The weblog of Christiaan Briggs
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber explains why he thinks the management of some of the closed aspects of Apple’s iPhone App Store are flawed.
And if that interests you, you might also be interested in this interview with Jonathan Zittrain and a review of his new book, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It.
Apparently there’s a big event on the horizon. A group of aliens calling themselves the Galactic Federation of Light are coming to earth on the 14th of October, in a prelude to saving us from the shit heads who currently run the place.
The message addresses “all people of earth” but then goes on to say “it shall be in the south of your hemisphere and it shall scan over many of your states … We give to you the name of Alabama.” So either it addresses all people of earth but then goes on to ignore them and speak to just the Americans (those in the southern part of the northern hemisphere), or the event is to be in the Southern Hemisphere and someone got their geography screwed up because Alabama ain’t in the Southern Hemisphere.
I’m picking the earlier; that Blossom, our messenger, is American and it’s a simple ethnocentric mistake. This is probably the same reason the alien guy in the background of the video is a blond white dude. Blossom and friends are presumably white Americans.
If these aliens have mastered intergalactic space travel you’d think they would have mastered a little plain English. “We give to you the name of Alabama”? They could have brushed up on their grammar a little too: “Authorities will be intruding into ‘our’ atmospherics that surround our ship.” “We do not come to destruct.”
And where’re the translations? English-only seems a little short-sighted, if not plain unethical coming from such ethical beings.
Then there’s the forewarning and demonisation of those who may be sceptical, a feather out of the cap of religion. And we all know why religions do that. Why would such aliens even feel the need to mention this? Self doubt? It’s no skin off their nose if people are sceptical, as “a craft of great size shall be visible … for all to see.”
Lastly, the message comes from someone called ‘Blossom Goodchild.’
As much as I would dearly love for there to be peaceful aliens who come to save the day, wishing it doesn’t make it so.
I don’t blame people for clutching at this sort of thing. They think, as I think, that humanity has infinitely more potential than it’s currently demonstrating. Essentially they’re searching for outward answers as to why we’ve fucked it up so badly; why we’re steering down the barrel of planetary devastation and World War III. They don’t want to believe that we could be the masters of our own destruction.
It may also have something to do with many of us coming to believe in the dichotomy of good and evil; that there are good people and that there are evil people. People don’t want to believe they’re evil so this inevitably leads one to question how the evil people got here and what we can do about them. Thus enter the alien super hero.
Searching for outward answers is a huge mistake in my opinion. Humans are neither good nor bad but have the capacity for both. Whether we’re destined for brighter things or an evolutionary dead end is unknown but it certainly seems we have the capacity to have a say in the matter. Blaming aliens, or hedging bets on aliens in shining armer, or simply gambling on an afterlife (as religions do) distracts one from doing what we need to do here and now on planet earth.
So, I’ve read this message from Blossom Goodchild and taken a look at the evidence and this is my message to those who want to believe this stuff: if this event doesn’t take place, don’t discount this but remember it as a piece of evidence that strongly contradicts those who profess to know about aliens and their intentions. And in the mean time go read this piece about confirmation bias.
‘We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,’ said uncontacted tribes expert José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Júnior. Meirelles works for FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department. ‘This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.’
Survival’s director Stephen Corry said today, ‘These pictures are further evidence that uncontacted tribes really do exist. The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct.’
You can write a letter to Peru’s president asking him to recognise his country’s isolated Indians’ land rights—which would protect uncontacted peoples on both sides of the Peru-Brazil border.
The work allegedly plagiarised? An article I published in 2006, titled, Plagiarism and intellectual loot. It’s a piece that rejects the idea of “intellectual property,” arguing instead that in a society organised with human happiness as an objective, copyright infringement laws and similar restrictions would not hinder the distribution and recombination of ideas.
It’s interesting—and amusing in some respects—to get fired for plagiarising a piece championing plagiarism, but it gets better. I plagiarised the whole piece myself, nearly word for word. McDonald didn’t plagiarise me. He plagiarised from the same book I did: Days of War, Nights of Love, published in 2000 by CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective, a book that actually encourages others to plagiarise from it.1
So, based on allegations by a faculty member at Texas Tech University, who had obviously come across my website, the editorial board of The Daily Toreador promptly fired McDonald, publicly accusing him of plagiarising me and of “compromising the integrity of the paper and the academic institution it serves.”
A reporter is said to undermine a newspaper’s credibility in failing to honestly acknowledge sources, but, however predictable, publicly chastising and firing a volunteer writer from a student newspaper for plagiarising an opinion piece championing plagiarism seems a little tactless to me. Clearly there’s a little more to the story.
Not only was McDonald’s public firing tactless but it was also based on incorrect information. Neither The Daily Toreador’s Editor, Michelle Casady, nor anybody else, ever got in touch with me before making the decision to fire McDonald and publicly humiliate him by failing to explain the full story. The public statement that McDonald plagiarised me is simply incorrect. Furthermore, not only has the editorial board mislead their readers to the full extent of this story but they’ve subsequently denied McDonald the chance to explain his side of the story to their readers.
By incorrectly accusing McDonald of plagiarising me and by accusing McDonald of compromising the integrity of the paper without rejoinder, I think the editorial board does a disservice to both McDonald and their readers. At the very least they should retract the accusation that McDonald plagiarised me and offer McDonald the chance to give their readers a more nuanced side to the story.
They even went to the length of arguing that plagiarism is a “serious offense in any forum” and “a very serious problem within our society” and “in no way, shape or form should … ever be tolerated.” Not even, it seems, when you’re making a point about plagiarism itself.
Copyright and plagiarism are ideas that deserve full and frank discussion in our societies and a view as blinkered as the one above does nothing to further an adult discussion on the topic.
External links:
I. “Intellectual Property”
Many of us have been taught from our youth that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Whenever a child has an exciting idea, an older person is quick to point out either that this idea has been tried before and didn’t work, or that someone else not only has already had the idea but also has developed and expounded upon it to greater lengths than the child ever could. “Learn and choose from the ideas and beliefs already in circulation, rather than seeking to develop and arrange your own,” seems to be the message, and this message is sent clearly by the methods of “instruction” used in both public and private schools throughout the West.
Despite this common attitude, or perhaps because of it, we are very possessive of our ideas. The concept of “intellectual property” is ingrained in the collective psychosis much deeper than the concept of material property. Plenty of thinkers have appeared who have asserted that “property is theft” in regard to real estate and other physical capital, but few have dared to make similar statements about their own ideas. Even the most notoriously “radical” thinkers have still proudly claimed their ideas as, first and foremost, their ideas.
Consequently, little distinction is made between the thinkers and their thoughts. Students of philosophy will study the philosophy of Descartes, students of economics will study Marxism, students of art will study the paintings of Dali. At worst, the cult of personality that develops around famous thinkers prevents any useful consideration of their ideas or artwork; hero-worshipping partisans will swear allegiance to a thinker and all his thoughts, while others who have some justified or unjustified objection to the conceiver of the ideas will generally have a difficult time not being prejudiced against the ideas themselves. At best, this emphasis upon the “author-owner” in the consideration of propositions or artwork is merely irrelevant to the worth of the actual propositions or artwork, even if the stories about the individual in question are interesting and can encourage creative thinking by themselves.
The very assumptions behind the concept of “intellectual property” require more attention than we have given them. The factors that affect the words and deeds of an individual are many and varied, not the least of them being her social-cultural climate and the input of other individuals. To say that any idea has its sole origins in the being of one individual man or woman is to grossly oversimplify. But we are so accustomed to claiming items and objects for ourselves, and to being forced to accept similar claims from others, in the cutthroat competition to acquire and dominate (before we are acquired and dominated) that is life in a market economy, that it seems natural to do the same with ideas. Certainly there must be other ways of thinking about the origins and ownership of ideas that warrant consideration—for our present approach does more than merely distract from the ideas.
Our tradition of recognising “intellectual property rights” is dangerous in that it results in the deification of the publicly recognised “thinker” and “artist” at the expense of everyone else. When ideas are always associated with proper names (and always the same proper names, in point of fact), this suggests that thinking and creating are special skills that belong to a select few individuals. For example, the glorification of the “artist” in our culture, which includes the stereotyping of artists as eccentric “visionaries” who exist at the edge (the “avant-garde”) of society, encourages people to believe that artists are significantly and fundamentally different from other human beings. Actually, anyone can be an artist, and everyone is, to some extent; being able to act creatively is a crucial element of human happiness. But when we are led to believe that being creative and thinking critically are talents which only a few individuals possess, those of us who are not fortunate enough to be christened “artists” or “philosophers” by our communities will not make much effort to develop these abilities. Consequently we will be dependent upon others for many of our ideas, and will have to be content as spectators of the creative work of others—and we will feel alienated and unsatisfied.
Another incidental drawback of our association of ideas with specific individuals is that it promotes the acceptance of these ideas in their original form. The students who learn the philosophy of Descartes are encouraged to learn it in its orthodox form, rather than learning the parts which they find relevant to their own lives and interests and combining these parts with ideas from other sources. Out of deference to the original thinker, deified as he is in our tradition, his texts and theories are to be preserved as-is, without ever being put into new forms or contexts which might reveal new insights. Mummified as they are, many theories become completely irrelevant to modern existence, when they could have been given a new lease on life by being treated with a little less reverence.
So we can see that our acceptance of the tradition of “intellectual property” has negative effects upon our endeavors to think critically and learn from our artistic and philosophical heritage. What can we do to address this problem? One of the possible solutions is plagiarism.
II. Plagiarism and the Modern Revolutionary
Plagiarism is an especially effective method of appropriating and reorganising ideas, and as such it can be a useful tool for a young man or woman looking to encourage new and exciting thinking in others. And it is a method that is revolutionary in that it does not recognise “intellectual property” rights but rather strikes out against them and all of the negative effects that recognising them can have.
Plagiarism focuses attention on content and away from incidental issues, by making the genuine origins of the material impossible to ascertain. Besides, as suggested above, it could be argued that the genuine origins of the contents of most inspirations and propositions are impossible to determine anyway. By signing a new name, or no name at all, to a text, the plagiariser puts the material in an entirely new context, and this may generate new perspectives and new thinking about the subject that have not appeared before. Plagiarism also makes it possible to combine the best or most relevant parts of a number of texts, thus creating a new text with many of the virtues of the older ones—and some new virtues, as well, since the combination of material from different sources is bound to result in unforeseeable effects and might well result in the unlocking of hidden meanings or possibilities that have been dormant in the texts for years. Finally, above all, plagiarism is the reappropriation of ideas: when an individual plagiarises a text which those who believe in intellectual property would have held “sacred,” she denies that there is a difference in rank between herself and the thinker she takes from. She takes the thinker’s ideas for herself, to express them as she sees fit, rather than treating the thinker as an authority whose work she is duty-bound to preserve as he intended. She denies, in fact, that there is a fundamental difference between the thinker and the rest of humanity, by appropriating the thinker’s material as the property of humanity.
After all, a good idea should be available to everyone—should belong to everyone—if it really is a good idea. In a society organised with human happiness as the objective, copyright infringement laws and similar restrictions would not hinder the distribution and recombination of ideas. These impediments only make it more difficult for individuals who are looking for challenging and inspiring material to come upon it and share it with others.
So, if there truly is “nothing new under the sun,” take them at their word, and act accordingly. Take what seems relevant to your life and your needs from the theories and doctrines prepared by those who came before you. Don’t be afraid to reproduce word for word those texts which seem perfect to you, so you can share them with others who might also benefit from them. And at the same time, don’t be afraid to plunder ideas from different sources and rearrange them in ways that you find more useful and exciting, more relevant to your own needs and experiences. Seek to create a personally constructed body of critical and creative thought, with elements gathered from as many sources as possible, rather than choosing from one of the prefabricated ideologies that are offered to you. After all, do we have ideas, or do they have us?
III. Language and the Question of Authorship Itself
Words, musical and artistic conventions, symbols and gestures, all these things are useful only because we hold them in common—that alone makes them currency for communication. Human beings, just like everything else in the world, are not isolated entities: each of us exists as part of a vast web, as in intersection of strands that proceed from every direction. None of us could be what we are if not for the others around us and before us, and the natural world beyond—our thoughts are constructed from the languages spoken around us, our values and narratives are assembled from the found objects of this world; we represent our experiences and memories to ourselves in the configurations developed by the civilisation that raised us.
This is not to say that nothing is original; rather, everything is original, for every expression, every action, however frequently repeated, issues from a unique point in the web of human relations. But at the same time, this means that the recontextualisation of pre-existing elements (which some call “plagiarism”) is essential to all communication. And if every expression is both borrowed and unique, it seems absurd to try to separate expressions into one category or the other. Yes, each of us participates in the continuation and evolution of the languages we speak; but in truth, the line between imitation and innovation is so blurry that any distinction are bound to be arbitrary.
If that is the case, then let us leave it to the scientists to figure out the chronological details of who was the first to arrange words or musical notes in a particular order. Much more important, for us, is what we can do with these combinations of shared elements.
Some claim for themselves the rights of ownership over combinations they believe (rightly or not) they were the first to apply; many of them justify this by insisting that these combinations are the perfect expression of their emotions or experiences, and that those who read or hear them are being granted direct access to their souls. But the fact is, a poem or song always has a different significance for the listener or reader than it did for the composer. The reader applies the words to her own experiences, searches her heart to see which ones will resonate with the unique emotions she has felt. Like it or not, once you create something and send it out into the world, it has a life of its own in the reactions and emotions it provokes in others—and it will not answer to you or represent you except by coincidence. For the writer, the true significance of the work is in the act of creation itself, in the rearranging and shaping of forms. Those who hope to retain control of the products of their creation afterwards are living in denial.
Thus we can throw out all the superstitions surrounding the author’s signature—the question of so-called authenticity, the glorification of self-expression, the concept of intellectual property—and see the signature for what it really is: another element of the composition itself. The signing of a work is a part of the creative process: it offers a context in which the work will be interpreted. What signature could truly capture the complete origins of a work, anyway, considering all the disparate and ancient components that make up any given work of art, and all the human relations and innovations that were necessary to arrive at them? For that matter, if the notion of the fixed, distinct identity of individuals is also a superstition, that renders ever the possibility of an individual signature preposterous! If one wanted to be honest, one would sign the name of one’s entire civilisation to one’s poetry or pottery, and add to that the seal of the cosmos from which it arose—effectively communalising the work.
This being the case, if the signature is just another element of the composition, it makes just as much sense to sign with another’s name, or with a false name (complete perhaps with a fabricated identity), depending on which can offer the context that will best enhance the content of the work. For once we are through with the delusion that we can own expressions—context and all—that will best serve to help us find ourselves and each other and, then, to transform what we find.
Recent Comments