Too many things going on.

Not here, not just me. Yes, I’m busy, but that’s not what this is about. Not directly, not immediately.

Too many things. Going on.

You should know what I mean.

Libraries don’t want Google and Microsoft to make them dig­i­tized books for free, if they can’t release them with­out restraint to the pub­lic. Good for them. Ger­man pub­lish­ers opine that “world copy­right” should only expire when the last gov­ern­ment in the world releases its grip on a work. Bad for you. Author­ity of Wikipedia is crap. Good for every­body. Author­ity of printed books is an illu­sion. This is news? It’s get­ting so you can’t make a liv­ing as a con­tent cre­ator any­more. My ass. It’s get­ting so you can’t make a liv­ing as a con­tent cre­ator any­more with­out giv­ing it away for free. How odd.

A swirl. A roil. And a real—but unremarked—opportunity for the world to break some­thing all of us think is impor­tant: our own authority.

See, you clearly haven’t seen the future I have. You’re not mak­ing it seem that way, at least. It ter­ri­fies me on a deep level, and yet I will sit by the win­dow watch­ing for lights on the hori­zon, try­ing to dis­cern thun­der from mor­tar fire. Despite the fact that I expect to be caught up and con­sumed, destroyed, and remade in it.

What?

No, not phys­i­cally. Nononono. Not “us” in the sense of the meat bags we walk around in. “Us” in the sense of this char­ac­ter writ­ing this scary unin­tel­li­gi­ble rant right here. The author.

The auc­to­r­ial “us”. The author­i­ta­tive “us”. The defin­i­tive edi­tion of “us”. We’re dead in the water.

You should know this already, at least: I spend hours every week pre­serv­ing old books. I buy them, I scan them, I OCR them, I proof­read them, and thou­sands of other peo­ple around the world help do that as well, and in the end we pro­duce author­i­ta­tive elec­tronic ver­sions that get dis­trib­uted around the world.

It’s fun. You learn a lot. But a number—the major­ity, I’d guess—of our vol­un­teer col­leagues believe that what we’re doing is mak­ing cor­rect and accu­rate edi­tions of books. We’re pre­serv­ing them. Sav­ing them, in some way.

Some oth­ers of us just like to read ran­dom crap. Count me in that minority.

It makes you smart, this arbi­trary mag­pie jour­ney through bits and snips of dis­con­nected learn­ing. By my account­ing, at least, it makes you smart. As in, it is not merely suf­fi­cient but nec­es­sary to do it.

If you don’t do it, then you are not smart. If you do it—read widely and indis­crim­i­nately, and find plea­sure in vari­ety and esoterica—you will become smart.

The com­ing war, the destruc­tion and remak­ing of the world, is about that.

It’s not about music copy­ing. It’s not about Flickr and consumer-​​generated con­tent. It’s not about p2p net­work­ing and piracy and earn­ing a liv­ing as a par­a­site on the cre­ative class.

It’s about what’s true. Because if it’s in a book, it’s true.

See. Any­body can scan a book. Google, the Open Con­tent Alliance, you. Go buy a Plus­tek Optic­Book 3600 and some old books—or new books, if you’re feel­ing lucky—and scan the hell out of ‘em and post them to the Inter­net. As an indi­vid­ual, it should take you a day to pro­duce a rea­son­able machine-​​readable ver­sion of any vol­ume you want. Tops.

Go do it now.

First you will do it. And Google will do it. Microsoft will do it. Five Uni­ver­si­ties will also do it. If the book is at all of inter­est, there will have been mul­ti­ple print­ings. Trans­la­tions, edi­tions, revi­sions, com­pet­ing ver­sions in print. Those will mul­ti­ply, and prop­a­gate, and mutate, and they will all of them more or less be acces­si­ble. Soon.

What then is real? Which is right?

Fur­ther: Take each book, and make from it a sheaf of pages. Each page an image from a paper book, and meta­data ver­sion of the words and images thereon. You’re look­ing online at page 23 of an old clas­sic novel, or per­haps an orig­i­nal Mark Twain short story from The Galaxy Mag­a­zine, and you click the “next” but­ton in your book-​​reader, and some­thing hap­pens on the Inter­net and you are shown page 24.

Which? The next one made by the same per­son on the same day, from the same edi­tion of the same printed orig­i­nal? What if the micro­film from the 1970s was miss­ing its page 24, but a friendly col­league in Min­nesota has man­aged to scan one and post it on their book­log, and the magic of the world to come has linked the first bro­ken record to the sec­ond, mend­ing it?

That sounds safe, right? You just fixed the book. Col­lab­o­ra­tively. That’s awe­some and all web2.0y.

But here is the sound the drums of war will make in the dis­tance: which page 25 is the right one? Whose page 25, reached from your 24? If there are six dif­fer­ent 25s? If there are some that have been proof­read and oth­ers made by machine OCR with no punc­tu­a­tion? If there are ver­sions improved, with mod­ern­ized spellings or improved stan­dards of pro­pri­ety or amus­ing in-​​jokes or foot­notes or schol­arly mar­gin­a­lia, or taken from man­u­scripts and drafts, or taken from mashups and for­eign translations?

How can you know what is right, if any path to the truth is allowed?

Who will get credit? What will you cite? And who will you trust?

And so the book will die. Thou­sands more will take each dead book’s place… but they will not count.

And the author, as it is under­stood today—in the law, in the cul­ture, in the academy—will die. And some­thing else will take its place as well… but they will not count.

The sci­ence I was given as a child entailed pond water and hunt­ing fos­sils and look­ing closely at the diver­sity of the world. The human­i­ties I was taught as a child entailed read­ing foot­notes and going to the biggest library and an immod­er­ate lack of focus, of want­ing to know more about the thing unre­marked than the sub­ject at hand. The art I was admir­ing as a child entailed illus­tra­tors, typog­ra­phers, adver­tis­ing, all their beauty made mun­dane by its preva­lence and ubiq­uity, not the clas­sics and the canon: the music of exper­i­ment, the museum in a mag­a­zine, the crafts­man and the hobbyist’s great­est work. And my peo­ple were engi­neers above all else, and the engineer’s eye I inher­ited was the sense of poten­tial every­where, in every scrap of metal or snip­pet of code, to be remade some­day into some­thing won­der­ful, or nec­es­sary, or inter­est­ing. The same eye I use for sci­ence, and art, and scholarship.

I was raised to see straw spun into gold.

Not every­body was. And so there will be war, because what we are doing now in this age of digiza­tion is shred­ding the aus­tere and canon­i­cal nuggets of tra­di­tional gold back into flakes and thence to straw. And rais­ing up the dross and chaff and lost and lesser works that the world had thought it threw aside, and mak­ing them as eas­ily reached as any clas­sic tome.

The virtues of great works aren’t eas­ily dif­fer­en­ti­ated from those of unknown works, when you get a close look at them all. Nor are the virtues of schol­ars, and lay­men; crafts­men and hacks. Nor even pla­gia­rists, and compilers.

The con­tin­gent his­tory of what is worth­while and cor­rect is being undone. Every day. And all that poten­tial is being redis­trib­uted, willy-​​nilly, faster all the time.

This war will be sad, and ter­ri­ble, and many whose lives revolve around the estab­lish­ment and prop­a­ga­tion of auc­tori­tas will be hurt in this con­flict. And it may in time spill over into the phys­i­cal world as well: there will be impris­on­ment, and fir­ings, and indus­tries made and broken.

But the vic­tims don’t deserve this inevitable pain, nor will they be pre­pared. For the most part, they have not been trained for it.

From the Knicker­bocker New-​​York Monthly Mag­a­zine vol 22, no 2 (1843)

One of the hob­bies cher­ished in the most espe­cial man­ner by the good cit­i­zen of Paris, is Phi­los­o­phy; not that he takes delight in the cul­ti­va­tion of wis­dom, or makes the study of nature his pur­suit: but when things go well with him in the world; when his for­tune has reached the limit of his desires; when age has abated the ardor of his pas­sions, and in the bosom of his fam­ily he finds him­self sur­rounded with every com­fort and lux­ury that heart could wish; he fan­cies him­self beyond the com­mon acci­dents of life; he becomes a philoso­pher. His phi­los­o­phy is his pet, his play-​​thing, his hobby-​​horse upon which he gets astride, and gam­bols like a frol­ic­some child. Should his wife scold, should his roast-​​beef be burnt, should a sud­den shower break up a party of plea­sure, he alone pre­serves his equa­nim­ity; is smil­ing, sooth­ing, and con­so­la­tory; he is a philoso­pher. Phi­los­o­phy is his sov­er­eign panacea; with the under­stand­ing that no pre­cau­tions have been neglected to secure him as far as pos­si­ble against the weight­ier mishaps of life.