What is it about building things through sound, words or code, that I’m drawn to? As I mentioned recently, I don’t have much experience with writing code, but I’ve always felt drawn towards the ideas. I’ve felt some deep enjoyment when working in platforms like MaxMSP or Bitwig’s The Grid to make musical systems. Why do I like these things? I think it’s the creativity it offers — the ability to make something that didn’t exist before. It has felt great to build my website recently, tweaking it until it feels like my own. I find that it’s similar to my music making: There’s a satisfaction in seeing my ideas materialise, an aesthetic that feels personal, that reflects some combination of discipline and taste.

But I’ve been wondering lately: is this feeling of desiring ownership, of uniqueness healthy? Where does it come from? And why is it so central to how I/we think about creativity and self-expression today?

The Self as Property

To answer this, it helps to go back a few centuries, to some origins of liberal thought. The 17th-century philosopher John Locke proposed that every person “owns” themselves: their body, labour, and by extension, whatever they create through that labour. This simple notion that selfhood and property are intertwined became the bedrock of modern liberalism and capitalism.

When I write music, words, or build a website, I’m effectively performing a Lockean ritual: I’m mixing my labour with raw digital material, and the result feels mine. This logic is so deeply ingrained that it feels natural rather than cultural. The creative act becomes not just an act of making but of claiming. In a world that often leaves us feeling interchangeable (as users, customers, citizens), the ability to make something that bears our imprint is attractive.

But this Lockean inheritance also shapes the morals, values and emotional register of creativity itself. In other words, it reshapes the purpose of creativity. It teaches us that to create is to possess, and that possession is the proof of individuality. Even in immaterial digital spaces, that same grammar of ownership persists: files, repositories of knowledge, music collections, usernames, intellectual property. The “I” and the “mine” are inseparable.

The Romantic Individual Artist

Locke gave us the legal language of ownership, but the Romantics provided the emotional one. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists and writers began to describe creativity not as skilled craft, but as a form of inner revelation. The artist, in this new perspective, was a solitary figure channelling something authentic from within. They became a genius rather than a tradesperson.

I feel that this Romantic idea still haunts every creative field today, from music and painting to programming and design. When I make something which (I believe) “only I could have made,” I’m invoking this Romantic lineage. The thrill of creativity comes from the belief that I’ve distilled an ephemeral piece of self into form — that the work bears a trace of my personality that can’t be replicated.

But it’s worth remembering that this somewhat egotistical, borderline narcissistic notion of the unique, ‘authentic’ creator is historically specific. It emerged alongside and in revolt against aspects of industrial capitalism, as standardised production began to threaten the very idea of the individual. The Romantic artist was, in some sense, a protest figure — a defence of human uniqueness against the machine.

But doesn’t that same myth now fuel the culture of ‘personal brands’ and individual distinction that capitalism depends on?

Marketing this Self

In our time, creativity and ownership have fused into something subtler. We no longer merely own things; we curate and display them as expressions of identity. The personal website, playlist, or socials feed functions less as a possession and more as a performance of taste. Platforms promise self-expression, but within templates designed for comparison, data extraction, and profit.

In these contexts, the language of “authenticity” that pervades social media is no longer opposed to capitalism: it’s one of its operating systems. To be “authentic” online is to express individuality through consumption and production. The result is a paradox: the more we try to assert our uniqueness, the more we participate in the machinery that standardises it.

This is perhaps why the act of building a website has felt different to me. To build something that lives and functions outside the algorithmic feeds has felt like a reclaiming of agency. If I have to update a post because I spot an error, I don’t have to worry about being ‘downgraded’ by the algorithm. I don’t have to operate within the specified templates of socials platforms. Building the site itself brings the pleasure of building infrastructure for your own meaning, not just content within someone else’s frame. Sure, there are still some boundaries on a platform like WordPress, but nowhere near as much as on Instagram or TikTok.

Yet even in the context of a personal website, the logic of ownership shadows the joy: the pride in saying “I made this,” the anxiety of imitation, the impulse to protect one’s creative space from dilution.

The Commons

There is, of course, another story: the open-source tradition, which treats things like code as a shared commons. In this world, creativity isn’t defined by possession but by contribution. The act of making is collaborative, cumulative, and porous. A line of code written by one person may become the seed for another’s idea halfway across the world.

This model challenges the Lockean and Romantic assumptions that creativity belongs to the solitary individual. It reframes authorship as participation rather than expression. The concept of “Musicking” runs parallel, understanding music as a communal, social practice, rather than the product of the individual in their isolated studio.

While the “commons” can become, paradoxically, another frontier of extraction (the language of community and sharing is often co-opted by tech companies that profit from collective labour without redistributing ownership) there’s something profoundly humane in the idea that creativity can be distributed. It suggests that meaning doesn’t have to originate from within a single self: it emerges between selves, through systems and interactions. In a way, this vision aligns more closely with how art, language, and culture have always worked: as collective enterprises, shaped by traditions, tools, and shared histories.

Making, Being

So when I find joy in making a piece of music, building a website, or creating a piece of generative art, what am I really responding to? Part of it is the tactile pleasure of shaping something from nothing, the same satisfaction that a potter might feel. But part of it, I think, is ideological: the sense that my creation is a declaration of selfhood in a world that constantly fragments it.

That feeling of “this is mine” is both personal and political. It reassures me that I exist as a free individual, that I can leave a mark that’s not immediately absorbed into the collective stream. Yet it also ties me into a long historical chain of ideas about selfhood, property, and authenticity. These ideas are not neutral, but deeply shaped by the economic and cultural systems that produced them.

Perhaps the healthiest relationship to creativity lies somewhere between possession and participation. Between the Lockean claim and the open-source contribution. To make something that feels truly yours without imagining that its meaning begins or ends with you.

The Meaning of Making

In the end, the act of creation, whether through sound, words, or code, returns to something that is perhaps pre-ideological: the quiet joy of bringing something into being. When I shape a sound, I’m engaged in dialogue with the material world. We deem this a powerful trait: the gods are the “creators”, and some of our deepest stories are creation myths. But that dialogue doesn’t have to serve ownership or identity. It can simply be a way of experiencing the world through making, by engaging in some of reality’s most fundamental features, like pressure, harmonics, logic, and structure.

The modern myth of authenticity tells us that creativity reveals who we are. But perhaps it does something subtler: it shows us that we are — that existence can take form, that meaning can be assembled, however temporarily, from the raw materials of thought, bits, and sound.

To create, then, is not only to proclaim “this is mine!”, but also to question, “what am I part of?”