Intellectual property is a freakish modern invention

It's not hard to see that artificial intelligence is going to put a lot of pressure on our existing system of intellectual property law but easy to forget that that system is hardly eternal. I weave together diverse strands like Homer, James Joyce, cryptocurrency, Immanuel Kant, and the human author as a large language model to make a point about how the status quo we are afraid to leave is actually a pretty fleeting and weird moment in history.