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

increased by orders of magnitude, the effect on the ability to synthesize and integrate it has been nil. The new oceans of fact and data thus overload the unaltered talents of synthesis, distorting or, in some cases, breaking them. Thus overwhelmed by the machine, many have turned to it for relief. It only gets them in deeper. If the machine is uncomfortable with certain of the old ways, they clear them from its path, and in so doing they serve its cause and promote its implacable progress.

Although bluntly and petulantly insisting upon an unfettered right to property that is not one’s own appears closely correlated with this servitude, such a metastasized sense of entitlement has multiple causes. There is the common illusion, one of the chief tools in appealing for votes, that wealth arises without effort or risk, and one is entitled to it mainly by having been born. One votes in that case for the candidate who promises to divide up the self-generating pie equally, and if someone complains that his labor is unjustly appropriated his petition is filed and neglected under greed in regard to ill-gotten gains. This sense of entitlement is long suffused into the American bone, but as wealth does not in fact come from a fountain, every material entitlement enjoyed by one person is an obligation suffered by another: an almost mathematical truth that the pridefully “generous” must of necessity ignore.

As the movement against copyright is notably youthful, it is perhaps unsurprising that a sense of entitlement drives it. A young person, having spent most years of his life with others providing for him rather than the other way around, easily mistakes this for the natural order, and may, when it begins to fall away, become incensed and try heroically to “restore” it via various forms of protest. Many, living within the university, a privileged semi-socialist anomaly sustained from without by the wealth of the market economy it disdains, think not only that living thusly should be the mandated state of the world, but that it is.

And, then, the deeply held belief that the work of the intellect and spirit cannot in any way but obscenely be treated as property may come from more than half a century of intensive, pattern-forming education in this premise as actuality. Previous generations paid far more often for what current generations now call “content.” Movies, vaudeville, theater, news, and music were until relatively recently not available for “free” on radio and television. Even as radio and television took hold in the formative period from the late twenties through the early sixties, the proportion of overall news and entertainment for which one had to pay directly was greater than now in a “free media” universe.

New generations progressively more and more media saturated have been more and more habituated to pay via their toleration of constant interruption and intrusion, and in the generally higher prices that cover the high costs of ubiquitous advertising. That, rather than targeted dollars, is the currency extracted from them. The habit has been inbred until it is their instinct, leading them en masse to believe that paying directly is a repugnant scam equivalent to forcing someone to pay for the air he breathes. Indeed, “content” is so pervasive for someone bathed in a world of continuous multiple inputs that it must seem very much like air. Thus, breathing in and breathing out as nature intended may explain, for example, why in this country it is estimated that 21 percent of all software in use is pirated.124 It cannot be merely greed or opportunism that generates theft on such a massive scale that its adherents and sympathizers want to recalibrate law and the norms of civilization to accommodate it. It must be ever more intense, rapid, and destructive acculturation.

Among other things, as intemperate revolutions often do, without adjustment this revolution will destroy the dream it advocates. By insistence upon unhindered access without regard for rights and incentives that have been carefully balanced over centuries, the hurried new order will diminish the substance over which it demands sovereignty. It will have its access, but, as time passes, to less and less, and eventually perhaps to almost nothing, the means having grossly overpowered the ends. The past may be brilliantly cataloged and made accessible as never before, but at the cost of making the culture of the present relatively barren. Though it may never be entirely extinguished, it can be made as eerily quiet as if without the beat of a single heart.

We can turn the whole world into the most wonderful museum imaginable, overcoming problems of time, space, and distribution that only recently were considered insoluble. Culture, though, is not something to which you can buy a ticket, even the miraculous ticket now on its way. It is not something to be viewed in a museum, read on a page, bought, owned, or possessed in any form. To believe that it can be is a mistake in more than just nomenclature on the part of “consumers” of culture, which is a thing that cannot be consumed. What they mistake for culture is in fact its product. Culture is the activity, atmosphere, surroundings, knowledge, conditions, understandings, assumptions, predilections, accidents, necessities, and events that create the things you can buy a ticket to see, or take home in a canvas bag silk-screened with a picture of Jane Austen. Culture is to what is widely mistaken for culture as fishing is to fish. As such, it cannot be appropriated, and, if it is to stay alive, it cannot be handled with a summary upending of the rather delicate mechanisms—copyright being one—that over the centuries have evolved to sustain it.

Recently, in the horse country west of Washington, D.C., a stable of thoroughbreds made the news. Obviously, their owner had gone to some trouble to obtain them. Stables of thoroughbreds don’t simply appear. But then, either because he lost some capacity within himself or just fell out of love, he decided—and it was