In response to the article of Fichte and original authorship, this blog aims to critically dissect the idea of “genius” in the digital age. The key central theme is to enquire about what truly classifies a genius and who determines the threshold for the same. Biagioli notes in the article that Young’s perception of genius stemmed from inherent rarity, but Fichte’s premised on the traditional American notion of “personal expression”, the latter essentially boiled down to an individual imprint on the process. It is argued that the explanation put forth later in Biagoli’s article by Justice Holmes of containing “something unique”, might be riddled with insufficiency in today’s technological age. A rather rudimentary example comes to my mind, if an image on Instagram is posted by X, and Y crops it a bit and applies a filter (“something unique”) – would this classify as genius as the process indeed did leave an imprint of personal expression?

Fichte’s idea of the form of being inalienable is something that is inherently incapable of being stolen and the property can be legally appropriated to limit the exploitation of the work. However, the point is that the digital paradigm is now governed by posts, reposts, retweets, and NFTs – so how do we apply the idea of inalienability to an individual’s thought process, and where does the “morality” of the plagiarist lie in this dichotomy.

The other question that comes to my mind is how we juxtapost the harsh critique of Fichte for reprinting in alignment with the endless resharing in our age on social media. He argued that reprinting violated the “perpetual ownership of the text by its author” which intersected with the public paying a sum of money for a text which has not been radically altered from its original. Both notions are arguably outdated in today’s age which encourages mass sharing without any money being paid by the consumer, so the question remains who is a genius, who is the true consumer or author, and what is the medium?