Ship (Trunk) of Theseus

 

Yesterday on my walk I was thinking about music history and I saw it as a trunk that gets sent around the world over many hundreds of years. The trunk arrives in various locations and people go through it and they take what they want to use--books, photographs, weavings, little artifacts, and instructions like recipes. People take what they want and then it's pushed off into the sea and it floats to another location. When it arrives, people pick through it, and in every country that it arrives at, there's something else missing from it, or people put something back that is not like the original. We don't have a complete record of what people are using and not replacing, or placing something new in it without saying that it's new, so as the trunk arrives in New York, say, in the 1930s, American culture picks through it and we have things like Big Band and Blues that get taken out of the trunk and things that are put back in, and then it gets put on a train and rides the rail lines throughout the country and arrives in different towns, where people take things out put things back. After traveling through hundreds or thousands of towns the trunk is battered and depleted by the time it arrives back in New York in 1980. It's culturally empty--there are no musical instruments in it, so they had to find something new, things like turntables in order to replenish the almost empty trunk. Whatever is in it now has very little connection to what was in it originally, so that gets set around on trains and trucks and arrives in new places mostly empty, and people are trying to refill it but the system doesn't allow it because it's much broken from before. 

You can't expect its history to continue on as it had. It's bereft of its original power, so we have to re-conjure it and work off copies. That's essentially what's happened since the internet. People have learned to adapt and we've made good stuff over the last 30 or 40 years based on copies, but it's lost its thread to the original roots and spiritual nature of what was originally in the trunk.

3/16/2021

[3/16/2025: The trunk is now fully replenished with data sets that are all mostly anonymous copies, so it is virtually original. When the trunk arrives at a port in different countries, the people there might be banned from accessing it, as it is prohibitively expensive by design. You might get access to part of the trunk but not all of it because culture is behind a paywall.]