5 pages 

5 pages due tomorrow

Bogan Wang

Expository Writing

Prof. Sara

Paper 1 rough draft

Feb 15th 2020

A legal, reasonable and glorified plagiarism era

Will you make a seat for the elderly on the bus? Will you find a way to return the owner when you pick up your wallet? I believe your answer is yes. Because these are proof of our kindness and moral affirmation. However, if asked: Have you ever bought or used piracy? Many people are afraid to open their mouths and be embarrassed. Copyright and patents are not only in practical applications, but also in knowledge. This means that everyone’s ideas and theories are unique. It is true that the society and the world now pay more and more attention to the so-called intellectual property protection, and even continue to promote related laws. But for businessmen’s profit-seeking and vested interests behind them, the relevant laws may be just to beautify or hide their plagiarism.

For most people who have succeeded, they will try to chase higher achievements. This includes more wealth and greater power. The government or interest group that has the right to speak in this world has set laws and rules for the rights and interests of a few people in many ways. Many ‘too big to fall’ companies have delivered amazing taxes to their respective governments and solved the employment problem for many people. These are the ‘beneficiaries’ of existing laws. For example, the Disney company is known to people all over the world and all ages. More and more seemingly beautiful original works have been distributed into different fields by Disney. Manga, animation, movies and more. Even if we live in the age of the Internet, we still can’t search and verify that the books that were published in the library 50 years ago and published in small numbers are the originals of the famous works. Many Disney and Disney’s work fans will insist that Disney has its own creative team. Disney is also a company that respects originality and intellectual property protection. These fans cannot see Disney’s plagiarism of the kernel. Even smart and knowledgeable people can see through the source of the original version of the existing work at one glance, but Disney has taken these plagiarized stories for its own benefit. And they spoke eloquently that they had not copied. They take advantage of the law and public opinion very well.

They are good at beautifying the products of plagiarism. I believe Apple is a more influential company than Disney. Creativity is probably the biggest impression most people have of Apple. When every generation of Apple’s mobile phones came out, the official slogan would be related to ‘redefinition’. Countless people rush to Apple products. Many Apple fans and Disney fans have the same thing: they insist that the technology brought by Apple must be the latest and pioneering. We can’t deny that Steve Jobs did bring innovation that changed the world when he was alive, but when his successor Tim Cook took office, more and more people complained about the lack of innovation ability of Apple’s updated products every year. Through data analysis, we can find that in recent years, users of Apple products have begun to think rationally and have given up their support for Apple. Because competitors gradually have features that Apple did not have or later. Fans don’t know that Apple is a ‘secondary developer’ of many original technologies. This credit is inseparable from Apple’s excellent and efficient public relations team.

We can find a phenomenon that consumers are more willing to pay for creativity. When someone is pioneering a field, it will attract countless people to imitate and compete. These latecomers certainly did not copy directly but rebuilt according to the existing model. I am from China. I believe most people in other countries in the world have never been to China. The impression of China is still there: world factories, plagiarism, not paying attention to copyright and inferior products. Times have changed, we have entered the 21st century 20s ’. China is no longer a country that survived by processing products for Western countries. We also start to innovate and create. As a latecomer, Chinese products began to threaten the high technology of developed countries. In 2019, the United States expelled Huawei, the leader in 5G network technology, from social media and public broadcasting to publicize that Chinese companies had stolen the most advanced technology in the United States. In addition, the products launched by Chinese technology companies in the past two years have also been hanged because they created features that American companies do not have. Without targeting political and national positions, this is simply a slaughter of innovation and creativity. This is the same as the Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg in Foer. (211) The difference is that one is on the bright side and the other is secretly. As a giant and overlord of social media platforms, Facebook has not had a strong competitor for many years since its inception. Whenever there is a potential threat, it will immediately attack the opponent. Means are acquisitions, or suppression by capital. Instagram was successfully acquired by Facebook. However, Snapchat, which came out in 2011, poses a huge threat to the status of Instagram. Facebook reintroduced its skills and wanted to spend heavily on Snapchat, but did not expect that Snapchat has not accepted this condition so far, and it has been operating successfully. Although Facebook’s products are positioned the same as Snapchat, their cores are completely different. Instagram is becoming more homogenous with Facebook, but Snapchat has changed the way people socialize with a new model. If the plagiarists in the world are like Facebook and Disney, there will be less innovation. In my opinion, it is an act that hinders the progress of human civilization.

Facebook’s algorithms make us think less and less, at least on the social media level. We handed our choices to a machine, a computer, so our brain’s workload plummeted. In the process, our creativity and inspiration for innovation will also be missed. Convenience brings us the benefits we can enjoy today but deprives us of our future development. There was no mature and applied algorithm in Picasso’s time that would lose his inspiration. At the same time, Picasso’s era before his death did not allow him to enjoy the benefits of success through his own art. ‘But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift…it’s never really for the person it’s directed at.’ (242) When not chasing interests and rights, such artists have created the treasures of the world. Picasso did not commercialize his work, and he would never know that one day after his death, his work could sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. In my opinion, his masterpiece is irreproducible and cannot be imitated by algorithms and plagiarism. We have never heard of any contemporary artist who created a work of the same value by imitating Picasso’s style, and good imitators may have been heavily hired into the museum to copy. This is probably why his work is so valuable. This is also the value of creativity.

In this utilitarian era, the creator’s ideas and works seem to be protected, which is only superficial. Copyright is only the final dignity of creators. Copyright can only prove that ‘I’ created and invented this thing. People who buy copyright are the biggest gainers. Some people even insult the original work through more immoral means, and this is plagiarism. Many large companies or organizations, when they see the benefits behind something, first try to gain ownership and control of such things for a very low value. When owners are unwilling to sell the results of their wisdom to these groups, they will perfectly ‘copy’ a copy by various means. Then it will be widely advertised, claiming that they are original. The products they plagiarized were legal. ‘Yet Disney’s protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural…Disney and Contemporary Art.’ (241) When the plagiarist’s work is successful, they even intensify. They do not allow any work that could potentially harm their plagiarism. In this environment, originality is the one that loses the most.

“The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors … those for the repeal of the estate tax.” (245) Lethem told an awkward fact. Different organizations, companies and governments in the world want to acquire new technology, new ideas and new art. Monopoly these technologies while wanting more people to participate in these original works for better development. In my opinion, you can’t have things both ways. Nowadays, groups of different positions often cause the creators and plagiarism to happen constantly for their own interests. We need to think about how to solve this problem. Like Foer said, the algorithm brings so-called convenience to Facebook users, so that users do not need to think deeply. Similarly, as creators continue to be plagiarized and succeed in their work, the precious inspiration in their minds will only decrease.

Bogan Wang

Expository Writing

Prof. Sara

Paper 1 rough draft

Jan 28th 2020

Invisible change is the scariest

In our life, many things happen repeatedly, and people will accept these things implicitly. This means that we are changing, whether in terms of ethics, laws or values. We live in an era of highly developed Internet and technology, while passively receiving massive data and information flows every day. Whether or not these data or information flows are what we need, we are always assimilated and changed invisibly. Maybe people have not realized that the development of individuals or groups, no matter what they are, is being passively promoted. So obviously a small number of people who have mastered the core technology are doing such things. Mark Zuckerberg is one of them, and even a dangerous leader. It is precisely because of such people and organizations that most people in this world are being threatened unknowingly.

For a large part of the world, life is inseparable from the existence of social media. The first thing many people do when they wake up is to take out their mobile phones or computers and receive information through social media. Undoubtedly, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and its first message they see is not necessarily a greeting from friends. It may also be a McDonald’s advertisement that guesses that you are desperate for breakfast. Many people feel amazing, even considerate, because this seems to be what they need. The next thing may be to follow the ad recommendation and enjoy it. This function is a product of something called algorithm. Foer clearly states what is the algorithm，“That was the point of his language: Knowledge, all knowledge, could ultimately be derived from computation. It would be an effortless process, cogitatio caeca or blind thought. Humans were no longer even needed to conceive new ideas. A machine could do that, by combining and dividing concepts.”（109）As early as the 17th century, Europe was still in the Baroque period. When people were crazy about art, a man with great wisdom in multiple fields at the same time, Leibniz, had proposed the concept of algorithms, and even acted on this concept. This genius has the same spirit as Zuckerberg. More and more things and jobs can be replaced by machines and artificial intelligence. This may be the consensus of geniuses separated by hundreds of years. We have to admit that people’s lives have become more convenient under this factor. But everything is a double-edged sword. Have we thought about the algorithms behind Facebook and are they making us as human beings the most special point-creativity, weakening? Although the algorithm has appeared in the past few centuries, perhaps its starting point is good for all human beings. But when the few people or organizations that control it use its methods or become no longer pure for their own benefit, people should reflect on whether our thinking is being interfered with.

People should be wary of such a company and leader. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook’s behavior is a threat to people’s thinking in the future, which is foreseeable. Facebook has been pervasive in life, and wherever the Internet and humans exist, it is affected and even controlled at some level. It is not a simple communication tool considered by people. We are influenced, changed and even dominated by social media. Some changes are invisible. Foer claims, “With the looming threat that our embarrassing information will be broadcast, we’ll behave better. And perhaps the ubiquity of incriminating photos and damning revelations will prod us to become more tolerant of one another’s sins.”(105-106) But is this in line with the existing moral standards of our human beings? Tolerance is positive most of the time. However, this does not mean that after being discovered, you can comfort yourself by forgiving others. If a criminal, or a person with a high probability of committing a crime, is “tolerated” on social media full of uncertainty, I believe this will only make these people worse. Facebook collects our personal information and uses algorithms to try to regulate people’s ethics and behavior. This is the idea deep inside Zuckerberg. The current situation is that Facebook holds a large amount of user data, and at the same time uses its own ‘unique’ algorithm to grasp the dirty and ugly side of some people, as well as the weakness of human. They can achieve any purpose by these means . As a person who has a strong admiration for hackers and also has unimaginable wealth, he has the ability to change humankind. Any country in this world is ruled by the government. Then Facebook is like a revolutionary version of government, decentralized, legal, and cannot be removed.

Facebook hides his thoughts very cunningly. The restless man violated campus rules and authority as early as college. Foer writes, “The point is that Facebook has a strong, paternalistic view on what’s best for you, and it’s trying to transport you there.”(106).Under the powerful function of the algorithm, Facebook’s behavior towards users is similar to that of parents. Parents do not persecute, but children often follow their parents’ opinions. It uses algorithms to use the form of moral panic to change people’s thinking. There are lots of examples that because of the moral panic, people loss or hurt their own legal, right benefits. This is one of the ways that algorithms virtually harm people. When we use Facebook, there is a donation advertisement for a nonprofit fund organization. Maybe at first the users simply wanted to understand the background of the organization and didn’t think too much. However, the algorithm analyzes the user’s personality and life, screens out some softhearted people, and then uses some words and slogans to make users donate because of moral. Even the living conditions of these donors are not very good. However, the original intention of these users is simply curious. It’s not that donating is a bad thing, but no one is obliged to do it. For every individual in this world, everyone has the right to choose, and each choice should not change their minds because of non-existing condemnation.

Algorithms not only drive us through our thinking to do things that are not subjective, but also threaten people in other ways. Foer Writes, “It has bragged about how it increased voter turnout (and organ donation) by subtly ramping up the social pressures that compel virtuous behavior.”(113) I don’t know how Facebook made such remarks, and they refreshed my personal perception. When a voluntary thing is controlled by means to achieve the interests of certain groups, is this the so-called ‘subtly ramping up the social pressures that compel virtuous behavior.’? Political stance and organ donation are two very serious and important topics in life. People have the right to decide their own political positions and organ donations. But some people may not be so determined, and this can be changed through algorithms. Algorithms can put a politician on the stage of history. Facebook can push to voters with some one-sided information. No party is 100% clean. Negative information must be objective. Perhaps such a push would cause voters to change their decisions. Organ donation is a very private and voluntary option for a person. For people with religious beliefs, conservative parents, and some cultural practices, their organ donation is not necessarily positive. The algorithm can also achieve similar effects to voting through analysis.

As algorithms develop, we become more and more accustomed to the convenience that algorithms bring to us. This is a red flag and we need to think. Human beings are the most intelligent beings in the currently known creatures. Born as a person, independent thinking is our most unique ability. It was human beings who carried out the industrial revolution and technological revolution; it was humans who invented electronic components, the Internet and artificial intelligence. Unconsciously, technology has reached a very developed level. As we explore the future, we haven’t thought too much about whether the current moral standards can drive more advanced technology. In my opinion, therefore there are people like Zuckerberg and companies like Facebook trying to change the world with their own values ​​and interests. The existence of the algorithm itself is not wrong, it is just a formula, an invention. But the people or organizations that use it have changed it. Foer writes, ‘The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organizations that run the machines. (P111) If human thinking can be replaced by machines, it means that we have lost our greatest qualities as human beings. There is no difference between humans and the walking dead who don’t think on their own. Machines are always machines. Maybe machines can create attractive works of art, but such works lack soul. The algorithm cannot analyze how Beethoven stubbornly resists the injustice and suffering of life to create masterpiece. There is not only one ‘Zuckerberg’ in the world. When we face a suggestion made by ‘Facebook’, we should think rationally. Is this kind of suggestion really what we want instead of accepting it passively.

•••

MARTHA STOUT

WHAT Is SANITY? Are “normal” people always sane, or could it be said that we
experience sanity only at certain times? After witnessing a jarring event, have you
ever found yourself in a condition that is not exactly sane: a state of frantic agita­
tion or numbness and distraction? These are just some of the questions explored
by Martha Stout in her first book, The Myth ef Sanity: Divided Consciousness and
the Promise ef Awareness (2002), from which this selection comes. Stout draws on
her nearly 30 years of practice as a clinical psychologist to show that the tendency
to dissociate–to withdraw from reality-begins as a life-preserving resource that
defends against severe trauma in childhood, but later can develop into a way of
life defined by emotional detachment and prolonged disengagement with the
world. In the most extreme cases, a dissociative disorder can cause individuals to
black out for extended periods or to develop multiple personalities in order to
cope with life’s challenges. By defirring a continuum that extends from the
everyday experience of spacing out or getting lost in thought to conditions like
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stout urges her readers to recognize the com­
plexity of consciousness itsel£ If all of us dissociate to some degree, then a term
like “sanity” is simply too crude to capture the real nature of mental health,
which requires a proper balance between dissociation and engagement. The
patients Stout focuses on in her study have lost this precious balance, but with
her help, they come to see the meaning of their lives as something they can
recover. In jargon-free prose, Stout tells stories of her patients’ struggles for
sanity, revealing in each case how buried or missing ,memories disrupt their
awareness of the present.

For more than 25 years Stout served on the clinical faculty of the Harvard
Medical School through the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and
the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In addition, she has taught on
the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and the psychology
faculty of Wellesley College. Since completing The Myth ef Sanity, she has
published two other best selling books The Sociopath Next Door (2005) and The
Paranoia Switch (2007).

“When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday,” from THE MYTH OF SANITY by Martha Stout, copyright

© 2001 by Martha Stout. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

Biographical information comes from and
.

413

414 MARTHA STOUT

•••
When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning,

It Was Friday

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on “I shall
forget!” , never, never

“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a
memorandum of it.”

-LEWIS CARROLL

Imagine th~t you are in your house–no-you are locked in your house cannot
get out. It 1s the dead of winter. The drifted snow is hi”ghe th ‘. d
bl kin h • r an your wm ows

oc g t e light of both moon and sun. Around the house the · d ‘
night and day. ‘ wm moans,

N . . tha
.c tl ow unagme t even though you have plenty of electric lights, and per-
iec y good central heating, you are almost always in the dark d · ld
b hin • an quite co

e~ause s?met g 15 wr~ng with the old-fashioned fuse box in the basement’.
Inside this cobwebbed, mnocuous-looking box the fu k b ·

d
. , ses eep urnmg out

an on account of this small malfunction all the power m· th h dl’ fail ‘ e ouse repeate y
s. : ou have replaced so many melted fuses that now your little bag of new

ones 15 ~mpty; ~ere are no more. You sigh in frustration, and regard your frozen
brea~ m . the light of the flashlight. Your house, which could be so
tomblike mstead. cozy, is

In all probabili_ty, there is something quirky in the antiquated fuse box; it has
developed some_ kind of needless hair trigger, and is not really reactin to an
dangerous electncal overload at all Should you get some pe · g f y
P

o k t d h · nmes out o your
c e , an use t em to replace the burned-out fuses? That would solve the

po:wer-outage problem. No more shorts, not with copper coins in there. Using
coms woul~ scuttle the safeguard function of the fuse box but the need for a
safeguard nght now is questionable, and the box is keep~g you cold and ·
the dark for no good reason. Well, probably for no good reason. m

On the other hand, what if the wiring in the house really is overloaded
somehow? A fire could result, probably will result eventually. If you do not
find the fire soon eno_ugh, if you cannot manage to put the fire out, the whole
h?use could go up, w1tli you trapped inside. you know that deatli by burning is
hideous. You know also that your mind is playm· g tricks but thinkin. b fir

alrn · · h , g a out e,
you ost unagme t ere is smoke in your nostrils right now.

So, do you go back upstairs and sit endlessly in a dark livm· d .c d b fr g room, e1eate
num om the ~old, though you have buried yourself under every blariket i~
th_e house~ No ligh~ to read by, no music, just the wail and rattle of the icy
wmd outside? Or, m an attempt to feel more hum d ak thin an, o you m e gs

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 415

wann and comfortable? Is it wise to gamble with calamity and howling pain? If
you turn the power back on, will you not smell nonexistent smoke every
moment you are awake? And will you not have far too many of these waking
moments, for how will you ever risk going to sleep?

Do you sabotage the fuse box?
I believe that most of us cannot know what we would do, trapped in a situ-

ation that required such a seemingly no-win decision. But I do know that any-
one wanting to recover from psychological trauma must face just this kind of
dilemma, made yet. more harrowing because her circumstance is not anything
so rescuable as being locked in a house, but rather involves a solitary, unlockable
confinement inside the limits of her own mind. The person who suffers from a
severe trauma disorder must decide between surviving in a barely sublethal mis-
ery of numbness and frustration, and taking a chance that may well bring her a
better life, but that feels like stupidly issuing an open invitation to the unspeak-
able horror that waits to consume her alive. And in the manner of die true hero,
she must choose to take the risk.

For trauma changes the brain itself. Like the outdated fuse box, the psycho-
logically traumatized brain houses inscrutable eccentricities tliat cause it to
overreact-or more precisely, misreact-to the current realities of life. These
neurological misreactions become established because trauma has a profound
effect upon· the secretion of stress-responsive neurohormones such as norepi-
nephrine, and thus an effect upon various areas of die brain involved in memory,
particularly the amygdala and die hippocampus.

The amygdala receives sensory information from the five senses, via the thal-
amus, attaches emotional significance to the input, and then passes along this
emotional “evaluation” to the hippocarnpus. In accordance with die amygdala’s
“evaluation” of importance, the hippocampus is activated to a greater or lesser
degree, and functions to organize the new input, and to integrate it with already
existing information about similar sensory events. Under a normal range of con-
ditions, this system works efficiently to consolidate memories according to their
emotional priority. However, at the extreme upper end of hormonal stimulation,
as in traumatic situations, a breakdown occurs. Overwhelming emotional signifi-
cance registered by the amygdala actually leads to a decrease in hippocampal activa-
tion, such that some of the traumatic input is not usefully organized by the
hippocampus, or integrated witli oilier memories. The result is that portions of
traumatic memory are stored not as parts of a unified whole, but as isolated sen-
sory images and bodily sensations tliat are not localized in time or even in situa-
tion, or integrated with other events.

To make matters still more complex, exposure to trauma may temporarily
shut down Broca’s area, die region of the left hemisphere of the brain that trans-
lates experience into language, die means by which we most often relate our
experience to others, and even to .ourselves.

A growing body of research indicates that in these ways the brain lays down
traumatic memories differently from the way it records regular memories. Reg-
ular memories are formed through adequate hippocampal and cortical input, are
integrated as comprehensible wholes, and are subject to meaning-modification

416 MARTHA STOUT

by future events, and through language. In contrast, traumatic memories include
chaotic fragments that are sealed off from modulation by subsequent experience.
Such memory fragments are wordless, placeless, and eternal, and long after the
original trauma has receded into the past, the brain’s record of it may consist only
of isolated and thoroughly anonymous bits of emotion, image, and sensation that
ring through the individual like a broken alarm.

Worse yet, later in the individual’s life, in situations that are vaguely similar to
the trauma-perhaps merely because they are startling, anxiety-provoking, or
emotionally arousing-amygdala-mediated memory traces are accessed more
readily than are the more complete, less shrill memories that have been integrated
and modified by the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex. Even though unified
and updated memories would be more judicious in the present, the amygdala
memories are more accessible, and so trauma may be “remembered” at inappro-
priate times, when there is no hazard worthy of such alarm. In reaction to rela-
tively trivial stresses, the person traumatized long ago may truly feel that danger is
imminent again, be assailed full-force by the emotions, bodily sensations, and per-
haps even the images, sounds, smells that once accompanied great threat.

Here is an illustration from everyday life. A woman named Beverly reads a
morning newspaper while she sits at a quiet suburban depot and waits for a traiIL
The article, concerning an outrageous local scandal, intrigues her so much that- for
a few minutes she forgets where she is. Suddenly, there is an earsplitting blast from
the train as it signals its arrival. Beverly is painfully startled by the noise; her head
snaps up, and she catches her breath. She is amazed that she could have been so
lacking in vigilance and relaxed in public. Her heart pounds, and in the instant
required to fold the newspaper, she is ambushed by bodily feelings and even a
smell that have nothing whatever to do with the depot on this uneventful morn-
ing. If she could identify the smell, which she never will, she would call it
“chlorine.” She feels a sudden rigidity in her chest, as if her lungs had just turned
to stone, and has an almost overpowering impulse to get out of there, to run.

In a heartbeat, the present is perceptually and emotionally the past. These
fragments of sensation and emotion are the amygdala-mediated memories of an
afternoon three decades before, in Beverly’s tenth summer, when, walking home
from the public swimming pool, she saw her younger sister skip into the street
and meet an immediate death in front of a speeding car. At this moment, thirty
years later, Beverly feels that way again.

Her sensations and feelings are not labeled as belonging to memories of the
horrible accident. In fact, they are not labeled as anything at all, because they have
always been completely without language. They belong to no narrative, no place
or time, no story she can tell about her life; they are free-form and ineffable.

Beverly’s brain contains, effectively, a broken warning device in its limbic
system, an old fuse box in which the fuses tend to melt for no good reason,
emphatically declaring an emergency where none now exists.

Surprisingly, she will probably not wonder about or even remember the
intense perceptual and emotional “warnings,” because by the next heartbeat, a
long-entrenched dissociative reaction to the declared emergency may already
have been tripped in her brain, to “protect” her from this “unbear_3:ble”

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 417

childhood memory. She may feel strangely angry, or paranoid, or childishly
timid. Or instead she may feel that she has begun to move in an uncomfortably
hazy dream world, far away and derealized. Or she may completely depart from
her “self’ for a while, continue to act, but without self-awareness. Should this
last occur in a minor way, her total experience may be something such as,
“Today when I was going to work, the train pulled into the station-the blasted
thing is so loud!-and the next thing I remember, it was stopping at my stop.”
She may even be mildly amused at herself for her spaciness.

Most of us do not notice these experiences very much. They are more or
less invisible to us as we go about daily life, and so we do not understand how
much of daily life is effectively spent in the past, in reaction to the darkest hours
we have known, nor do we comprehend how swampy and vitality-sucking
some of our memories really are. Deepening the mire of our divided awareness,
in the course of a lifetime such “protective” mental reactions acquire tremendous
habit strength. These over-exercised muscles can take us away even when trau-
matic memory fragments have not been evoked. Sometimes dissociation can
occur when we are simply confused or :frustrated or nervous, whether we recog-
nize our absences or not.

Typically, only those with the most desperate trauma histories are ever
driven to discover and perhaps modify their absences from the present. Only
the addictions, major depressions, suicide attempts, and general ruination that
attend the most severe trauma disorders can sometimes supply motivation suffi-
ciently fierce to run the gauntlet thrown down by insight and permanent
change. On account of our neurological wiring, confronting past traumas
requires one to re-endure all of their terrors mentally, in their original intensity,
to feel as if the worst nightmare had come true and the horrors had returned. All
the brain’s authoritative warnings against staying present for the memories and
the painful emotions, all the faulty fuses, have to be deliberately ignored, and
in cases of extreme or chronic past trauma, this process is nothing short of
heroic.

It helps to have an awfully good reason to try, such as suffocating depression
or some other demonic psychological torment. Perhaps this is a part of the rea-
son why philosophers and theologians through the centuries have observed such
a strong connection between unbearable earthly sorrow and spiritual enlighten-
ment, a timeless relationship that psychologists have mysteriously overlooked.

In order: to appreciate what psychological trauma can do to the mind, and to
a life, let us consider an extreme case of divided awareness, that of a woman
whose psyche was mangled by profound trauma in her past, and who came to
me for treatment after several serious suicide attempts. Her story is far grimmer
than most of us will ever know, and the consequent suffering in her adult life has
been nearly unsurvivable. And yet, should one meet her on the street, or know
her only casually, she would seem quite normal. In fact, one might easily view
her as enviable. Certainly, when looking on from a distance, nothing at all
would appear to be wrong, and much would be conspicuously right.

Julia is brilliant. After the summa cum laude from Stanford, and the full schol-
arship at the graduate school in New York, she became an award-winning

418 MARTHA STOUT

producer of documentary films. I met her when she was thirty-two, and an
intellectual force to be reckoned with. A conversation with her reminds me of
the New York Review of Books, except that she is funnier, and also a living, breath-
ing human being who wears amethyst jewelry to contrast with her electric
auburn hair. Her ultramarine eyes gleam, even when she is depressed, giving
one the impression, immediately upon meeting her, that there is something spe-
cial about her. She is, however, soft-spoken and disarming in the extreme. She
does not glorify, does not even seem to notice, either her prodigious intelligence
or her beauty.

Those same blue eyes notice everything, instantly, photographically. The
first time she walked into my office, she said, “Oh how nice. Did you get that
little statue in Haiti? I did a kind of project there once. What a spellbinding
place!”

She was referring to a small soapstone figurine, the rounded abstraction of a
kneeling man, that I had indeed purchased in Port-au-Prince, and that sat on a
shelf parallel to my office door. She had not glanced back in that direction as she
came in, and must have captured and processed the image in a microsecond of
peripheral perception.

“That’s very observant,” I said, whereupon she directed at me a smile so
sparkling and so warm that, for just the barest moment, her lifelong depression
cracked and vanished from the air around her, as if it had been nothing but a
bubble. The radiance of her momentary smile caused me to blink, and I knew
exactly then, even before the first session began, that if she would let me, I
would do everything I could to keep this particular light from going out.

At a moment’s notice, Julia can speak entertainingly and at length about
film, music, multicultural psychology, African politics, theories of literary criti-
cism, and any number of other subjects. Her memory for detail is beyond excep-
tional, and she has the sto1yteller’s gift. When she is recounting information, or a
story, her own intellectual fascination with it gives her voice the poised and
expertly modulated quality of the narrator of a high-budget documentary about
some especially wondrous endangered animals, perhaps Tibetan snow leopards.
She speaks a few astutely inflected sentences, and then pauses, almost as if she is
listening-and expects you to be listening-for the stealthy crunch-crunch of paws
on the snow’s crust.

Curious about this, I once asked her whether she were an actress as well as a
filmmaker. She laughed, and replied that she could do first-rate narrative voice-
overs, if she did say so herself, but had not a smidgen of real theatrical ability. In
fact, she said, sometimes the people she worked with teased her good-naturedly
about this minor chink in her armor.

At my first session with her, when I asked her why she had come to therapy,
she spent thirty minutes telling me in cinematic detail about her recent attempt
to kill herself, by driving to an isolated Massachusetts beach at three A.M. on a
Tuesday in late January, and lying down by the sur£ By so doing, she sincerely
expected not to be found until well after she had frozen to death. Taking her
omniscient narrator tone, intellectually intrigued by the memory, she described
the circumstances of her unlikely accidental rescue by a group of drunken

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 419

college students, and then spent the second thirty minutes of our hour together
likening this near-death experience to the strangely impersonal distance from a
story one can achieve on film with certain authorial camera moves.

“By then, I was floating above myself, looking down, sort of waiting. And I
know I couldn’t actually have seen those kids, but I felt that I did. Over the sound
of the waves, I don’t think you can really hear footsteps in the sand, but still …. ”

And I strained to hear the crunch-crunch.
Therapy is a :frightening thing, and people do not often seek it out because

they are only mildly unhappy. In my work, and because of the high-risk indivi-
duals who are referred to me, it is not unusual for me to hear stories of attempted
suicide from people I have only just met. I have come almost to expect such
accounts, in fact.

At our second session, and in exactly the same tone she had used to describe
her suicide attempt, Julia began by giving me an interesting account of her new
project on the life of a promising writer who had died young, reportedly of a
rare blood disease he had contracted in western China. After about fifteen min-
utes of this, I stopped her, and explained that I wanted to know something about
her, about Julia herself, rather than about Julia’s work. Seeing the blank expres-
sion come over her face, I tried to provide her with some nonthreatening guid-
ance. I asked her some general, factual questions about her childhood.

And at that second session, this is what the articulate, intellectually gifted
Julia remembered about her own childhood: an only child, she knew that she
had been born in Los Angeles, but she did not know in which hospital. She
vaguely remembered that when she was about ten, her parents had moved
with her to another neighborhood; but she did not remember anything about
the first neighborhood, or even where it was. Though she did not know for
sure, she assumed that the move must have taken place because her parents had
become more prosperous. She remembered that she had a :friend in high school
named Barbara (with whom “I must have spent a lot of time”), but she could
not remember Barbara’s last name, or where Barbara had gone after high school.
I asked Julia about her teachers, and she could not remember a single one of
them, not from grade school, not from middle school, not from high school.
She could not remember whether or not she had gone to her high school
prom or her high school graduation. The only thing she seemed to remember
vividly from childhood was that when she was about twelve, she had a little ter-
rier dog naµied Grin, and that her mother had Grin put to sleep when he
needed an expensive stomach operation.

And that was all she remembered of her childhood, this successful thirty-
two-year-old woman with the cinematic mind. And it took forty-five minutes
for her to pull out that much from the dark, silent place that housed her early
memories. She could not remember a single holiday or a single birthday. At
thirty-two, she could swim, read, drive a car, and play a few songs on the
piano. But she could not remember learning any of these skills.

Insufficient memory in the context of an adequate intellect, let alone a gifted
one, is the next observation-right after the extraordinary understatement and
humor-that causes me to become suspicious about a patient’s past.

420 MARTHA STOUT

At our third session, she asked me an astonishing question, but also, really,
the obvious question: “Do other people remember those things, about their tea-
chers, and going to their graduation, and learning to drive, and so on?” When I
told her that, yes, they usually do remember, at least to a much greater degree
than she did, she reverently said, “Wow,” and then she was quiet for a few min-
utes. Finally, she leaned forward a little and asked, “So what’s wrong with me?”

Cautiously, because I knew what I had to say might at first sound preposter-
ous or worse to Julia, I said, ‘Tm wondering about early traumatic experiences
in your life. Even when someone’s cognitive memory is perfectly good, as yours
is, trauma can disrupt the memory in emotional ways.”

Julia thought I was way off base; or at least the part of her that collected
amethyst jewelry, made award-winning films, and talked about camera angles
thought I was way off base. Another part of Julia, the part that kept trying to
commit suicide, the part that prevented her from moving back to Los Angeles
as her career demanded, the part that sometimes made her so sleepy during the
middle of an ordinary day that she had to be driven home, that part kept her
coming back to therapy for the next six years. During those six years, step by
step, Julia and I cast some light on what had happened to her. She agreed to
be hypnotized; she began to remember her dreams; she acknowledged her faint
suspicions. She even traveled back to Los Angeles, to talk with distant relatives
and old neighbors.

What we eventually discovered was that, when she was a child, Julia had
lived in a house of horrors, with monsters jumping out at her without warning
and for no apparent reason, except that Julia had come to assume, as abused chil-
dren do, that she must be a horrible person who deserved these punishments. By
the time she was school age, she had learned not to cry, because tears only
encouraged her parents to abuse her further. Also, she had lost any inclination
whatsoever to let anyone know what was going on. Telling someone and asking
for help were concepts foreign to her despairing little soul. The thought that her
life might be different had simply stopped occurring to her.

And soon, in a sense, she had stopped telling even hersel£ When the abuse
began, she would “go somewhere else”; she would “not be there.” By this, she
meant that her mind had learned how to dissociate Julia’s self :from what was
going on around her, how to transport her awareness to a place far enough
away that, at most, she felt she was watching the life of a little girl named Julia
from a very great distance. A sad little girl named Julia was helpless and could not
escape; but psychologically, Julia’s self could go “somewhere else,” could be psy-
chologically absent.

Simply put, Julia did not remember her childhood because she was not pres-
ent for it.

All human beings have the capacity to dissociate psychologically, though
most of us are unaware of this, and consider “out-of-body” episodes to be far
beyond the boundaries of our normal experience. In fact, dissociative experi-
ences happen to everyone, and most of these events are quite ordinary.

Consider a perfectly ordinary person as he walks into a perfectly ordinary
movie theater to see a popular movie. He is awake, alert, and oriented to his

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY
421

surroundings. He is aware that his wife is with him and that as they si·t d •
. . . ‘ own1n

t~err aisle seats, she 1s to his right. He is aware that he has a box of popcorn on
his l~p. He ~ows ~hat the movie he has come t~ see is entitled The Fugitive, and
that its star 1s Harnson Ford, an actor. As he waits for the movie to begin, per-
haps he worries about a problem he is having at work.

Then the lights in the theater are lowered, and the movie starts. And within
twenty-five minutes, he has utterly lost his grasp on reality. Not only is he no
longer worried about work, he no longer realizes that he has a job. If one could
read his thoughts,. one would discover that he no longer believes he is sitting in a
theater, though in reality, he is. He cannot smell his popcorn; some of it tumbles
out of the box he now holds slightly askew, because he has forgotten about his
own hands. His wife has vanished, though any observer would see that she is still
seated four inches to his right.

And without moving from his own seat, he is running, running, running-
not with Harrison Ford, the actor-but with the beleaguered fugitive in the
movie, with, in other words, a person who does not exist at all, in this movie-
goer’s real world or anyone else’s. His heart races as he dodges a runaway train
that does not exist, either.

This perfectly ordinary man is dissociated from reality. Effectively, he is in a
trance. We might label his perceptions as psychotic, except for the fact diat when
the movie is over, he will return to his usual mental status almost instantly. He
will see the credits. He will notice that he has spilled some popcorn, aldiough he
will not remember doing so. He will look to his right and speak to his wife.·
More than likely, he will tell her that he liked the movie, as we all tend to
enjoy entertainments in which we can become lost. All that really happened is
that, for a little while, he took the part of himself that worries about work prob-
lems and other “real” things, and separated it from the imaginative part of him-
self, so that the imaginative part could have dominance. He dissodated one part of
his consciousness from another part.

When dissociation is illustrated in this way, most people can acknowledge
that they have had such interludes from time to time, at a movie or a play, read-
ing a book or hearing a speech, or even just daydreaming. And then the out-
of-body may sound a little closer to home. Plainly stated, it is the case that
under certain circumstances, ranging from pleasant or unpleasant distraction to
fascination to fear to pain to horror, a human being can be psychologically absent
from his qr her own direct experience. We can go somewhere else. The part of
consciousness that we nearly always conceive of as the “self’ can be not there for
a few moments, for a few hours, and in heinous circumstances, for much longer.

As the result of a daydream, this mental compartmentalization is called dis-
traction. As the result of an involving movie, it is often called escape. As the
result of trauma, physical or psychological, it is called a dissociative state. When
a hypnotist induces dissociation, by monotony, distraction, relaxation, or any
number of other methods, die temporary result is called an hypnotic state, or a
trance. The physiological patterns and the primary behavioral results of distrac-
tion, escape, dissociative state, and trance are virtually identical, regardless of
method. The differences among diem seem to result not so much from how

422 MARTHA STOUT

consciousness gets divided as from how often and how long one is forced to
keep it divided.

Another recognizable example of how consciousness can be split into pieces
has to do with the perception of physical pain. On the morning after seeing The
Fugitive, our moviegoer’s wife is working frenetically to pack her briefcase, eat
her breakfast, get the kids off to school, and listen to a news report on television
all at the same time. She is very distracted. In the process of all this, she bashe;
her leg soundly against the comer of a low shel£ Yet the woman is not seem-
ingly aware that she has injured hersel£ That night, as she is getting ready for
bed, she notices that she has a large colorful bruise on her right thigh. She thinks
“Well, now, I wonder how I did that.” ‘

In this case, a person was distracted, and the part of her consciousness that
would normally have perceived pain was split apart from, and subjugated to, the
part of her consciousness that was goal-directed. She was not there for the direct
experience of her pain. She was somewhere else (the briefcase, the breakfast, the
kids, the news). And because she was not there, she does not remember the
accident.

The direct experience of physical pain can be split off in cases of much more
serious injury as well. Most of us have heard stories along the lines of the parent
who, with a broken leg, goes back to the scene of an accident and wrenches
open a mangled car door with her bare hands in order to rescue her child. Less
valorous, I myself remember my car being demolished by a speeding limousine.
My knee was injured, but I felt no pain just after the crash, was more or less
unaware of my body at all. My first thought before being dragged out of my
car was to peer into the rearview mirror and inspect rny teeth, and to decide
that everything must be okay because there were no chips in them. And then
there are the war stories about maimed infantrymen who have had to flee from
the front line. All such circumstances affect memory in fascinating ways. Note,
for example, that when veterans get together, they often laugh and tell war stor-
ies as though those times had been the best of their lives.

Agony that is psychological can be dissociated, too. While she was being
abused, Julia developed the reaction of standing apart from herself and her situa-
tion. She stopped being there. Certainly, some parts of her consciousness must
have been there right along. She could watch her parents, even predict their
moods. She could run and hide. She could cover her injuries. She could keep
her parents’ secrets. But the part of her consciousness that she thinks of as her
self was not there; it was split off, put aside, and therefore in some sense pro-
tected. And because her self had not been there, her self could not remember
what had happened to her during much of her childhood.

What does this feel like, not being able to remember whole chapters of
one’s own life? I have asked many people this question, Julia among them. As
usual, her answer was obvious and startling at the same time.

“It doesn’t feel like anything,” she answered. “I never really thought about
it. I guess I just assumed, sort of tacitly assumed, that everyone’s memory was
like mine, that is to say, kind of blank before the age of twenty or so. I mean,
you can’t see into someone else’s mind, right? All you can do is ask questions,

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 423

and it never even occurred to me to ask anybody about this. It’s like asking,
‘What do you see when you see blue?’ First of all, you’d never think to ask.
And secondly, two people can agree that the clear blue sky is blue, but does
i:he actual color blue look the same to both of them? Who knows? How would
you even ask that question?

“Of course, every now and then I’d hear people talking about pin-
the-tail-on-the-donkey, or some other thing about a little kid’s birthday, and
I’d wonder how they knew that. But I guess I just figured their memory was
especially good, or maybe they’d heard their parents talk about it so much that
it seemed like a memory.

“The memories I did have seemed like aberrations, like pinpoints of light in
a dark room, so vague that you’re not really sure whether you’re seeing them or
not. Certainly, there was nothing like a continuous thread of memory that
linked one part of my life to another.

“Really it wasn’t until you started asking me questions about my teachers
and so forth that I ever even had any serious questions about my memory.
After you started asking, I asked a couple of other people, just out of curiosity,
and I began to realize that other people really do have childhood memories, and
some of them are pretty vivid. I was surprised.

“What can I tell you? It just never occurred to me to wonder about it
before. It felt like … it felt like nothing.”

She shrugged. Most people shrug. They are genuinely surprised, and at a

loss.
Now the conspicuous question to ask Julia was, “All this time that you’ve

been so unhappy, all the times you’ve tried to end your life, what did you think
was causing all that misery?”

“I thought I was crazy,” she answered.
This is easy enough to understand. Imagine a simple and, relatively speaking,

innocuous example. Imagine that someone, call her Alice, leaves work early one
day and goes to the oral surgeon to have her two bottom wisdom teeth
extracted. The extractions go well; the doctor packs the gums with cotton and
sends Alice home. On the way home, for some fictitious reason, let us say magic
moonbeams, Alice completely loses her memory of the visit to the oral surgeon.
She now assumes that she is driving directly home from work, as she does on
most days. After she gets home, she is okay for a while, but gradually the anes-
thetic wears off, and she begins to experience a considerable amount of pain in
her mouth. Soon the pain is too strong to ignore, and she goes to the bathroom
mirror to examine the situation. When she looks into her mouth, she discovers
that there are wads of cotton in there. And when she takes the cotton out, she
discovers that two of her teeth are missing, and she is bleeding!

Alice is now in the twilight zone. The ordinary experience of having her
wisdom teeth pulled has turned into a situation that makes her feel insane. One
or two more of such experiences, and she would be convinced.

Childhood trauma creates a particularly bewildering picture. Observe normal
children at play, and you will realize that children are especially g~od at diss?ci-
ating. In the interest of play, a child can, in a heartbeat, leave himself behind,

424 MARTHA STOUT

become someone or something else, or several things at once. Reality is even
more plastic in childhood. Pretend games are real and wonderful and consuming.
It is clear to anyone who really looks that normal children derive unending joy
from their superior ability to leap out of their “selves” and go somewhere else,
be other things. The snow is not cold. The body is not tired, even when it is on
the verge of collapse.

Because children dissociate readily even in ordinary circumstances, when
they encounter traumatic situations, they easily split their consciousness into
pieces, often for extended periods of time. The self is put aside and hidden. Of
course, this reaction is functional for the traumatized child, necessary, even kind.
For the traumatized child, a dissociative state, far from being dysfunctional or
crazy, may in fact be lifesaving. And thanks be to the normal human mind that
it provides the means.

This coping strategy becomes dysfunctional only later, after the child is
grown and away from the original trauma. When the original trauma is no lon-
ger an ongoing fact of life, prolonged dissociative reactions are no longer neces-
sary. But through the years of intensive use, the self-protective strategy has
developed a hair trigger. The adult whom the child has become now experiences
dissociative reactions to levels of stress that probably would not cause another
person to dissociate.

The events that are most problematic tend to be related in some way to the
original trauma. However, human beings are exquisitely symbolic creatures, and
“related” can reach unpredictable and often indecipherable levels of abstraction
and metaphor. A long shadow from a city streetlight can remind someone of the
tall cacti on the Arizona desert where his father used to threaten to “feed” him to
the rattlesnakes. An innocent song about the wind in the willow trees can
remind someone else of the rice fields that were a part of her childhood’s land-
scape in Cambodia. A car backfiring on Beacon Street in Boston can remind yet
another person of that spot on the trail where his eighteen-year-old platoon
mate exploded six feet in front of him.

And so for the adult who was traumatized as a child, the present too has a kind
of mercurial quality. The present is difficult to hold on to, always getting away.

In Julia’s case, though she had not questioned her poverty of memory for
the past, she had begun to suspect even before she came into therapy that she
was losing time in the present. Probably this is because there are more external
reality checks on the present than there are on the past. From other people–and
from radio, television, the Internet, date books-there are ongoing reminders of
the present time of day, and day of the week. Markers of time in the past are less
immediate, and sooner or later most dates and chronologies for the past begin to
feel amorphous to us all. It is hardly amazing that one should have forgotten
something that happened twenty years ago. But if a person lets on that she has
no memory of an important event that occurred this very week, friends and
associates are unlikely to let such a lapse go unremarked.

At one of her early sessions with me, Julia announced, “When I woke up
Tuesday morning it was Friday.”

“Pardon?”

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 425

“When I woke up this morning it was Tuesday, and then I discovered that it
was Friday for everybody else.”

“How do you mean?”
“Well, the last thing I remember before waking up this morning was having

dinner Monday night. So I thought it was Tuesday. And then I went in to work,
and some sponsors were there that I was supposed to meet with on Friday. So I
asked my assistant what was up, and she said, ‘You wanted to meet with these
people this morning, remember?’ And I said, ‘No. I wanted to meet with them
on Friday.’ She looked at me, and said, ‘Today is Friday, Julia.’

“I finessed. I laughed and said, ‘Of course. That’s terrible. No more late
nights for me. Pretty soon I’ll be forgetting my name. Ha, ha.’ But it isn’t
funny. This happens a lot. I just lose time. Hours, days. They’re gone, and I
don’t know what I’ve done or where I’ve been or anything else.

“I’ve never told anyone this before. It’s embarrassing. Actually, it’s terrifying.
“I don’t understand any of it, but the thing I understand the least is that

apparently I go about my business during these times, and nobody notices any
difference in me. At least, no one ever says anything. After the meeting this
morning, I realized that on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I must have
done a mountain of editing. There it was, all finished. I did a good job, even.
And I don’t remember a bloody thing.”

During this confession, I saw Julia cry for the first time. Quickly, though,
she willed her tears under control, and wanted me to tell her about a word she
had heard me use the previous week, “dissociative.” She questioned me as if the
issue were a strictly academic one for her, which it clearly was not. I gently
steered her back to the subject of herself and her week.

“Where did you have dinner Monday night?”
“What? Oh. Dinner Monday night. I had dinner at the Grill 23 with my

friend Elaine.”
“Was it a nice time?” I continued to question.
“I think so. Yes, I think it was okay.”
‘What did you and Elaine talk about, do you remember?”
“What did we talk about? Let’s see. Well, I think we talked about the film a

bit. And we talked about the waiter. Very cute waiter.” She grinned. “And we
probably spent the longest time talking about Elaine’s relationship with this new
guy, Peter. Why do you ask?”

“You said the dinner was the last thing you remembered before you woke
up this morning. I thought it might be important. What did Elaine say about
Peter?”

“Well, she said she’s madly in love, and she said she wanted me to meet him
because she thought we’d have a lot to talk about. He’s from L.A., too.”

“You and Peter are both from L.A. What else did you and Elaine say about
L.A.?”

Julia looked suddenly blank, and said, “I don’t remember. Why? Do you
really think something about the place where I grew up scares me enough that
just talking about it blasts me into never-never land for three days? That really
can’t be, though. I mean, I talk about L.A. a lot to people.”

426 MARTHA STOUT

“I think it’s possible that something during the dinner scared you enough to
make you lose yourself for a while, although we’ll never know for sure. Obvi-
ously, talking about L.A. doesn’t always do that, but maybe there was something
in that particular conversation that reminded you of something else that triggered
something in your mind, something that might seem innocuous to another per-
son, or even to you at another time. But as I say, we’ll never know for sure.”

“That’s frightening. That’s awful. It’s like I’m in jail in my own head. I
don’t think I can live this way anymore.”

“Yes, it’s very frightening. I suspect it’s been very frightening for a long
time.”

“You got that right.”
Julia’s knowledge of her own life, both past and present, had assumed the

airy structure of Swiss cheese, with some solid substance that she and her gifted
intellect could use, but riddled with unexplained gaps and hollows. This had its
funny side. A few months later, when she had gained a better acceptance of her
problem, she came in, sat down, and said in a characteristically charming way,
“How do you like my new bracelet?”

“It’s beautiful,” I replied. “I’ve always admired your amethyst jewelry.
When did you get that piece?”

“Who knows?”
She grinned at me again, and we both laughed.
The somewhat old-fashioned term for Julia’s departures from herself during

which she would continue to carry out day-to-day activities is “fugue,” from the
Italian wordfuga, meaning “flight.” A dissociative state that reaches the point of
fugue is one of the most dramatic spontaneously occurring examples of the
human mind’s ability to divide consciousness into parts. In fugue, the person,
or the mind of the person, can be subdivided in a manner that allows certain
intellectually driven functions to continue-rising at a certain time, conversing
with others, following a schedule, even carrying out complex tasks-while the
part of consciousness that we usually experience as the “self’-the self-aware
center that wishes, dreams, plans, emotes, and remembers-has taken flight, or
has perhaps just darkened like a room at night when someone is sleeping.

The departures of fugue are related to certain experiences in ordinary human
life that are not generated by trauma. For example, similar is the common expe-
rience of the daily commuter by car who realizes that sometimes she or he
arrives back at home in the evening without having been aware of the activities
of driving. The driving was automatically carried out by some part of the mind,
while the self part of the mind was worrying, daydreaming, or listening to the
radio. The experience is that of arriving at home without remembering the pro-
cess of the trip. If one reflects upon the minute and complex decisions and man-
euvers involved in driving a car, this ordinary event is really quite remarkable.

Clinical fugue differs from common human experience not so much in kind
as in degree. Fugue is terror-driven and complete, while the more recognizable
condition is the result of distraction, and relatively transparent. As fugue, the car
trip example would involve a driver who failed to remember not just the process
of the trip, but also the fact that there had been a trip, and from where.

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, !TWAS FRIDAY 427

Far beyond distraction, the more remarkable dissociative reaction of fugue would
have been set off by something–an event, a conversation, an image, a
thought-that was related, though perhaps in some oblique and symbolic way,
to trauma.

Not all traumatized individuals exhibit outright fugue. For some people,
stressful events trigger a dernifugue that is less dramatic but in some ways more
agonizing. Another of my patients, Lila, refers to her experience as “my flyaway
self’:

“I had an argument with the cashier at the Seven-Eleven store. I gave him a
twenty and he said I gave him a ten. He wouldn’t give me my other ten dollars
back. The way he looked at me-it was just the way my stepfather used to, like
I was stupid, like I was dirt. I knew he wasn’t really my stepfather, but all the
feelings were there anyway. After a minute, I just couldn’t argue about it. I left
without my money, and by the time I got back home, my flyaway self thing had
started. Once it starts, it’s like there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I’m
gone, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“What does it feel like?”
“Oh boy. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just … it’s just really awful.

I don’t know … everything around me gets very small, kind of unreal, you
know? It’s my flyaway self, I call it. It feels like … my spirit just kind of flies
away, and everything else gets very small-people, everything. If it were hap-
pening now, for example, you would look very small and far away, and the
room would feel kind of unreal. Sometimes even my own body gets small and
unreal. It’s awful. And when it happens, I can’t stop it. I just can’t stop it.”

What Lila describes as her “flyaway self’ is in some respects similar to the
derealization that most people have known occasionally, usually under passing
conditions of sleep deprivation or physical illness. One temporarily has the
sense of looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope: everything
looks small and far away, though one knows intellectually that these same things
are just as close and life-sized as ever.

Imagine being forced to live lengthy segments of your life in this state.
Imagine that you were falling inexorably into it, to remain there for a week or
more at a time, because of events such as an unpleasant argument with a stranger
at a convenience store. As bad as this would be, the situation for someone like
Lila is incalculably worse, because for her the phenomenon has its origins in
trauma. .

Another of my patients offered a specific image, and for me an indelible one,
to describe the same dissociative condition. Forty-nine-year-old Seth, like Julia,
is successful, educated, and visually talented, and his disquieting description
reflects his aptitudes. At the beginning of this particular therapy session, he had
been telling me about a startling encounter, at a company softball game, with
another person lost in the dissociated space with which he himself was all too
familiar.

“I knew exactly where she was,” said Seth.
“What does it feel like?” I asked. “Can you tell me what it feels like when

you’re there? How do you change?”

MARTHA STOUT

“I don’t change. It’s not that I change. Reality changes. Everything becomes
very small, and I exist entirely inside my mind. Even my own body isn’t real.”

Indicating the two of us and the room around us, he continued, “Right
now, this is what’s real. You’re real. What we’re saying is real. But when I’m
like that, the office is not real. You’re not real anymore.”

“What is real at those times?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly. It’s hard to explain. Only what’s going on in my

mind is real. I’ll tell you what it feels like: I feel like I’m dog-paddling out in
the ocean, moving backwards, out to sea. When I’m still close enough to the
land, I can sort of look way far away and see the beach. You and the rest of
the world are all on the beach somewhere. But I keep drifting backwards, and
the beach gets smaller, and the ocean gets bigger and bigger, and when I’ve
drifted out far enough, the beach disappears, and all I can see all around me is
the sea. It’s so gray-gray on gray on gray.”

“Is there anything out in the ocean with you?” I asked.
Seth replied, “No. Not at that point. I’m completely alone, more alone than

you can imagine. But if you drift out farther, if you go all the way out to where
the bottom of the sea drops off to the real abyss part, then there are awful things,
these bloodthirsty sea creatures, sharks and giant eels and things like that. I’ve
always thought that if something in the real world scared me enough, I’d drift
out and out to past the dropping-off part, and then I would just be gobbled up,
gone–no coming back, ever.

“When I’m floating out in the middle of the sea, everything else is very far
away, even time. Time becomes unreal, in a way. An hour could go by that
seems like a day to me, or four or five hours could go by, and it seems like
only a minute.”

Some extreme trauma survivors recognize that they are dissociative, and
others do not recognize this. Many times, an individual will realize at some
point in adulthood that she or he has had a lifelong pattern of being “away” a
grievously large portion of the time.

During the same session, Seth described his own situation in this way:
“Actually, when I was a child, I don’t know how much time I spent away

like that. I never thought about it. It was probably a lot of the time, maybe even
all the time. It just was.”

“You mean it was your reality, and so of course you never questioned it,
any more than any other child questions his reality?”

“Right. That’s right. That was when I was a child. And most of the time it
still happens automatically, bang, way before I know it’s coming; but in here
now, sometimes, there’s this brief moment when I know I’m about to go
away, but I still have time to try to keep it from taking over. Emphasis on try.”

“How do you do that?” I asked.
“By concentrating. By trying with everything I’ve got to concentrate on

you, and what you’re saying, and on the things around me in the office here.
But then there’s physical pain, too. My eyes hurt, and I know I could make
myself feel better if I shut them. But I try not to. And I get this thing in my
stomach, which is the hardest thing to fight. There’s this pain that feels like

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 429

I just swallowed a whole pile of burning coals, this torture feeling that beams out
from my stomach to the rest of my body; sooner or later, it just takes me over.”

He grimaced and put a fist to his breastbone.
When Seth said this about pain in his stomach, I remembered, as I had

remembered during descriptions by many, many others, that there is a common
Japanese term, shin pan, inexactly translated as “agitated heart syndrome,” refer-
ring to a great pain between the chest and the stomach, just under the solar
plexus. Shin pan, a condition as real within Eastern medicine as is cataract or
ulcer or fractured fibula within Western medicine, is a pain of the heart that
does not involve the actual physical organ. In our culture, we consider such a
thing-a “heartache,” if you will-to be poetry at most. We do not understand
that much of the rest of the world considers it to be quite real.

I said to Seth, “It must be frightening to be out in the ocean like that.”
“Actually, it’s not,” he replied. “The abyss part, with the sharks and all, that’s

frightening. But for most of my life it was really no more frightening than the
things that were on the beach, no more frightening than reality, I guess is what
I’m saying. So floating in the middle of the ocean was really the best place, even
though I guess that sounds strange. Also, being there takes care of the physical pain;
there’s no more pain when I’m there. It’s just that now, I mean lately, the beach,
where you are, and everything else, sometimes it makes me wish I could maybe be
there instead. I guess you could say that now, at least sometimes, I want to live.”

I smiled at him, but he looked away, unsure of what he had just proposed.
Referring back to Seth’s softball team acquaintance, whose dissociative epi-

sode had begun our discussion, I said, “It must be strange to be with another
person when you know she’s drifting away in an ocean just like you do
sometimes.”

“Yes, it’s very strange.”
“How did you know she was drifting? Did she tell you?”
“No. She didn’t tell me. She didn’t say anything at all about being dissoci-

ated. She was just standing around with us, talking about these incredible things,
horrible things from her past, without any em0tion, without any reaction to
them. She played well that day, actually, but she won’t remember any of it,
that’s for sure.”

“You mean,” I asked, “another person, besides you, might not have known
she was dissociated?”

“Absolufely. I’m sure someone else might not have known at all. It’s just
that I looked at her, and I saw me. It was like talking to somebody who didn’t
have a soul.”

”You mean her soul was somewhere else?”
“Yes, I guess so. Her soul was somewhere else,” Seth said.
After a brief silence, he turned the discussion back to his own life: “The

other day, my wife was trying to talk to me about something really important
that happened when the twins were born. Doesn’t matter what it was; what
matters is that I had no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t have a clue. It
wasn’t a dim memory. It wasn’t anything. I didn’t have that memory because I
wasn’t there.”

430 MARTHA STOUT

“You weren’t there, but your wife didn’t know that at the time?” I asked.
“No, she didn’t know that at all. But you know, most of the time when she

and I are making love, and I’m not there, she doesn’t know it even then.”
“You mean, someone can be that close to you, and still not know?”
“Yes.”
At that moment I thought, and then decided to say aloud, “That’s so sad.”
A single tear skimmed down Seth’s cheek. He wiped it quickly with the

back of his hand, and said, “I’m sorry, it’s just that, well, when I think about it,
I realize that, really, I’ve missed most of my own life.”

He stopped and took a deep breath, and I wondered whether he might have
to dissociate just to get through this experience in my office.

I asked, “Are you here now, at this moment?”
“Yes, I think so. Yes.”
There was another pause, and then with more emotion in his voice than he

was usually able to show, he said, “It’s so hard, because so much of the time
when I’m here, what you’re seeing is not what I’m seeing. I feel like such an
impostor. I’m out in my ocean, and you don’t know that. And I can’t tell you
what’s going on. Sometimes I’d really like to tell you, but I can’t. I’m gone.”

Seth’s description of his inner life makes it wrenchingly clear that the trau-
matized person is unable to feel completely connected to another person, even a
friend, even a spouse. Just as limiting, perhaps even more limiting, is such a per-
son’s disconnection from his or her own body. You will recall that Lila’s “fly-
away self’ owned a body that was only “small and unreal,” and that when Seth
was in his ocean, his mind was separated from his physical sel£ I began this chap-
ter with Julia, the brilliant producer of documentary :fihns, and as it happens,
about a year into her treatment, an event occurred that well illustrates the survi-
vor’s trauma-generated dissociation from the body itself; or more accurately,
from those aspects of mind that inform one of what is going on in the body.

One morning just after the workday began, Julia’s assistant, a gentle young
woman who was quite fond of her boss, noticed that Julia was looking extremely
pale. She asked how Julia was feeling, and Julia replied that she thought her
stomach was a little upset, but other than that she was sure she was fine. Ten
minutes later, walking down a corridor, Julia fell to the floor, and by the time
the panic-stricken assistant came to her aid, she was unconscious. An ambulance
arrived and rushed Julia to the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she under-
went an immediate emergency appendectomy. Her life was in danger, and the
situation was touch-and-go for a while, because her infected appendix had
already ruptured and severe peritonitis had resulted. She survived, however, and
during her recovery, when she was well enough to see me again, she recounted a
postsurgery conversation with her doctor.

“The doctor kept asking me, ‘Didn’t you feel anything? Weren’t you in
pain?’ I told her my stomach had been upset that morning, but I didn’t remem-
ber any real pain. She said, ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ I guess she just couldn’t
believe that I really hadn’t felt any pain. She said that I should have been in
agony by the previous night, at the very latest. She kept saying ‘agony.’ But I
didn’t feel it. I swear to you I didn’t feel any pain, much less agony.”

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 431

“I believe you,” I said to Julia.
“Well, I don’t think she did. I guess a ruptured appendix involves a lot of

pain for most people.”
“Yes. Yes it does,” I replied, trying to disguise some of my own

astonishment.
“I know I’ve tried to kill myself intentionally, more than once, so maybe

this sounds crazy-but I don’t want to die one day just because I’m confused.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I don’t want to die because I can’t feel anything. I don’t want to end up

dead because I can’t feel what’s going on in my body, or because I can’t tell the
difference between that psychosomatic pain I’m always getting in my chest and
some honest-to-God heart attack.”

Julia said “psychosomatic,” but I was thinking shin pan, again.
“You know how we talk about my tendency to be dissociative? Well do

you think I dissociate from my body, too? Because if that’s what I’m doing,
then it’s the illusion from hell. I mean, if it’s supposed to save me, it’s not work-
ing. In fact, it’s going to kill me one day. And even if it doesn’t kill me, what’s
the use of living if I can’t feel anything? Why should I be alive when I lose big
parts of my life? I mean, really, how can you care about anything if you can’t
even know the truth about yourself? If you keep losing yourself?”

I said, “I think that’s one of the best questions I’ve ever heard.”
“You do? You mean you agree with me about how I can’t really care about

living if I keep losing myself?”
“I said that’s one of the best questions. I didn’t say I knew the answer.”
“Oh boy, you’re cagey,” she said, and grinned. “So okay, how do I find the

answer?”
“Well you know, you could try to remember. We could try hypnosis, for

one thing.”
I believed that Julia might be ready to bring up the lights in the cold, dark

house of her past.
“Yes, so you’ve said. And the idea scares the hell out ofme.” There was a

substantial pause before she continued. “The idea scares the hell out of me, but I
think I have to do it anyway.”

“Why do you have to?”
“Because I want to·know. Because I want to live.”
“So, let’~ do it?” I asked.
“Let’s do it,” Julia said.

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

WITHIN THE READING

1. Drawing on the information Stout provides, discuss the relations between
the mind-in particular the memory-and the brain. Why are traumatic
memories generally inaccessible? When Stout refers to “our divided

432 MARTHA STOUT

awareness,” what does she mean? Is it possible for awareness to become
undivided? If such a state can be achieved at all, can it ever become penna-
nent, or is “dividedness” an inescapable feature of consciousness itself?

2. Explain the difference between dissociation and ordinary distraction. What is
it about Julia’s lapses of memory that qualifies them as examples of dissocia-
tion? Are there significant differences between Julia’s lapses and Seth’s? Has
Seth devised ways of coping that have proven more successful than Julia’s?

3. In her discussion of Seth, Stout makes a reference to the condition known as
shin pan, a term taken from Asian medicine. Does this reference bring
something new to our understanding that the term heartache does not? Is
Stout just showing off her knowledge of Eastern culture, or is she trying to
get us to rethink our own attitudes about the importance of emotions?

QUESTIONS FOR WRITING

1. The title of Stout’s book is The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the
Promise of Awareness. Now that you have read one chapter from her book,
why do you think she refers to sanity as a “myth”? What does she mean by
“the promise of awareness”? How might “awareness” differ from “sanity”?

2. Julia and Seth both qualify as extreme cases of dissociation, but their
experiences may also shed some light on ordinary consciousness. Taking
Stout’s essay as your starting point, and drawing also on your own experi-
ence, discuss the nature of consciousness. Does the mind operate like a
camcorder, or is awareness more complex and less continuous than the
images stored in a camcorder’s memory?

3. Can we ever know reality-the world as it actually is—–or are we trapped
within our own mental worlds? If memory shapes our perceptions from
moment to moment, then would you say that experience can ever teach. us
anything new? If memory is unreliable, then what are the implications for
self-knowledge? Is the ancient adage “Know Thyself’ actually an invitation
to wishful thinking?

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

BETWEEN READINGS

1. In “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan,” Ethan Watters makes the
case for seeing depression as a cultural construct rather than an empirical fact.
He does not deny the reality of depression as an experience, but he proposes
that people in different cultures will understand the disorder differently.
Dr. Laurence J. Kirmayer, an authority whom Watters quotes vvith approval,
notes that “a Nigerian man might experience a culturally distinct form of

WHEN I WOKE UP TUESDAY MORNING, IT WAS FRIDAY 433

depression by describing it as a peppery sensation in his head. A rural
Chinese farmer might speak only of shoulder or stomach aches. A man in
India might talk of semen loss or a sinking heart or feeling hot.” What might
Watters say about Stout’s account of dissociative disorders? What might
Stout say about Watters’ view? What conclusions can we draw from the fact
that Julia, Seth, and others respond to trauma in similar ways? Does this
similarity undermine Watters’s argument about the role of culture?

2. In her text, Stout discusses how dissociation causes people to have different
experiences of reality. Her patient Seth describes what happens to his
perception when he dissociates: “It’s not that I change. Reality changes.”
How_ is the concept of reality related to perception? How can that help
explain why, as Tim O’Brien writes, “In a war, you lose your sense of the
definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in
a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true”? How do the versions of
truth and reality the texts embrace complicate, confirm, or contradict
each other? How might the subjective nature of truth and reality make
communication difficult for O’Brien’s narrator and his fellow soldiers, as
we~ as for Stout’s patients? How can awareness of the subjectivity of
reality make communication easier?

, …
FRANKLIN FOER

FRANKLIN FOER (RHYMES WITH “LORE”) is a writer long associated with the liberal
magazine the New Republic, which was founded in 1914 by leaders of the Pro-
gressive movement. Impatient with the mainstream media, which these leaders
saw as controlled by moneyed interests, they were hoping to create an indepen-
dent journal of ideas. Since then, the New Republic has seen its ups and downs,
but the near-collapse of the magazine during Foer’s second stint as editor exposes
the stubborn persistence of the problem it was founded to address: the survival of
independent media in a highly unequal society like ours. In 1914, the elite owed
their towering wealth to railroads, coal mines and oil wells; today they control
the Internet and the “attention economy.”

Foer was a casualty and not the cause of the magazine’s decline. After a term
as editor, he left to pursue other projects when he was lured back to the editor’s
post by Chris Hughes, then a boyish 28-year-old lucky enough to have shared a
room with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg when the two were students at
Harvard. As part of the original Facebook team, Hughes later sold his interest in
the platform for an amount purportedly in excess of700 million dollars. And that
enormous wealth encouraged him to think that he could reshape the nation’s
cultural life in the ways he thought best. One of his first moves was to buy the
New Republic, a respected but financially strapped print magazine.

At first, the New Republic’s journalists welcomed Hughes as a white knight
who had arrived in the nick of time to save them from the problems created by
the shift away from print to the Internet. They interpreted the return of Foer as a
sign of Hughes’ commitment to serious, hard-hitting analysis. But gradually the
writers at the magazine realized that their owner had something else in mind, as
Sarah Ellison reports in Vanity Fair, another mass-market periodical:

Over time, one of the big :flash points that developed between Hughes
and his New Republic writers was their productivity. What that some-
times meant-despite Hughes’s stated contempt for “superficial metrics
of online virality”-was productivity measured in Web traffic …. The
site’s traffic did indeed double, but never got beyond that. “It was not
just about traffic,” another former staffer told me. “It was. really about
[Hughes] kind of feeling, ‘These writers are taking my money, and
they’re coasting. They’re sitting around in their office, intellectually
masturbating, while I’m paying them.”‘

“Mark Zuckerberg’s War on Free Will” from A WORLD WITHOUT MIND: THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF
BIG TECH by Franklin Foer, copyright© 2017 by Franklin Foer. Used by permission of Pengwn Books, Ltd.

102

FRANKLIN FOER 103

In the editorial offices of the New Republic, the older culture of ideas collided with
the new culture of information. If ideas are measured by their quality, iriformation
can be quantified in metrics like “visits,” “page views,” and “downloads.” Deter-
mined to increase the :flow of traffic to the New Republic’s online site, Hughes
eventually fired Foer, whose exit inspired two thitds the staff to resign in protest.

Just prior to Hughes’ purchase of the magazine, sales had more than doubled,
but on his watch, newsstand sales declined by 57% in 2013 and by another 20%
in 2014. Today, the magazine limps along, a shadow of its former sel£ Hughes
abandoned it in 20i6, after deciding to devote his energies to venture capital.

Franklin Foer continues to write for some of the best magazines in the coun-
try, most recently the Atlantic. His latest book, World Without Mind: The Existential
Threat ef Big Tech (2017) tries to come to terms with dangers presented by the
cultural clash that all but destroyed his magazine, and, quite possibly, many others
in the years to come.

REFERENCES

Sarah Ellison, “The Complex Power Coupledom of Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge.”
Vanity Fair July 2014. https:/ /www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/chris-hughes-
sean-eldridge-new-republic-congress-run

Katerina Eva Matsa and Michael Barthal, “The New Republic and the State of Niche
News Magazines.” Pew Research Center. FACTANK: News in the Numbers.
10 December 2014. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank:/2014/12/10/the-new-
republic-and-the.,.state-of-niche-news-magazines/

• ••
Mark Zuckerberg’s War

on Free Will

Silicon valley graduated from the counterculture, but not really. All the values it
professes are the values of the sixties. The big tech companies present themselves
as platforms- for personal liberation, just as Stewart Brand preached. Everyone
has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfill their intellectual and
democratic potential, to express their individuality. Where television had been
a passive medium that rendered citizens inert, Facebook is participatory and
empowering. It allows users to read widely, think for themselves, and form their
own opinions.

We can’t entirely dismiss this rhetoric. There are parts of the world, even
in the United States, where Facebook emboldens citizens and enables them to
organize themselves in opposition to power. But we shouldn’t accept Facebook’s
self-conception as sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down
system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation,

104 FRANKLIN FOER

but that’s a surface trail. In reality, Face book is a tangle of rules and procedures
for sorting .information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit
of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them,
using them as lab rats in its behavioral experiments. Wbile it creates the impres-
sion that it offers choice, Facebook patemalistically nudges users in the direction
it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that thoroughly
addicts them. It’s a phoniness most obvious in the compressed, historic career of
Facebook’s mastermind.

Mark Zuckerberg is a good boy, but he wanted to be bad, or maybe just a little bit
naughty. The heroes of his adolescence were the original hackers. Let’s be precise
about the term. His idols weren’t malevolent data thieves or cyber-terrorists. In the
parlance of hacker culture, such ill-willed outlaws are known as crackers. Zuck-
erberg never put crackers on a pedestal Still, his hacker heroes were disrespectful
of authority. They were technically virtuosic, infinitely resourceful nerd cowboys,
unbound by conventional thinking. In MIT’s labs, during the sixties and seven-
ties, they broke any rule that interfered with building the stuff of early computing,
such marvels as the .first video games and word processors. With their free time,
they played epic pranks, which happened to draw further attention to their own
cleverness-installing a living, breathing cow on the roof of a Cambridge dorm;
launching a weather balloon, which miraculously emerged from beneath the turf,
emblazoned with “MIT,” in the middle of a Harvard-Yale football game.

The hackers’ archenemies were the bureaucrats who ran universities, corpo-
rations, and governments. Bureaucrats talked about making the world more effi-
cient, just like the hackers. But they were really small-minded paper-pushers who
fiercely guarded the .information they held, even when that .information yearned
to be shared. When hackers clearly engineered better ways of doing things–a box
that enabled free long-distance calls, an instruction that might improve an operat-
ing system-the bureaucrats stood in their way, wagging an unbending finger. The
hackers took aesthetic and comic pleasure if!- outwitting the men in suits.

When Zuckerberg arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2002, the heyday of the
hackers had long passed. They were older guys now, the stuff of good tales, some
stuck in twilight struggles against The Man. But Zuckerberg wanted to hack, too,
and with that old-time indifference to norms. In high school-using the nom
de hack Zuck Fader-he picked the lock that prevented outsiders from fiddling
with AOL’s code and added his own improvements to its instant messaging
program. As a college sophomore he hatched a site called Facemash-with the
high-minded purpose of determining the hottest kid on campus. Zuckerberg
asked users to compare images of two students and then determine the better
looking of the two. The winner of each pairing advanced to the next round of his
hormonal tournament. To cobble this site together, Zuckerberg needed photos.
He purloined those from the servers of the various Harvard houses that stockpiled
them. “One thing is certain;’ he wrote on a blog as he put the finishing touches
on his creation, “and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well.”

His brief experimentation with rebellion ended with his apologizing to a
Harvard disciplinary panel, as well as campus women’s groups, and mulling strategies

MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WAR ON FREE WILL 105

to redeem his soiled reputation. In the years since, he’s shown that defiance really
wasn’t his natural inclination. His distrust of authority was such that he sought out
Don Graham, then the venerable chairman of the Washington Post company, as
bis mentor. After he started Facebook, he shadowed various giants of corporate
America so that he could study their managerial styles up close. Though he hasn’t
fu]ly shed his awkward ways, he has sufficiently overcome his introversion to appear
at fancy dinner parties, Charlie Rose interviews, and vanity Fair cover shoots.

Still, the juvenile fascination with hackers never did die, or rather he carried
it forward into his.new, more mature incarnation. When he finally had a corpo-
rate campus of his own, he procured a vanity address for it: One Hacker Way. He
designed a plaza with h-a-c-k inlaid into the concrete. In the center of his office
park, he created an open meeting space called Hacker Square. This is, of course,
the venue where his employees join for all-night Hackathons.As he told a group
of would-be entrepreneurs, “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a
hacker culture.”

Plenty of companies have similarly appropriated hacker culture–hackers are
the ur-disrupters-but none have gone as far as Facebook. Of course, that’s not
without risks. “Hacking” is a loaded term, and a potentially alienating one, at
least to shareholders who crave sensible rule-abiding leadership. But by the time
Zuckerberg began extolling the virtues of hacking, he’d stripped the name of most
of its original meaning and distilled it into a managerial philosophy that contains
barely a hint of rebelliousness. It might even be the opposite of rebelliousness.
Hackers, he told one interviewer, were ‘Just this group of computer scientists who
were trying to quickly prototype and see what was possible. That’s what I try to
encourage our engineers to do here:’ To hack is to be a good worker, a responsible
Facebook citizen–a microcosm of the way in which the company has taken the
language of radical individualism and deployed it in the service of conformism.

Zuckerberg claimed to have distilled that hacker spirit into a motivational
motto: “Move Fast and Break Things.” Indeed, Facebook has excelled at that.
The truth is, Facebook moved faster than Zuckerberg could ever have imagined.
He hadn’t really intended his creation. His company was, as we all know, a dorm
room lark, a thing he ginned up in a Red Bull-induced fit of sleeplessness.As his
creation grew, it needed to justify its new scale to its investors, to its users, to the
world. It needed to grow up fast.According to Dustin Moskovitz, who cofounded
the company with Zuckerberg at Harvard, “It was always very important for our
brand to get away from the image of frivolity it had, especially in Silicon Valley!’
Over the span of its short life, the company has caromed from self-description
to self-description. It has called itself a tool, a utility, and a platform. It has talked
about openness and connectedness. And in all these attempts at defining itself, it
has managed to clarify its intentions.

Though Facebook will occasionally talk about the transparency of govern-
ments and corporations, what it really wants to advance is the transparency of
individuals-or what it has called, at various moments, “radical transparency” or
“ultimate transparency.” The theory holds that the sunshine of sharing our intimate
details will disinfect the moral mess of our lives. Even if we don’t intend for our
secrets to become public knowledge, their exposure will improve society.With the

106 FRANKLIN FOER

looming threat that our embarrassing information will be broadcast, we’ll behave
better. And perhaps the ubiquity of incriminating photos and damning revela-
tions will prod us to become more tolerant of one another’s sins. Besides, there’s
virtue in living our lives truthfully. “The days of you having a different image for
your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably
coming to an end pretty quickly,” Zuckerberg has said. “Having two identities for
yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

The point is that Facebook has a strong, paternalistic view on what’s best
for you, and it’s trying to transport you there. “‘To get people to this point where
there’s more openness-that’s a big challenge. But I think we’ll do it,” Zucker-
berg has said. He has reason to believe that he will achieve that goal. With its size,
Facebook has amassed outsized powers.These powers are so great that Zuckerberg
doesn’t bother denying that fact. “In~ lot of ways Facebook is more like a govern-
ment than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and
more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies!’

Without knowing it, Zuckerberg is the heir to a long political tradition. Over
the last two hundred years, the West has been unable to shake an abiding fantasy;
a dream sequence in which we throw out the bum politicians and replace them
with engineers-rule by slide rule. The French were the first to entertain this
notion in the bloody, world-churning aftermath of their revolution. A coterie of
the country’s most influential philosophers (notably, Henri de Saint-Simon and
Auguste Comte) were genuinely torn about the course of the country. They hated
all the old ancient bastions of parasitic power-the feudal lords, the priests, and the
warriors-but they also feared the chaos of the mob. To split the difference, they
proposed a form of technocracy-engineers and assorted technicians would rule
with beneficent disinterestedness.Engineers would strip the old order ofits power,
while governing in the spirit of science. They would impose rationality and order.

This dream has captivated intellectuals ever since, especially Americans. The
great sociologist Thorstein Veblen was obsessed with installing engineers in
power and, in 1921, wrote a book making his case. His vision briefly became a
reality. In the aftermath of World War I, American elites were aghast at all the
irrational impulses unleashed by that conflict-the xenophobia, the racism, the
urge to lynch and riot. What’s more, the realities of economic life had grown
so complicated, how could politicians possibly manage them? Americans of all
persuasions began yearning for the salvific ascendance of the most famous engineer
of his time: Herbert Hoover. During the war, Hoover had organized a system that
managed to feed starving Europe, despite the seeming impossibility of that assign-
ment. In 1920, Franklin Roosevelt-who would, of course, ultimately vanquish
him from politics-organized a movement to draft Hoover for the presidency.

The Hoover experiment, in the end, hardly realized the happy fantasies about
the Engineer King. A very different version of this dream, however, has come to
fruition, in the form of the CEOs of the big tech companies. We’re not ruled by
engineers, not yet, but they have become the dominant force in American life,
the highest, most influential tier of our elite. Marc Andreessen coined a famous

MARK ZUCKERBERG’$ WAR ON FREE WILL 107

aphorism that holds, “Software is eating the world.” There’s a bit of obfuscation in
that formula-it’s really the authors of software who are eating the world.

There’s another way to describe this historical progression. Automation has
‘come in waves. During the Industrial Revolution, machinery replaced manual
workers. At first machines required human operators. Over time, machines came
to function with hardly any human intervention. For centuries, engineers auto-
mated physical labor; our new engineering elite has automated thought. They
have perfected technologies that take over intellectual processes, that render the
brain redundant. O:r; as Marissa Mayer once argued, “You have to make words less
human and more a piece of the machine.” Indeed, we have begun to outsource our
intellectual work to companies that suggest what we should learn, the topics we
should consider, and the items we ought to buy. These companies can justify their
incursions into our lives with the very arguments that Saint-Simon and Comte
articulated: They are supplying us with efficiency; they are imposing order on
human life.

Nobody better articulates the modern faith in engineering’s power to trans-
form society than Zuckerberg. He told a group of software developers, “You know,
I’m an engineer, and I think a key part of the engineering mindset is this hope and
this belief that you can take any system that’s out there and make it much, much
better than it is today. Anything, whether it’s hardware, or software, a company, a
developer ecosystem, you can take anything and make it much, much better.” The
world will improve, if only Zuckerberg’s reason can prevail–and it will.
1HE PRECISE SOURCE OF FACEBOOK’s power is algorithms. That’s a concept repeated
dutifully in nearly every story about the tech giants, yet it remains fuzzy at best to
users of those sites. From the moment of the algorithm’s invention, it was possible
to see its power, its revolutionary potential. The algorithm was developed in order
to automate thinking, to remove difficult decisions from the hands of humans, to
settle contentious debates. To understand the essence of the algorithm-and its
utopian pretension-it’s necessary to travel back to its birthplace, the brain of one
of history’s unimpeachable geniuses, Gottfried Leibniz.

Fifty years younger than Descartes, Leibniz grew up in the same world of
religious conflict. His native Germany; Martin Luther’s homeland, had become
one of history’s most horrific abattoirs, the contested territory at the center of
the Thirty Years War. Although the battlefield made its own contribution to the
corpse count, the aftermath of war was terrible, too. Dysentery, typhus, and plague
conquered the German principalities. Famine and demographic collapse followed
battle, some four million deaths in total.The worst-clobbered of the German states
lost more than half of their population.

Leibniz was born as Europe negotiated the Peace ofWestphalia ending the
slaughter, so it was inevitable that he trained his prodigious intellectual energies
on reconciling Protestants and Catholics, crafting schemes to unify humanity.
Prodigious is perhaps an inadequate term to describe Leibniz’s mental reserves.
He produced schemes at, more or less, the rate he contracted his diaphragm.
His archives, which still haven’t been fully published, contain some two hundred
thousand pages of his writing, filled with spectacular creations. Leibniz invented

108 FRANKLIN FOER

calculus-to be sure,he hadn’t realized that Newton discovered the subject earlier,
but it’s his notation that we still use. He produced lasting treatises on metaphysics and
theology; he drew up designs for watches and ,vindmills, he advocated universal
health care and the development of submarines.As a diplomat in Paris, he pressed
Louis XIV to invade Egypt, a bank-shot ploy to divert Germany’s mighty neighbor
into an overseas adventure that might lessen the prospect of marching its armies
east. Denis Diderot, no slouch, moaned, “When one compares … one’s own small
talents with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one’s books and go
die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner.”

Of all Leibniz’s schemes, the dearest was a new lexicon he called the universal
characteristic-and it, too, sprang from his desire for peace. Throughout history;
fanciful thinkers have created languages from scratch in the hope that their con-
coctions would smooth communication between the peoples of the world, fos-
tering the preconditions for global oneness. Leibniz created his language for that
reason, too, but he also had higher hopes: He argued that a new set of symbols and
expressions would lead science and philosophy to new truths, to a new age of rea-
son, to a deeper appreciation of the universe’s elegance and harmony, to the divine.

What he imagined was an alphabet of human thought. It was an idea that
he first pondered as a young student, the basis for his doctoral dissertation at
Altdorf. Over the years, he fleshed out a detailed plan for realizing his fantasy.
A group of scholars would create an encyclopedia containing the fundamental,
incontestably true concepts of the world, of physics, philosophy, geometry, ev-
erything really. He called these core concepts “primitives,” and they would in-
clude things like the earth, the color red, and God. Each of the primitives would
be assigned a numerical value, which allowed them to be combined to create
new concepts or to express complex extant ones. And those numerical values
would form the basis for a new calculus of thought, what he called the calculus
ratiocinator.

Leibniz illustrated his scheme with an example. What is a human? A rational
animal, of course. That’s an insight that we can write like this:

rational x animal = man

But Leibniz translated this expression into an even more mathematical sentence.
“Animal,” he suggested, might be represented with the number two; “rational”
with the number three. Therefore:

2 x3 6

Thought had been turned into math-and this allowed for a new, foolproof
method for adjudicating questions of truth. Leibniz asked, for instance, are all men
monkeys? Well, he knew the number assigned to monkeys, ten. If ten can’t be
divided by six, and six can’t be divided by ten, then we know:There’s no element
of monkey in man-and no element of man in monkey.

That was the point of his language: Knowledge, all knowledge, could ulti-
mately be derived from computation. It would be an effortless process, cogitatio

MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WAR ON FREE WILL 109

caeca or blind thought. Humans were no longer even needed to conceive new
ideas. A machine could do that, by combining and dividing concepts. In fact,
Leibniz· built a prototype of such a machine, a gorgeous, intricate compilation
of polished brass and steel, gears and dials. He called it the Stepped Reckoner.
Leibniz spent a personal fortune building it. With a turn of the crank in one
direction the Stepped Reckoner could multiply, in the other direction divide.
Leibniz had designed a user interface so meticulous that Steve Jobs would have
bowed down before it. Sadly, whenever he tested the machine for an audience, as
he did before the Royal Society in London in 1673, it failed.The resilient Leibniz
forgave himself these humiliating demonstrations. The importance of the universal
characteristic demanded that he press forward. “Once this has been done, if ever
further controversies should arise, there should be no more reason for disputes
between two philosophers than between two calculators:’ Intellectual and moral
argument could be settled with the disagreeing parties declaring, “Let’s calculate!”
There would be no need for wars, let alone theological controversy, because truth
would be placed on the terra fuma of math.

Leibniz was a prophet of the digital age, though his pregnant ideas sat in the
waiting room for centuries. He proposed a numeric system that used only zeros
and ones, the very system of binary on which computing rests. He explained
how automation or white-collar jobs would enhance productivity. But his critical
insight was mechanical thinking, the automation of reason, the very thing that
makes the Internet so miraculous, and the power of the tech companies so
potentially menacing.

Those procedures that enable mechanical thinking came to have a name. They
were dubbed algorithms. The essence of the algorithm is entirely uncomplicated.
The textbooks compare them to re<:mes--a series of precise steps that can be followed mindlessly.This is different from equations, which have one correct result. Algorithms merely capture the process for solving a problem and say nothing about where those steps ultimately lead.

These recipes are the crucial building blocks of software. Programmers can’t
simply order a computer to, say, search the Internet. They must give the computer
a set of specific instructions for accomplishing that task. These instructions must
take the messy human activity oflooking for information and transpose that into
an orderly process that can be expressed in code. First do this … then do that ….
The process. of translation, from concept to procedure to code, is inherently reduc-
tive. Complex processes must be subdivided into a series of binary choices. There’s
no equation to suggest a dress to wear, but an algorithm could easily be written
for that-it will work its way through a series of either/ or questions (morning or
night, winter or summer, sun or rain), with each choice pushing to the next.-

Mechanical thinking was exactly what Alan Turing first imagined as he col-
lapsed on his run through the meadows of Cambridge in 1935 and daydreamed
about a fantastical new calculating machine. For the first decades of computing, the
term “algorithm” wasn’t much mentioned. But as computer science departments
began sprouting across campuses in the sixties, the term acquired a new cachet. Its
vogue was the product of status anxiety. Programmers, especially in the academy,

110 FRANKLIN FOER

were anxious to show that they weren’t mere technicians. They began to describe
their work as algorithmic, in part because it tied them to one of the greatest of all
mathematicians-the Persian polymath MUQ.ammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, or
as he was known in Latin, Algoritmi. During the twelfth century, translations of
al-Khwarizmi introduced Arabic numerals to the West; his treatises pioneered
algebra and trigonometry.By describing the algorithm as the fundamental element
of programming, the computer scientists were attaching themselves to a grand
history. It was a savvy piece of name dropping: See, we’re not arriviste, we’re
working with abstractions and theories,just like the mathematicians!

There was sleight of hand in this self-portrayal. The algorithm may be the
essence of computer science-but it’s not precisely a scientific concept. An algo-
rithm is a system, like plumbing or a military chain of command. It takes know-
how, calculation, and creativity to make a system work properly. But some systems,
like some armies, are much more reliable than others. A system is a human artifact,
not a mathematical truism. The origins of the algorithm are unmistakably human,
but human fallibility isn’t a quality that we associate with it. When algorithms
reject a loan application or set the price for an airline flight, they seem imper-
sonal and unbending. The algorithm is supposed to be devoid of bias, intuition,
emotion, or forgiveness. They call it a search engine, after all-a nod to pistons,
gears, and twentieth-century industry, with the machinery wiped clean of human
fingerprints.

Silicon Valley’s algorithmic enthusiasts were immodest about describing the
revolutionary potential of their objects of affection. Algorithms were always
interesting and valuable, but advances in computing made them infinitely more
powerful. The big change was the cost of computing. It collapsed, and just as
the machines themselves sped up and were tied into a, global network. Comput-
ers could stockpile massive piles of unsorted data-and algorithms could attack
this data to find patterns and connections that would escape human analysts. In
the hands of Google and Facebook, these algorithms grew ever more powerful.
As they went about their searches, they accumulated more and more data. Their
machines assimilated all the lessons of past searches, using these learnings to more
precisely deliver the desired results.

For the entirety of human existence, the creation of knowledge was a slog
of trial and error. Humans would dream up theories of how the world worked,
then would examine the evidence to see whether their hypotheses survived or
crashed upon their exposure to reality. Algorithms upend the scientific method-
the patterns emerge from the data, from correlations, unguided by hypotheses.
They remove humans from the whole process of inquiry.Writing in Wired, Chris
Anderson argued: “We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data
without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into
the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms
find patterns where science cannot:’

On one level, this is undeniable. Algorithms can translate languages with-
out understanding words, simply by uncovering the patterns that undergird
the construction of sentences. They can find coincidences that humans might
never even think to seek. Walmart’s algorithms found that people desperately

MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WAR ON FREE WILL 111

buy strawberry Pop-Tarts as they prepare for massive storms. Still, even as an
algorithm mindlessly imple:-°ents its proce~ures-a:1-d even as it learns .to see

ew patterns in the data-it reflects the mmds of its creators, the motives of :s trainers. Both Amazon and N etflix use algorithms to make recommenda-
tions about books and films. (One-third of purchases on Amazon come from
these recommendations.) These algorithms seek to understand our tastes, and
the tastes of like-minded consumers of culture.Yet the algorithms make funda-
mentally different recommendations. Amazon steers you to the sorts of boo~s
that you’ve seen before. Netflix directs users to the unfamiliar. There’s a busi-
ness reason for this difference. Blockbuster movies cost Netflix more to stream.
Greater profit arrives when you decide to watch more obscure fare. Computer
scientists have an aphorism that describes how algorithms relentlessly hunt for
patterns:They talk about torturing the data until it confesses.Yet this metaphor
contains unexamined implications. Data, like victims of torture, tells its inter-

rogator what it wants ~o hear.
Sometimes, the algorithm reflects the subconscious of its creators. To take

an extreme example: The Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney conducted a study
that found that users with African American names were frequently targeted
with Google ads that bluntly suggested that they had arrest records in need
of expunging. (“Latisha Smith, Arrested?”) Google is not particularly forthright
about why such results appear. Their algorithm is a ferociously guarded secret.Yet,
we know that Google has explicitly built its search engine to reflect values that
it holds dear. It believes that the popularity of a Web site gives a good sense of its
utility; it chooses to suppress pornography in its search results and not, say, anti-
Semitic conspiracists; it believes that users will benefit from finding recent articles
more than golden oldies. These are legitimate choices-and perhaps wise business
decisions-but they are choices, not science.

Like economics, computer science has its preferred models and implicit
assumptions about the world.When programmers are taught algorithmic think-
ing, they are told to venerate efficiency as a paramount consideration. This is
perfectly understandable. An algorithm with an ungainly number of steps will
gum up the machinery, and a molasseslike server is a useless one. But efficiency
is also a value.When we speed things up, we’re necessarily cutting corners, we’re

generalizing.
Algorithms can be gorgeous expressions of logical thinking, not to mention

a source of ease and wonder. They can track down copies of obscure nineteenth-
century tomes in a few milliseconds; they put us in touch with long-lost elemen-
tary school friends; they enable retailers to deliver packages to our doors in a flash.
Very soon, they will guide self-driving cars and pinpoint cancers growing in our
innards. But to do all these things, algorithms are constantly taking our measure.
They make decisions about us and on our behalf. The problem is that when we
outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organi-
zations that run the machines.

Mark Zuckerberg disingenuously poses as a :friendly critic of algorithms. That’s
how he implicitly contrasts Facebook with his rivals across the way at Google.

112 FRANKLIN FOER

Over in Larry Page’s shop, the algorithm is king, a cold, pulseless ruler. There’s
not a trace of life force in its recommendations and very little apparent understand-
ing of the person keying a query into its engine. Facebook, in his flattering
self-portrait, is a respite from this increasingly automated, atomistic world. “Every
product you use is better off with your friends;’ he says.

What he is referring to is Facebook’s News Feed. Here’s a brief explanation
for the sliver of humanity who have apparently resisted Facebook:The News Feed
provides a reverse chronological index of all the status updates, articles, and photos
that your friends have posted to Facebook. The News Feed is meant to be fun, but
also geared to solve one of the essential problems of modernity-our inability to
sift through the evergrowing, always-looming mounds of information.Who better,
the theory goes, to recommend what we should read and watch than our friends?
Zuckerberg has boasted that the News Feed turned Face book into a “personalized
newspaper.”

Unfortunately, our friends can do only so much to winnow things for us.
Turns out, they like to share a lot. If we just read their musings and followed links
to articles, we might be only a little less overwhelmed than before, or perhaps
even deeper underwater. So Facebook makes its own choices about what should
be read. The company’s algorithms sort the thousands of things a Face book user
could possibly see down to a smaller batch of choice items.And then within those
few dozen items, it decides what we might like to read fust.

Algorithms are, by definition, invisibilia. But we can usually sense their
presence-that somewhere in the distance, we’re interacting with a machine.
That’s what makes Face book’s algorithm so powerful. Many users-60 percent,
according to the best research-are completely unaware of its existence. But
even if they know of its influence, it wouldn’t really matter. Face book’s algo-
rithm couldn’t be more opaque. When the company concedes its existence to
reporters, it manages to further cloud the algorithm in impenetrable descrip-
tions. We know, for instance, that its algorithm was once called EdgeRank. But
Facebook no longer uses that term. It’s appropriate that the algorithm doesn’t
have a name. It has grown into an almost unknowable tangle of sprawl. The
algorithm interprets more than one hundred thousand “signals” to make its
decisions about what users see. Some of these signals apply to all Facebook
users; some reflect users’ particular habits and the habits of their friends. Per-
haps Facebook no longer fully understands its own tangle of algorithms-the
code, all sixty million lines of it, is a palimpsest, where engineers add layer
upon layer of new commands. (This is hardly a condition unique to Facebook.
The Cornell University computer scientist Jon Kleinberg cowrote an essay
that argued, “We have, perhaps for the first time ever, built machines we do
not understand …. At some deep level we don’t even really understand how
they’re producing the behavior we observe. This is the essence of their incom-
prehensibility:’ What’s striking is that the “we” in that sentence refers to the
creators of code.)

Pondering the abstraction of this algorithm, imagine one of those earliest
computers with its nervously blinking lights and long rows of dials. To tweak the

MARK ZUCKERBERG’$ WAR ON FREE WILL 113

algorithm, the engineers turn the knob a click or two. The engineers are con-
stantly making small adjustments, here and there, so that the machine performs
to their satisfaction. With even the gentlest caress of the metaphorical dial, Face-
book changes what its users see and read. It can make our friends’ photos more
or less ubiquitous; it can punish posts filled with self-congratulatory musings and
banish what it deems to be hoaxes; it can promote video rather than text; it can
favor articles from the likes of the New York Times or BuzzFeed, if it so desires.
Or ifwe want to be melodramatic about it, we could say Facebook is constantly
tinkering with how. its users view the world-always tinkering with the quality
of news and opinion that it allows to break through the din, adjusting the qual-
ity of political and cultural discourse in order to hold the attention of users for a
few more beats.

But how do the engineers know which dial to twist and how hard? There’s
a whole discipline, data science, to guide the writing and revision of algorithms.
Facebook has a team, poached from academia, to conduct experiments on users.
It’s a statistician’s sexiest dream-some of the largest data sets in human history, the
ability to run trials on mathematically meaningful cohorts. “When Cameron Mar-
low, the former head ofFacebook’s data science team, described the opportunity,
he began twitching with ecstatic joy. “For the fust time:’ Marlow said, “we have a
microscope that not only lets us examine social behavior at a very fine level that
we’ve never been able to see before but allows us to run experiments that millions
of users are exposed to.” ·

Facebook likes to boast of the fact of its experimentation more than the
details of the actual experiments themselves. But there are examples that have es-
.caped the confines ofits laboratories.We know, for example, that Face book sought
to discover whether emotions are contagious. To conduct this trial, Facebook
attempted to manipulate the mental state of its users. For one group, Facebook
excised the positive words from the posts in the News Feed; for another group, it
removed the negative words. Each group, it concluded, wrote posts that echoed
the mood of the posts it had reworded. This study was roundly condemned as
invasive, but it is not so unusual.As one member of Facebook’s data science team
confessed: “Anyone on that team could run a test. They’re .always trying to alter
people’s behavior.”

There’s no doubting the emotional and psychological power possessed
by Facebook-at least Facebook doesn’t doubt it. It has bragged about how it
increased voter turnout (and organ donation) by subtly amping up the social pres-
sures that compel virtuous behavior. Facebook has even touted the results from
these experiments in peer-reviewed journals: “It is possible that more of the .60%
growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single
message on Facebook.” No other company has so precisely boasted about its ability
to shape democracy like this-and for good reason. It’s too much power to entrust
to a corporation.

The many Facebook experiments add up. The company believes that it has
unlocked social psychology and acquired a deeper understanding ofits users than
they possess of themselves. Facebook can predict users’ race, sexual orientation,

114 FRANKLIN FOER

relationship status, and drug use on the basis of their “likes” alone. It’s Zucker-
berg’s fantasy that this data might be analyzed to uncover the mother of all rev-
elations, “a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships
that governs the balance of who and what we all care about.” That is of course
a goal in the distance. In the meantime, Facebook will probe–const~tly testi~
to see what we crave and what we ignore, a never-ending campaign to improve
Facebook’s capacity to give us the things that we want and things that we don’t
even ~ow we want. Whether the information is true or concocted, authoritative
reportmg or conspiratorial opinion, doesn’t really seem to matter much to Face-
book. The crowd gets what it wants and deserves.

The Automation of Thinking: We’re in the earliest days of this revolution, of
course. But we can see where it’s heading. Algorithms have retired many of the
bureaucratic, clerical duties once performed by humans-and they will soon
begin to replace more creative tasks. At Netflix, algorithms suggest the genres of
movies to commission. Some news wires use algorithms to write stories about
crime, baseball games, and earthquakes, the most rote journalistic tasks.Algorithms
have produced fine art and composed symphonic music, or at least approximations
of them.

It’s a terrifying trajectory, especially for those of us in these lines of work. If
algorithms can replicate the process of creativity; then there’s little reason to nur-
ture human creativity. Why bother with the tortuous, inefficient process of writ-
in~ or painting if a computer can produce something seemingly as good_and in a
painless flash?Why nurture the overinflated market for high culture, when it could
be so abundant and cheap? No human endeavor has resisted automation, so why
should creative endeavors he any different?

The engineering mind-set has little patience for the fetishization of words
and images, for the mystique of art, for moral complexity and emotional
expression. It views humans as data, components of systems, abstractions. That’s
:-7hy Facebook has so few qualms about performing rampant experiments on
its ~sers. T~e whol_e effort is to make human beings predictable–to ·anticipate
their behav10r, which makes them easier to manipulate. With this sort of cold-
?:ooded thinking, so divorced ~om the contin~ency and mystery of human life,
1t s easy to see how long-standmg values begm to seem like an annoyance-
why a concept like privacy would carry so little weight in the engineer’s cal-
culus, why the inefficiencies of publishing and journalism seem so imminently
disruptable.

Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free
“”.’ill, t_o relieve ~umans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right
direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that
our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us,
~n a superior direction. That’s always been a danger of the engineering mind-set, as
1t moves beyond its roots in building inanimate stuff and begins to design a more
perfect social world. We are the screws and rivets in the grand design.

MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WAR ON FREE WILL

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

WITHIN THE READING

115

1. At times, Foer’s argument seems to take the form of a personal attack on
Mark Zuckerberg. Reread the chapter, noting all the moments where Foer
turns our attention directly to him. What purpose do these moments serve? Is
this simply an example of what philosophers call an argument ad hominem–an
attack on a person rather than a fair evaluation of his ideas? Or does Foer see
Zuckerberg as representative of the Internet in general, especially because
Facebook has had such an outsized impact? To what degree does personality
play an unusual role in the history of the Internet? Millions of people know
Zuckerberg’s name, but who knows the name of Wal-Mart’s CEO or the
Chairman of General Motors? Is there something about the Internet that
makes it feel especially personal? How do algorithms contribute to the
personal feel of the Web?

2. A key word in Foer’s title is “free will.” What does Foer mean by his phrase
a “war on :free will”? The use of Facebook clearly requires active attention
and choice. Newsfeeds provide information nonstop, much of it eagerly
consumed. Indeed, it is possible to spend many hours searching for a few
absorbing posts. No one tells Facebook users what to read or what they
should ignore. At every step, they seem to exercise control, and their deci-
sions are guided by purpose and reflection. What does Foer mean, then, by
alleging that the lnternet–and Facebook in particular-undemrines free will?

3. Why does Foer mention Leibnitz, the inventor of calculus? Is he simply
showing off his historical knowledge? Or he is trying to demonstrate a long-
term tendency in the West? What were Leibnitz’s motives in his attempt to
create a thinking machine which could process ideas automatically? What does
Foer’s knowledge of history add to our understanding of the Web, which
clauns to be completely new and unprecedented? Why is Foer so critical of
engineers, including Mark Zuckerberg? If the purpose of engineering is to
enhance the quality of life, why would anyone object to improvements in the
flow of knowledge–improvements that actually hold back a deluge of
unwanted information? Does Facebook’s mechanical thinking give Zucker-
berg more power, or has it moved beyond anyone’s control?

QUESTIONS FOR WRITING

1. To what extent does the countercultural history of the Internet-its cele-
bration of sixties-style openness-conflict with what Foer calls the “auto-
mation of thinking”? The hacker culture Foer references at the start of his
chapter celebrates resistance to established sources of authority. And today,
the Internet still seems to offer some of us the greatest freedom we eajoy
anywhere. Yet Foer alleges that the masters of the Internet have created a
system that controls everything-even the way we think-without our

116
FRANKLIN FOER

2.

n�ticin�. Is Foer, an older journalist whose influence has declined along with pnnt ma�zines, mo�vated by spite, or does he have a point about theway the Web s freewheeling rhetoric disguises authoritarian tendencies? The title of Foer’s b�ok is World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of BigT_ech. One key word m that title is “existential,” which can simply imply that �ig _tech �ep1:’es�nts a threat to_ our “existence.” But the word “existential”

1.

2.

ames with 1_t nc�er _ conno�tlons. A major school of modem philosophy isknown as_ existennalism, which espouses the idea that humans have no rea­so1: to extSt e�cept for the ones they make for themselves. Existentialist p�osophe:5 like Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the idea that a god created us with a _particul� mission or task. Instead, the existentialists believe that we are ethically obligated to take full responsibility for the people we become and the wo�ld we have made. Pretending that we aren’t responsible is whatSartre descnbed as “bad faith”-intellectual dishonesty Takin th ‘d . . . • g ese 1 eas asyour ��g pomt, explain how and why “Big Tech” might be viewed as an e�tennal threat . In what ways does it appear to free us from the work ofcreanng ourselves? Does Big Tech encourage “bad faith”?

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

BETWEEN READINGS

In “The_End ofLoyalty,” Rick Wartzrnan chronicles the triumph ofa new
econormc �odel, one based on cutting production costs instead of raisingwages. This strategy has w. orked so far because W-1-·� and th ail . «=1an o er ret ers can rmport pr�ducts manufactured overseas for wages so low that no Ameri­can could �urvive on them. And here at home, these rerailers have the abilityto underpnce everybody else. The problem is that with the loss of manufacturing jobs, wages h�e �e_eroding too. Walmart, then, has radicallychanged the character of soaal life m America, but so too has Facebook. Have they changed social life in the same way? Are they both producing thesame trends, or are th_e two completely separate? Is Facebook helping to endthe �e:15e of _commuru� that used to bind workers and employers together?Or 1s it helpmg to reknit the tom social fabric?

Connecting present events to the past is a distinctive way of thinkin kn “hi . . . ” Oft g ownas . st�nazmg. en, by turning to history, we can see our current sit-uation m a new and revealing way. Both Foer in “Mark Zuck b , w F Will” er erg s aron_ .ree_ and Ta-Nehisi Coates in “The First White President” his-tonc1ze m order_ to �� deeper insight into their subjects. First, explain howand why they histonaze. Then respond to this question: Is there somethinga�out our culture today that makes the past invisible? Does our obsession ‘?th :11� _future blind us to the past? What advantages might be gained fromhistoncizmg?

•••

JONATHAN LETHEM

CRITICS OFTEN USE the word prolific to describe Jonathan Lethem. He has published
nine novels, five collections of stories, two essay volumes, a novella, and a comic
book. But a better word for him might be protean. In the religion of the ancient
Greeks, Proteus was a god of the sea who presided over unexpected change, a
power that gave him the ability to alter .his shape whenever humans tried to
compel him to foretell events. Like the mythical Proteus, Lethem is a shape-shifter
whose work threads across boundaries of all kinds-the boundaries between detective
:fiction, for example, and the “serious” literature of ideas. What Lethem has written
about New York might be said to encapsulate his view of both life and art:

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled
inside one another, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and
steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else
which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing
workmen periodically wrench open. . . . We only pretend to live on
something as orderly as a grid.

For Lethem, the writer’s task is to look beneath the reassuring surface. He
believes the truth is seldom found by stopping with the obvious or respecting
conventions. Indeed, he sees the act of writing as fundamentally promiscuous.

Perhaps it is not at all surprising that Lethem would have some unexpected
ideas about what it means to be creative. Normally we think of creativity as the
ability to say or do something completely original, but the isolation implied by this
belief strikes Lethem as unappealing. Instead, he celebrates what he calls the
“ecstasy of influence.” If we wish, we can treat words, ideas, and images as some­
body’s private property, but we can also view them as available for everyone to
use. Nothing, he suggests, is totally original: everything is bound up with every­
thing else, if not on the surface, then underneath, like the “lines of television cable
and fresh water” hidden by the “grid.” Once we give up the idea of the private
ownership of culture, writing and thinking take on a new life, as acts of generosity
that place us in debt to everyone who .has made our creativity possible.

Excerpt from THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: NONFICTIONS, ETC. by Jonathan Lethem, copyright © 2011 by
Jonathan Lethem. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division
ofRandom House LLC and Random House Group LTD. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, out­

side of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission.

Quotation comes from Michlko Kakutani, “One by One, Narratives Reflecting Life’s Mosaic,” New York Times,
January 8, 2008.

231

232 JONATHAN LETHEM

Lethem’s argument is powerful, and many writers, artists, and scientists have
experienced the ecstasy he describes. But where does that leave the writing done
in the university itself? Most universities impose harsh penalties on plagiarists, the
people who use the words of others without attribution-that is, without an
acknowledgment of someone’s prior ownership. Indeed, your own college or
university might expel students found guilty of cheating. Where does cheating
start and creativity stop?

•••
The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies,
one chapter is not tom out of the book, but translated into a better
language; and every chapter must be so translated ….

-JOHN DONNE

Love and Theft

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an
amour Jou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger.
The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen,
whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate
with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator-marked by her forever-remains
alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his
tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Lichberg
later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works
faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt
Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden,
unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of
this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov,
knowing Lichberg’s tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation
that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature
has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little
of what we admire in Nabokov’s Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the
former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously
borrow and quote?

“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The
line comes from Don Siegel’s 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 233

Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach’s blaz-
ing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel’s long, sturdy auteurist career.
Yet what were those words worth-to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience–
in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presum-
ably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and
inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the
culture at large?

Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan’s music. The songwriter
has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from
Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga’s Confessions ef a Yakuza.
He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott’s study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album
Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in
which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness oflove, as they do so often in
Dylan’s songs. Lott’s title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler’s Love and
Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the
interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael
and Queequeg-a series of nested references to Dylan’s own appropriating,
minstrel-boy sel£ Dylan’s art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to
look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have
little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confeder-
ate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan’s newest record, Modem
Times. Dylan’s originality and his appropriations are as one.

The same might be said of all art. I realized this forcefully when one day I
went looking for the John Donne passage quoted above. I know the lines, I
confess, not from a college course but from the movie version of 84, Charing
Cross Road with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. I checked out 84, Char-
ing Cross Road from the library in the hope of finding the Donne passage, but it
wasn’t in the book. It’s alluded to in the play that was adapted from the book,
but it isn’t reprinted. So I rented the movie again, and there was the passage,
read in voice-over by Anthony Hopkins but without attribution. Unfortunately,
the line was also abridged so that, when I finally turned to the Web, I found
myself searching for the line “all mankind is of one volume” instead of”all man-
kind is of one author, and is one volume.”

My Internet search was initially no more successful than my library search. I
had thought that summoning books from the vasty deep was a matter of a few
keystrokes, but when I visited the website of the Yale library, I found that most
of its books don’t yet exist as computer text. As a last-ditch effort I searched the
seemingly more obscure phrase “every chapter must be so translated.” The pas-
sage I wanted finally came to me, as it turns out, not as part of a scholarly library
collection but simply because someone who loves Donne had posted it on his
homepage. The lines I sought were from Meditation 17 in Devotions upon Emer-
gent Occasions, which happens to be the most famous thing Donne ever wrote,
containing as it does the line “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it
tolls for thee.” My search had led me from a movie to a book to a play to a
website and back to a book. Then again, those words may be as famous as they
are only because Hemingway lifted them for his book title.

234 JONATHAN LETHEM

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 some-
thing 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 scis-
sors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.

Contamination Anxiety

In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist
Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Coun-
try Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the
eighth of October ’38,” Waters said. “I was fixin’ a puncture on a car. I had been
mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come
to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the
Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin’ Blues,” asked Waters if there were
any other songs that used the same tune. “There’s been some blues played like
that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once
put a record out-Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin’ Blues.’ I
heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.”
In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he
“made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just
like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame,
misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his
mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy,
Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field.”

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of”open source”
culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks
are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians
have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approxi-
mate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee
“Scratch” Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive
pre-digital hardware, creating what they called “versions.” The recombinant
nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and
London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process
generates countless hours of music.

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 235

Visual, sound, and text collage-which for many centuries were relatively
fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)-became explosively cen-
tral to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada,
rnusique concrete, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage,
the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twen-
tieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the moment, chronol-
ogies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate-Igor Stravinsky’s
music and Daniel Johnston’s, Francis Bacon’s paintings and Henry Darger’s, the
novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author who pillaged
Dickens’s Bleak House to write The Bondwoman’s Narrative), as well as cherished
texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery of their “plagia-
rized” elements, like Richard Condon’s novels or Martin Luther King Jr.’s
sermons-it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion,
and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act,
cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.

In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the tele-
vision canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy
and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of
cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show’s hot-tempered
cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right
to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” If nostalgic cartoonists had
never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show;
without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would
be no South Park; and without The Flintstones-more or less The Honeymooners
in cartoon loincloths-The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don’t strike
you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that
links Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and
Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra,
copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked
by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we
want more plagiarism.

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are
awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to
art by art itsel£ Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself
of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities,
and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never
experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating
out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how
deeply he or she submerges that knowing.

What happens when an allusion goes unrecognized? A closer look at The
Waste Land may help make this point. The body of Eliot’s poem is a vertiginous
melange of quotation, allusion, and “original” writing. When Eliot alludes to
Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalarnion” with the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till
I end my song,” what of readers to whom the poem, never one of Spenser’s
most popular, is unfumiliar? (Indeed, the Spenser is now known largely because
of Eliot’s use of it.) Two responses are possible: grant the line to Eliot, or later

236 JONATHAN LETHEM

discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot evidenced no
small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste
Land can be read as a symptom of modernism’s contamination anxiety. Taken
from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the
anxiety?

Surrounded by Signs

The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a certain but unspecifi-
able intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility. They meant to
reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once again into close con-
tact with the matter that made up their world. Andre Breton’s maxim ”Beautiful
as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating
table” is an expression of the belief that simply placing objects in an unexpected
context reinvigorates their mysterious qualities.

This “crisis” the surrealists identified was being simultaneously diagnosed by
others. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of modernity was found in a cer-
tain technological orientation he called “enframing.” This tendency encourages
us to see the objects in our world only in terms of how they can serve us or be
used by us. The task he identified was to find ways to resituate ourselves vis-a-vis
these “objects,” so that we may see them as “things” pulled into relief against the
ground of their functionality. Heidegger believed that art had the great potential
to reveal the “thingness” of objects.

The surrealists understood that photography and cinema could carry out this
reanimating process automatically; the process of framing objects in a lens was
often enough to create the charge they sought. Describing the effect, Walter
Benjamin drew a comparison between the photographic apparatus and Freud’s
psychoanalytic methods. Just as Freud’s theories “isolated and made analyzable
things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of per-
ception,” the photographic apparatus focuses on “hidden details of familiar
objects,” revealing “entirely new structural formations of the subject.”

It’s worth noting, then, that early in the history of photography a series of
judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that art: courts were
asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission
before he could capture and print an image. Was the photographer stealing
from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating something of
private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in favor of the pirates.
Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill,
Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the photographer should
be free to capture an image without compensating the source. The world that
meets our eye through the lens of a camera was judged to be, with minor excep-
tions, a sort of public commons, where a cat may look at a king.

Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get
called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic
deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a
dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 237

Platonic Always, where_ it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly
passed through, a certam gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary
story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious
:fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known
work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not
Anglo-Saxon but postwar English-and further, that fiction he’d himself ratified
as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial,
and timebound references-he impatiently amended his proscription to those
explicit references. that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When
pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference.
Here, trans-generational discourse broke down.

I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings,
zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A *S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore
Show. I was born with words in my mouth-“Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,”
“Xerox”-object-names as :fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and
“toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their
emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet
mysterious to me-I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart,
and “remember” the movie Summer ef ’42 from a Mad magazine satire, though
I’ve still never seen the :film itsel£ I’m not alone in having been born backward
into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cul-
tural environment with which we’ve both supplemented and blotted out our
natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests
of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or
citizen, I’d probably better be permitted to name it.

Consider Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer:

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their
lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night
one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet.
and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in
Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the
time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to
the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson
Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae
and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall’s fall-i.e., when damn
near everything presents itself as familiar-it’s not a surprise that some of today’s
most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing,
in reirnagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms
of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are
paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for “real” to three whole dimensions
to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights. ‘

Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be attached to the
artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we swim, the
alternative-to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance-is far
worse. We’re surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them.

238 JONATHAN LETHEM

Usemonopoly

The idea that culture can be property-intellectual property-is used to justify
everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing
songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret
Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. C~rpora-
tions like Celera Genomics have filed for patents for human genes, while the
Recording Industry Association of America has sued music downloaders for co~y-
right infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with
defendants as young as twelve. ASCAP bleeds fees from shop owners who play
background music in their stores; students and scholars _are shame~ fro~ placing
texts facedown on photocopy machines. At the same tune, copynght 1s revered
by most established writers and artists as a birthright ~nd bulwark, the_ s~urce of
nurture for their iniini.tely fragile practices in a rapaaous world. Plagiansm and
piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught to drea~, as they
roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that
are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon w~t needs no_ defens:.
In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copynght. I~ is
taken as a law both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like
the law ag~t murder, and as naturally inherent in our ‘:orld, ~e the l_a’:’ of
gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is_~ ongom~ soaal _negotiation,
tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect m its every mca~tion.

Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favo~ed
providing just enough incentive to create, not~g more, :md thereafter _allowing
ideas to flow freely, as nature intended. His conception o~ cop~ght was
enshrined in the Constitution, which gives Congress the authonty to promote
the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securin~ for ~ted Times _to Au~o~
and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Wntmgs and D1scovenes.
This was a balancing act between creators and society as a w~~le; ~econd comers
might do a much better job than the originator ~th the ongmal 1~ea.

But Jefferson’s vision has not fared well, has m fact been steadily eroded by
those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be
owned by someone or other. The distinctive feature of modem American c~py-
right law is its almost limitless bloating-its expansio~ in both. scope ~d du:ation.
With no registration requirement, every creative act m a tangible medi1:11111s now
subject to copyright protection: your email to your child or your child’s ~er
painting, both are automatically protected. The first Congress to grant copynght
gave authors an initial term of fourteen years, which ~ould b~ renewed for another
fourteen if the author still lived. The current term is tlie life of the author plus
seventy years. It’s only a slight exaggeration to sa~ tliat ~ch time Iv.lickey Mouse
is about to fall into tlie public domain, the mouse s copynght t:rrn 1s ex_tended.

Even as the law becomes more restrictive, technology 1s exposmg those
restrictions as bizarre and arbitrary. When old laws fixed on reproduction as the
compensable (or actionable) unit, it wasn’t because there was anything ~nda-
mentally invasive of an autlior’s rights in the making of a copy. Rather it was

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 239

because copies were once easy to find and count, so tliey made a useful bench-
mark for deciding when an owner’s rights had been invaded. In the contempo-
rary world, though, the act of “copying” is in no meaningful sense equivalent to
an infringement-we make a copy every time we accept an emailed text, or
send or forward one–and is impossible anymore to regulate or even describe.

At the movies, my entertainment is sometimes lately preceded by a dire
trailer, produced by the lobbying group called the Motion Picture Association
of America, in which the purchasing of a bootleg copy of a Hollywood film is
compared to the theft of a car or a handbag-and, as tlie bullying supertitles
remind us, “You wouldn’t steal a handbag!” This conflation forms an incitement
to quit tliinking. If I were to tell you that pirating DVDs or downloading music
is in no way different from loaning a friend a book, my own arguments would
be as ethically bankrupt as the MP AA’s. The truth lies somewhere in the vast
gray area between these two overstated positions. For a car or a handbag, once
stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the appropriation of an article of
“intellectual property” leaves tlie original untouched. As Jefferson wrote, “He
who receives an idea from me, receives iristruction himself without lessening
mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Yet industries of cultural capital, who profit not from creating but from distrib-
uting, see the sale of culture as a zero-sum game. The piano-roll publishers fear the
record comparries, who fear tlie cassette-tape manufacturers, who fear the online
vendors, who fear whoever else is next in line to profit most quickly from the intan-
gible and infinitely reproducible fruits of an artist’s labor. It has been the same in
every industry and witli every technological irmovation. Jack Valenti, speaking for
the MPAA: “I say to you tliat the VCR is to tlie American film producer and tlie
American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

Thinking clearly sometimes requires unbraiding our language. The word
“copyright” may eventually seem as dubious in its embedded purposes as “family
values,” “globalization,” and, sure, “intellectual property.” Copyright is a “right”
in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative
results. So let’s try calling it that-not a right but a monopoly on use, a
“usemonopoly”-and then consider how the rapacious expansion of monopoly
rights has always been counter to the public interest, no matter if it is Andrew
Carnegie controlling the price of steel or Walt Disney managing the fate of his
mouse. Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist’s
heirs or some corporation’s shareholders, the loser is the community, including
living artists ~ho might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.

The Beauty of Second Use

A few years ago someone brought me a strange gift, purchased at MoMA’s down-
town design store: a copy of my own first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music,
expertly cut into tlie contours of a pistol. The object was tlie work of Robert
The, an artist whose specialty is tlie reincarnation of everyday materials. I regard
my first book as an old friend, one who never fails to remind me of the spirit with
which I entered into this game of art and commerce–that to be allowed to insert

240 JONATHAN LETHEM

the materials of my imagination onto the shelves of bookstores and into the minds of
readers (if only a handful) was a wild privilege. I was paid $6,000 for three years of
writing, but at the time I’d have happily published the results for nothing. Now my
old :friend had come home in a new form, one I was unlikely to have imagined for
it myself The gun-book wasn’t readable, exactly, but I couldn’t take offense at that.
The fertile spirit of stray connection this appropriated object conveyed back to me–
the strange beauty of its second use–was a reward for being a published writer I
could never have fathomed in advance. And the world makes room for both my
novel and Robert The’s gun-book. There’s no need to choose between the two.

In the first life of creative property, if the creator is lucky, the content is sold.
After the commercial life has ended, our tradition supports a second life as well.
A newspaper is delivered to a doorstep, and the next day wraps fish or builds an
archive. Most books fall out of print after one year, yet even within that period
they can be sold in used bookstores and stored in libraries, quoted in reviews, par-
odied in magazines, descnbed in conversations, and plundered for costumes for kids
to wear on Halloween. The demarcation between various possible uses is beau-
tifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss
through the realm of culture into which they’ve been entered, the more so as they
engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like
nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own-artists are no more
able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is
able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children’s classic The Velveteen
Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual
poaching. The value of a new toy lies not in its material qualities (not “having
things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle”), the Skin Horse explains,
but rather in how the toy is used. “Real isn’t how you are made …. It’s a thing
that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play
with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” The Rabbit is fearful,
recognizing that consumer goods don’t become “real” without being actively
reworked: “Does it hurt?” Reassuring him, the Skin Horse says: “It doesn’t hap-
pen all at once …. You become. It takes a long time …. Generally, by the time you
are Real, most of your hair has been loved off; and your eyes drop out and you
get loose in the joints and very shabby.” Seen from the perspective of the toy-
maker, the Velveteen Rabbit’s loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism,
signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for
eve1y possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for
the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Asso-
ciation of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little
sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for
collectors. And artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the colla-
gists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next genera-
tion of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding
with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that charac-
terizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 241

what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of cul-
ture in the first place: to make the world larger.

Source Hypocrisy, or, Disnial

The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work
of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarft, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi,
Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady
and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book,
and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De
La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney’s protectorate of lobbyists has policed
the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox-
threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for
the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly
Crawford from using any Disney-related images-including artwork by Lichten-
stein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others-in her monograph Attached to the Mouse:
Disney and Contemporary Art.

This peculiar and specific act-the enclosure of commonwealth culture for
the benefit of a sole or corporate owner-is close kin to what could be called
imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles
by more privileged (and better-paid) artists. Think of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon, or some of the albums of Paul Simon or David Byrne: even without
violating copyright, those creators have sometimes come in for a certain skepti-
cism when the extent of their outsourcing became evident. And, as when Led
Zeppelin found themselves sued for back royalties by the bluesman Willie
Dixon, the act can occasionally be an expensive one. To live outside the law, you
must be honest: perhaps it was this, in part, that spurred David Byrne and Brian
Eno to recently launch a “remix” website, where anyone can download easily
disassembled versions of two songs from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album
reliant on vernacular speech sampled from a host of sources. Perhaps it also
explains why Bob Dylan has never refused a request for a sample.

Kenneth Koch once said, ”I’m a writer who likes to be influenced.” It was a
charming confession, and a rare one. For so many artists, the act of creativity is
intended as a Napoleonic imposition of one’s uniqueness upon the universe–
apres moi le deluge of copycats! And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or
Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices
in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to
stopper the bottle: cultural debts fl.ow in, but they don’t fl.ow out. We might call
this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious
source hypocrites of all time: Disnial.

You Can’t Steal a Gift

My reader may, understandably, be on the verge of crying, “Communist!” A
large, diverse society carmot survive without property; a large, diverse, and mod-
em society carmot flourish without some form of intellectual property. But it

242 JONATHAN LETHEM

takes little reflection to grasp that there is ample value that the term “prope ,,
doesn’t capture. And works of art exist simultaneously in two economies a mrty
k , -et economy and a gift economy.

The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gifi
establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodi t
leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for~
hacksaw blade, and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness
~s, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don’t want to be bothered, and
if the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I’ll shop elsewhere. I just want
a hacksaw blade. But a gift makes a connection. There are many examples, the
candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few
words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These
tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may
be extended to the most complicated of unions-marriage, parenthood, mentor-
ship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they
degenerate into something else.

Yet one of the more difficult things to comprehend is that the gift economies-
like those that sustain open-source sofrware–coexist so naturally with the market. It
is precisely this doubleness in art practices that we must identify, ratify, and enshrine
in our lives as participants in culture, either as “producers” or “consumers.” Art that
matters to us-which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or
offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience–is received
as a gift is received. Even if we’ve paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert
hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing
to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant
level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.

The way we treat a thing can change its nature, though. Religions often
prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is
lost if they are bought and sold. We consider it unacceptable to sell sex, babies,
body organs, legal rights, and votes. The idea that something should never be
commodified is generally known as inalienability or unalienability—a concept
most famously expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the phrase “endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights … ” A work of art seems to be a hardier
breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true
that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist
to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art,
then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure
commodity. I don’t maintain that art can’t be bought and sold, but that the gift
portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising. This is the rea-
son why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot)
can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e., it’s never really
for the person it’s directed at.

The power of a gift economy remains difficult for the empiricists of our market
culture to understand. In our times, the rhetoric of the market presumes that
everything should be and can be appropriately bought, sold, and owned-a tide of
alienation lapping daily at the dwindling redoubt of the unalienable. In free-market

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 243

th
,.., an intervention to halt propertization is considered “paternalistic,” because it

eo,,, . d ” .al ,,
jpbibits the free action of the citizen, now reposi:e as ~ poten~ ~ntreprene~r.
Of course, in the real world, we know that child-re~g, family ~e,_ ~ducatt~n,
socialization, sexuality, political life, and many other basic human ac~vittes req~e
jnsUlation from market forces. In fact, paying for many of these -~gs ~ rum
them- We may be willing to peek at Ulho Wants to Marry a Multtmtlltonatre or an
eBay auction of the ova of fashion models, _bu~ only to reassure ourselves that
some things are still beneath our standards of digmty. . .

What’s remarkable about gift economies is that they can flounsh m the most
unlikely places-in rundown neighborhoods, on the Internet, in sc_ientific co~-
munities, and among members of Alcoholics Anonymous. A classi~ example is
commercial blood systems, which generally produce blood supplies of lower
safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems. A. gift economy. may be
superior when it comes to maintaining a group’s comm1tment to certam extra-

market values.

The Commons

Another way of understanding the presence of gift economies-which dwell like
ghosts in the commercial machine–is in the sense of a _public com1:1ons. A co~-
mons, of course, is anything like the streets over which we drive, the skies
through which we pilot airplanes, or the public parks or beaches on which we
dally. A commons belongs to everyone and no one, and ~ts use is controlled ~nly
by common consent. A commons describes resources like the body of ancient
music drawn on by composers and folk musicians alike, rather than the co~-
modities, like “Happy Birthday to You,” for which ASCAP, 114 years after it
was written continues to collect a fee. Einstein’s theory of relativity is a com-
mons. Writings in the public domain are a commons. Gossip about c~lebriti:s is
a commons. The silence in a movie theater is a transitory commons, 1mpossibly
fragile, treasured by those who crave it, and constructed as a mutual gift by those

who compose it.
The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through

with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall
commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language:
altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a
language is •a commons doesn’t mean that the community owns it; rather it
belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.

Nearly any commons, though, can be encroached upon, par_titioned,
enclosed. The American commons include tangible assets such as public forests
and minerals, intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents, critical infrastruc-
tures such as the Internet and government research, and cultural resources such as
the broadcast airwaves and public spaces. They include resources we’ve paid for
as taxpayers and inherited from previous generations. They’re not just_~ inven-
tory of marketable assets; they’re social institutions an~ cultural tr~dit10_ns that
define us as Americans and enliven us as human bemgs. Some mvasions of
the commons are sanctioned because we can no longer muster a spirited

244 JONATHAN LETHEM

commitment to the public sector. The abuse goes unnoticed because the theft of
the commons is seen in glimpses, not in panorama. We may occasionally see a
former wetland paved; we may hear about the breakthrough cancer drug that tax
dollars helped develop, the rights to which pharmaceutical companies acquired
for a song. The larger movement goes too much unremarked. The notion of a
commons ef cultural materials goes more or less unnamed.

Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical
necessity. We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying
belief in private ownership, to the detriment of the public good. We have to
remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit
our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources
are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all
the people just for the benefit of a few.

Undiscovered Public Knowledge

Artists and intellectuals despondent over the prospects for originality can take
heart from a phenomenon identi£ed about twenty years ago by Don Swanson,
a libra:ty scientist at the University of Chicago. He called it “undiscovered public
knowledge.” Swanson showed that standing problems in medical research may
be significantly addressed, perhaps even solved, simply by systematically survey-
ing the scienti£c literature. Left to its own devices, research tends to become
more specialized and abstracted from the real-world pro blerns that motivated it
and to which it remains relevant. This suggests that such a problem may be tack-
led effectively not by commissioning more research but by assuming that most or
all of the solution can already be found in various scienti£c journals, waiting to
be assembled by someone willing to read across specialties. Swanson himself did
this in the case ofRaynaud’s syndrome, a disease that causes the fingers of young
women to become numb. His finding is especially striking-perhaps even
scandalous-because it happened in the ever-expanding biomedical sciences.

Undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question the extreme
claims to originality made in press releases and publishers’ notices: Is an intellec-
tual or creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precur-
sor? Does solving certain scienti£c problems really require massive additional
funding, or could a computerized search engine, creatively deployed, do the
same job more quickly and cheaply? Lastly, does our appetite for creative vitality
require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome
killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy ef
injluenc-=.d deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and
timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists?

Give All

A few years ago, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced a retrospective
of the works of Dariush Mehzjui, then a fresh enthusiasm of mine. Mehzjui is
one of Iran’s finest filmmakers, and the only one whose subject was personal

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 245

relationships among the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Needless to say, oppor-
tunities to view his films were-and remain-rare indeed. I headed uptown for
one, an adaptation of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, titled Pari, only to dis-

‘cover at the door of the Walter Reade Theater that the screening had been can-
celed: its announcement had brought threat of a lawsuit down on the Film
Society. True, these were Salinger’s rights under the law. Yet why would he
care that some obscure Iranian filmmaker had paid him homage with a medita-
tion on his heroine? Would it have damaged his book or robbed him of some
crucial remuneration had the screening been permitted? The fertile spirit of stray
connection-one stretching across what is presently seen as the direst of interna-
tional breaches-had in this case been snuffed out. The cold, undead hand of
one of my childhood literary heroes had reached out from its New Hampshire
redoubt to arrest my present-day curiosity.

A few assertions, then:
Any text that has infiltrated the common mind to the extent of Gone With

the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses inexorably joins the language of culture. A map-
turned-to-landscape, it has moved to a place beyond enclosure or control. The
authors and their heirs should consider the subsequent parodies, refractions, quo-
tations, and revisions an hono.r, or at least the price of a rare success.

A corporation that has imposed an inescapable notion-Mickey Mouse,
Band-Aid-on the cultural language should pay a similar price.

The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but
“to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” To this end, copyright
assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to
build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is
neither unfair nor unfortunate.

Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The
case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act.
Arguments in its favor are as un-Arnerican as those for the repeal of the estate tax.

Art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the field of culture.
Digital sampling is an art method like any other, neutral in itsel£
Despite hand-wringing at each technological tum-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 are they worth?
What would they be worth if some future Dylan worked them into a song?
Should I care to make such a thing impossible?

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural lan-
guages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The cita-
tions that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read;
they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul-let us go
further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all

246 JONATHAN LETHEM

human utterances-is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondha~d, con-
sciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sourc~~’ and daily u~ed
by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born_ o_f th_e superst1t1on that he ong-
inated them; whereas there is not a rag of ongmahty about them ai:1-ywhere
except the little discoloration they get from his mer_it~ and mor~ caliber and
his temperament, and which is revealed in charactenstlcs of phrasmg. 01~ and
new malce the warp and woof of every moment. There is no threa~ that 1s not
a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all
quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and con-
sciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves,
might we not forgive it of our artworks? . ·

Artists and writers-and our advocates, our guilds and agents-too often
subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And
we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterpri~es o~ our
selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privil~ged roles. People live differ-
ently who treat a portion of their wealth ~s a gift. If we devalue a~d obscure
the gift-economy function of our art practl.ces, we turn our works into noth-
ing more than advertisements for themselves. -w_ e ~ay console ~urselves that
our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity 1s. some. heroic _counter to
rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that wit~ artists pu~g on or:e
side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser 1s the collectl.ve pub~c
imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose e~1s-
tence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth domg

in the first place.
As a novelist, I’m a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a w~dy d~>’.· Pretty

soon I’ll be blown away. For the moment I’m grateful to be making a livmg, and
so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson _s~nse) you please
respect my small, treasured usemonopolies. Don’t pirate my edit1ons; do plunder
my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my
stories. They were never mine in the :first place, bu_t I gave the~ to you. If you
have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessmg.

KEY: I IS ANOTHER

This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped,
and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, t~os~ sourc~s I forgot along t~e
way). First uses of a given author or speaker are highlighted m b~l~ type. Near_y
every sentence I culled I also revised, at least s?ghtly-for necess1t1~s o~ space, m
order to produce a more consistent tone, or snnply because I felt like it.

Title

The phrase “the ecstasy of influence,” which embeds a rebuking play on Harold
Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” is lifted from spoken remarks by Professor

Richard Dienst of Rutgers.

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 247

Love and Theft

” … a cultivated man of middle age … ” to ” … hidden, unacknowledged mem-
ory?” These lines, with some adjustments for tone, belong to the anonymous
editor or assistant who wrote the dust-flap copy of Michael Maar’s The Two
Lolitas. Of course, in my own experience, dust-flap copy is often a collaboration
between author and editor. Perhaps this was also true for Maar.

“The history of literature … ” to ” … borrow and quote?” comes from
Maar’s book itsel£

“Appropriation has always … ” to ” … Ishmael and Queequeg … ” This par-
agraph makes a hash of remarks from an interview with Eric Lott conducted by
David McNair and Jayson Whitehead, and incorporates both interviewers’
and interviewee’s observations. (The text-interview form can be seen as a com-
monly accepted form of multivocal writing. Most interviewers prime their sub-
jects with remarks of their own-leading the witness, so to speak-and gently
refine their subjects’ statements in the final printed transcript.)

“I realized this … ” to ” … for a long time.” The anecdote is cribbed, with
an elision to avoid appropriating a dead grandmother, from Jonathan Rosen’s
The Talmud and the Internet. I’ve never seen 84, Charing Cross Road, nor searched the
Web for a Donne quote. For me it was through Rosen to Donne, Hemingway,
website, et al.

“When I was thirteen … ” to “.. . no plagiarist at all.” This is from William
Gibson’s “God’s Little Toys,” in Wired magazine. My own first encounter with
William Burroughs, also at age thirteen, was less epiphanic. Having grown up
with a painter father who, during family visits to galleries or museums, approv-
ingly noted collage and appropriation techniques in the visual arts (Picasso, Claes
Oldenburg, Stuart Davis), I was gratified, but not surprised, to learn that litera-
ture could encompass the same methods.

Contamination Anxiety

“In 1941, on his front porch … ” to” … ‘this song comes from the cotton field.”‘
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs.

” … enabled by a kind … freely reworked.” Kembrew McLeod, Freedom ef
Expression. In Owning Culture, McLeod notes that, as he was writing, he

happened to be listening to a lot of old country music, and in my
casual listening I noticed that six country songs shared exactly the same
vocal melody, including Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life,” the
Carter Family’s ”I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” Roy
Acuff’s “Great Speckled Bird,” Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who
Made Honlcy Tonk Angels,” Reno & Smiley’s ”I’m Using My Bible
for a Roadmap,” and Townes Van Zandt’s “Heavenly Houseboat
Blues.” … In his extensively researched book, Country: The Twisted
Roots ef Rock ‘n’ Roll, Nick Tosches documents that the melody these
songs share is both “ancient and British.” There were no recorded
lawsuits stemining from these appropriations ….

248 JONATHAN LETHEM

” … musicians have gained … through allusion.” Joanna Demers, Steal This
Music.

“In Seventies Jamaica … ” to ” … hours of music.” Gibson.
“Visual, sound, and text collage … ” to ” … realm of cultural production.”

This plunders, rewrites, and amplifies paragraphs from McLeod’s Owning Culture
except for the line about collage being the art form of the twentieth and twenty~
first centuries, which I heard filmmaker Craig Baldwin say, in defense of sam-
pling, in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals.

“In a courtroom scene … ” to “.. . would cease to exist.” Dave Itzkoff,
New York Times.

“… the remarkable series of ‘plagiarisms’ … ” to “… we want more
plagiarism.” Richard Posner, combined from The Becker-Posner Blog and
The Atlantic Monthly.

“Most artists are brought … “to” … by art itself.” These words, and many
more to follow, come from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. Above any other book I’ve
here plagiarized, I commend The Gift to your attention.

“Finding one’s voice … filiations, communities, and discourses.” Semanticist
George L. Dillon, quoted in Rebecca Moore Howard’s “The New Aboli-
tionism Comes to Plagiarism.”

“Inspiration could be … act never experienced.” Ned Rorem, found on
several “great quotations” sites on the Internet.

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted … out of chaos.” Mary Shelley,
from her introduction to Frankenstein.

“What happens … ” to” … contamination anxiety.” KevinJ. H. Detttnar,
from “The illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics of Postmodern
Plagiarism.”

Surrounded By Signs

“The surrealists believed … ” to the Walter Benjamin quote. Christian Keathley’s
Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, a book that treats funnish fetishism
as the secret at the heart of film scholarship. Keathley notes, for instance, Joseph
Cornell’s surrealist-influenced 1936 film Rose Hobart, which simply records “the
way in which Cornell himself watched the 1931 Hollywood potboiler East of
Borneo, fascinated and distracted as he was by its B-grade star”-the star, of
course, being Rose Hobart herself This, I suppose, makes Cornell a sort of father
to computer-enabled fan-creator re-workings of Hollywood product, like the
version of George Lucas’s The Phantom Menace from which the noxious Jar Jar
Binks character was purged; both incorporate a viewer’s subjective preferences
into a revision of a filmmaker’s work.

” … early in the history of photography” to ” … without compensating the
source.” From Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig, the greatest of public advocates
for copyright reform, and the best source if you want to get radicalized in a hurry.

“For those whose ganglia … ” to “. . . discourse broke down.” From David
Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram,” reprinted in A Supposedly Fun Thing
I’ll Never Do Again. I have no idea who Wallace’s “gray eminence” is or was.

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 249

I inserted the example of Dickens into the paragraph; he strikes me as over-
looked in the lineage of authors of “brand-name” fiction.

“I was born … Mary Tyler Moore Show.” These are the reminiscences of
Mark Hosler from Negativland, a collaging musical collective that was sued by
U2’s record label for their appropriation of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m
Looking For.” Although I had to adjust the birth date, Hosler’s cultural menu
fits me like a glove.

“The world is a home . . . pop-culture products … ” McLeod.
“Today, when we can eat … ” to” … flat sights.” Wallace.
“We’re surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” This phrase, which I

unfortunately rendered somewhat leaden with the word “imperative,” comes
from Steve Erickson’s novel Our Ecstatic Days.

Use monopoly

” … everything from attempts … ” to “defendants as young as twelve.” Robert
Boynton, The New York Times Magazine, “The Tyranny of Copyright?”

“A time is marked … ” to ” … what needs no defense.” Lessig, this time from
The Future of Ideas.

“Thomas Jefferson, for one … ” to “‘. .. respective Writings and
Discoveries.”‘ Boynton.

” … second comers might do a much better job than the originator … ” I
found this phrase in Lessig, who is quoting Vaidhyanathan, who himself is char-
acterizing a judgment written by Learned Hand.

“But Jefferson’s vision … owned by someone or other.” Boynton.
“The distinctive feature … ” to “. . . term is extended.” Lessig, again from

The Future of Ideas.
“When old laws … ” to ” … had been invaded.” Jessica Litman, Digital

Copyright.
“‘I say to you … woman home alone.”‘ I found the Valenti quote in

Mcleod. Now fill in the blank: Jack Valenti is to the public domain as
____ is to ___ _

The Beauty of Second Use

“In the first … ” to” … builds an archive.” Lessig.
“Most books . . . one year … ” Lessig.
“Active reading is … ” to ” … do not own … ” This is a mashup of Henry

Jenkins, from his Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Partidpatory Culture, and
Michel de Certeau, whornJenkins quotes.

“In the children’s classic … ” to ” … its loving use.” Jenkins. (Incidentally,
have the holders of the copyright to The Velveteen Rabbit had a close look at
Toy Story? There could be a lawsuit there.)

250 JONATHAN LETHEM

Source Hypocrisy, or, Disnial

“The Walt Disney Company . . . alas, Treasure Planet … ” Lessig.
“Imperial Plagiarism” is the title of an essay by Marilyn Randall.
“. . . spurred David Byrne . . . My Life in the Bush of Ghosts … ” Chris

Dahlen, Pitchfork-though in truth by the time I’d finished, his words were so
:1tterly _dis~olved within my own that had I been an ordinary cutting-and-pasting
J oumahst 1t never would have occurred to me to give Dahlen a citation. The
effort of preserving another’s distinctive phrases as I worked on this essay was
sometimes beyond my capacities; this form of plagiarism was oddly hard work.

“Kenneth Koch … ” to “… deluge of copycats!” Emily Nussbaum, The
New York Times Book Review.

You Can’t Steal a Gift

“You can’t steal a gift.” Dizzy Gillespie, defending another player who’d been
accused of poaching Charlie Parker’s style: “You can’t steal a gift. Bird gave the
world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.”

“A large, diverse society … intellectual property.” Lessig.
“And works of art … ” to ” … marriage, parenthood, mentorship.” Hyde.
“Yet one … so naturally with the market.” David Bollier, Silent Theft.
“Art that matters … “to” … bought and sold.” Hyde.
“We consider it unacceptable … ” to “‘… certain unalienable Rights … “‘

Bollier, paraphrasing Margaret Jane Radin’s Contested Commodities.
“A work of art … ” to ” … constraint upon our merchandising.” Hyde.
“This is the reason … person it’s directed at.” Wallace.
“The power of a gift … ” to ” … certain extra-market values.” Bollier, and

also the sociologist Warren 0. Hagstrom, whom Bollier is paraphrasing.

The Commons

“Einstein’s theory … ” to “.. . public domain are a commons.” Lessig.
“That a language is a commons … society as a whole.” Michael Newton,

in the London Review of Books, reviewing a book called Echolalias: On the Forgetting
of Language by Daniel Heller-Roazen. The paraphrases of book reviewers
are another covert form of collaborative culture; as an avid reader of reviews,
I know much about books I’ve never read. To quote Yann Martel on how
he came to be accused of imperial plagiarism in his Booker-winning novel Life

of Pi,
Ten or so years ago, I read a review by John Updike in the New York
Times Review of Books [sic]. It was of a novel by a Brazilian writer,
Moacyr Scliar. I forget the title, and John Updike did worse: he clearly
thought the book as a whole was forgettable. His review-one of those
that makes you suspicious by being mostly descriptive . . . oozed indif-
ference. But one thing about it struck me: the premise …. Oh, the
wondrous things I could do with this premise.

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM 251

Unfortunately, _no one was ever able to locate the Updike review in question.
“The American commons … “to” … for a song.” Bollier.
“Hon~ring the commons … ” to ” … practical necessity.” Bollier.

· “We m Western … public good.” John Sulston, Nobel Prize-winner and
co-mapper of the human genome.

“We have to remain … ” to” … benefit ofa few.” Harry S Truman at the
opening ~f the E:verglades N~tional Park. Although it may seem the height of
presumption to np o!f a _president-I found claiming Truman’s stolid advocacy
as ~y own embarra~s~~ m th: extreme–! didn’t rewrite him at all. As the poet
Mananne Moore said, If a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say
it better?” Moore confessed her penchant for incorporating lines from others’
work, explaining, “I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of
composition.”

Undiscovered Public Knowledge

” … intellectuals despondent .. _.” to ” … quickly and cheaply?” Steve Fuller,
The Intellectual. There’s something of Borges in Fuller’s insight here; the notion
of a storehouse of knowledge waiting passively to be assembled by future users is
suggestive of both “The Library of Babel” and “Kafka and his Precursors.”

Give All

“·:· one ~£Iran’s fines~ … ” to” … meditation on his heroine?” Amy Taubin,
Village Voice, although 1t was me who was disappointed at the door of the Walter
Reade Theater.

“The primary objective … ” to ” … unfair nor unfortunate.” Sandra Day
O’Connor, 1991.

” … the future will be much like the past” to” … give some things away.”
Open-source film archivist Rick Prelinger, quoted in McLeod.

“Change may be troubling … with certainty.” McLeod.
“• • • woven entirely … ” to “… without inverted commas.” Roland

Barthes.
“The ke~el, the soul … ” to “. . . characteristics of phrasing.” Mark Twain,

from a _co_nso~ letter to Helen Keller, who had suffered distressing accusations
of plagiansm., (.). In_ fact, h~r work included unconsciously memorized phrases; .
un~er Keller s particular circumstances, her writing could be understood as
a kind o~ allegory _of the “constructed” nature of artistic perception. I found
the_ Twam quote m the aforementioned Copyrights and Copywrongs, by Siva
V aidhyanathan.

“Old and new … ” to” … we all quote.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. These
guys all sound alike!

“People live differently … wealth as a gift.” Hyde.
” I’ · · • m a cork … ” to ” … blown away.” This is adapted from The Beach

Boys so1:-g “‘Til I Die,” written by Brian Wilson. My own first adventure with
song-lync p . . h I · d h erm1ss10ns came w en trle to ave a character in my second novel

252 JONATHAN LETHEM

quote the lyrics “There’s a world where I can go and/Tell my secrets to/In my
room/In my room.” After learning the likely expense, at my editor’s suggestion I
replaced those with “You take the high road/I’ll take the low road/I’ll be in
Scotland before you,” a lyric in the public domain. This capitulation always
bugged me, and in the subsequent British publication of the same book I
restored the Brian Wilson lyric, without permission. Ocean of Story is the title of
a collection of Christina Stead’s short fiction.

Saul Bellow, writing to a friend who’d taken offense at Bellow’s fictional
use of certain personal facts, said: “The name of the game is Give All. You are
welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the
strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing.” I couldn’t bring myself
to retain Bellow’s “strength,” which seemed presumptuous in my new con-
text, though it is surely the more elegant phrase. On the other hand, I was
pleased to invite the suggestion that the gifts in question may actually be light

and easily lifted.

Key to the Key

The notion of a collage text is, of course, not original to me. Walter Benjamin’s
incomplete Arcades Project seemingly would have featured extensive interlaced
quotations. Other precedents include Graham Rawle’s novel Diary of an
Amateur Photographer, its text harvested from photography magazines, and
Eduardo Paolozzi’s collage-novel Kex, cobbled from crime novels and news-
paper clippings. Closer to home, my efforts owe a great deal to the recent essays
of David Shields, in which diverse quotes are made to closely intertwine and
reverberate, and to conversations with editor Sean Howe and archivist Pamela
Jackson. Last year David Edelstein, in New York magazine, satirized the Kaavya
Viswanathan plagiarism case by creating an almost completely plagiarized column
denouncing her actions. Edelstein intended to demonstrate, through ironic
example, how bricolage such as his own was ipso facto facile and unworthy.
Although Viswanathan’s version of”creative copying” was a pitiable one, I differ

with Edelstein’s conclusions.
The phrase Je est un autre, with its deliberately awkward syntax, belongs to

Arthur Rimbaud. It has been translated both as “I is another” and “I is some-
one else,” as in this excerpt from Rimbaud’s letters:

For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To
me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch
it, I listen to it: I make a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir
in the depths, or springs on to the stage.

If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the
Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of
skeletons which, since time immemorial, have been piling up the fruits
of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming to be, themselves, the authors!

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

WITHIN THE READING

253

1. Discuss the relationship between the two economies that Lethem
describes-the econ~my of the market and the economy of the gift. What is
the role of property m the two economies, and what role do culture and the
arts play in each? At first glance the two economies might appear to be
antith:tical, but L:them suggests that the two of them can actually coexist.
How 1s such coexistence possible, and in what ways might the two econo-
mie~ sustain and revitalize each other? How would the disappearance of the
public commons damage the whole society? In what respects does private
property depend on the health of the commons?

2. In your own words, explain the following passage: “A time is marked not so
much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted.
The character ~fan era hangs upon what needs no defense. In this regard,
fe:1 of_ us question the contemporary construction of copyright.” How
rmght It be pos~ible that ideas which seem to require no defense are actually
the most revealing ones? Why aren’t the most discussed ideas the ones of
gr:atest consequence? If the justness of the copyright appears to be self-
evident, what can we conclude about the blindnesses of our own historical
period? In what ways do our copyright laws reflect deeper anxieties about
o~ r~lations to others? Does the common sense of our time prevent us from
enJoymg more creative lives?

3. Explain ~ethem’s point when he declares, “When damn near everything
pres:1:ts itself :15 ~ar … it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most
ambitious art 1s gomg about trying to make the familiar strange.” What does
Lethem mean when he claims that “everything presents itself as familiar”?
And what might be involved in making the familiar strange? What effect
does the familiar have on us, and what effect does strangeness have? How do
the_ artists Lethem discusses make the familiar seem strange? How might
taking the words of someone else and putting them to. a new use illustrate
the :V:1lue of estrangement? Does Lethem himself manage to make the
familiar strange, and why is doing so important to. his argument?

QUESTIONS FOR WRITING

1. The anthropologist David Graeber has made the claim that all societies, even
those that have developed sophisticated forms of private property, still
observe an implicit communism on the level of basic human interactions.
For example, if your father asks you for a wrench while he is repairing a
fau~~t, you would not nor:mally respond with the question, “What’s in it for
me. If the word communism actually refers to the owning of things in
common, does Lethem seem to accept the argument that something like

254 JONATHAN LETHEM

common ownership is required for the health of a society? In what ways
might communism in this sense actually contribute to demo<=cy as well as personal freedom? In what ways might the open source movement represent a rebellion against the dominant ways of thinking about property as funda- mentally private?

2. Does Lethem want students to cheat? When he writes that plagiarism is the
soul of all human utterances, does he really mean it? Does he believe that
you should feel free to learn from the ideas of others, while still respecting
the principle of private ownership when it comes to words? Would he
approve of your submitting a paper purchased from an Internet company?
Would he approve of splicing into your next essay sentences or whole
paragraphs taken from someone else’s work, all without proper attribution?
Does Lethem do the same thing himself? Is Lethem’s argument amoral—that
is, is it indifferent to ethical concerns? Is his view actually immoral-
calculated to do harm? Or is Lethem trying to promote a different set of
values? What might those values include?

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

BETWEEN READINGS

1. In what ways might the “ecstasy of influence” celebrated by Lethem qualify
as a form of”love” in the sense explored by Barbara Fredrickson in Love 2.0?
With its detailed attention to the brain, Fredrickson’s argument might
seem quite far removed from Lethem’s literary concerns, but can biological
science shed light on the process Lethem explores? Look, for example, at
Fredrickson’s discussion of “brain coupling”:

Communication–a true meeting of the minds-is a single act,
performed by two brains. Considering the positivity resonance of
love, what I find most fascinating about these findings is that a key
brain area that showed coupling in [the] speaker-listener study was
the insula, an area linked with conscious feeling states.

Does making someone else’s language your own qualify as brain coupling too,
and does it produce a change in your conscious emotional state? Can we
think of sharing language as a form of positivity resonance? If love as
Fredrickson defines it helps to expand the boundaries of the self, does the
ecstasy of influence do the same?

2. In his defense of the freedom to use culture creatively, Lethem levels
criticism at a major player on the entertainment scene:

The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue
from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwaifs, Fantasia,
Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: A PLAGIARISM

Won~erland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan,
Sl~eptn~ Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book …. yet
DISney s prot~ctorate .o~lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of
cultural matenals as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox~th t ·
legal action. rea erung

2S5

~ you expl~ ~~ ex_plore_ the reasoning behind Lethem’s critique, con-
sider Joseph ~tiglitz s discussion of economic monopolies in “Rent Seeking
and the _M~ of an Unequal Society.” Is the Disney Company guilty of
:ent see~i~g m the sphere of culture? Does such behavior contribute to
mequalit1es of access 😮 cultural capital? Does Stiglitz want to bring open
~cess to the econormc sphere–access akin to the commons Lethem extols
~ the realm of culture? Or does Stiglitz argue for a change less sweeping in
1ts scope?