In my previous life as a smart person, I learned in calculus that a derivative is a measure of how a function changes as its input changes. A derivative of a derivative is then called a higher-order derivative. In real-world applications, one can derive that our lives can now be classified as higher-order derivatives, or more accurately, our ideas.
The year is 2010. The wheel – widely-recognized as the greatest invention of all-time – was invented, depending on which geek you ask, around 8000 B.C. That means about 10,000 years has passed and still no one has re-invented it yet. Why not? Because you can’t. Re-inventing simply means you are taking someone else’s idea or creation, and modifying – at times improving – it to look like something new. Except it’s not new. It’s old. That, my loyal reader, is in a nutshell, the age we’re living in. It was inevitable. With 10,000 years worth of ideas and innovations preceding us – how can we be expected to come up with anything new? We’ve run out of new ideas but it’s not our fault; we are simply victims of time and progress.
Everything now is a derivative of a derivative. The word derivative itself is a derivative of a derivative, derived from the latin derivare derived from the words de and rivus combining to mean “downstream.” And this is exactly what is happening at this point in our civilization – picking up hand-me-downs downstream, watered down, as it were. If you cut a swath through our society today, you would see evidence of this across the entire cross-section.
The well of movie ideas has dried out. Neither a glistening stone nor a drop of dew left. Witness the proliferation of sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, remasters, rehashes, re-adaptations of TV shows, comics, books, cartoons, etc. I’m not saying this is necessarily all bad – I’m really glad they rebooted the Batman franchise, for example – but there’s only so much old shit, no matter how much you stir-fry it, that we can take. Vampires? Done to death. Zombies? Dead and done. Werewolves? Done like dinner. The highest grossing film of all-time? Avatar was just a mish-mash of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Braveheart, Last of the Mohicans, the Smurfs, and Jaws 3-D. My favourite movie this year, Inception, while ingenious, also made use of ideas previously touched on in Existenz, the Matrix, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 8 ½, Abre Los Ojos (or its better known but crappier Hollywood remake, Vanilla Sky), A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc… Some critics called it: “James Bond meets the Matrix,” which I thought was ridiculous, but goes to show that it is impossible these days not to reduce something new to something previous. This is especially true in books, where on the back cover you can read the usual critical hyperbole proclaiming, “A brave new original writer has arrived!” followed closely by, “combines elements of Fight Club with Silence of the Lambs, with a Bukowski cragginess and Hornby sweetness.” WTF?
We can apply this to music as well. “I just heard this great new band, they sound like a cross between so-and-so and so-and-so.” Isn’t this how you describe it to your friends? How about TV shows? Never that original to begin with, they ran out of ideas long ago, with reality shows about reality shows the best idea they can come up with.
The list goes on:
Comic books – ceased to be interesting since all the cool superpowers have already been spoken for. What you’re left with now are turds like Hindsight Lad and Arm Fall Off Boy.
Sports – All the sports worth playing are already being played. Exhibit A: Now you have this as a sport.
Food and beverages – everything that we can eat and drink has been eaten and drunk. Every flavour and taste bud identified. Making umpteenth flavours of vodka doesn’t count. Though I don’t know about you, but a pure refreshing bacon vodka soda sounds pretty good right about now.
Fashion – what’s old is new and old and new again. Retro means we’ve run out of ideas.
Sex – all positions have been done. All sins no longer original. All fetishes explored by Savage Love.
Art – still trying, but mostly old ideas expressed in different forms.
Inventions – this is a good one. You could argue that this is the last bastion of innovation and ingenuity, carrying with it the last vestiges of hope, but you’d be wrong. The thing is, all those harebrained ideas have already been thought of. It only remains for the technology to catch up. So it’s not about the realization of an idea, but the idea itself. Teleportation, for example, while not yet functionally realized, has existed as an idea for decades. After the invention of cars, boats, planes, the next logical step in transport would have been instantaneous travel. Another one of my favourite concepts, time-travel – which I am still stubbornly anticipating – has existed as an idea long before Doc Brown fell off his toilet.
So where does this leave us? Downstream. Higher-order derivatives. It’s not so bad really. While there’s nothing new for us to contribute, it has always been infinitely easier to take an idea that’s already there and improve upon it. And take the credit. Or if it fails, you have the benefit of saying it wasn’t your idea. Hence, the age of creating something new is over. Now comes the age of improving what’s already there. Impossible is nothing? Maybe. Impossible to come up with a new ad campaign after six years? Yup. New is dead. Behold! I give you the new and improved. Thus spoke Tom Day.
– Tom Day
