Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

tools, rubber gloves, and stolen property in the trunk. In my naïveté, I thought we had nailed him. But he then showed up with his lawyer and accused us of stealing his car. Obviously, he fathered descendants.

From the same source, although not the same person: “One theory that supporters of ‘intellectual property’ have not considered. If this is property as they claim then it has value, and, more importantly, it can be taxed.”47 Of course, its earnings are taxed (and what kind of nonproperty is capable of generating a return?), as it itself is taxed upon the death of whoever owns it. But what we have here is, I believe, a call for a wealth tax on what the proponent believes is not actually property. Real estate is taxed this way, as are boats, cars, and other such things in various states and localities as a result of specific legislation, but most property—stocks, bonds, furniture, savings accounts, et al.—is not. Therefore, the fact that it is not taxed does not prove that it is not property, and the fact that it is property does not require that it be taxed. The comment above is an end run, like trying to put Al Capone away for nonpayment of taxes. But there is no Al Capone here, and the end run is simply mean-spirited flailing, a sign that whoever proposed it is ready to use whatever weapons are at hand without compunction but with obvious pride in his supposed cleverness and deliberate ruthlessness.

And if one is to be critical of semantics, the errors here cited flow as if from an inexhaustible well. For example, “Realistically, it’s Helprin asking for welfare. He is asking the government to give him a greater subsidy.”48 Based apparently on the belief that all property and labor are held in common, and that wealth is something distributed by the government rather than created by those the government taxes—a notion that, though widely credited, is logically impossible—the author of this judgment does not know the meaning of the word subsidy and thinks someone is a beggar and a freeloader for objecting to a proposal to command the product of other people’s labor without charge. But, why not? I’m just “a mouthpiece for the corporate copyright machines,”49 who wants “to muddy the waters so completely that the issue can’t be debated in good faith,”50 so as “to give politicians backing for their initiatives that lobbyists pay them for.”51 And, “it certainly is interesting that just as a new ‘copyright alliance’ [that is, the effort on the part of corporations with an interest in copyright to push against the tide, with lawyers and lobbyists attempting to fight a battle that will not be decided by lawyers and lobbyists but by public opinion] has formed to push for stronger copyright laws, we start seeing articles like this one…. A conspiracy-minded person might suggest that this is no coincidence.”52

And I also shot Lincoln. Although I had never heard of the “copyright alliance” and have always been the natural adversary of the corporations to whom circumstances force me to license my copyrights at what, due to their superior weight and resources, are sometimes for me disadvantageous terms, after this I would be delighted to ally with them in defense of copyright in any legal, ethical, and transparent fashion. And people who make accusations of conspiracy must have a lot of rough bark on them to do so given that they themselves have longstanding organizations and programs with enormous numbers of fuzzy adherents, and I, whatever my failings, am entirely alone in this except that Joseph Tartakovsky of the Claremont Institute was kind enough to have the wikis printed out for me because my dial-up connection works at only 20 kbps, which is true but only an excuse, because I much prefer paper and ink. In fact, I love it, and when I have ink on my pants or shirt, people sometimes ask how I have stained my clothes and I, having in mind Johnson’s “ink-stained wretch,” reply that my clothes are not stained at all.

For these marks are the badges of the profession, over thousands of years, and, contrary to what a carelessly thinking advocate of the electronic culture might assume, my preference is well educated and of long standing. I have been using paper and ink for more than sixty years, and computers for almost thirty. In our household, we have seven, running on several operating systems. There is not so much in this new world—in fact, of substance there is virtually nothing—so that experience such as I have had would be insufficient to judge it, and I judge it to be wanting. There is a dignity and tranquility to the fixedness of the penned or printed page. It has the solidity of hand work. A marked-up manuscript, with interlinear and marginal notes in various colors and handwritings, lines, shapes, commands, cross-outs is as unique as a fingerprint and as surprising as an abstract painting. And when you’re working with it you know that it is there. You can feel it, and see it. It is not constrained to appear in only one page or less at a time. It does not need either fragile bearings, electronically vulnerable semiconductors, or a supply of electricity. It can be dropped, or soaked in water, and survive. It does not blink and flee. It lets you in. The difference is similar to that between holding a baby in your arms or looking at it from without, through the glass of an incubator. “Honest inkwell, sacred to the poet, / from whose ink a world emerges—.”53 Paper and ink. Stick with it.

These few examples represent a vast reservoir of hostile inanity. One could fill a “laptop” with them. This is, after all, the era in which students think we fought Germany in the Civil War, electricity was invented by John Travolta, and Frank Perdue was the seventy-sixth president of the United States. But what exactly is going