Modern dissidents argue that the chain of causality starts with biology, which bounds the culture of a people. That culture grows the institutions which define the politics and economics of society. Replace half the population of Haiti with Japanese people and you end up with a vastly different society. The Japanese would seize control of the country, impose their will and the result would be a political-economy that is nothing like anything that could exist in an African run society.
While this is a good rule of thumb for general politics, it falls apart when there is a revolution in technology. The Industrial Revolution started in England and spread to the European continent. It quickly resulted in massive cultural changes as people moved from the countryside to the cities to work in factories. It is a great example of how revolutionary technological changes can reverse the flow of the great chain of causality as the new technology is absorbed by the society.
Of course, the Industrial Revolution did not start in England by luck. The slow transformation of the people, resulting in lots of smart people looking to solve old problems, is the counter to this claim. The Industrial Revolution was the result of the changes in the European population that started in the Middle Ages. It was biology that brought about the technological revolution, so one can argue that the great chain of causality holds up even in revolutionary moments.
Putting that aside, the West is at the end of one of those revolutions, which is the microprocessor revolution. The way we live today is very different from how we lived fifty years ago, at least when it comes to how we interact with one another and how individuals interact with society. Fifty years ago, this post would not be written because there would be no way to see it even if it was written. Fifty years ago, information was relatively scarce, while today it is unlimited.
This is what makes the present plagiarism panic in the academy something more than just a tempest in a teapot. Fifty years ago, it was hard to copy and paste the work of others because copy and paste did not exist. Written words were typed with a typewriter, which meant typing out what it was you were stealing. Before publishing, many hands edited and retyped those words. The whole process moved much slower, so getting caught was also much easier.
That changed with technology, but the editing and fact checking process did not change with the new technology. Instead, it atrophied. The new technology turned the flow of written material into a firehose and those old processes were not able to keep up with the volume. Not only that, the bottlenecks were blown open like a raging river blasting through a damn. Today written content flows without restriction and without any serious scrutiny in the modern academy.
There is another issue here. Technology has created a new conception of the public domain that was unimaginable fifty years ago. Wikipedia, for example, is technically not a publisher and it has no authors. It is a crowdsourced repository of information that is explicitly intended to be in the public domain. The internet itself is the repository of all human knowledge now. Again, most of it is intended to be freely available to whoever is interested, because it is the public domain.
Can you plagiarize the internet? How about Wikipedia? The concept of plagiarism is tied to property rights. You produce a written work using your labor so you have an ownership claim to it. If on the other hand, you give it away freely on the internet or post it on a site like Wikipedia, do you still own it? Can it be stolen when your clear intent is to share it with the world, perhaps anonymously? Throw in the fact that these sources change over time and the issue gets quite murky.
Then you have the fact that there are only so many ways to state things, especially those that are part of a contextual reality. Claudine Gay got in trouble for repeating what amounts to echolalic babbling that defines her field of study. There are only so many ways to preach against whiteness, so by now every way to state the simplistic ideas within that field have been done many times. No matter how you say something in grievance studies, you sound like everyone else.
That is what will be revealed by these efforts to scan the works of academics for plagiarism using modern tools. The rigid conformity in most of these fields has led to a narrowing of what is safe to write in a paper. If everyone was fastidious about siting the work of others, all new papers would be so littered with citations that the index would be longer than the paper. The plagiarism hunters will find they are overwhelmed with examples to the point where it becomes meaningless.
This brings up another issue. The culture of the internet from the very beginning was to be open and communal. Long before the scolds were allowed online, the culture of the internet was anarchic. If you posted something online it was fair game. Anyone could use it and modify it to their purposes. Post a pic of yourself on vacation and it could end up being used by someone posting about that vacation spot. No one thought or thinks about who owns a pic, a meme or anything that is online.
In other words, the culture of the internet has changed the culture in general as people spend so much time online. Someone using a picture of your house, for example, only matters if their intent is to cause you harm or they unintentionally create a problem for you, like having a mob show up at your door. No one contacts the real estate sites demanding that old images of their house be taken down. Can you even do this, even if you had the desire? Would a court side with you?
Bill Ackman’s wife allegedly copied from Wikipedia. How can we know this when it is possible the Wiki contributor copied from Mx. Ackman? Maybe she cribbed from some third source that the Wiki author also used. Is this even copying when the whole point of the site is to collect up information for public consumption? Again, can you steal something that is made freely available? Plagiarism assumes intent and the lack of consent, which is missing in this example.
On top of all this, the biggest players in the technology space rely on ambiguous definitions of what constitutes property. They capture all sorts of things about you and your behavior and sell it to corporations and governments. They argue it is theirs to sell because you do not technically own your habits and tastes. An emerging quality of the ruling elite is an abandonment of the old concepts of ownership. You no longer own you, at least not in the traditional sense of it.
Much is said about the ideological nature of the managerial elite, but it may be that their fanaticism is simply a defense mechanism. As technology continues to erode the old rules, their ideological fervor fills the void. The free flow of information is not opening and democratizing society, but instead leading to an authoritarian reaction by the managerial elite to the threats technology brings to the old rules. Like the steam engine, the microprocessor promises to overthrow the old order.
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