When I played Spyro as a child, its world was complete, without traces of anything, no history. No background. A world with no influences, music which was never played by anyone, a beautiful summer forest, puzzles and gems and orbs. Now, I start to think about how the soundtrack is structured and that perfect being of Spyro starts to fracture. So I stop thinking because it is not worth the value lost to question the most deep art experiences.

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Isn’t there something disingenuous about a philosopher searching for arguments, as such, to prove a point? Surely they should be just looking closer at the way things work? But pragmatically a good, graspable argument is often hard to find.

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Copyright is super important to capitalism as an idea, because of the struggle over wages. The idea has to be important, because that is all that the capitalist brings to the process, apart from a modicum of sweat. Then this fight over the driving instinct spreads like a virus into all elements of culture. The idea becomes the boss in the head, which is responsible for transforming ideas into original value.

Within the logical space of cultural appropriation the idea becomes important as the representative of nationality, or of tribe, not of humanity. The cultural leader in the head. But of course, in the ideal space of capital, where an idea comes from has little importance, so long as the copyright is held by the business. Then the origin of an idea only matters, or not, to the advertiser.

Then again, the care for originality is also a form of the care for truth – I care, where did this movement start? This morally happens alongside the distribution of, or care over, economic rewards for an idea. But in truth, originality is combinatory. There is only one origin, and that is the world itself. So origin should be disavowed as being important, since to say ‘I am the origin’ is to make too strong a claim. Standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that.

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A national style is an enforced set of references looked at in isolation. But look closer and you see that they all refer beyond the ‘nation’. The isolation is performatively enforced by curriculums.

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There is a certain sort of ‘high brow’ attitude which is basically a pile of references on which someone plants a flag, not to say this is what is good, but to say ‘this is what I like, and it is liked by other great people.’

So much of art criticism, defence of works and delineation of the great is about ‘is it okay for me, being who I am, who I want to be, enjoy this thing which those unlike me enjoy?’ is it okay to like this? Even though people say it isn’t for my class, my sort, to enjoy?

Just enjoy whatever, it doesn’t matter.

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The idea that globalisation was just some kind of benign force affecting the world economy, requiring developed economies to deregulate, and regress the welfare state, is a load of crap. It was always about a race to the bottom, businesses trying to make more money by exporting the working class abroad, and bypassing a century or more’s worth of reinforced employee rights, then keeping those foreign working classes depressed via sympathetic state actors, through both lent force of arms and economic disincentives, and incentives to their ruling classes. The idea that this particular arrangement somehow benefits the world is a joke. But this left the parties of labour, and entire national economies, in a kind of quandary they are only just starting to leave, as slowly the economies where the cheap work has been done have begun to strengthen, due to the mass influx of foreign investment, and are beginning to demand more of themselves, and of their business partners, and at the same time, the crash austerity inflicted on us has made us more ‘competitive’. This is a tragedy. At least, this is how I understand it.

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The idea that gentrification is the fault of the people moving into areas is remarkably short sighted. Rather, it’s the fault of greedy landlords and estate agents in other areas, of vacant housing and property asset behaviour, and of the lack of investment in poorer areas to begin with.

Being angry with the new residents is like being angry at the river for flooding an area, ignoring the years of deforestation, and agricultural and landscape engineering that caused the flood.

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Impostor syndrome in authorship is internalising the view present in criticism (parental, societal, literature) that only people who are somehow special write – an elite myth ‘elu’. But this is historically and truthfully a load of crap. At the beginning of the author’s life there is only the page, the blank screen, and contemporaries of all kinds to impress, or not. And what impresses, is not monolithic, but composed of nebulae. All there is, is work.