originality

We're mimetic creatures. We learn by copying others.

Memes spread - we see something, we agree with it, we like it, we share it.

Recently, many of us have had little else to do but to be online, to see things and to share things. we share some things because we like them and some things because we're outraged by them. There's plenty of outrage to go around right now.

Copying is a big part of creativity. Something I realised a while ago is that everything has been said. The only thing left to do is to add your twist. While Ezra Pound proclaimed 'make it new' at the beginning of the 20th century, Virgil Abloh talks about taking something that exists and changing it by 3%. Before perhaps you could make something totally new.

Now, whether you like it or not, you're in a dialogue with what came before. You can call Abloh's appropriation ripping off or you can see it as being in a dialogue with the past and acknowledging your references. You will be influenced by something and here's a way you can make them explicit.

Anyway, there's a lot of sharing and posting going on now. While some things should elicit silence, others demand that people speak. The thing is though that speaking requires listening and saying something should be either backed by knowledge and education or be a genuine appeal for learning. How helpful is just sharing something? Where's your 3%? Where's your action? How will you take something that exists and give it your twist?

Without actual change, without actual engagement and without actual commitment beyond a social media feed, words are merely 'sound and fury - signifying nothing'.

I felt like sharing was inappropriate for me today. But when I spoke to some friends and listened to what they had to say, I changed my mind. The problem with the sharing was mine. But now I’ve shared, that’s not it. I’ll continue to educate myself and if I can, I’ll continue to have those conversations. As we said,

there’s actual wonderful identity mixed with a sort of low level, constantly humming trauma. To not be able to discuss one because of the other is sad.