Programmer Humor

Based Chad Guy Debord via Society of the Spectacle:

In Debord's treatment, modern society forces culture to constantly re-appropriate or re-invent itself, copying and re-packaging old ideas. Thesis 207 makes this point, rhetorically:

"Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea."

This passage concerning plagiarism is itself directly lifted from Poésies by French-Uruguayan author Isidore Lucien Ducasse, better known as the Comte de Lautréamont. In particular, the original French text for both Debord and Lautréamont's versions of the passage are identical: "Les idées s'améliorent. Le sens des mots y participe. Le plagiat est nécessaire. Le progrès l'implique. Il serre de près la phrase d'un auteur, se sert de ses expressions, efface une idée fausse, la remplace par l'idée juste."

You gotta hand it to Debord for committing to the bit, half the book has phrases and ideas copied and re-worked to fit his theses in SotS.

He's also right, we literally learn by copying information into our own minds and changing it with our own ideas. Nobody born feral in the woods is going to invent a toaster all on their own without the accumulated knowledge of humanity behind them.