Tag Archives: intellectual property

David Mitchell on Cloud Atlas’ Provenance: Good Writers are Good Magpies

David Mitchell‘s bestselling 2004 novel Cloud Atlas sold millions of copies, and garnered ample critical praise (I have mixed feelings about it). What I found most interesting about the novel was Mitchell’s recounting of its genesis:

The germ of the opening (and closing) Adam Ewing narrative, about a notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s, comes from a section in Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel…For mid-19th-century language I ransacked Herman Melville, in particular Moby-Dick and his superb sketches of the Galápagos Islands, The Encantadas….Robert Frobisher, the louche second narrator of Cloud Atlas, can trace his ancestry to a book called Delius As I Knew Him by the frail composer’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby….Frobisher’s language comes from Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood….Luisa Rey, an American investigative journalist, is a mix of the 1970s TV detectives I enjoyed as a kid, All the President’s Men and James Ellroy, whose plot-velocity always impresses me….The care home that Cavendish finds himself incarcerated in comes fromOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a young man’s fear of senescence….Architectural features from pioneering SF classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and The Machine Stops by EM Forster…are present, with rich dollops of Blade Runner. The university where Sonmi is housed is a carbon copy of the technical college where I worked in Japan…. The question/answer format for the story was inspired by…those interviews you get in Hello! magazine

Note that Mitchell does not say the ideas, characters and language for Cloud Atlas sprang fully formed from his mind, and in a sudden burst of primal creativity–that owed no debts to any cultural formations around him–transformed themselves into the written word on a blank page. He does not make himself out to be a writer that is a creative singularity or a fount of originality; he is, in short, not suggesting he is that creature so beloved of ‘intellectual property’ defenders the world over. Rather Mitchell is simply acknowledging what every honest writer knows is the case: to write is to borrow; the more you read works written by others, the more you draw upon them in your writing to enrich it; no one is truly ‘original’ or ‘creative’ in the primitive, fantastical, magical sense imagined by deluded artists and IP lawyers. Mitchell has lifted plots, or characters, or language with varying degrees of directness; his writing bears the impress of his reading, his cultural immersion. His skill as an author, acknowledged by many of his readers, and some of his critics, lies in his expert transformation of that material into something simultaneously distinctive and revelatory of its provenance.

What is remarkable about the excerpt above is that Mitchell is able to articulate some of the influences on his writing quite clearly; most artists cannot do so quite distinctly and thus are able to convince themselves of their ‘originality.’ It is a fair bet Mitchell would admit there are numerous other literary and cultural inferences–not so clearly noted–that have also found their way into his writing.

A good writer is a good magpie, building his nest from materials brought home from afar.

Hyman Strachman the Pirate AKA Troops Supporter

Hyman Strachman is a pirate. But he doesn’t fly the Jolly Roger, drink rum, hop around on a pegleg with a cutlass tucked neatly into a cummerbund, board ships while yelling “aarrr!” or call anyone a ‘scurvy bilge rat.’ Rather, he buys DVDs, makes multiple copies of them using a ‘duplicator’ and ships them to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has not kept an official count but estimates that he topped 80,000 discs a year during his heyday in 2007 and 2008, making his total more than 300,000 since he began in 2004….

That sounds like massive copyright infringement to me. And it is. But Mr. Strachman is not going to be brought to justice any time soon. Not even by the MPAA:

Howard Gantman, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said he did not believe its member studios were aware of Mr. Strachman’s operation. His sole comment dripped with the difficulty of going after a 92-year-old widower supporting the troops. “We are grateful that the entertainment we produce can bring some enjoyment to them while they are away from home,” Mr. Gantman said.

Mr. Strachman’s activity, if carried out by anyone else, for any other reason, would have brought the wrath of the Righteous Copyright Enforcers, sorry, the MPAA, on his head. But Mr. Strachman is doing it for ‘the boys over there,’ fighting for our freedom. So Mr. Gantman eases up, knowing well that if there is one line you do not cross, it is the one that would turn you into a non-supporter of the troops. (Except when you are going after retired generals speaking unfavorably about the conduct of wars overseas; then you load both barrels and fire.)

Of course, the studios have tried to help ‘our boys’ as well, ‘sending military bases reel-to-reel films…and projectors for the troops.’ The reason studios send ‘reel-to-reel films’  to military bases and not DVDs is that they are well aware that DVD-burners and laptops are a dime-a-dozen on bases, and that the young, just-above-teenaged soldiers who make up a sizable portion of the troops overseas are quite likely to respond to DVDs in precisely the same way that young, just-above-teenaged men and women in the US react to DVDs back home: They’d make copies of them or rip them and pass those on. The studios love ‘our boys,’ they just don’t trust them to observe the laws they are defending.

Note:  As expected, the New York Times article linked to above uncritically parrots an MPAA talking point:

Although the most costly piracy now takes place online through file-sharing Web sites, the illegal duplication of copyright DVDs — usually by organized crime in Eastern Europe and China, not by retirees in their 90s in the American suburbs — still siphons billions of dollars out of the industry every year.

It would be extremely useful for the Times to tell us how these staggering ‘billions and billions‘ numbers are calculated. For I have no idea. It would also be a useful enhancement of this debate if once, just once, the Times might talk about how movie attendance is enhanced by the word-of-mouth buzz created by the presence of ‘pirated’ DVDs and torrented versions of movies. Just once.

Schopenhauer on the Pernicious Influence of Copyright on Writing

Modern debates on the ‘intellectual property’ front involve several, overlapping, recurring themes. One persistent pair of inter-related concerns is: How are creators, authors, artists, ‘content producers’, and the like to be compensated for their ‘contributions’ to our commons? and, How indispensable are the protections of the various legal regimes that are termed ‘intellectual property’ (and its related economic arrangements) for the continued sustenance and facilitation of ‘artistic production’? The answering of these questions almost invariably involves a reckoning with fundamental issues of artistic motivation and innovation. The pedigree of those kinds of debates is, of course, older than modern Internet-related intellectual property disputes, and unsurprisingly enough, the pronouncements of those who have approached the puzzles of artistic provenance in the past are relevant for them. Sometimes those pronouncements can be especially, pointedly, on target and serve as useful reminders that skepticism about ‘intellectual property’ predates the Internet.

From Arthur Schopenauer’s “On Authorship and Style” (from Essays of Schopenhauer, University of Adelaide E-books repository):

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money. They think in order to write, and they may be recognised by their spinning out their thoughts to the greatest possible length, and also by the way they work out their thoughts, which are half-true, perverse, forced, and vacillating; then also by their love of evasion, so that they may seem what they are not; and this is why their writing is lacking in definiteness and clearness.

Consequently, it is soon recognised that they write for the sake of filling up the paper, and this is the case sometimes with the best authors….As soon as this is perceived the book should be thrown away, for time is precious. As a matter of fact, the author is cheating the reader as soon as he writes for the sake of filling up paper; because his pretext for writing is that he has something to impart. Writing for money and preservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as if money lay under a curse, for every author deteriorates directly he writes in any way for the sake of money. The best works of great men all come from the time when they had to write either for nothing or for very little pay….The deplorable condition of the literature of to-day…is due to the fact that books are written for the sake of earning money. Every one who is in want of money sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it.

Incidental aside: The indictment of writing-as-if-paid-by-the-word is pungent and on point; the wisdom of “I coulda written less but I didn’t have the time” lives on.

Video Game ‘Cloning’: What Is It Good For?

Cloning of video games is a Bad Thing. Or so sayeth Brian X. Chen and some video game developers (New York Times, March 12th, ” For Creators of Games, A Faint Line on Cloning”). Roughly, the thesis advanced is: ‘cloning’ can be destructive of developer motivation and the video game market, and thus seems to require legal intervention (by the application of patenting protections). I want to raise some questions that I hope will complicate the picture Chen provides us of innovation and its relationship to its legal regulation.

So,

In any commercialized art form, be it movies, literature or fashion, the creators often tread a fine line between inspiration and shameless copying. Some small video game makers say that line seems to have all but disappeared….“When another company takes inspiration from the game and they try to make a different game out of it, that’s when getting imitated turns into a compliment,” said Rami Ismail, a co-founder of Vlambeer. “Getting cloned is like getting punched in the face. It’s like a robbery.” Demoralized, Vlambeer stopped development of Ridiculous Fishing for several months. “It was kind of a motivation black hole,” said Jan Willem Nijman, another founder. “It almost destroyed Vlambeer.”

So, copying is ‘shameless’; the imitated seems to think it is both a ‘compliment’ and ‘like getting punched in the face’ and like ‘robbery;’ it can act as demotivator. Ismail’s statement starts by noting ‘inspiration’ and the creation of ‘different games’, which would seem to be a good thing (for game players at least). But something goes wrong: even though a new game has been created, it has employed ‘cloning’, the copying of  ”the soul of a game — its gameplay mechanics, design, characters and storyline — “. And this has demotivated the folks at Vlambeer.

This story raises questions well worth pursuing. What did Vlambeer do? Did it make another game? Did the presence of the new, ‘cloned’ game force them into other innovative avenues of development, rather than just working on a previously explored artistic niche? Did the cloning prevent Vlambeer from staying safely and staidly on the same beaten track? What brought Vlambeer back to working on games? What do they work on now and how? More generally, is it the case that those developers whose games have been ‘cloned’ start working on another game or do they exit the development market? Does cloning produce an arms race with games developers innovating furiously to maintain a cutting edge?

Other questions suggest themselves. Did consumers get more games out of this episode of cloning? Were the ‘cloned’ versions of the game better in any regard? Even if the “gameplay mechanics, characters and storyline” are ‘cloned’ what does it mean to say the ‘design’ was cloned? Was the interface of the cloned version identical, or did the interface work ‘better’ in some interesting dimension? For instance, are any of the ‘cloned’ games faster? Do they load quicker? Do game players indicate their preferences for these new games in any way?

After not raising these questions, Chen turns to possible legal protections and regimes:

One reason that cloning is so frequent in the game industry is that there is no easy way to protect a game. A piece of published writing or a photograph can be copyrighted, but not the mechanics of a game. Small game makers could seek patents protecting software design, but they generally shy away from this because acquiring a patent can be both time-consuming and relatively expensive, said Ellisen Shelton Turner, an intellectual property lawyer at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles.

In addition, because games so often draw inspirations from previous works, many game creators believe that patent protections could stifle creativity in future games, Mr. Turner said. “A lot of them are anti-patents,” he said. “And only in hindsight do they think patents are the proper thing to do when someone has stolen their idea.”

But what are the ‘mechanics’ of a game and why are they kinds of things that could be be copyrighted? Turner claims that developers shy away from acquiring patents because of the difficulties of the process but then in the next sentence puts it down to their acknowledgment of the creativity-stifling potential of patent protection. Those same developers might know that their development has drawn freely on the creative output of other developers and that seeking patent protections might be damaging to the ecology of the game development world; developers might be more cognizant of this ecology and its particular constraints, than say, corporate ‘intellectual property’ lawyers.  The belated self-knowledge that Turner ascribes to game developers might rather be their acknowledgment of the particular contours of their development community: that their decision to not seek patents  comes with a price attached while contributing to very particular freedoms enjoyed by game developers.

Finally, the central claim, that cloning results in bad outcomes:

The founders of Vlambeer, the maker of Radical Fishing, said they disagreed that cloning was good for consumers. They said cloning would make it more difficult for small companies to take risks on new ideas, but easy for big companies to succeed by rehashing old ideas. As a result, all new games could look extremely alike and unoriginal.

“If we go into that sort of spiral we’ll end up in a place where there’s only cloners, and there’s a limited amount of creativity happening,” Mr. Ismail said. “That’s the biggest horror scenario.”

This ‘horror scenario’ seems overstated. First, in light of the questions raised above. Second, because, peculiarly, in the scenario envisaged, game players appear to have no agency, no discrimination. They do not grant any game-maker first-mover advantage, they seem not to select between games, they mindlessly take on clones just because they are similar to extant games.

‘Cloning’ suggests the creation of identical copies; but the situation at hand deals with new games that incorporate central features of the older game. This fact, and the nature of the game development process, which draws on a ‘commons’ of code, algorithmic techniques, and a grab-bag of tricks and solutions to game development problems, considerably complicates the picture of the game development world and its possible legal regulation that emerges from Chen’s article.

Cary Sherman is Upset SOPA and PIPA Were Not Enacted

I am thankful to the RIAA‘s Cary Sherman for having provided a wonderful sample of writing, which may profitably be used by those teaching classes on rhetoric and critical thinking. I’m referring to Sherman’s screed in today’s New York Times, which alternates between self-pity and bluster in complaining about the failure of the passage of SOPA and PIPA, and which concludes with the line “We need reason, not rhetoric, in discussing how to achieve a ['safe and legal Internet'].” Do as I say, not as I do.

(Pardon me for merely taking potshots at Mr. Sherman below; on matters like these, I tend to write with a red cloud misting my eyes, and can barely type coherent sentences; pardon me too, for not addressing every single ‘point’ that Mr. Sherman attempts to make.)

We begin then, with:

The digital tsunami that swept over the Capitol last month, forcing Congress to set aside legislation to combat the online piracy of American music, movies, books and other creative works, raised questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age.

“Tsunami”: Remember those aqueous beasts that killed hundreds of thousands and caused billions of dollars in damage? That’s what a concerted, organized political action against the RIAA’s attempt to clamp down on the ‘Net was like. It certainly raised questions for me about “how the democratic process functions in the digital age.” For instance, why doesn’t it happen more often in this nation? Note: I said “clamp down.” I am playing along.

Then,

Policy makers had recognized a constitutional (and economic) imperative to protect American property from theft…They knew that music sales in the United States are less than half of what they were in 1999, when the file-sharing site Napster emerged, and that direct employment in the industry had fallen by more than half since then, to less than 10,000.

“Constitutional” – the use of this term is an old-fashioned, well-worn American tactic to induce feelings of betrayal in a good citizen (ideally, one that hasn’t read the Constitution). I assume Mr. Sherman is equally concerned about another “constitutional imperative,” that of limited terms for copyright protection.

“Theft” – followed by two claims whose causes have yet to be traced to online music sharing. Note: I used “sharing.” I brought my bat and ball too.

At the 11th hour, a flood of e-mails and phone calls to Congress stopped the legislation in its tracks. Was this the result of democracy, or demagoguery?

“Demagoguery” – unfortunately, the line between this terrible thing and “democracy” is a hard one to draw and historically, has been so. Certainly, from the ramparts of the castle, the approaching “tsunami” of pitchforks may look like it was cobbled together by demagogues.

Misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works. Consider, for example, the claim that SOPA and PIPA were “censorship,” a loaded and inflammatory term

“Loaded and inflammatory,” like “piracy,” “tsunami,” “theft,” and “misinformation” (which conjures up images of a Ministry of Information dishing out newspeak). The use of the latter terms is permitted only when the RIAAA and its minions are obeying “constitutional,” “economic,” and perhaps even moral imperatives. To resist them is “demagoguery.”

I might be mistaken in presenting Sherman’s Op-Ed as a piece of political rhetoric; its agonizingly self-pitying tone suggests a deeper, psychologically rooted dysfunction. I know pop-psychologizing is poor form, but really, what can you do with lines like the following?

The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power….[These sites]  are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.

So let me wrap up this shooting-fish-in-a-barrel episode and get back to work: Sherman’s “hyperbolic mistruth,” presented on the editorial page of one of the world’s most moneyed media outlets is a “self-serving political declaration.” Read it, ‘clip it’, keep it aside. You’ll see in in textbooks soon, mark my words.

And go read the Wikipedia articles linked to above.

Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings The Blues”

This past weekend’s viewing pleasures included a long-standing, and much-awaited, resident of my movie queue: Nina Paley‘s 2008 graphically and musically eclectic reworking of the Indian epic Ramayana, Sita Sings The Blues. The movie incorporates four elements: a reworking of the traditional narrative of the Ramayana; a Mystery Science Theater-like commentary on the Ramayana carried out by shadow puppets (in my mind, the highlight of the movie); musical episodes from the Ramayana, featuring blues classics performed by Annette Hanshaw; and an autobiographical parallel tale featuring Paley herself.

Sita Sings The Blues is musically and visually diverse. The episodes from the Ramayana resemble 18th-century Rajput painting featuring characters in profile; the shadow puppets converse in silhouette about the Ramayana’s plot; the musical episodes featuring Hanshaw’s songs featuring vector graphic animation are the most modern looking; and lastly, Paley’s autobiographical tale is told using Squigglevision. The Ramayana’s sometime-baroque narrative is simplifed to concentrate on the Rama-Sita subplot and its persistent obsessions of wifely devotion and idealization of female sexual purity; the shadow puppets with their distinctive urban Indian accents showcase the ambiguously irreverent and idiosyncratic readings that generations of Indians have carried out on their epics; the Hanshaw interludes remind us that underneath the fun and games, the story of Sita, which lies at the heart of the Ramayana, can be read as a tragedy; and lastly the contemporary tale of relationship-breakdown shows us that exile, heartbreak, and rejection are perennial features of our encounters with other human beings.

Paley’s movie is not, of course, just about animation, music, and the epics. It also constitutes a statement in the modern debate over how artistic creations in this day and age are to be distributed, consumed, and paid for; Sita Sings The Blues was released under a Creative Commons Share Alike Common Attribution License. On an extra on the DVD, Paley, in the course of an interview with WNET, offers some passionate thoughts on culture control and lockdown, and how her decision to release the movie under her chosen license came about. (Incidentally, the use of Hanshaw songs almost crippled the movie thanks to the licensing rules and fees associated with them; on this and on other aspects of the movie’s positioning within the modern ‘intellectual property’ debate, it is well worth reading some of the informational material on the movie’s website.)

Lastly, according to Paley, the movie attracted some flak from both left and right – the Indian ones, that is. From the ‘left’: Paley’s movie is an act of cultural and artistic appropriation that fails to situate the movie in its correct position in post-colonial discourse. From the ‘right’: Paley’s movie is an act of cultural and artistic appropriation, which, in suggesting that modern gender and sexual relations can enlighten us about the presuppositions that lie at the heart of religious epics, and in providing a not-so-pompously-moralistic alternative retelling of a Scripture, is insulting and disrespectful of the sentiments of millions of Hindus.

When fire is directed from both flanks, all is well. Go see the movie.

Megan McArdle’s Defense Of Property Rights

In the Atlantic, Megan McArdle offers a long, tilting-at-strawmen defense of (intellectual) property rights. (In what follows, I’m not going to attempt line-by-line rebuttals; McArdle rambled too much for that. I’ve simply directed my ire against the two aspects of the post that stood out the most: the attack on a strawman argument and the patronizing, sneering tone of voice.)

I get the sense that people find it intuitive that many people think property is, at its heart, a system for deciding how to allocate a limited and fixed set of stuff….I’m not sure how we settled on “it’s non-rivalrous” as the reason that file sharing is a) not stealing and b) okay….But [libertarians] haven’t, to me, advanced a theory of property–either moral or economic–to which the property “rivalrous” is really so obviously fundamental that in its absence, we’re no longer dealing with property.

McArdle takes herself to be arguing against the claim that “If non-rivalrousness obtains with respect to a good there should be no property rights with respect to it”. This, as far as I can tell, has never been the basis, of any argument against property rights in anything. It has however, in many, many, different venues been the basis of a claim that suggests that goods that are non-rival in nature require some rejiggering of legal regimes–and intuitions built on long discourses surrounding those regimes–that have been constructed with rivalrousness central to their understanding of property rights. That is all. Anyone that takes on non-rivarlousness in goods as being a sufficient reason for there being no property rights pertaining to those goods is tilting as windmills.

Ironically, McArdle seems to imagine some consensus over the understanding of property rights (she invokes an imaginary “We” again and again that does nothing more than recapitulate some shadowy set of established intuitions that are precisely the ones up for reconfiguration in the modern debate about IP rights), and by throwing out a bunch of hypotheticals (the Barnes and Noble example she constructs is a classic), actually lands up undermining some conventional intuitions that people might have about rival goods instead. In the B&N case, I’d suggest she ends up making a good argument for why property rights should be weaker even in the case of solid, tangible, rival goods like printed books (read the example; it is entirely plausible that someone on reading her example would be tempted to respond, “Well, when you put it that way, maybe it’s better that someone walks out with a book from a store rather than that book being pulped!”). Similarly, for the trespass case; McArdle again lands up making a very good case for why some variants of non-interference squatting should not be a problem for proponents of property rights (read the example; a plausible response might be “Now that you put it that way, I think using that cabin up in the mountains while the owner isn’t there might not be such a bad thing for society after all”). I’m not sure if this was her intention but she certainly succeeds.

McArdle’s article though, for my money, commits an even greater sin than the mere commission of a fallacy. She patronizes:

[I]t occurred to me how many of the analogies seem to have been designed by and for college students. Which is to say, they are reasoning from a pretty simple version of property, appropriate to someone who doesn’t really engage in much commerce.

There is that old sneer–which seems to be almost obligatory for folks who advocate for strong (intellectual) property rights–all over again: You don’t do business; you don’t understand commerce; why participate in this discussion about an issue that bears on culture? Let folks that do “commerce” get to decide how information should be legally manipulated, controlled and regulated. No matter what kind of information it is. (What makes this sneer especially ironic in the context of the particular case is that McArdle jumped to offer her defense in the context of the JSTOR/Schwartz imbroglio, a case that has a great deal to do with the dissemination of a scholarly scientific and cultural archive.)

Update: Changed post title to “Property Rights” rather than “IP rights”

An “Intellectual Property” Lesson From A Busker

On Saturday morning, as I sat at 7th Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, waiting for a Q train to take me back home, I noticed a banjo player playing across the tracks from me on the Manhattan-bound platform. The station was noisy as usual, but still, somehow, his urgent strumming and foot stomping (on a percussion device I cannot name) managed to catch my attention. The banjo was insistent and perky, and the beat provided by the foot-drum (there you go, I named it myself), combined with it to produce an oddly compelling rhythm. As befitting a subway busker, his instrument case sat open next to him, awaiting small change and rumpled bills. I thought of making a contribution, and sighed, “If only I wasn’t going the wrong way; I’d have given him some cash; I’ve got a train to catch.” And then, bizarrely, another voice spoke: “Fool! You’ve blathered on so much about voluntary contributions underwriting new economic paradigms for supporting artists in a world free of onerous “intellectual property” regimes, and you won’t cross the tracks to stick a bill in a busking bowl?”

So I got up, checked to see if a train was coming, ran up the stairs, across the divider, down the stairs, up to a startled banjo player, threw in a dollar bill (there seemed to be a few more of them in there), and ran back up the stairs back to my platform. The homeward-bound Q train pulled in, and a dollar poorer, I headed home.

Getting Rid of “Mastery” Over Mountains

A couple of days ago, in response to my post on the language of mountaineering, my friend Karl Steel said (on a Facebook page somewhere, far, far away):

Great piece, but haven’t you shifted the language of battle from climber vs. mountain to climber vs. self? what if we lose the battle or mastery language altogether

Karl is right, of course. And indeed, “losing” the language of “battle” and “mastery” is what I had in mind when I said:

There is something hopelessly naive in this request for reconfiguration of the language. After all, to use the language of “overcoming”, “conquest”, and “assault” works because it props up so many other tropes and fictions: that the summit was possible without any partnership (human or technological) is perhaps the most vivid and urgent of these.

So, to reiterate: I think the language of “mastery” and “battle” persists at heart because mountaineering is fundamentally conceived of as a solo endeavor. Now, even group expeditions can be described in the same language; indeed, perhaps even more so, because more militarized language can kick in: see for instance, the use of “logistics”, “campaign”, “supply routes” and so on. But still, I think, the fundamental act is conceived of as a man, alone, getting on top of the mountain, and it is to address that seemingly individual feat that I think the really heavy-duty arsenal of “overcoming” is deployed.

Interestingly, before commencing my discussion of whether mountaineering language could be reconceived as “self-mastery” I had noted a thought, which I perhaps should have developed further:

But this makes me think of the impoverishment of the language we employ for indicating human accomplishment: perennially pitted “against” something, as having been achieved in opposition to forces ranged against it. Perhaps we are stuck with that language.

I still think that reconfiguring that language requires, more than anything else, reconceiving human accomplishment as not solitary adventures but collective action, a reconception that is required elsewhere in getting rid of the pernicious fallacy of “the author” (a madness that now finds its legal teeth in our modern debates over “intellectual property”). But much, much, more on that later.