David Carr writes about efforts to shape a code of conduct for content aggregators online, including Maria Popova’s new website, The Curator’s Code.

Quoting Simon Dumenco:

“We want some simple, common-sense rules. There should be some kind of variation of the Golden Rule here, which is that you should aggregate others as you would wish to be aggregated yourself.”

A code for remixing was something Kirby and I were trying to squeeze out of yesterday’s SXSW panel (not sure we succeeded) and something I’ve been thinking about since I drew this “Good Theft vs. Bad Theft” chart for Steal Like An Artist.

My gut check for creative theft: If I’m alone in an elevator with an artist I’ve stolen from: Does she pat me on the back and say good job, or does she punch me in the face?

Maria Popova on Mark Pagel’s Wired For Culture:

Language, says Pagel, was instrumental in enabling social learning — our ability to acquire evolutionarily beneficial new behaviors by watching and imitating others, which in turn accelerated our species on a trajectory of what anthropologists call “cumulative cultural evolution,” a bustling of ideas successively building and improving on others. (How’s that for bio-anthropological evidence that everything is indeed a remix?) It enabled what Pagel calls “visual theft” — the practice of stealing the best ideas of others without having to invest the energy and time they did in developing those.

Later on she says:

“Steal like an artist” might then become “Steal like an early Homo sapiens,” and, as Pagel suggests, it is precisely this “theft” that enabled the origination of art itself.

Maria, btw, is now curating a new Tumblr called Explore. Follow her!

Nice interview with Maria. As a grad school dodger, I really liked this bit:

I just taught a class at Columbia, at their MBA school—they asked me to be a guest speaker. My grandmother has always had a real problem with the fact that I never went and got an MBA, and I’ve been trying all this time to explain to her that I have learned so much more in the past six years doing this. So finally, the other day, when I was telling her about Columbia, it really dawned on her that because of how I’ve structured my intellectual curiosity, they’re asking me to go and talk to MBAs.

(Follow her at BrainPickings.org or curiositycounts on Tumblr.)