Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

billion. Now, as mere atoms amidst this mass, the damage we can do is by comparison so much less that rage counts for nothing but a cry to be heard—even if from a protective and cowardly anonymity. Were anyone to have behaved in such a way (like a “Hockey Dad,” a “Shock Jock,” or a foul-mouthed blogger) on the real commons of a New England village even as it existed in my youth and young-manhood, he would have been immediately brought up short, if not committed or jailed. In the new “commons,” brutishness and barbarism are accepted, just as no one dares, as once they would have, to put a pack of high school students in their place as they half-terrorize a subway car or a bus.

I had touched upon a mysterious nerve, and although the style of the response can be explained, who, exactly, would react in such a way to a plea for the extension of the term of copyright? Had I offended a sub-cult amid those modern people who dress like circus clowns or adorn themselves like cannibals? (That is not an exaggeration if you consider the requirement politely to stifle one’s reactions in the face of massive tattooing; nose, ear, and other rings; feathered adornments; perpetual three-day beards; orange and blue hair; and even variations of what used to be called war paint; plus degrees of undress that used to be confined to the Folies-Bergere or the pages of the National Geographic. If Queequeg were dropped on Santa Monica, trying to find him would be like playing Where’s Waldo?

I don’t claim to want to understand a great deal that goes on these days in America, as most of its raging enthusiasms are beyond my comprehension, but I never would have thought that such a reaction was possible anywhere. I would have bet money that it wasn’t, and I would have lost. Because there actually is a kind of tribe, a community of interest, united by a shared passion in attacking copyright. They are in spirit the impossible fusion of the tribe of boys in The Lord of the Flies, the extras in a Mel Gibson post-nuclear-holocaust movie, and the American Library Association. Their wildness has been denatured into a crusade against copyright, their audacity lies in button-pushing, and their chief barbarism is the use of intemperate language behind a shield of anonymity on the internet. They are sprinkled like confectioners’ sugar over all the United States, although no doubt more than 99 percent of them reside within an iPod’s throw of a Starbucks. When mobilized, they are able to surge like a mighty ocean through the abstract channels of the internet. I offended them because I wrote a piece calling for the strengthening of copyright when the heart of their cause is to abolish it. What began as an argument about the duration of copyright quickly devolved into a dispute about its legitimacy.

Make no mistake about this. They may protest that they are not against copyright itself but rather its abuses, extensions, and unnecessary inconveniences. This is an unartful dodge. Not only the persistent undercurrents of their logic and commentary, but their unselfconsciously expressed arguments show their true colors. If, as they assert, copyright stifles culture and intellectual advancement, if it is a tax, a monopoly, injurious to the public good, and of marginal legitimate purpose, why would they be for it? If what they argue were true, I wouldn’t be for it either.

Some state the case for abolition directly, unashamedly, and even violently, but though not all of them subscribe to the same views, and each of course has his own take on things, the train they are riding is clearly headed toward abolition, and they do not disavow one another, even the most extreme, except perhaps when cornered. The calculation (or, better, reflex) on the part of the mob is, likely, how much to accept the leaders’ apparent overcaution in exchange for the benefit of their respectability, and on the part of the leaders it is, likely, how much setback and embarrassment to tolerate in return for passion, numbers, force, and fuel. One thing is clear after reading hundreds of pages of their unshielded conversation on the internet: the more they succeed, the less coy they will be about their aims and predilections, and the more absolutist these will become.

I had stumbled into this encampment as artlessly as some of my former British Merchant Navy shipmates, in Yokohama in 1966 or 1967, who walked up to a group of smoldering Yakuza, pulled the edges of their eyelids back to simulate an Asian visage, and enquired, “Choinese restaurant? Choinese restaurant?” Thirty years later, I received, figuratively, the same reception they did. The attacks were often ad hominem, seeking to discredit all of my views on any subject, and apparently even my whole life—which they cannot possibly know—as well as my abilities such as they are, my honesty, and my integrity. I will leave out an account of such assaults, as they are irrelevant to the dispute.

Because of the very great number of assailants it is tempting to liken them to mosquitoes on the tundra, but that would be a mistake. Taken together, they are a bull. I put out a cape, and they charged. When I was twenty, I was hitchhiking through France in a glorious summer and found myself, with two young Scots, stranded for several days on the (then) little traveled Autoroute du Sud. We spent the daylight hours hoping that a car or truck would pass (which, when they did, was usually at about one hundred and ten miles an hour) and at night we would sleep in the organ loft of the little church at Givry. Sometimes cars would go by only every hour or so. Next to us was a field in which a young bull was grazing. The Scotsmen had been doing missionary work in East Africa and were familiar with large herd animals. It was their idea that,