The Chain

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal."

Before Nolan's The Odyssey, the story of Odysseus had already been told and retold by Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Tennyson, and before Homer, it was spoken aloud.

Jobs credited the quote to Picasso, but there's no evidence Picasso ever said it. The line is T.S. Eliot's: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." Eliot stole it too, from a Victorian critic who'd argued the reverse: that stealing is what small poets do.

Tech's most famous quote about stealing ideas was itself stolen, improved, and misattributed.

James Burke, of the BBC's "Connections," spent a career showing that inventions have no clean origin. The myth of singular invention survives only by erasing the chain. One episode followed the chain from the Little Ice Age through the steam engine to the passenger jet.

Eliot supplied the test in the part nobody repeats: bad poets deface what they take; good poets make it better, or at least different.

Software is the most Burkean industry alive and the most invested in pretending otherwise. Take Space Invaders. Tomohiro Nishikado started from Breakout. He wanted the satisfaction of clearing a screen, so he turned the blocks into aliens and let them shoot back. Breakout was Atari's single-player Pong, prototyped by Wozniak on an assignment handed to Jobs. And Pong was Bushnell's copy of a tennis game he'd watched on Ralph Baer's home console. Which was called the Odyssey.

In 1987, I was writing Smalltalk-80 software on the Xerox 6085, inside the lineage Jobs is accused of stealing. Apple didn't clone that world. It grafted the interface onto a mass-market personal computer.

In 1992, I pushed to use SGML for the multimedia titles at Compact based on my experience at IBM. Five years later, after we'd sold millions of copies, a kid explained to me that there was this new thing called XML. It wasn't new. It was SGML with the parts nobody used cut off, handed to people who had only ever seen HTML. He was standing in the middle of the chain, erasing it in real time, and he was right about everything except where it came from.

I was an early Zynga employee. That’s where I first saw Mark Pincus’s “Proven, Better, New” in practice: start with what’s proven, make it better, and risk one new thing. He explains the idea in his book, "Life at the Speed of Play." His framework gives Eliot’s test an operational form: Eliot judged poems after the fact; Mark tells builders where to put the risk before building. SpellBurst is the first time the product calls have been entirely mine. It grafts a match-3 cascade onto a word game. Neither is new; the connection is.

The work has always been choosing what to carry forward, where to graft it, and whether the result becomes better, or at least different. Tennyson's Ulysses says, "I am a part of all that I have met." That isn't a sentiment. It's a citation.