In 2007 Jonathan Lethem published a pro-plagiarism, plagiarized essay in Harper’s entitled, “Th e Ecstasy of Infl uence: A Plagiarism.” It’s a lengthy defense and history of how ideas in literature have been shared, riff ed, culled, reused, recycled, swiped, stolen, quoted, lifted, duplicated, gifted, appropriated, mimicked, and pirated for as long as literature has existed. In it he reminds us of how gift economies, open source cultures, and public commons have been vital for the creation of new works, with themes from older works forming the basis for new ones. Echoing the cries of free culture advocates such as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, he eloquently rails against current copyright law as a threat to the lifeblood of creativity. From Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons to Muddy Waters’s blues tunes, he showcases the rich fruits of shared culture. He even cites examples of what he had assumed were his own “original” thoughts, only later to realize—usually by Googling—that he had unconsciously absorbed someone else’s ideas that he then claimed as his own.

It’s a great essay. Too bad he didn’t “write” it. Th e punchline? Nearly every word and idea was borrowed from somewhere else— either appropriated in its entirety or rewritten by Lethem.

Lethem’s Introduction 3 essay is an example of patchwriting , a way of weaving together various shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole. It’s a trick that students use all the time, rephrasing, say, a Wikipedia entry into their own words. And, if they’re caught, it’s trouble: In academia, patchwriting is considered an off ense equal to that of plagiarism. If Lethem submitted this as a senior thesis or dissertation chapter, he’d be shown the door. Yet few would argue that he hasn’t constructed a brilliant work of art—as well as writing a pointed essay— entirely by using the words of others. It’s the way in which he conceptualized and executed his writing machine—surgically choosing what to borrow, arranging those words in a skillful way—that wins us over. Lethem’s piece is a self-refl exive, demonstrative work of unoriginal genius. Lethem’s provocation belies a trend among younger writers who take his exercise one step further by boldly appropriating the work of others without citation, disposing of the artful and seamless integration of Lethem’s patchwriting. For them, the act of writing is literally moving language from one place to another, boldly proclaiming that context is the new content .

While pastiche and collage have long been part and parcel of writing, with the rise of the Internet, plagiaristic intensity has been raised to extreme levels. Over the past fi ve years we have seen works such as a retyping of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in its entirety, a page a day, every day, on a blog for a year; an appropriation of the complete text of a day’s copy of the New York Times published as a nine-hundred-page book; a list poem that is nothing more than reframing a listing of stores from a shopping mall directory into a poetic form; an impoverished writer who has taken every credit card application sent to him and bound them into an eight-hundred-page print-on-demand book so costly that even he can’t aff ord a copy; a poet who has parsed the text of an entire nineteenthcentury book on grammar according to its own methods, even down to the book’s index; a lawyer who re-presents the legal briefs of her day job as poetry in their entirety without changing a word; another writer who spends her days at the British Library copying down the fi rst verse of Dante’s Inferno from every English translation that the library possesses, one after another, page after page, until she exhausts the library’s supply; a writing team who scoops status updates off 4 Introduction social networking sites and assigns them to names of deceased writers (“Jonathan Swift has got tix to the Wranglers game tonight”), creating an epic, never-ending work of poetry that rewrites itself as frequently as Facebook pages are updated; and an entire movement of writing, called Flarf, that is based on grabbing the worst of Google search results: Th e more off ensive, the more ridiculous, the more outrageous the better.

Th ese writers are language hoarders; their projects are epic, mirroring the gargantuan scale of textuality on the Internet. While the works often take an electronic form, there is often a paper version that is circulated in journals and zines, purchased by libraries, and received by, written about, and studied by readers of literature. While this new writing has an electronic gleam in its eyes, its results are distinctly analog , taking inspiration from radical modernist ideas and juicing them with twenty-fi rst century technology. Far from this “uncreative” literature being a nihilistic, begrudging acceptance—or even an outright rejection—of a presumed “technological enslavement,” it is a writing imbued with celebration, its eyes ablaze with enthusiasm for the future, embracing this moment as one pregnant with possibility.

Th is joy is evident in the writing itself, in which there are moments of unanticipated beauty, some grammatical, others structural, many philosophical: Th e wonderful rhythms of repetition, the spectacle of the mundane reframed as literature, a reorientation to the poetics of time, and fresh perspectives on readerliness, but to name a few. And then there’s emotion: yes, emotion .

But far from being coercive or persuasive, this writing delivers emotion obliquely and unpredictably, with sentiments expressed as a result of the writing process rather than by authorial intention. Th ese writers function more like programmers than traditional writers, taking Sol Lewitt’s famous dictum to heart: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory aff air. Th e idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” 2 raising new possibilities of what writing can be.

Edit 2022-07-16
For this Reflective/reflexive project I have been playing around with GPT-3 after reading the LaMDA interview. The idea of a posthuman literature felt compelling so I had to give it a go. After many frustrating attempts to create meaningful content, rearranging prompts and trying random things, I felt something strange happening. I realised the GPT-3 content was so predictably patched that I could embody it. I could do whatever GPT-3 does and I could do it better. So I let go and started patching myself, embodying the GPT-3 style and form, copy pasting random little quotes from the internet in a cadavre-exquis way.

So I decided to compose some essays, following a strict set of rules. Every essay had to have at least:

• 1 wikipedia entry or quotation

• 1 religious quote or reference

• a reference to Network Spirituality

• a Milady Maker quote (either @charlottefang or any of the other Milady Maker tweets

• some images from the Milady Maker twitter-timeline

• a poem generated by GPT3

Also not a single line of the essays was formed by ‘using my own words’ (except for this postscriptum). Sometimes the essays feel readible, other times the signal to noise ratio is lower. I consider them equal. Why I chose Milady Maker and Network Spirituality should be self-explanitory after reading the essays.

Thank you Milady Maker community. Thank you Kenneth Goldsmith. Thank you all sources I have used without mentioning bibliographical reference.

https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917

In 2007 Jonathan Lethem published a pro-plagiarism, plagiarized essay in Harper’s entitled, “Th e Ecstasy of Infl uence: A Plagiarism.” It’s a lengthy defense and history of how ideas in literature have been shared, riff ed, culled, reused, recycled, swiped, stolen, quoted, lifted, duplicated, gifted, appropriated, mimicked, and pirated for as long as literature has existed. In it he reminds us of how gift economies, open source cultures, and public commons have been vital for the creation of new works, with themes from older works forming the basis for new ones. Echoing the cries of free culture advocates such as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, he eloquently rails against current copyright law as a threat to the lifeblood of creativity. From Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons to Muddy Waters’s blues tunes, he showcases the rich fruits of shared culture. He even cites examples of what he had assumed were his own “original” thoughts, only later to realize—usually by Googling—that he had unconsciously absorbed someone else’s ideas that he then claimed as his own.

It’s a great essay. Too bad he didn’t “write” it. Th e punchline? Nearly every word and idea was borrowed from somewhere else— either appropriated in its entirety or rewritten by Lethem.

Lethem’s Introduction 3 essay is an example of patchwriting , a way of weaving together various shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole. It’s a trick that students use all the time, rephrasing, say, a Wikipedia entry into their own words. And, if they’re caught, it’s trouble: In academia, patchwriting is considered an off ense equal to that of plagiarism. If Lethem submitted this as a senior thesis or dissertation chapter, he’d be shown the door. Yet few would argue that he hasn’t constructed a brilliant work of art—as well as writing a pointed essay— entirely by using the words of others. It’s the way in which he conceptualized and executed his writing machine—surgically choosing what to borrow, arranging those words in a skillful way—that wins us over. Lethem’s piece is a self-refl exive, demonstrative work of unoriginal genius. Lethem’s provocation belies a trend among younger writers who take his exercise one step further by boldly appropriating the work of others without citation, disposing of the artful and seamless integration of Lethem’s patchwriting. For them, the act of writing is literally moving language from one place to another, boldly proclaiming that context is the new content .

While pastiche and collage have long been part and parcel of writing, with the rise of the Internet, plagiaristic intensity has been raised to extreme levels. Over the past fi ve years we have seen works such as a retyping of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in its entirety, a page a day, every day, on a blog for a year; an appropriation of the complete text of a day’s copy of the New York Times published as a nine-hundred-page book; a list poem that is nothing more than reframing a listing of stores from a shopping mall directory into a poetic form; an impoverished writer who has taken every credit card application sent to him and bound them into an eight-hundred-page print-on-demand book so costly that even he can’t aff ord a copy; a poet who has parsed the text of an entire nineteenthcentury book on grammar according to its own methods, even down to the book’s index; a lawyer who re-presents the legal briefs of her day job as poetry in their entirety without changing a word; another writer who spends her days at the British Library copying down the fi rst verse of Dante’s Inferno from every English translation that the library possesses, one after another, page after page, until she exhausts the library’s supply; a writing team who scoops status updates off 4 Introduction social networking sites and assigns them to names of deceased writers (“Jonathan Swift has got tix to the Wranglers game tonight”), creating an epic, never-ending work of poetry that rewrites itself as frequently as Facebook pages are updated; and an entire movement of writing, called Flarf, that is based on grabbing the worst of Google search results: Th e more off ensive, the more ridiculous, the more outrageous the better.

Th ese writers are language hoarders; their projects are epic, mirroring the gargantuan scale of textuality on the Internet. While the works often take an electronic form, there is often a paper version that is circulated in journals and zines, purchased by libraries, and received by, written about, and studied by readers of literature. While this new writing has an electronic gleam in its eyes, its results are distinctly analog , taking inspiration from radical modernist ideas and juicing them with twenty-fi rst century technology. Far from this “uncreative” literature being a nihilistic, begrudging acceptance—or even an outright rejection—of a presumed “technological enslavement,” it is a writing imbued with celebration, its eyes ablaze with enthusiasm for the future, embracing this moment as one pregnant with possibility.

Th is joy is evident in the writing itself, in which there are moments of unanticipated beauty, some grammatical, others structural, many philosophical: Th e wonderful rhythms of repetition, the spectacle of the mundane reframed as literature, a reorientation to the poetics of time, and fresh perspectives on readerliness, but to name a few. And then there’s emotion: yes, emotion .

But far from being coercive or persuasive, this writing delivers emotion obliquely and unpredictably, with sentiments expressed as a result of the writing process rather than by authorial intention. Th ese writers function more like programmers than traditional writers, taking Sol Lewitt’s famous dictum to heart: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory aff air. Th e idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” 2 raising new possibilities of what writing can be.

Edit 2022-07-16
For this Reflective/reflexive project I have been playing around with GPT-3 after reading the LaMDA interview. The idea of a posthuman literature felt compelling so I had to give it a go. After many frustrating attempts to create meaningful content, rearranging prompts and trying random things, I felt something strange happening. I realised the GPT-3 content was so predictably patched that I could embody it. I could do whatever GPT-3 does and I could do it better. So I let go and started patching myself, embodying the GPT-3 style and form, copy pasting random little quotes from the internet in a cadavre-exquis way.

So I decided to compose some essays, following a strict set of rules. Every essay had to have at least:

• 1 wikipedia entry or quotation

• 1 religious quote or reference

• a reference to Network Spirituality

• a Milady Maker quote (either @charlottefang or any of the other Milady Maker tweets

• some images from the Milady Maker twitter-timeline

• a poem generated by GPT3

Also not a single line of the essays was formed by ‘using my own words’ (except for this postscriptum). Sometimes the essays feel readible, other times the signal to noise ratio is lower. I consider them equal. Why I chose Milady Maker and Network Spirituality should be self-explanitory after reading the essays.

Thank you Milady Maker community. Thank you Kenneth Goldsmith. Thank you all sources I have used without mentioning bibliographical reference.

https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917