Why Is Nothing Original Anymore?

some musings on what’s causing the originality crisis

Every category of modern life has a pioneer. For philosophy one could argue it’s Plato and Aristotle. For comedy it’s Charlie Chaplin. For flight it’s the Wright Brothers. The first person to do something, to explore, or set out into new territory, sets the boundaries — establishes the parameters by which most others follow. For modern fantasy, look no further than Tolkien and Lewis. They are seared across the collective genre so much that one can certainly change the names, but the genre is dominated by orcs, elves, trolls, and mythical quests.

That’s not a complaint. A pioneer’s job is to hand the rest of us a foundation strong enough to build on. The question is what we do with it — whether we keep building, or just keep copying.

Growing up in the late-90s, early 2000s, I was exposed to a sort of hyper-culture. The digital world was picking up. Blockbuster was in its heyday. Video games, certainly around before then, were starting — thanks in large part to GoldenEye 007 — to push the boundaries of what constituted gameplay.

Movies during this time were likewise intriguing. Blockbuster hits like Jurassic Park (based in part on the Michael Crichton novel), The Patriot, Dances with Wolves, Legends of the Fall, and Saving Private Ryan captivated audiences and introduced them to a fusion of newer video capabilities, better sound, and clearer images. These were original stories, or original enough adaptations, told by people willing to take a swing in the box office.

But over time, things became more and more derivative. Instead of taking chances, studios took safer bets: remakes, reboots, the fifth sequel to a franchise that ran out of ideas around the third. As society grew more complex, it also stifled the ability to create apart from what was already created. The pioneers had done their job, maybe a little too well. Their foundations calcified into formulas, and the formulas became the whole industry as we see it today.

Objective Culture

Sociologist Georg Simmel dissected this issue in modern life. He found there were two aspects of culture: objective culture — human creation through art, philosophy, science, and more — and subjective culture: the ability of humans to process and take in culture. As human creation expands, the ability of a society to digest the culture accumulated up to that point grows more and more difficult. Any individual is truly unable to absorb the amount of objective culture.

This explains why pioneers — like Tolkien — are able to set the standard for their field (Tolkien was of course brilliant). He didn’t have to consume centuries of fantasy like a modern fantasy author has to today. This complexity compounds over time, and given the rise of the internet and the ability to acquire mass amounts of information, it becomes all the more challenging to ever absorb enough.

Risk Aversion and Institutional Caution

There is a notion in business known as the “founder’s principle.” With this principle, the founders of an organization set out to take over an area of business — to make a name for themselves. So, like all the tech startup stories, they open up a garage and start competing. They go door-to-door and drum up business. Like the Michael Scott Paper Company, they have to create a clientele from nothing — and this is not for the faint of heart. It takes drivenness, motivation, and a keen awareness of what you are about. But over time, as business expands, many businesses lose their “founder’s principle.” They lose the drive that made them what they are and fade instead to low-risk decisions. They hedge their bets and stop pushing originality and innovation, and instead adopt a posture of keeping the status quo.

Applying this theory to society is helpful and explains a bit of what is going on. As several prominent businesses dominate the market, they seek to avert risk. This happens with Hollywood as well — it is far more risky to try an entirely new movie genre than it is to try to do what is already working. While the audience may eventually grow bored, the financial backers mitigate risk.

We live in a culture of risk aversion, because we can. In the early days of America, life did not allow for such aversion. Sickness, starvation, death by violence — all of these were possibilities. There was an awareness that to better life, one may need to sacrifice. It is why we see in 1776 that Americans banded together, risking their lives to start out for a better future.

Status Anxiety and the Rise of Public Man

As American society expanded and material wealth blossomed, capitalism, while certainly better than the alternatives, became unfettered and gave way to a drive for cultural capital. Creative output, far removed from the motivation for the betterment of society, became a way to earn social points as an individual. The 20th century saw the rise of the public man. This public man, as Richard Sennett has helpfully diagnosed (in his book The Fall of Public Man), became an actor on the stage of public opinion and gaze. Public spaces became shows to demonstrate originality, not for the betterment of society, but for the promotion of the self. Public culture became a theatre, and with each act, the actors ceased to improvise and instead played on — in a mimetic fashion — the reaction of the crowd. This mimesis obfuscated the ability to be original and instead created a cycle of theatre — trying to appease the eyes of the onlookers.

Within this play framework, there was a status achieved. The more the crowd laughed at the public man, the more he did what they laughed at, and the less he cared to do things that may not cause laughter — to stay within the bounds of what the crowd wants. Social media only heightens this — trends are merely public man acting a part on the stage of society. But the moment public man has a misstep, he loses the status he gained. His fall is often catastrophic. Richard Nixon, the president with one of the most lopsided election victories of all time, is a great example of this. His fall from status was so vast that fifty years later we are still feeling the effects. Nixon became an example of public failure. Public opinion, and the desire for status, drove him to do something, and the result was humiliation.

Status anxiety pushes the masses to stay within the confines of what the spectacle of society desires. If people post videos of themselves after a break-up, crying and sharing their feelings with the world, then as others follow it becomes the norm.

Fragmentation and the Collapse of a Shared Canon

Mass media certainly pushed public man to perform more than ever before, but it also disintegrated any form of shared canon or cultural consensus. Take film for instance. When film was starting out, there were a few films that were released. Humphrey Bogart, though not in the earliest days of film, was in nearly every hit film during the 1940s. Casablanca in 1942 became a shared canon for culture. The themes it expressed left the theatre with the viewers who all shared in it. “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” The line was fantastic and put a capstone on the film. The film demonstrates in the end that despite loss and tragedy, new friendships and bonds can be formed. And those around the country who saw it came away with the shared narrative. Today, we hop on social media after a film and find all sorts of niche takes and subcultural commentary.

Flash forward to the modern film age and not only is media fragmented, but the themes are more complex. To start, we all watch what we want to watch in our homes. There is an infinite selection. Genres upon sub-genres dominate. Cultural reference points became less and less shared. Big hits certainly carry this effect, but not as they used to. The shared canon that could serve as a springboard for cultural trends and views became harder and harder to achieve amidst the complexity of modern art.

Institutionalization of Creativity

Pierre Bourdieu, in analyzing modern culture, understood that social life is organized around several, often interconnected fields. Each field has its own standards, rules, hierarchies, and even culture. So within the academic field there are certain rules, as well as unique credentials and status markers. Likewise in the political field, there are political parties, slogans, and positions. A full social hierarchy. Each field has a specific social capital and its own rules. More and more people are pressed into fields, and these fields colonize production. A person within the academic field, for instance, writes and thinks in a way that promotes his or her self within that field. They are not writing to grow within the political field, as it has different qualifications and standards.

For Bourdieu, as each field matures, it further perpetuates itself by rewarding those within it — they are rewarded for following the rules, guidelines, and standards, and not breaking them. The earliest pioneers in each field worked outside of the institutions that came after them, and so they were, in some respects, free to think outside of their funnel.

The Algorithm Killed Originality

The problem with the algorithm is both its benefit and its vice. What makes it unique is the very thing that kills it. Social media designers sought a way to keep a person locked into the content space. To keep wanting more and more until they look up and hours have passed. In other words, they were seeking a way to parasitically consume the time of the consumer. And they found it. A curated feed of videos that match other videos a user watches.

This curated list ensured that the viewer was seeing what they already were looking for, not what they least expected. In the days before the internet or even the digital world, a person would have to go down to the library, pull out the card catalogue, and select a topic. They’d then have to go to the book they wanted, pull it out, and read. And as they read, they certainly were engaging with a distinct topic, but each page was not algorithmic — it was entering into a discussion that could bring anything.

As the reader processed the information, their mind would (free of “watch this next” prompts) make syntopical connections. Connections with other concepts or words, or even cultural topics. The brain in this space was able to connect on its own and wasn’t forced to connect by the algorithm. But as the algorithm feeds us what we want, the brain becomes lazy, for lack of a better term. We relax and process the videos we are fed instead of proactively making connections.

So Why Are We Unoriginal?

This has been somewhat of a long rant, but we are unoriginal not because we are incapable of being original — no. Instead it is because we’ve been conditioned to be derivative. Our fields lock us into set ideas of what “thinking” looks like. The algorithm feeds us processed content which lulls our originality faculties to sleep, where they lay collecting dust. We stay in line with institutional order out of fear that we will lose status if we step beyond the status quo. And public man, unaware that he is putting on a show for the audience, is incapable of stopping and asking “what does it mean to be uniquely me?” Instead he reacts to what the audience is looking for.

I’m certainly not opposed to a remake. What I am opposed to is our inability to expand beyond the limits of social decay. To step where few are stepping. We fear the power of public opinion more than we desire the satisfaction of exploration.