Years ago, I was speaking with a Professor friend of mine, extolling the virtues of digital books.
In my idealism I was bubbling over about the elimination of the high cost associated with college text books. I saw this as a new age where everyone would have better access to higher education and as new discoveries were made, the new data could effortlessly be inserted in the text books so people wouldn’t have to buy the revised editions of a hard copy.
My Professor friend nodded and conceded that if things worked that way, it would improve education and could make higer education somewhat less costly.
He said simply, “Sometimes the best ideas, built on the best of intentions, don’t work out like we think they will. I’ll stick with my dusty paper books for the time being.”
At the time I envisioned a world where everyone had access to the sum total of human knowledge and that we would then all be playing on a level field. Naively I thought that the best angels of humanity would rise to the top and we would enter a new age of cooperation and creativity. I thought equality and harmony were just around the corner, built on free exchange of information and thought.
I WAS A MORON!
Yep, at that time in my life I was leaning pretty left. I thought the vast majority of people would choose light and temper their natural selfishness because the promise of everyone being happy, healthy, and productive would be so alluring.
Looking back from 2021, I have a bitter laugh. There’s also a sadness, humanity could be so much more, but the opportunity may have passed. Now I think we’re heading for another “Dark Age”.
Five years, or so later, my friend and I were having a similar discussion. This time the discussion started because He was having to incorporate EBooks into his curriculum. He was dealing with variations in some of the books. It turned out that many of the Ebooks, even though they had the same ISBN number contained different text and there was no notation of when revisions had been made. To make things more confusing the Ebooks didn’t match the hardcopy text books that could be purchased from the campus book store.
That was when I realized that an Orwellian component had come into play. In my innocence I’d never considered that anyone would prefer censorship or alteration of the facts in a book, to fit a narrative. I actually believed that we as a species had grown beyond that.
Truth rings like a bell. You might not like it, but Truth stands on it’s own merit.
Knowledge, and understanding may start out flawed, but there is a logical step by step refinement that is driven by the truth of new undeniable facts. We should be able to see that process, to chart it, and books provide the evidence of our journey towards understanding.
If we can look at the old books and theories contained within, we have a view into how knowledge evolves and how new data can, and should trigger re-evaluation of a theory or belief.
I always believed that books, and the written word were somehow sacred. That is why the Nazi book burnings were so abhorrent to me.
During our conversation, discovering that books were no longer being treated with any kind of reverence, it dawned on me perhaps digital media was too ephemeral to be trusted with the knowledge of our species.
Maybe a better method would be to have books start out as digital, collect the data and facts then publish a hard copy (a snapshot if you will,) that would be placed in every library all over the world. Then you’d publish addenda in hard copy as warranted.
But even as I had that thought, I knew the genie was out of the bottle. People will always choose convenience over having to do the actual work of locating a book in a library stack and opening it. The books would simply rot to dust on library shelves.
That was the beginning of my journey toward a more conservative view of the world. That journey continued the more I became aware of subtle changes to books. Specifically Ebooks.
I bought into the convenience of having a book on my phone or computer to read at lunch. I purchased a lot of Ebooks but as I read them there were changes. At first it was small corrections, reasonable edits that corrected a typo or made a sentence read better.
These changes were within what I considered, the realm of reasonable. I could see an author making those changes in the Ebook because it was simple and didn’t require an entirely new press run. The changes would be folded into the printed copies of the book as needed.
But the edits became more plentiful, and far reaching. Soon some of my favorite books diverged in their Ebook form from the hard copy I’d had for years. Then I started seeing it in movies.
The weirdest example was in “Alien”. A friend had a laserdisc version of Alien. When we’d seen the movie in the theater we’d noted that the Nostromo’s shuttle had a name. When we’d purchased the movies on videotape there wasn’t a name on the shuttle.
At the time, we thought it was probably something to do with the resolution of the videotape. When my friend purchased the laserdisc version of Alien, the name once again appeared on the shuttle. But DVD and Bluray versions, the name was gone again.
This suggested that there were multiple versions of the movie and there was no way of telling which cut you actually were purchasing. Shortly after our “discovery” multiple cuts of movies were being repackaged as “New” xyz cuts, thereby maximizing profit to the studios. I think at one time, this friend and I had 6 different cuts of Alien and who knows how many other movies between us.
I lost my DVD / Bluray collection and all of my books in a house fire. At the time, I chose to invest heavily in streaming movies and Ebooks so that I’d never have to face the heartbreak of losing collections again.
Except that’s not how it works.
Movies and books available online can disappear suddenly and with no explanation.
Gone with the Wind,for example now has a whole Social Justice disclaimer before you get to watch the movie.
Looney Toons collections have Whoopie Goldberg reminding viewers that some of the depictions in the cartoon are representative of an era when racial relations were horrific. She even has to comment on Bugs Bunny having a go at German and Japanese soldiers.
All she needed to say was that those cartoons were propaganda from World War II and in context, they were supposed to give theater goers of the time, a laugh and bit of hope. But instead we’re subjected to the whole Social Justice Warrior education about a 6 minute cartoon.
If you’re sitting down to watch Looney Tunes, you’re not looking for any deep political lessons, you’re looking for some mindless goofy antics to put a smile on your face.
The point here is that if everything in malleable, if everthing can be edited and altered then we risk corrupting and losing our global knowledge.
If we eliminate dissenting opinions, we eliminate healthy discourse that could lead in new directions. If we censor comedy, or free speech, in my opinion we accelerate the decline of civilization.
If all that you believe is given to you in little spoonfuls of “Approved” narrative then you shouldn’t be surprised to discover that almost nothing you know is true.
We all know that a large percentage of the population will be surprised, then angry, then possibly violent. When that happens… Well, you have book burnings, and stuff akin to the fall of Rome.
This time, it will be worse than the dark ages. Because libraries have fewer and fewer books, some libraries are even destroying books rather than curating them.
A large percentage of late 20th and early 21st century information is digital only. After everything is burned, the power goes down, the internet doesn’t work, and the cell towers go offline what resources will be available to rebuild from?
We’ve written our knowledge and history in the sand on a beach. When the tide comes in, it will be lost.
Just as a lot of old knowledge had to be rediscovered when the Dark Ages waned, humanity will have to claw their way back from the abyss and start over.
For just a minute, imagine what this world would be like if the industrial revolution had started 300 years earlier. What might we know now? The people of Greece, Rome, China, MesoAmerica, and Egypt were all equal in intelligence to us. What they lacked was knowledge, science, and resources.
All of these civilizations were working on those problems when they fell. We’ll never know how much was lost or suppressed. But we do know they contemplated the stars, and studied mathematics. We know they could build massive structures and grasped art, literature, and rudimentary physics.
An argument could be made that had these civilizations conquered their greed, need to control each other, and war, choosing instead to work together we’d be a lot further along in our development than we are today.
Then again, I’m reminded of the line from The Fifth Element, “Everything you create you use to destroy.”
Perhaps that kind of cooperation would have just reduced the population.