Originality exists, it just doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
I remember writing about this challenge of blank slate beginnings a few years ago when two colleagues got embroiled in an argument about originality.
📑 Terra Nullius
Being a successful Lockean Titan is like being the successful staph bacterium that manages to find its way into a break in its host’s skin and spawn an infection: yes, you had all the characteristics necessary to go viral (ahem), but you also got lucky by being in the right place at the right time, and if you hadn’t been there, someone else would have been.
Cory Doctorow explains that ideas are like germs that often involve a little luck to come into fruition.