Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

using a long-sleeved shirt, we should teach ourselves bullfighting. The reason I am still here and thus able to irritate people who don’t like copyright is that the bull was perfectly behaved, he always went for the shirt, he was apparently frightened, perhaps even cooperative, and he seemed to be enjoying the whole thing. I think he liked us. We liked him. As he was young and new to the game, perhaps for him it was a learning experience, with us in the role of his mother and father.

Almost a lifetime later, I had an encounter with a different kind of bull, a huge, fully grown adult in his prime, who had broken down a gate and was wandering around the road near my house, angry moisture clouds coming double-barreled through his nostrils like shotgun blasts. A few people had stopped, and remained in their cars. Remembering my pleasant experience in France, I thought to be a hero and maneuver the bull back through the gate. On my first try, however, he signaled me by lurching forward, head down, and planting both front hooves upon the asphalt. On my second, more tentative try, he charged. There was no compromise or hesitation. All two thousand pounds of him, dense musculature focused, horns pointed, nostrils flaring, eyes wild, came at me with surprising speed. I was well over fifty but have never sprinted faster in my life. Like a bullet, I zinged into a grove of pines to my right, and the two of us, one of us in adrenalized terror, started weaving around the trunks. Then, with a snort of contempt, he decided to go back onto the road.

The anti-copyright bull, a centurion of the electronic culture, is quick, massive, muscular, untiring, and stupid. Although it can’t (or doesn’t) really read, write, or think, it and others like it are setting the agenda for your future and mine. We are now busy—sometimes against our will as we open an inbox with six hundred e-mails or are summoned from a mountain pool by a cell phone with an abominable ring—applying machine algorithms to our lives, like it or not. And this new regime is anchored not in a great truth or discovery but in a swarm of dullard machines and a great many fatuous assertions.

Before touring the more pertinent arguments, most of which are sufficiently careless and spurious to be a Disneyland of self-impeachment, one should have some idea of their origins. What occult force has brought so many people together into a movement both as agile and dense as a tyrannosaurus running, a movement that, in the time it takes to fill a fountain pen, can deliver three-quarters of a million badly written missives to every corner of the world? Granted, they are much like the poets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, thirty or forty years ago. There seem to have been about five hundred of these. Each one had a poetry magazine that published five hundred poems in each issue. Each magazine had five hundred subscribers. And each poet had subscriptions to five hundred magazines. The traffic was remarkably heavy and mainly borne by the post office, and, as in the inbreeding of Spanish royalty, the effect was peculiar. There was, however, something almost noble about the fuse of this bud, as it was poetry itself that moved them to their complex arrangement of mutually reflecting mirrors.

The primum mobile of the anti-copyright partisans, however, is a lot less noble than that of the five hundred poets of Cambridge. The force that created their movement, and the glue that holds it together—on account of which they suffer no apparent embarrassment—was their epic battle with the record companies. In 1999, the recording industry was (by revenue) three-quarters the size of the book publishing industry, but by 2006 a good deal less than half its size, thanks to an average annual negative growth of 3.5 percent. For some reason, music seems to be the first pillar to fall. When I arrived in Cambridge as a freshman in 1965, more than half of the Harvard Coop’s record aisles was devoted to classical music. A few years later, it was no more than a tenth. And once the locusts have exhausted one husk they turn to another. It is not surprising, however, that they would focus next on the printed word even though what really exercises them is software, their metier. Like good jackals, they go for the weak. Software and motion pictures are not only behemoths, but fast-growing behemoths, having annually increased their revenues, from 1999 to 2005, at 8 percent and 7.2 percent respectively, whereas in the same period book publishing grew at approximately half that rate, and from a smaller base. In 2005, book revenues were $24.42 billion. Revenues from software and the motion picture industry were $193 billion.7

It is not difficult to see which is the weakest animal in the herd. Not only is it true that publishing as a sector is financially feeble, but it is (as hard to believe as this may be, given the publishing consolidations of recent years) less concentrated than either Hollywood or Microsoft and its vassals, and it has far less spare money with which to fund its defense. Add to that the difference between the motion picture executive, after whom the pit bull, cobra, and tarantula were named, and the typical mouse-burger publisher, and no strategist worth his double Ethiopian nonfat goat milk latte would advise attacking the hard target before knocking out the soft one. Much like Lenin’s rope-selling capitalists, publishers, who live by copyright, publish lots of books attacking it and very few in defense. In fact, at least in the realm of general books rather than legal treatises, this may be the only one. That they have fallen into such a pattern is explained, I believe, by the same thing that explains why such an overwhelming proportion of the West’s intelligensia believed that resisting communism and the Soviet Empire was to have been