Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

Lessig’s view, as reported in paraphrase by the New York Times, that copyright law is “too stifling of the artists who follow,” and that the Sonny Bono Act “stifles creation.”99

Where do they get the idea that copyright is a drag on artistic production? Are they suggesting that Pasternak could not write because Yeats had beaten him to the punch, that Tolstoy didn’t write War and Peace because Moby Dick was copyrighted? I have published six hundred books, articles, short stories, essays, newspaper pieces, and the like. Not once in the forty-six years in which I have been engaged in this have I given a thought to someone else’s copyright except when quoting a song. Literary work is not like assembling Legos,™ piling one modularized thing above another. Perhaps the cut-and-paste generation sees it that way, for which they should be rigorously held to account by—what else—copyright law. And if copyright did not exist? This would not encourage literary fecundity, but retard it. Because Batman is copyrighted, it means you can’t write it again, or Batman II, Batman III, Batman IV, The Return of Batman, Batman’s Brother, Batman’s Sister, and so forth. You are forced instead to do what the letter-writer suggests you are prevented from doing—“making something even better”: in this case, something else. This is precisely what has been done so often that even after hundreds of years of copyright and a decade of the “outrageous” Sonny Bono Act we are afloat in the richest sea of information and publication that mankind has ever known. There is so much, and it grows so fast, that the institutions tasked with tracking it cannot keep up. And upon this deep and swelling sea are a tribe of people who are convinced that, because of what they imagine to be the repressive and strangulatory effects of copyright, they are in a desert.

Perhaps many of those responsible for the three-quarters of a million postings exercised by my article in the Times have come up through an educational system that has addicted them to the promiscuous use of what others write, so that they think this is what writing is, and they themselves cannot write absent such reliance. Now they wish to alter the customs and laws of civilization to accommodate their failings.

Would Jefferson have been sympathetic to their arguments, their demeanor, their lack of polish? Would the author of the Declaration of Independence have been drawn to their inability to recognize how the spark of genius actually arises, as it did so often in him? I don’t think that he would have been at all agreeable to their association, much less that he was in any way their champion. More likely that upon reflection in the tranquility of Monticello, which as I write and despite the rare haze I can see in the far distance, he would have held them to be fast-talking thieves.

CHAPTER 4

THE ESPRESSO BOOK MACHINE

Using Machines to Hold Machines in Check

Not long ago, on one of those Virginia days that relieves potters of the necessity of firing their kilns, I was rowing on glassy water down the Rivanna River. Approaching a buoy where I would make a turn and head back, I looked to my left and saw, on the bank, an idiot who was mocking the ancient and unassuming motions of rowing. Evidently unfamiliar with the kind of racing shell that Eakins portrayed and that is a thing of beauty, and perhaps amused that it didn’t have a motor, he was aping my motions and laughing maliciously. After all, how stupid can you be to row five miles in the heat when you might never move a muscle, eat cupcakes and pork rinds all day, smoke like a volcano, and sit in your bass boat hooked up to an oxygen bottle?

The wonders of misinterpretation flow generously from malice. Thirty years ago, based on the statement of an obviously psychopathic (and very minor) character in one of my books, a reviewer attacked me ad hominem for, he maintained, hating cities. At the time, I was living in New York, where I was born, working in the library of the New-York Historical Society on a novel, Winter’s Tale, that is, if anything, a 748-page tribute to a city with which I was as deeply and immoderately in love as if it were a woman.

I bring this up because it bears upon the electronic culture, the machine, and the arguments that surround both. To wit, just as accusing someone of being a communist, or an anti-communist, so as to skate over the substance of his arguments is (or was) a common tactic, so in regard to anything having to do with mechanization the easiest reflex is to brand an opponent a Luddite. That is, someone who, like the early-nineteenth-century craftsmen who destroyed the powered looms threatening their way of life (and were severely repressed for doing so), rashly and irrationally fights the inevitable and the good. What most damns the Luddites in the common wisdom is that they failed to make distinctions (although they did: they did not attack machines per se, but only those that were displacing their customary industry), not even bothering with the bath water as they threw out all the babies. How stupid and pointless to object, for example, to the steam engine, the cotton gin, or the railroad.

The original progressives embraced such things as instruments of rationalism that would in tandem with their beloved techniques of social engineering make the world over for the better. Their recent heirs, however, have stopped short. A shift occurred sometime between their mocking of conservatives for objecting to water fluoridation and their own subsequent fear and suspicion of an encyclopedia’s-worth of substances. In a single generation they went from an uncritical embrace of scientific culture to a supercritical rejection. They may not know it, but they have begun to swing back the other way, lured by the supposed wonders of the new