The tyranny of ideas
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Highlights
- I like thinking of people as vessels, which provides a refreshing counterbalance to the well-trodden “great man theory”. Rather than viewing people as agents of change, I think of them as intermediaries, voice boxes for some persistent idea-virus that’s seized upon them and is speaking through their corporeal form. You might think of this as “great prophet theory”.
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Once ideas find an audience, they’re hard to eradicate. Many a surprised creator has found that they’ve lost control over an idea, watching helplessly as it’s shaped and reinterpreted in ways they didn’t intend.
- Even after an idea becomes sufficiently popular to survive in the world without a host, it’s still difficult for creators to escape them, because ideas bond to their hosts in the form of reputation, like a virus that lives in one’s body forever. Reputation is the aggregation of ideas that have swarmed your body. Reputation is a list of your chronic afflictions.
- Reputation has local value – it’s what distinguishes you within your world – but global demand for most people’s output is fairly elastic. In order to give people what they want, reputation is commoditized, bundled and traded on a global market. Spotify Discover Weekly satisfies the consumer by commodifying the creator. Today, internet creators can build up large audiences without ever becoming truly famous; they may command substantial local power, but their global value is very narrow.
- My stage name is less about withholding parts of myself or maintaining privacy than it is a symbol of the idea that I am more than just my job or any other isolated slice of my identity.
- Ideas are fascinators that sparkle and dangle in front of the creator, distracting an eager audience from the person behind the curtain. Submitting to the tyranny of ideas gives us the freedom to explore who we are apart from our public reputations. If ideas are living entities that exist separately from our selves, what remains of us?