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The Laksamana - official blog of M. Shahrim
18/3/2025
The world is changing everyday. So rapid, that we have become oblivious to the foundational stones from which our civilization take shapes.
Take smartphone for example. When did it become necessity?
During its dawn era, we didn't think of it as important. Many years later, everyone has one.
Technically speaking, the "smartphone" is already a necessity way before its era, and not a sudden necessity as we commonly think.
Before smartphone, there is mobile phone.
Before mobile phone, there is landline phone.
At the end of invention is reinvention. Home telephone reinvented, giving us the mobile phone like Nokia 3310.
Mobile phone is reinvented once more, giving us smartphone like the model you are using to read this lame blog.
Primitive mugs was invented as early around 5000 BC.
After being invented, it was invented again.
Handles added and redesigned. Different materials were used. Shapes and sizes were changed.
The cycles of invention-reinvention continues, until people stopped focusing on the mug as mug, and starts to repurpose it.
At the end of reinvention is repurpose.
Today, mugs are made for a variety of purposes aside from for drinking.
There are mugs for merchandises, pranks, indoor decorations, toys and art piece.
Put a logo on a mug and it turns into brand advertisement. It may have new purpose but its foundation doesn't change - you can still use it to drink coffee while formulating =SUM(E3:E10) on Excel.
Microsoft made Excel. LibreOffice made Calc. WPS made Spreadsheet. Google made Sheets.
But at the end of the day a Japanese guy repurposed Excel for painting.
(I used to repurpose Powerpoint too, as video editor)
ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen are reinventions (I noticed they all have similar chat UI too). Soon, we will see them being repurposed. Or, is it already?
While this concept are more popular with actual invention such as cars, software, and medicines, but if you think about it, this pattern also applies to intangible things such as holidays, system of government and even memes!
[ This post is a revisit to older post originally written in Bahasa Sarawak ]
Mohamad Shahrim
author of The Laksamana