Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

easily fall prey to its own). By definition it cannot rely on the opinions of others. Because it is almost always more imperiled, exposed, and accountable, it is educated in bearing the consequences of its every utterance, whereas the voice of the crowd never has to pay a price: upon the failure of its assumptions it merely dissolves, and its former adherents, anonymous, comfortably forget what once they asserted, and melt into new streams of opinion. Had each Turkish soldier had to decide individually whether or not to make that winter ascent, they all might have thought harder and better about it in the absence of so many others carrying them and their orders along on an utterly worthless wave of quick-set belief.

In the electronic culture, however, the decision has already been made in regard to such things. To quote Jeremy Carroll, chief product architect of Top Quadrant, discussing an aspect of his work: “Semantic Web technology…” will make possible “consensus instructions from many different sources, or instructions that other people have already found helpful (rather than back-breaking searches and comparisons).”23 It is the labor, care, and learning in making such comparisons that bring the benefits of experience, a sharp eye, and good judgment. As anyone who has ever used it knows, the internet is a magnificent (if often unreliable) research tool. But relieving one of the burden and labor of getting to where one is going erodes context and understanding. You can home in on an exact figure or statistic without any knowledge of its place, position, or historical development. You can extract a quote, literally, out of context. You can use the new power of extraction to take you immediately to a single brick, flat up against your face, of a cathedral, without your having apprehended it from afar during a day’s walk while, from amid the undulating hills, watching it take different positions, change with perspective, flash differently in colors depending on the light, and seemingly grow in size from something that distance makes less than a thumbnail to a vast mountainous wall looming above you. All this you must earn, and all this you can miss if you need not contribute labor and time, and if you do not devote to your subject the thought that context demands as surely as a rolling sea calls forth the attentive and continually alert operations and adjustments of good seamanship.

Even the Wikipedia, which has controls and rules governing its content, is easy to hijack. Any obsessive with an ax to grind can contribute to the biography of someone he despises. No one in his right mind would commission Lillian Hellman to write the encyclopedia article on Mary McCarthy, but the wiki invites and encourages such things by its very form. Theoretically, there need be little difference between, for example, the Wikipedia and the Britannica, were the editors of the Wikipedia responsibly to check and shape everything in it (the more they would, the less like the Wikipedia and the more like the Britannica it would be, and in my experience I have found that they appear not to check and often are factually inaccurate). The Wikipedia uses a vastly larger pool of contributors instead of fewer contributors with certain expertise. I prefer the latter approach, as I would in picking a pilot, a neurosurgeon, a lawyer, a mechanic, or a teacher, which, obviously, makes sense pretty much across the board. But with expertise can come deeply ingrained bias, so perhaps some conjunction between the two approaches will sharpen both. Where the wiki concept fails most disturbingly, however, even with the most careful oversight, is in the attribute of fixedness, for no matter what the precautions or purity of motivation, the wikis are like the Great Soviet Encyclopedia on speed. Instead of an office in the Kremlin sending out new paragraphs and doctored photographs to be inserted in a row of heavy books, a process that took weeks or months and was detectable as the paste wrinkled the page, it is done seamlessly, instantly, anonymously, and without cease. Revision as used by the Soviets was a tool to disorient and disempower the plasticized masses. Revision in the wikis is an inescapable attribute that eliminates the fixedness of fact. Both the Soviets and the wiki builders imagined and imagine themselves as attempting to reach the truth. But both have in common the great ease of changing what once was firmly set upon a page. It is only a difference of speed and approach. Tyranny of this sort from a central authority is no worse than lack of accountability from a vast number of anonymous contributors (in the case of the response to my article, a cyber mob of unprecedented efficiency) with the power to revise history at will.

The entries in the bloggy-type wikis are often so quick, careless, and primitive that they are analogous to spitting on the street. Their authors write the way Popeye speaks, though with less polish. This is because there is no investment, risk, or accountability, and thus no matching labor or probity. The difference between authorship and the “wiki,” at least in the wiki here at issue, is like the difference between a lifelong marriage and a quick sexual encounter at a bacchanal with someone whose name you never know and face you will not remember, if, indeed, you have actually seen it.

The rights of authorship, the most effective guarantor of which is copyright, protect fact from casual manipulation; slow the rush to judgment; fix responsibility; encourage conscience in assertion and deliberation; and protect the authority of the individual voice, without which we are little more than nicely yoked oxen.

Threatened or vanquished nations usually produce sympathizers, traitors, and collaborators drawn to rivals or enemies largely out of fear. As if sensing the greater market value of working from within, seldom do they openly cross the lines, preferring to remain in place. The quislings and the French collabos were uncommonly direct. The habit of fear that drives