I don't think I can succinctly capture in a few lines how meaningful and essential this entire essay is right now. The narrative pushed upon us with AI has been "ease, convenience" - while this may be beneficial in very specific scenarios (I'm literally thinking medical), to have this replace the artistry of creating is abhorrent. You're so absolutely right, the magic is in human effort.
The key to it, I feel, is the difference between those who actually love creating, and those who love having a creation. Even if you can’t monetize it (but much more so when you CAN monetize it), there is the sort of person who is in love with the process of creation, with the person you become through the multiple attempts and failures and experiments and scrapping those experiments just to have another idea and then find that also doesn’t really work but through some slow and infinitely torturously labored iteration something starts to take shape, something that might have little to do with what you originally imagined but it aligns with your chakras somehow and you become glad it exists and you have brought it into being not so much for the thing itself as for its entire process of becoming, and what it did to you.
And then you have the person who just wants that perfect glossy final product and wants no part of the mess - whether to profit from, or to show off with, or whatever. To use as a badge of success of some sort, to possess. Those two drivers are profoundly different - one thinks ‘I love this’ and the other ‘people will love this’.
This second sort sees nothing wrong with plagiarism in any guise, the first doesn’t get the point of plagiarising.
Every word of this essay is absolutely gorgeous, thank you for this. I grieve everything that is lost to the pursuit of efficiency, the rejection of friction
The Akira slide (I'm waiting for this to be the name of a new viral Tiktok dance set to "slowed" samples of vaporwave music, just you wait!) feels so detached from its source. I've noticed that when it makes its inevitable appearance in a random shonen/seinen anime, video game, film, etc. I've regrettably stopped connecting it to Akira, despite my familiarity to the source material.
!! so interesting, yes the akira slide has sort of taken on a life of its own but in doing so it is not "new" but a sort of zombified action that makes the source more blurry.
There's an interesting parallel (kinda, sorta, not really, but maybe) to be drawn here between the Akira slide and the neologisitic Big Chungus meme. The origination of the meme is from a single frame in a Merrie Melody short that aired in 1941 called Wabbit Twouble.
A hapless, fat Elmer Fudd is tormented by Bugs while on summer vacation in a national park (his place within the Looney Tunes ensemble had yet to solidify at this point. Bob Klampett and Tex Avery originally conceived him as a dimwitted, overweight tourist until they eventually settled on Elmer being a slimmer, irritable hunter which we now see today). In an attempt to keep Bugs underground, Elmer nails a wooden door over the entrance to his den, looks directly at the camera and confidently says "that'll hold 'em."
Bugs Bunny manages to open the door, step through, and suddenly alter his appearance to mirror that of fat Elmer as he chides his efforts and the internet does what it always does with stills taken from animated films...
With all that context out of the way (and apologies if this is already known to you), I've seen enough folks who, similarly to your brother in regard to the Akira slide, ably point out Big Chungus without knowing its Bugs Bunny, let alone the actual source material. In a bizarre flex, Warner Bros. took notice and went out of their way to copyright the meme rather than allow it to exist as its own entity outside their influence. They've inserted Big Chungus into commercials, films, and advertisements all while waylaying anyone foolish enough to share the image with an army of lawyers. It feels on brand for a multi-billion dollar corporation to witness an organically nurtured trend, capture it, and viciously hoard it for profit. All of this effort for a single image rather than dedicate resources to bankrolling a studio of animators to create something new or even preserve the art from which their replication emerged.
Can't let the peasants have their fun when there's nominal profit to be made.
I don't think I can succinctly capture in a few lines how meaningful and essential this entire essay is right now. The narrative pushed upon us with AI has been "ease, convenience" - while this may be beneficial in very specific scenarios (I'm literally thinking medical), to have this replace the artistry of creating is abhorrent. You're so absolutely right, the magic is in human effort.
urgh, thank you so much for reading.... you absolutely get it.
As always, your command of language gets me so hype and inspired. You feed my hope in humanity, Inigo. Thank you ❤️🔥
thank you, as always, for taking such care with my work!! 🤎
i’m so old school, even social media doesn’t feel like “real interaction” to me tbh…. Love how you brought it back to artists and people at the end.
The key to it, I feel, is the difference between those who actually love creating, and those who love having a creation. Even if you can’t monetize it (but much more so when you CAN monetize it), there is the sort of person who is in love with the process of creation, with the person you become through the multiple attempts and failures and experiments and scrapping those experiments just to have another idea and then find that also doesn’t really work but through some slow and infinitely torturously labored iteration something starts to take shape, something that might have little to do with what you originally imagined but it aligns with your chakras somehow and you become glad it exists and you have brought it into being not so much for the thing itself as for its entire process of becoming, and what it did to you.
And then you have the person who just wants that perfect glossy final product and wants no part of the mess - whether to profit from, or to show off with, or whatever. To use as a badge of success of some sort, to possess. Those two drivers are profoundly different - one thinks ‘I love this’ and the other ‘people will love this’.
This second sort sees nothing wrong with plagiarism in any guise, the first doesn’t get the point of plagiarising.
Every word of this essay is absolutely gorgeous, thank you for this. I grieve everything that is lost to the pursuit of efficiency, the rejection of friction
Inigo, this is amazing—one of your best.
Thank you, my darling!! 🖤
the akira bit reminds me of the whole ‘xerox of a xerox’ conundrum in bojack horseman
omfg, i completely forgot about that—that’s exactly it!!
As always, Inigo, great stuff.
The Akira slide (I'm waiting for this to be the name of a new viral Tiktok dance set to "slowed" samples of vaporwave music, just you wait!) feels so detached from its source. I've noticed that when it makes its inevitable appearance in a random shonen/seinen anime, video game, film, etc. I've regrettably stopped connecting it to Akira, despite my familiarity to the source material.
!! so interesting, yes the akira slide has sort of taken on a life of its own but in doing so it is not "new" but a sort of zombified action that makes the source more blurry.
There's an interesting parallel (kinda, sorta, not really, but maybe) to be drawn here between the Akira slide and the neologisitic Big Chungus meme. The origination of the meme is from a single frame in a Merrie Melody short that aired in 1941 called Wabbit Twouble.
A hapless, fat Elmer Fudd is tormented by Bugs while on summer vacation in a national park (his place within the Looney Tunes ensemble had yet to solidify at this point. Bob Klampett and Tex Avery originally conceived him as a dimwitted, overweight tourist until they eventually settled on Elmer being a slimmer, irritable hunter which we now see today). In an attempt to keep Bugs underground, Elmer nails a wooden door over the entrance to his den, looks directly at the camera and confidently says "that'll hold 'em."
Bugs Bunny manages to open the door, step through, and suddenly alter his appearance to mirror that of fat Elmer as he chides his efforts and the internet does what it always does with stills taken from animated films...
With all that context out of the way (and apologies if this is already known to you), I've seen enough folks who, similarly to your brother in regard to the Akira slide, ably point out Big Chungus without knowing its Bugs Bunny, let alone the actual source material. In a bizarre flex, Warner Bros. took notice and went out of their way to copyright the meme rather than allow it to exist as its own entity outside their influence. They've inserted Big Chungus into commercials, films, and advertisements all while waylaying anyone foolish enough to share the image with an army of lawyers. It feels on brand for a multi-billion dollar corporation to witness an organically nurtured trend, capture it, and viciously hoard it for profit. All of this effort for a single image rather than dedicate resources to bankrolling a studio of animators to create something new or even preserve the art from which their replication emerged.
Can't let the peasants have their fun when there's nominal profit to be made.
The akira slide and Kanye examples are soooo spot on- I love how you balance literature with pop culture examples!!