Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (best reads of all time .txt) 📕

pages of fishing for explanation and definition came back with nary a minnow. There is no satisfactory theory of beauty, just as there is no conclusive literary criticism or definitive philosophy. These things, like eschatological questions, simply will not submit even to reason in its most brilliant manifestations, for they are beyond reason, as even the most faithful children of the Enlightenment will discover when eventually they realize that a description of the instrument is not an explanation of the cause.

Which is all to say that since the Enlightenment, out of respect for the wondrous powers of science, some aspects of life have been “scientized” to harmful effect, and in some areas reason has been allowed to dominate where its strengths and benefits cannot apply: in eschatology, aesthetics, governance (which much unfortunate experimentation has shown is not a science but an art), human relations, and literature in the broadest sense.

The ancient view of literature, built upon and overbrimming with love, humanity, and risk, has been replaced by an idea-building ethos very similar to mechanization, pressing the standard modern literary work toward well phrased (or not) speculation, essay, or philosophical pirouette. The fashion in novels is to be tight, short, unambitious, carefully narrowed, intellectualized, cynical, and constructed above all to be invulnerable to the accusation that the author has transgressed the accepted norms, that he has listened to his heart. An ideal novel of this sort might be called: Rimbaud’s Macaque, a Novel of the Hypothetical Romance of Isadora Duncan and Nikolai Tesla, or, the Birds of Werbezerk, which, to quote from the publisher’s copy, is “the dark and unforgiving account of a Santa Monica professor of Jewish studies who discovers that her parents were Bavarian Nazis and practicing cannibals.”

If literature is purged of its life and reduced to blocks of ideas; exposition; and something that, like science, builds narrow works of investigation into a vast structure, then of course it would be cooperative and mechanical, and why therefore would a copyright differ from a patent? But, in fact, the probability of an idea occurring simultaneously to more than one person is immensely greater than of its expression being the same. Newton and Leibniz discovered the calculus at the same time, but their revelations of this were not the same, even in the restricted language of mathematics. If, experimentally, two people were told to write a story about a Russian soldier who while fighting in Afghanistan learns that he is an orphan, it is almost certain that, although the “idea” would be the same, two different stories would result. Due to the great difference in the range of variables, the differences in congruity between, on the one hand, one idea and another, and, on the other hand, one form of expression and another, are vast, and therefore part of the sound basis of copyright.

From the Amazonblogs (how awkward and hideous a word) comes the following about “the fallacy of intellectual property” and the “hoarding of ideas”: “The sooner we can all get past the ‘idea’ that anyone can own the thoughts, the words, the music, the sooner we can survive the possibly ensuing class war and get down to the business of evolving our eventual hive mind.”96 I trust that the reader need not be reminded that “the dream of the commons” and the “hive mind” are things that do not and cannot exist. Connecting people via the internet will not produce such things anymore than will connecting them via telephone, bringing them together in an auditorium, or publishing newspaper articles or letters to the editor.

These conceptions are not confined to the fringe. A letter in the venerable Claremont Review of Books states that, “ideas and art are inextricably intertwined [and]…contemporary copyright is notoriously used by owners to protect ‘concepts’ (that is, ideas) from unauthorized use by others.”97 To quote once again and cite § 102 of Title 17 of the United States Code, “In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.”

This is the law, but even clearer are facts that exist independently of law, namely that concepts and ideas have not been repressed or stunted by copyright, and certainly not by the recent extension of copyright. Where is an example of this? How many books have been written about Pearl Harbor, the Constitution, Shakespeare, racism, education, particle physics, elephants, furniture, or veal cookery? Is the suggestion that once one is written and copyrighted the field of maneuver for pertinent concepts, ideas, or principles is somehow locked up?

The misconception stems from the dismal modern assumption that “Ideas and art are inextricably intertwined.” If they are intertwined, it means that they are two different things, as something cannot be intertwined with itself. And of course, because they are different, we have a word for each. Copyright applies clearly and forcefully to one while not to the other. Also, and as a partial illumination of the structure and justification of copyright, ideas come most readily. The world is littered with the invisible corpses of not only those that luckily were stillborn but those that deserved long life and were denied it by insufficient expression and execution. (For those who think that their grandchildren are their ancestors, a note: the execution of an idea is not the same as the execution of a person.) In about 1962, I “invented” digital recording, and I’m sure that a great many other people did, too. But the laurels justly go to those who understood it better, pursued it faithfully, expressed it coherently, and realized it finally.

From another letter in the same excellent publication: “Every time an artist makes a new work, the law should assume that ninety-nine artists are waiting in the wings to make something even better. The first artist…should not be able to slow the ninety-nine.”98 This comports effortlessly with Lawrence