Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, including some lifted from American science fiction of the '40s and '50s.

Everything I wrote, I believed instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a matter of adjacent data.

We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going.

We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us.