| Era | Tool | What Happened |
|---|---|---|
| Flash era | Macromedia Flash | Creative explosion, lots of bad ideas, some good ones |
| Modern web | LLMs | Standardized, accessible, boring |
Creativity is the new moat because AI makes it fast and easy to copy what already exists. The writer’s advice is simple: experimentation is how we discover interesting, valuable, worthwhile things that didn’t exist until some kid learned how to use Flash.
Source: inventbuild.studio