Image was generated by Meta AI
Everyone these days talks about AI and whatever Elon Musk is doing or releasing next week. But what we actually underrate the most is an innovation that changed everything. The Copy-paste-cut. We use them multiple times a day without even thinking about it.
Like, we literally just talk about ChatGPT, Metaverse and what not, and we don't stop to appreciate the fact that we can literally just take any text and place it wherever we please. We might term it insignificant in this current world of crazy innovations, but doesn't it seem magical to you all? The concept of holding something onto a temporary memory (located, who knows where) and you can just make it reappear on another page or place.
Reflect on your day-to-day for a second. How many time did you copy/cut and paste something elsewhere? A zoom meeting link? A phone number from Whatsapp? An amazing tweet you wanted to share with your friends? Or your digital wallet handle or address, you want to send to someone and want no mistakes whatever (crypto addresses for example).
We are essentially living our whole virtual lives according to these three instructions, and no one ever discusses how crazy that is.
I just recall the project I was on last week, how I was just playing Tetris with words and data. Copy this graph from that message, paste it there. Cut this whole section and bring over there... And like that I had 20 slides ready to be presented.
And it dawns on me: this is how we think now. We don't make up new things from nothing anymore. We sample, mashup, recombine. Every Instagrammed photograph is a collage of song lyrics, jokes from friends, and loose ideas. Every email is recycled greetings and copy-and-pasted information. Every text message is built upon a vocabulary of words we've already spoken, emoticons we've memorized, and GIFs we've stored away.
Is that lazy? Of course NOT! It's evolution.
Have you ever paused to imagine how writing was like before the advent of copy-paste-cut? I'm talking about the typewriter age. How thorough one had to be when writing a piece. Just one misspelled word, missing comma ,or disorientation of paragraph and you'd literally have to rewrite the entire thing.
They had to justify every sentence prior to writing it down because there was no going back. We just vomit whatever comes into our heads onto the screen and then re-organize them until it all works. We can try doing it fifteen ways and take the best of those. We can write the conclusion first and the introduction last. We can steal the perfect sentence from something we wrote six months ago and stick it in today's writing.
Those orders revolutionized innovation. We moved from creators to curators, and let me tell you? That's a whole lot more powerful.
Look at TikTok, for example. The whole platform is literally copy-paste-cut for video. Someone creates a sound, the rest of us cut it out, copy it, paste it onto our own things. Trends can exist because we can literally copy the formula and do it ourselves. Same with memes, they're just copy-paste-cut for jokes. Take the format, swap out the facts, boom, new content.
Even the way we learn is transformed. I am no longer out here memorizing phone numbers and addresses because I can just copy-paste them when I need them. My brain is this odd mix of actual knowledge and bookmarked knowledge. I know where things are, not so much the things themselves. And It's actually more efficient.
My friends think it's lame that I'm stoked about this, but I'm dead serious copy-paste-cut is the reason that our generation gets things done so fast. We don't have to recreate the wheel for everything we wish to do. We can take what we can, build on it fast, fail fast, and try again.
It is superpower-like, but without the superpower in any way being anything other than the power to rearrange information really well.
And don't even get started on how copy-paste-cut reworded the way we argue on the internet. Fifty percent of Twitter is just people copying someone else's horrible opinion and pasting it with their own spin. We're all quote-tweeting in real life now, quoting something and putting our own spin on it. Even this post is pretty much me copying the concept of "writing about innovations" and pasting my own love of keyboard shortcuts on top.
My second favorite innovation? Probably the search function, because what's the point of being able to copy-paste-cut if you can't find what you are looking for to begin with? Ctrl+F is the BFF of copy-paste-cut. They're like digital productivity's power couple.
But I believe the real innovation is not the commands but how they've conditioned the mind. We're the first generation to realize information is pliable, that things don't necessarily have to be the way they were when they were first made, that we can restructure things until they're improved.
Every time that I hit Ctrl+C, I'm, in a sense, telling the world that I'm not accepting things as they are. I'm grabbing what I desire, taking it as my own, and putting it where it's supposed to be. And that is a pretty empowered way to live.
So yeah, while the rest of the world is waiting for flying cars and robot servants, I'd rather appreciate the ability to copy this entire blog post, paste it into a tweet thread, and probably get more reads than I will on the actual blog. Copy-paste-cut is a philosophy. And once you see it that way, you can't help but look.
Everything is remix. Everything is editable. Everything can be better.
You simply need to know the correct shortcuts.