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[[Symbol processing|The thing]] about “Shakespeare” — the body of work, not the dude —is it that isn’t just “executable code”, deposited in a  kind of Elizabethethan GitHub and left there inviolate, for future generations to download and run. That  may be its root, but “Shakespeare” as we know it is the body of work that has grown around it: the performances, the learned monographs, the university lectures and countless sophomore essays, the re-readings, the editions, the adaptations and reimaginings, the ''mis''interpretations — if there even can be such a thing — the peculiar ability of Shakespearean adages and idioms to leach into the vernacular. Beyond that basic root — to be sure, an extraordinarily stout and fertile root it is — none of “the Shakespearean canon” comes from William Shakespeare.

Meaning doesn’t exist on the page, but is made, there on the fly, in the act of interacting. In this process, the author has already done his bit and does not play any part. A similar process went on when William Shakespeare created his texts, but it only happens once, and his cultural milieu is entirely lost on us now. William Shakespeare’s ''genius'' was to generate text so enduringly ''susceptible to creative interpretation'' by successive generations. His ''luck'' was that his texts caught the public attention in the first place. Could there be other texts, as brilliant as Shakespeare's, now lost to history?  

It would be bizarre if there were not. It may be — almost certainly is — true that other artists created work as rich in potential, but were never discovered, and disappeared into dust. That creators as towering as [[Nietzsche]] and [[Blake]] almost suffered this fate, before being posthumously recognised, illustrates the point. Blake died in poverty. Nietzsche sold 200 copies of ''Also Sprach Zarathustra'' in his lifetime.

So in one, trivial, sense [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] is right. Shakespeare’s ''code'' may not be an outlier in the history of written literature, known and unknown. (The idea that there is a “best” playwright in history— that literature can be ranked, is utilitarian drivel at its stupidest. [[There is no machine for judging poetry]]). But boy, does that trivial observation miss the point. For however threadbare the code, the richness of the Shakespearean ''canon'' is like nothing else on earth.

The Shakespeare canon is the great illustration of art as a dynamic, living, organic thing. William Shakespeare, late of Stratford-upon-Avon is an important part of what we now know (...and love?) as Shakespeare, but the [[strange loop]]s thrown around that body of work ever since, strengthening it, binding it, reinterpreting it, appreciating it — casting light on potential readings, weeding out or ignoring lesser known or obscurer extracts — this is what makes Shakespeare so enduring. Shakespeare, the corpus , endures because ''Shakespeare is not dead''.

The same thing is happening when we communicate. When the JC commits symbols to page, like this one, for better or worse, he brings his own “cultural apparatus” to the task: an idiosyncratic grasp of the English language, a particular history, a cultural upbringing, and formal and informal education from the schools of the academy and hard knocks. Should anyone (else) ever read this, they will bring ''their'' unique cultural apparatus — no less idiosyncratic — to the task of making sense of this odd string of symbols.