Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

and new Huxleys and Orwells to warn darkly of their carelessly or maliciously cultivated potential. But along the way, during the transition, many conveniences will arise, not so miraculous even if hailed as such, but, even if short of miracles, clear departures that will be the cause of great changes. Take, for one example, tailoring.

A most interesting and disappointing phenomenon that one must witness day after day is the belief of so many people in their own importance. Fly across the country or overseas and in almost any seat is someone who is convinced that what he does and who he is makes him superior to everyone around him. The construction worker looks down upon the Harvard professor, who looks down upon him in return. The sculptor thinks middle managers are no better than ants, and middle managers think the sculptor a pathetic fool. The combinations are endless. Once, a powerful financier, knowing that my mother was an actress and my father was in the film industry, turned to me at a dinner as if to share a presumed superiority, and began to demean the intelligence of people in show business. “Can you imagine,” he asked, expressing his contempt, “an actor!”

Had I the presence of mind at that moment, which I did not, my answer would have been, “Why don’t you imagine yourself on a stage in front of a thousand people poised to hear a pin drop and about to spend the next three hours closely and critically observing as you play Hamlet. Or Willy Loman. If you have the chance to do either you might instead jump the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle, because it’s easier.” Other people always are less worthy, contribute less, and have it easier than we do, we think, as part of our human nature. We take things so much for granted—such as clothing, which we wear every day and usually possess in great abundance—with little regard to the skills required and the difficulties in making it.

In the nineteenth century, my grandmother was a seamstress who, in kerosene and gas light, made shirtwaists. When I was young, she tried to teach me how to sew, and ever since I have had great respect for tailors. There are competent tailors and there are great tailors, not to mention designers and pattern cutters, even if so many people in so many other lines of work fail to understand, from ignorance and lack of sympathy, the intensely difficult requirements made upon such people, and the nature of their skills. This ancient profession now is figuratively in the curve of the wave. You can still see it, and it is still breathing air, but it is nonetheless soon to go under, subsumed in the change that will roll through almost all things.

For, not long from now, most clothing will be bespoke, not by tailors and seamstresses but by machines. A person who wants to be clothed will submit to a scan that will sense and then store his measurements in a digital pudding of algorithms and solid geometry. Overlying algorithms will adjust, if necessary, for the big dinner he had the night before, or the ten pounds he hopes to lose in the summer. Then he will choose the clothing he wants, specifying variations in cut, material, color, fasteners, or placement of buttons. And somewhere, perhaps in Hong Kong, Russia, or the room next door, a machine will lay out the fabric, laser-cut the patterns into the material, and then baste, sew, knit, hem, or stitch the cloth, quickly making a garment that previously would have cost a great deal more and taken many times longer to complete.

We have already entered the new paradigm that will bring us such things, and it can only strengthen. It will work upon almost anything manufactured, including the scribed objects that since the beginning of time have required hand and eye. The first things to have fallen—a long time ago—were those that early invited industrialization because of their easy replicability: sugar cubes, bricks, pig iron, stamped parts. Then came the things that required the complicated, if blind, direction of precise machines: filling and capping bottles, baling and tying hay, weaving patterns into cloth. The last stage will be machines that seem almost to think, that will build a house, make a custom-tailored suit, or travel through your colon to scout out and snip polyps that it will give to another machine to deliver to yet another machine for diagnosis.

Printing and publishing fit into this hierarchy very near the bottom, because their essence and utility from day one have been derived from the quality of replicability. The printing press is a masterwork of the old paradigm, and to rationalize the old paradigm economically it was necessary to have large print runs, and, thus, centralization, and following from that an immense and ponderous distribution network. If, however, it were possible to dispense with large print runs, neither centralization nor the trucks and rail cars for transport would be required, nor warehouses in which to store books in the downtime during fluctuation in demand, nor the large bookstores, inventory, and personnel with which to move stock. All of this apparatus and trouble is now rapidly becoming vestigial, and as in most great shifts in industrialization, and so often too in presidential nominating contests, the front-runners early in the competition, that which and those who seem inevitable, are often replaced by a compromise candidate or someone or something that appears to have come out of the blue.

In the case of books and publishing, for decades the front-runner as heir apparent to the printing press was the computer screen, whether (and at first) on the desktop, laptop, e-book, or i-book. A whole book—indeed, a whole library—can be sent over copper, fiber-optic, or the air, and at its destination manipulated, reproduced, searched, displayed, and stored with ease and speed heretofore unheard of. But there has been so much understandable resistance to this that the old ways, long vulnerable