Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

(embarrassingly) on the wrong side of history, and why they acted accordingly, and why to this day they cannot see what was at stake, what happened, how it happened, why, and according to what principles.

Is it not somehow revolting that the forceful drive of the copyright abolition movement, its lust aroused by music “sharing,” DVD copying, and software piracy, has turned upon the relative backwater of publishing? The spillover of passions and resources to the literary sphere (or what is left of it) seems disproportionate, unnecessary, unjust, and a touch sadistic, like a cat sporting with a mouse. This is not an oblique plea for a separate peace. All a separate peace usually does is move you back to the end of the line so you can wait to be dessert. Rather, I am indignant that a movement begun by people who wanted to avoid paying for music that to me is worse than North Korean water torture, now mortally threatens the stability of a craft and art that was ancient at the time of Jesus, that encompasses the world, and that has evolved by the love and labor of the greatest souls ever to have graced the earth.

When recently Pearson Education moved to stem the piracy of seventy-eight of its texts, it was met by the assertion that it stood on “shaky legal ground.” Those who pirated them displayed on their web site the following appeal: “There are very few scanned textbooks in circulation, and that’s what we’re here to change…. So pick up a scanner and start scanning.”8 It is easy to be sympathetic to students (and their parents) who because of the greed, vanity, and corruption of the people who make and assign textbooks must spend inordinate amounts for worthless tomes stuffed full of unnecessary graphics and obeisances to political correctness of one sort or another (showing a woman in the kitchen has long been almost a capital crime, and, apparently, male Caucasians no longer do math problems), but they are not so oppressed that this is yet or can ever be a justification for pulling down the whole temple. It is said that the American Association of Publishers finds 30,000 to 125,000 pirated files every week.9 And this is just the beginning.

As have others over the course of history, many have now decided that it is impossible not to be entitled to something that is easily and commonly stolen. Partly because my aging and self-indulgent generation has educated those in its wake to believe that the way to confront moral failing is to reclassify it as virtue, this they have done, and with unalloyed certainty. Copyright must be abolished so they won’t have to pay for the music and software that sustains them—like oxygen, which, after all, is free—for so vast a proportion of what they may claim to be their waking hours. Never has a human generation been so transformed by and dependent upon such an electronic blood flow. It is as if they are fighting for a quality upon which their existence depends. Thus, the passion, as strange as it may seem and as terribly mistaken as it is, to argue and declare, like Louis XIV, that the fruit of other people’s labor should naturally flow to them. It should not.

The advocates of “music sharing” think that, because the Beatles, half of whom are dead, have hundreds of millions, or perhaps even billions of dollars, and the people who would filch a song or two may have to buy their salad one tomato at a time and use milk crates as chairs, these expropriations are somehow mathematically justified. They aren’t, and not mainly because their cumulative effect has destroyed the music industry. They aren’t, because what has been done is simply wrong, and in contradiction of the rules and morals of civilization. Those who flatter themselves with such loose opinions should think of what the world would be like if everyone behaved as they do. It’s almost a matter of aesthetics. It doesn’t matter if you steal a lot or a little, or if you get away with it, or not: theft is ugly.

During my unreconstructed twenties, my father once assigned to me the task of eliminating a huge wasps’ nest in a woodpile beneath the kitchen window. Rather than use chemicals, and because fire may have been ill advised so close to the house even if a politician might not understand why, I decided to put my reflexes to the test. I took a heavy shovel and smashed the nest, launching at least a hundred wasps in maximal rage, whom I then engaged in a twenty-minute Battle of Britain, swatting with the shovel at implausibly high speed. There was no reason I should not have died that day, and even less reason to have remained unstung, but I did not, and I did. Never before or since had I or have I reacted so fast and with such unthinking efficiency—not even as the father of two-year-olds. With no time to calculate, much less reflect or strategize, I moved like a radar-directed gun, or something in a cartoon.

The response to my article was crafted by the wasps of the internet, who have been educated to move quickly and in synchrony, to cut and paste, to organize, skip, jump, and race from one thing to another in a frenzy of vituperation while treating people’s misfortunes as a form of entertainment. Their style of argument is reminiscent of the Red Guard’s. If you have ever been the odd man out at a dinner party—say, one of eight people, seven of whom furiously support a position you do not—you have an idea of what it is like to argue with a hundred, two hundred, twenty thousand, or two hundred thousand people at once. If an argument is converted simply to a contest of strength, endurance, or efficiency of reflex, mass can sometimes quite easily overcome accuracy, validity, and justice.

I could not even think to match my opponents