The Future for Plagiarists

I’ve recently been doing some freelance writing for a company that represents a number of travel, sport, and how-to websites. The writing assignments are usually quite short, usually taking no more than an hour to complete, and pay somewhere between $15 and $30 per assignment. To choose an assignment I simply log on to the company’s website and choose from a large database of assignments. The assignments have titles such as “Restaurants in Old Quebec”, “How to Install a Muffler”, and “Correct Your Slice”. With most of thse assignments, as I’m guessing it is for most contributing writers, I have little to no previous knowledge of the subject matter. This makes the company’s often-cited disclaimer, DO NOT PLAGIARIZE, intriguing. It is intriguing because the company insists on the writer visiting websites to generate content for the article. Of course, what is implicit in the company’s disclaimer is that you don’t take words from other sources and put them in your article without citing them. But still, if I am just paraphrazing what someone else has written, is this not the same as plagiarism?

I recently read a fascinating article by Jonathan Lethem in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism”. In the article, he abdicates completely original thought and advocates for the sharing of stories, passages, writings for the greater good of the written word. Here is an excerpt from that article:

“Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time. When I was thirteen I purchased an anthology of Beat writing. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered one William S. Burroughs, author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance. Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing. Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the Forties and Fifties, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.”

My point is not to compare myself to William Burroughs, but to instead question the idea of plagiarism. It seems that all of those teachers who warned us against plagiarism have essentially forgotten that words are not derived from some innate and private place inside of us. Words are a shared phenomena that should be used by others to ignite ideas and other written words. They should not be kept inside a locked box to claim royalty cheque after royalty cheque.

I am not suggesting that we steal the words of others for our own uses. I am suggesting that we use the words of others to stimulate and organize our own work, and in using the words of others in our own way create something ”akin to magic.”

The Future of Book Reviews

In the future, if book reviews even exist, book reviewers will not read the book that they are reviewing. In some cases we can already see that this is happening. Open the book pages of any major newspaper or magazine and you’ll probably read some reviewer going off on some wild tangent that is only slightly related to the content of the book. These tangents indicate that the reviewer doesn’t have enough knowledge of the book they are reviewing, so they’ve decided to fill up valuable space with comments that no one really cares about. I’ve even recently been told that a number of reviewers will use the copy that is sent to them on a press release for a book from a publishing company in their actual review. Holy crap. That is lazy and deplorable.  

As awful as this is, my prediction is that in the future reviewers will become so talented in the art of not reading the book they are reviewing that no one will be able to decipher the lie. To pay homage to this prediction I have decided to write a short review of Jaron Lanier’s newest book , You Are Not a Gadget. You decide if I’ve even read the book.

You Are Not a Gadget is a biting critique of the way digital culture undermines individuality, written by one of the geeks who apprently invented digital culture. This could be one of the best books you’ll read on digital culture in your lifetime.

Mr. Lanier is a rare digital engineer, and this is not because of his brains, but because of the fact that he likes human beings. His concerns about the way humans are being degraded by the technology they use are chilling but necessary. His basic argument is straightforward: Computer code may be a marvel, but it’s still inadequate for replicating anything as complex, ephemeral and mysterious as the deepest parts of human experience. He argues that the engineers originally in charge of the digital world forgot this, and instead built this digital world around functions that code can do well – shopping and amassing clouds of human interests and traits – and end anything that stood in the way of their vision. 

As scathing as his indictment is in this book, Mr. Lanier is an even-handed thinker, and ultimately an optimist who sees promise in a less-corporate digital future. But his main conclusion is undeniable: Society is being bossed around by a band of “cybernetic totalists” or “digital Maoists” who believe their beloved engineering system is more valuable than the humans it’s supposed to serve.

“Online culture is filled to the brim with rhetoric about what the true path to a better world ought to be, and these days it’s strongly biased toward an anti-human way of thinking,” Mr. Lanier writes. “The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality,” he continues. “They want to live in an airtight reality that resembles an idealized computer program, in which everything is understood and there are no fundamental mysteries.”

Oh no, that geek that still lives in his mother’s basement is running the digital world. And he’s a despot wielding a mouse.