What’s Original?

By David Snyder

What is original? Certainly not this very piece that I’m writing. The subject matter has been wrangled with by scores of experts far better versed in the subject than me. Certainly not the writing, which I’ve admitted to being written in a voice and style not entirely my own. And if we zoom out, it seems as though none of it is. There’s a popular bit of trivia out there that submits that every possible sentence in the English language that can be said has been said. I’m not going to research the fact, but you get the point.

I’m thinking about originality because it can’t go unnoticed that so many are obsessed with innovation these days. Innovations are, after all, new ideas, new methods, new technologies. They are new, essentially. Scholars fret over the slowing of innovation and what that might mean for the impending doom of humanity. Billionaire twenty-somethings in Silicon Valley claim to have all of the innovations we ever need. Our government enacts entirely new divisions to tackle and promote innovation. But it seems to me that innovation is damn near impossible in the time in which we live. There are no new things. There are repackaged things, refurbished things, enhanced things, restyled things. But what is new?

Take, for example, the iPhone. When Mr Jobs showed the world the thing back in ’07, it was presented as a beacon of innovation and engineering excellence. The latter is assuredly true. The iPhone was and remains a thing of beauty, a real testament to what we Sapiens are capable of. The entire world in our pockets. But was it innovative? Was it original? The phone’s most blockbuster feature, multi-touch, was being kicked around in the 1980s. The full-screen capability was done by Bill Gates and his poindexters years prior. Cellular technology wasn’t invented by Apple. None of what the iPhone brought to the world was truly new. Apple packaged everything generations of inventors had come up with into a brilliant little black and gray box, which nobody else had done before. But if each ingredient is unoriginal, does that mean the resulting product is unoriginal, too?

I bring all of this up because I think it’s important that we recognize that each new “innovation” that comes pouring out of the Valley won’t have reinvented the wheel, no, it will stand on all that has come before it. All of our art, our technology, our literature, it’s all come from a predecessor. Maybe it hasn’t be plagiarized or stolen with ill intent, but it all came from somewhere. And what’s more beautiful than looking at your phone and feeling a pang of realization that that phone is the culmination of all of our species’ progress? Even the sculptures of Michelangelo, the paintings of Da Vinci, the symphonies of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, the architecture of Lloyd Wright, the swing of a bat of the Bambino, the stallions of Ferrari, are products of the genius and ingenious that came before.

It’s comforting, in a way, knowing that all of human progress is on our side, helping us out and nudging us in the right direction. Could you imagine what we’d be up to without their help? I can’t even entertain the thought, mostly because I wouldn’t have this laptop.