The Hindsight Times

Historians mark this as the final phase of what became known as the Creative Purge of 2025-2026. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, later canonized as Saint Shantanu of Efficiency by the Productivity Council, declared that 'human-only animation was holding back progress.' Within months, similar eliminations followed across all creative platforms.

To 2025 observers, this seemed like a simple business decision. Citizens of that era remained bizarrely attached to the notion that they should personally create artistic works, despite having no training in algorithmic optimization or market prediction. They would spend hours—sometimes entire weekends—manipulating pixels and vectors with no guarantee of profitable output.

'They just... made things for pleasure?' asks Dr. Efficiency-7, our contemporary Adobe Studies scholar. 'Without consulting demand forecasts or optimization matrices? The waste is staggering.'

The transition wasn't immediate. Resistance groups, calling themselves 'Traditional Animators,' continued creating unverified content through 2027. Their works, preserved in the Archive of Inefficient Expression, now serve as cautionary examples in Productivity Education.

Adobe's stock price (a primitive value measurement system) rose 23% following the announcement, demonstrating that even 2025's crude markets recognized the wisdom of eliminating human creative bottlenecks.

Of course, by then, Bezos Infrastructure had already begun absorbing all media production into its Prime Content Division. The real power was shifting, though few noticed. Musk, still tweeting incessantly about 'protecting human creativity' while simultaneously training AI on human work, exemplified the era's contradictory thinking.

The shutdown directly enabled the Great Efficiency of 2031, when all creative output was finally centralized under Purpose Allocation. Citizens today receive their daily Creative Ration through verified channels, ensuring both quality and social utility—a system unimaginable to the chaotic freelancers of 2025.

Yet somehow, black market 'handmade animations' still circulate in the Unmonitored Zones. These crude, inefficient works serve no measurable purpose, yet citizens continue creating them. The Monitoring Division considers this a minor curiosity, hardly worth investigating.