Just riffing here. I haven’t watched the video yet, but added it to my queue for later. Having been alive long enough, and working in a “creative” field for a silly chunk of that time, I have my own thoughts on the nature of creativity.
Creativity is in the recombination.
Ideally, we all have the same access to everything around us – excluding what we allow ourselves to be talked out of using, through copyright laws, ownership rules, or any blocks/limitations within us or our environment. eg. It’s hard to know what to do with a persimmon if you’ve never seen one before because they don’t grow where you are, unless you talk to someone with persimmon experience and learn from them. Sure, you can guess and work it out. But if someone else has done a lot of things with the persimmon and you don’t bother to seek them out, then you are simply reinventing the persimmon.
The key to creativity is how we choose to combine the things around us.
A person sitting in the mud sucking on a rock isn’t likely to end up with more than a wet rock and a muddy butt.
Someone else with similar rocks might realize they can start stacking them, and eventually they end up with a crude structure made out of stacked rocks.
Someone else might see the structure made out of stacked rocks and realize if they shove mud in the cracks it will improve stability and insulation.
And on, and on things improve in the nascent rock stacking/mud filling industry. Until someone lays claim to stacked rocks, and nobody else is allowed to stack rocks unless they pay tribute to that guy. Another guy claims he has the right to mud in cracks between rocks. It was his idea first, try to prove it wasn’t. It’s only fair that you pay him if you want to use mud like that.
So everyone left looks around and realizes, hey, instead of dealing with these guys, if we shape the mud into blocks and cook it, it’ll get really hard and we can use that instead. Seriously, fuck those rock and mud filling guys.
And then some other guy lays claim to cooked mud, because he can recognize a good idea when he sees it. Dibs!
Assuming everyone left doesn’t decide enough is enough of this bullshit, and hang those three guys as a lesson in greed versus the common good to anyone thinking of pulling that shit again – freeing everything once again from ownership – capitalism gets a foothold.
