2025-11-19 18:27:00
Most cultures are built around the idea of private property. Grain is harvested once a year and stored for months. If someone steals the grain (which is difficult to securely lock up), it threatens the livelihood of the farmer and the stability of the community. By the time Hammurabi codified Babylonian law around 1750 BCE, grain theft was already so universally recognized as a crime that the code specifies not just the crime itself, but elaborate provisions about liability in special cases.
On the other hand, by this time, folk stories about Nasruddin, the Sufi trickster, were widespread. A baker hauls a neighbor before the judge, saying that the man had stood outside the bakery each day, smelling the delicious odors of his breads and cakes without paying. The judge demanded that Nasruddin hand over some gold pieces. Shocked, the man did as he was told. The judge jangled the coins, let the baker hear the gold in exchange for the sniffed odors, then handed the pieces back.
Modern life is filled with bakery moments. Shepard Fairey artworks on the sides of buildings, music coming from the club down the street and hearing about the best play at football’s Superb Owl without paying to see the game.
Corporations don’t like this. The Cubs sued the Wrigley Rooftops to prevent people outside Wrigley Field from seeing a baseball game. The NFL doesn’t even like it if you type the name of their championship game. And since the invention of radio, ASCAP and BMI have worked hard to make sure pubs and stores don’t play songs in their venues without paying a license. Corporations get most of the benefits of copyright, not creators.
There’s another kind of theft worth understanding–this is the competition that happens when someone creates an alternative that prevents a future sale from happening. The inventors of desktop publishing stole decades of revenue from hand typesetters. The steam shovel stole job security for ditch diggers. And AI is clearly going to be making many tasks humans used to do obsolete.
When the web showed up, it first destroyed the DVD-ROM business I was building, then took a big chunk out of the almanacs, pop culture books and other detailed references that were my specialty.
[And of course, there’s the theft of trust and attention that happens all around us, every day. Attention is probably worth more than grain for many of us, and trust is priceless. Yet our culture seems to view this as a cost of being modern, not a fundamental problem.]
But the most confusing cases aren’t about spam or hustles, or even technology replacing labor – they’re about creators building on what came before. When a comedian steals a joke, is that okay? What if it’s not the whole joke, just the rhythm of it? What happens if the comedian works in a language that the original jokester doesn’t speak? Dani amplifies the style of Tamariz and Green. Is that okay?
Is David Mamet’s style of dialogue off limits to every playwright who will follow? What about Jill Greenberg’s style of photography lighting?
Is there a difference between someone intentionally using a bass guitar progression or a movie director’s style or a color palette vs. stumbling onto one without intent? Why?
Years ago, I was working with Harry Harrison (author of the story that led to the movie Soylent Green) on a science fiction computer game project. At the time, I had just published one I had created with Michael Crichton. Harrison told me that he wasn’t speaking to Crichton. “Why?” I asked, sure that a good story was about to follow. It turns out that Harry had worked for a year to write a techno-thriller about a virus that comes from space and starts killing people. A few days before he was to turn it in, The Andromeda Strain came out and was a big bestseller. Crichton had pre-stolen his idea!
As more and more of us build, spread, buy and sell ideas, we’re going to have find a shared understanding of theft. Lumping them all together makes the term almost meaningless, and diminishes the original protections on finite physical goods, which still matter.
The debate about AI training on copyrighted work is getting tangled up in the wrong question. Critics claim that because AI models were trained by reading millions of books, articles, and images, they’re committing theft at scale. But this confuses the input with the output, the learning with the creation. [N.B. The AI leaders have made a lot of dumb mistakes and selfish choices. Pirating books they should have purchased, wasting money and power, being careless or cavalier about mental health–these are all critical issues, and I’m not minimizing them. AI is changing our world, and they’re being cavalier and careless.]
Copyright has never existed to prohibit the act of reading, viewing, or learning from existing work. Every artist learns by studying what came before. Mamet watched countless plays. Greenberg studied other photographers’ lighting. The question isn’t whether AI learned from copyrighted material – it’s whether what AI helps create diminishes the incentive for humans to create.
If AI-generated content competes with and replaces human creativity to the point where people stop creating because they can’t make a living, then we have a problem. Not because of how the AI learned, but because we’ve broken the system that uses profit to encourage human creation.
The purpose of copyright isn’t to control every exposure to creative work – it’s to ensure we have enough creators. If someone uses AI trained on a million novels to produce something genuinely new, that’s not grain theft.
As usual, our culture and our technology makes everything more complex. Especially when the speed of change continues to accelerate.
Grain theft is immoral. Improving the culture is imperative. There’s always going to be tension between the two.
2025-11-18 18:03:00
Which is worth more, Kind of Blue from Miles Davis, or the third Boston album?
It depends on your taste. I hope we can agree, though, that the fact that Miles spent four days on his album and Tom spent eight years on his is irrelevant.
Sometimes, we buy the story of inconvenient creation. The carrots at the farmer’s market or a hand-crafted piece of pottery is worth more because we know the focus and care that went into the creation of an item.
But software isn’t worth more when it’s hand-coded, and WhatsApp didn’t get acquired for billions of dollars because they had thousands of employees.
On the other hand, when British Petroleum paid Landor millions for a new logo, the meetings and effort and deniability were part of what they were paying for. The Nike logo isn’t powerful because they spent a lot of time or money on it…
Freelancers are close to their work, and it’s easy to tell ourselves that what we sell is our effort. That’s an error. There’s rarely a correlation between effort and value.
Even if you charge by the hour, you’re not selling hours. You’re selling something clients can use.
Clients will pay more for something useful than something that was difficult.
2025-11-17 18:03:00
Marshall Sahlins and others showed that early hunter gatherer societies generally didn’t work very hard. Two or three hours a day were spent gathering food, and the rest of the time was for social engagement and family.
With all the technology and innovation that has followed, why do we work four times as hard?
One reason is leverage. The tools we have offer apparently bigger prizes in exchange for the next unit of incremental labor. There wasn’t a point in working harder to get more berries, because you already had enough berries.
And the second reason is that the systems that created our culture have their own needs in mind. Landlords don’t provide housing as a public service–they do it to make a profit. And the wedding-industrial complex makes happy brides as a byproduct of making a profit. They’re the side effect, not the point.
Systems use status and affiliation within culture to motivate individuals to play along.
When it’s working as we hope, the system of systems produces possibility, civility and achievement. It increases health, connection and even joy.
But no one is in charge of these systems, and, especially as they become concentrated and powerful, they often fail to produce the outcomes we might be hoping for.
Many are intransigent and sticky, and they work hard to remain invisible. When we see the systems, we have a chance to do something about them. The hard part is organizing the community to push back before the new normal becomes permanent.
2025-11-16 18:03:00
Every one of the pings, dings and clicks on this page gives me the hives. Run them in a quick sequence and I need to leave the room. They are our Pavlovian bells, designed to trigger us into action.
At the bottom right is a button that says ‘stop all.’
That’s a useful idea.
We didn’t sign up for this all at once. We were seduced into becoming trained seals gradually, fish by fish.
Important work might not be quick or automatic or easy.
2025-11-15 18:03:00
If someone hands you a deck, you can be sure there are 52 cards covering four suits.
The universe is finite. The cards are the cards, and games work precisely for that reason. Every deck is the same, and all the players have the same options.
Some of the systems we compete in have a limited number of cards, known to all.
More often, though, there is the possibility of surprise. Options that weren’t considered by others, paths that are still unexplored. Technology mints new cards, but so do brave decisions and commitment.
It’s rare to know all the available cards, and rarer still to have them all.
2025-11-14 18:03:00
I’m not sure this is the right word for it, but we certainly need one.
Not ‘entrepreneurship’ which is a distinct skill. That term is usually reserved for people who start at zero and get to one, and mostly for people who operate in small businesses creating financial value through assets and equity.
But what about the person who navigates an important non-profit through changing times?
Or a product manager you can trust to not only ship the next solution on time, but to do it with unexpected improvements and a team that ends up better as a result of the journey. Some salespeople have it, guiding a complex transaction, and others don’t.
Captaincy describes someone who doesn’t just go to meetings–they change the outcome of the meeting. Someone who doesn’t depend on authority but is eager to take responsibility. It’s not about having a great idea… it’s about leading when the great idea collides with reality.
Winston Churchill and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf showed up as captains when that skill was really needed. So did Alexander Hamilton, for a while.
Captains set the agenda, create tension and lean into possibility. Captains aren’t just doing their job, they’re creating something that others thought was unlikely. They rarely have all the answers, but they’re very good at asking questions.
The difference between a successful artist and a painter is that the artist becomes captain of the creative arc, determining where and when to show up and what impact they seek to make.
You might not always want to choose a captain to join the team. A founder-led organization thinking about succession plans might prefer to hire a capable, persistent bureaucrat, someone who can reliably follow the model that’s already in place. A restless search for a new problem to solve might not be as valuable as simply doing a really good job on the existing problems.
Alas, we don’t teach ‘captaining’ in school. Sometimes, it arises, almost accidentally, in school sports and clubs. In fact, the culture of high school usually fights to make it go away. We don’t make it easy to describe on a resume, and there are no good tests for it.
It’s a skill, certainly, and ultimately a choice. We can model it, support it and create an organizational culture that makes it more likely to occur.
First, let’s name it and go looking for more of it.
