The information we publish on the web pales in comparison to the totality of information inside our heads. Companies like Jelly and Quora have jumped on the opportunity to expose that knowledge in a people-powered search engine, but if we take a step back, there’s a more fundamental question to be answered: what about making tools that help us better harness the stuff of our own minds? Can we use technology to fundamentally think and express more powerfully, and not just to make our lives marginally more convenient (one pizza at a time)?

The rise of software and the web has opened up many more potential dimensions for idea conception and expression. Yet the narrow digital channels we have today — whether self-expiring video or 140 character snippets of text — barely scratch the surface of what’s possible. As far as pushing the limits of what web-connected software can do (for us), we’re still splashing about in the kiddie section of the pool.

This is not to deny the profound emotional significance in the act of experiencing the world through another person’s eyes, or in the value of realtime access to global events. But it would be comically absurd to replace high school literature and writing with training courses for how to express oneself on Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat — because we’d be foregoing opportunities to grow the depth of our thinking. Yet this sort of deprivation is exactly what happens when we only use software to think about and communicate simple things faster and further. In your pocket and on your desk sit devices already brimming with the latent potential for interactive, multidimensional idea expression, but we’ve instead turned them into buckets full of single-purpose, push-button appliances.

Rewind a few hundred years, and the hot technology of the day was the printing press. Like the Internet, it magnified information’s reach by leaps and bounds. But it did something more for humanity than spreading further our existing knowledge. It also enabled mass literacy, and as communication theorist Harold Innis — a colleague and forebear of Marshall McCluhan — put it:

The art of writing provided [humans] with a transpersonal memory. [Humans] were given an artificially extended and verifiable memory of objects and events not present to sight or recollection. Individuals applied their minds to symbols rather than things and went beyond the world of concrete experience into the world of conceptual relations created within an enlarged time and space universe . . . Writing enormously enhanced a capacity for abstract thinking . . .[Human] activities and powers were roughly extended in proportion to the increased use and perfection of written records.

In other words, the externalization of thought into written form allowed us, as content creators, to think more ambitiously, not just more conveniently. Alan Kay notes in his essay “The Real Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet”:

The press was first thought to be a less expensive automation of hand written documents, but by the 17th century its several special properties had gradually changed the way important ideas were thought about to the extent that most of the important ideas that followed had not even existed when the press was invented.

Even the more powerful tools in our daily use like word documents, spreadsheets, and slideshows are not truly platforms borne of the digital age, but are instead incremental evolutions of their analog peers: paper, accounting ledgers, and projector slides, respectively. And other, more specialized tools like AutoCAD or Photoshop elude mainstream adoption with their vocational specificity and steep barriers to learning. Just as the early years of film were essentially just theater performances in front of a still-sitting camera, so too are we merely recreating pre-digital forms of expression, albeit with enormous differences in speed and reach.

The key to our greater potential is in our roots: humans are innately skilled at creating and using tools. More so than what we eat, or how we dress, or maybe even the company we keep, we are what we create. What we need are better general-purpose software toolkits that delicately pair the highly versatile capabilities of technology with the equally dynamic capabilities of the human mind. Given a set of building blocks with transparent, easily learned, and predictable behavior, we’re able to assemble them in unique and clever ways to achieve results with emergent complexity (often to the astonishment of the kit’s creators). Any such kit of building blocks comes with a unique space of possibilities, and given an environment friendly to experimentation (i.e. when mistakes are painless, they’re no longer mistakes), we will explore its greater depths.

For an illustrative example, one might look to Hypercard. Precursing (and inspiring) the web, Hypercard enabled anyone to create richly interactive programs, ranging from best-selling games to business inventory management systems to the creative explorations of elementary school children.

Rather than seeing a false dichotomy between complexity and accessibility, Hypercard recognized that complexity is not a bad thing. A real guitar is more complex than Guitar Hero, but try telling Hendrix to trade in his Stratocaster, or Basquiat to draw exclusively via Etch A Sketch. When complexity is at your disposal as a means to express your desires, needs, emotions, and ideas, it is sophistication. And the best systems are designed to expose their complexity in easily-digestible layers like an onion and not a knot — they must be simple to start, but grow with you instead of imposing an artificial ceiling in the pursuit of simplicity.

It’s no accident that Hypercard was designed by one of the greatest such system designers — Bill Atkinson, who co-created the Macintosh GUI by iteratively crafting visual metaphors for each and every complex facet of computing. Many of these metaphors are so intuitive as to feel almost obvious in hindsight, but this is a reflection of the elegance, not inevitability, of their design. The result brought the personal computer experience out of the folds of hobbyists and hackers to the mainstream.

Sadly, Hypercard itself rests in a digital grave somewhere in Santa Clara. Despite enjoying an intensely passionate and wide-reaching fanbase, it suffered from bad timing — launching shortly after Steve Jobs’ 1985 forced departure and, under John Sculley’s reign, spun off into a confused subsidiary company where it slowly withered away during the decades before Jobs’ return. Under different circumstances, it might have thrived and become one of the most widely used and transformative pieces of software.

The lack of open-ended flexibility like that found in Hypercard is a major contributing factor to the app fatigue that has now undeniably beset us. It’s much easier for developers to create inflexible, single-purpose apps than a lego kit for individuals to shape around their idiosyncratic needs. Instead of solving this underlying meta-problem, we’ve been trying to compensate with more.