Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

As often happens with new technologies, digital technology being a rich example, its stewards become so intoxicated with the adventure they are living that they forget that mechanism must adjust to man rather than vice versa. Much of the alienation and failure of the electronic age is due to the fact that its enthusiasts lack education in the humanities, and, like Soviet planners, value the design they have come to worship over the people they claim to serve. They tend to overlook and ignore human needs and preferences, which seldom run parallel to the powers and tendencies of machines, because in their careless mania they have been easily educated out of them, never having been well educated in them.

Thus it was widely assumed—and it may yet happen—that books would be replaced by the magnificently efficient digibook, which can accomplish miracles, if you allow that miracles are manifested in quantities rather than qualities. Although I am sometimes accused of being a kind of anti-Christ ignorant of and hostile to technology, this is hardly the case. I have had a lifelong interest in technology, and in physics half-theoretical, half-empirical, and entirely amateur. Starting a long time ago with my parents, I have made my family suffer through sincere disquisitions on horsepower, electrical engineering, thermodynamics, and much else. As an undergraduate, I took Professor Bode’s course on communications theory and thus heard directly from a recently retired director of the Bell Labs what, had I been a courageous investor rather than an investment chicken, I could have parlayed over the last forty years into perhaps a billion dollars.

Not born to be rich, by 1981 I had nonetheless begun to use a PC that required for its operation the absorption of several hundred pages of protocols and the placement of very large floppy disks in the freezer to fix frequent crashes. Combining this relatively early and intense experience with Professor Bode’s clear picture of where the field could lead, I went to my publisher, William Jovanovich, with a proposal. He hardly fit into the publishing industry, which frequently had its long knives out for him. They said he was rash, and they were right, but the reason they didn’t like him was that he embodied what they, lacking it, had come to detest. He was brilliant, courageous, far-seeing, daring, and deep. Unlike many of his shallow counterparts, he was aware that mortality gives to our lives, no matter how glorious, a signature in a minor key. That gave him perspective, gravitas, and wit. Not that he didn’t enjoy being a tycoon (he did), but while some of his fellow publishing chairmen and CEOs of the period were fattening in the Hamptons, parading in the main dining room of the Four Seasons, or—and this is neither fabrication nor exaggeration—snorting cocaine and dressing in women’s underwear and pig masks during fornication with Key West prostitutes, William Jovanovich, whom these pompous, glossy, corrupt, fly-by-night fakes thought somehow beyond the pale, was carefully reading through many volumes of Hazlitt. In today’s world, I suppose, reading Hazlitt does not bode well.

Because I knew him to be unburdened by either fear or conformity, I presented to him, in 1983 or 1984, my proposal for the following. It would be approximately 81/2 by 11 inches, about 1/3-inch thick, bound in leather in some shade of brown (which, in my long-lasting view is the only appropriate color for leather), like the portfolio that my parents had recently presented to me, that I showed him, and that as I write now sits on my desk to my left. When opened it would reveal two 81/2 x 11 screens, textured as much as the art of glassmaking could transform frosting into the feel of paper. To a near-sighted person it would look like an open book—the pages off-white or cream, the print black, illustrations in four colors, no glare, no flicker, no hum, and very high resolution. Eventually, as it was perfected, pages would be turned by placing your fingers on them and doing almost exactly what you do with a real book. The pressure and direction of a sweep of the hand would be read and obeyed. You could also turn pages by commanding it verbally to do so. You could tell it to search for a particular word or phrase, or assemble, for instance, all mentions of feldspar, the guillotine, or Easter Island. You could make a concordance or ask for a dictionary definition or a citation from another work, and these would appear.

Inside would be not merely one book but dozens, or scores. You could replace them by plugging and unplugging modules the size of Chiclets.™ Eventually, you would have access to the contents of the entire Library of Congress—by radio. And, you could tell it to take a letter, to read it back to you, to correct the spelling, and to file it in your computer at home and print out multiple copies. I confess that interconnectivity, the real gold ring, did not occur to me, and in this I bow to its well known inventor, my classmate, that spritely lummox, Al Gore. (Since he left college, no one has spoken to him, as no one has been able to interrupt him.) My quite limited concept, as presented above, would not have taken the kind of big bite out of things that could have changed them fundamentally.

Jovanovich was, to say the least, a very perspicacious man. His conclusion at the time was that something important was lacking, and that, regardless of whatever was absent, we were simply not ready for this. He was of course quite right in view of capabilities then (and those readily accessible even now) and the probable reception (again, then and now). What was lacking? Five hundred years of habit, tradition, and affection; the tactile feel of real paper; the weight and density of many pages; the difficulties that, conquered, instill pride; the smell of ink and new paper; the variations