The Ecstasy of Deep Influence - by Venkatesh Rao

The Contraptions Book club March pick is Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biopgraphy, by Robert Irwin. Chat thread. We will discuss this the week of April 28th. In a 2007 article, The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism, published in Harper’s, Jonathan Lethem delivered a great polemic against a narrow-minded view of authors’ rights, plagiarism, and claims to originality. A key passage is worth quoting in full: Despite hand-wringing at each technological turn — radio, the Internet — the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be troubling for those who crave less ambiguity, but the life of an artist has never been filled with certainty. The dream of a perfect systematic remuneration is nonsense. I pay rent with the price my words bring when published in glossy magazines and at the same moment offer them for almost nothing to impoverished literary quarterlies, or speak them for free into the air in a radio interview. So what

The Contraptions Book club March pick is Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biopgraphy, by Robert Irwin. Chat thread. We will discuss this the week of April 28th. In a 2007 article, The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism, published in Harper’s, Jonathan Lethem delivered a great polemic against a narrow-minded view of authors’ rights, plagiarism, and claims to originality. A key passage is worth quoting in full: Despite hand-wringing at each technological turn — radio, the Internet — the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be tro