[CuriouslyC]

Look at Vincent Van Gogh's art. He didn't sell shit except to his own brother in life, people hated it. Fast forward to now and his art is among the most valuable in the world, and people consider him one of the greatest geniuses of all time.

[embedding-shape]

How is one person's art not just incremental improvement on other's art? I expected some actually insightful answer, not just "Person Bs media creation was better than Person's A media", does that really count as "truly original" in your mind here? Yet browsers/WWW was just an incremental improvement? I'm sorry but I'm really confused now, sounds like we're really talking past each other here.

[CuriouslyC]

Browsers are just better gopher. If the WWW hadn't existed, we'd have xGopher 8.0 NG and our user experience would be mostly the same. Evolutionary pressures drive convergent evolution to stable solutions. We're on a technological gradient, and these things are incremental jumps driven by common human need (otherwise they wouldn't gain traction).

Creativity at the deepest level is seeing the cultural slope you're doing gradient descent on, and taking a hard left through the trees to a hidden slope that's way better rather than the one you were on.

I like Van Gogh as an example because of how hard he failed and the cultural U-turn, but hostility towards things that challenge the entrenched paradigm is a common response. Maybe Einstein and relativity is a more relevant example for you. People didn't read it at first and nod their heads, thinking to themselves "yes, of course!"