Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

in any reflexive game of speed or volume. In their addictive dialogue with their computers, their keystrokes come in rapid machine-gun surges that end in silences filled by flowerings upon the screens into which they stare like Turkish dope addicts, only to be followed by more surges and more silences, one machine talking to almost another. In such a world virtue is the rapidity and agility with which one responds to preprogrammed, modularized, mechanized routines. Close analysis of text, the slow and careful judgment of the delicate structure of a sentence, and sensitivity to the origins and syntactical placement of words, have long been eclipsed by cartoon-like graphics and machine-gun bursts of language meant not to mean anything as much as to move debate in the manner of the riot-control fire hoses against which many of this tribe may find themselves arrayed when they besiege meetings of the Group of Eight.

These are not sensible people. By now I have read far too much of what they have written not to know that though they eschew style, wit, punctuation, proper spelling, capitalization, and accuracy, they are functionally literate. Nonetheless, they cannot read, which may mean also that they do not read, but rather leap from screen to screen in quick Evelyn Wood–like scans which, like mixing nuts or candy into ice cream, they then meld with predigested versions or accounts of whatever they are supposed actually to have read. The material which they work and rework to death is often just as inaccurate as the collective product they hope to form. Taken for fact, misconception builds upon previous misconceptions until what emerges is the result of a high-speed game of telephone among thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands) of people, in which responsibility to the truth is considered met if one has read something somewhere that says something close to what one will now further distort.

The press has long done this professionally, and now does it even more, goaded by the need to work fast so as to fill the abysses of the Sorcerer’s-Apprentice news cycle and to keep floundering newspapers and media conglomerates out of the red. Let us say that you are a reporter pursuing a pursuable senator. You pull a story from (what used to be) a major newspaper stating that he likes to have sex with Jocko the Goat. That’s good enough. You’re not God. You’re not the FBI or the Warren Commission. If you have a reputable source, you’re covered, and you comfortably repeat it, even though, and probably, the senator may lust after goats no more than you lust after ostriches. The essence of it is that you can avoid responsibility for printing anything as long as someone else has printed it first.

In the internet culture, this is writ large. Relying upon error as authority has long been a flaw in almost every discipline, but when it moved at a stately pace its expansion was containable. Now it spreads geometrically and at the speed of light. It is the oxygen of the keyboard gunners, and without it they would lack sufficient speed to survive. As no one has put any brake on it, it has led to a general climate of unprecedented distortion, as one inaccuracy flows into others that flow into others, rapidly eroding the basic mechanisms of intellectual discipline that have favored civilization.

And then there is the effect of the mechanism itself on the quality of its output. How do you attract attention to your “blog”? (I put the word in quotation marks not in an attempt to delegitimatize it—it is perfectly legitimate—but to quarantine it because it is so ugly that other words should be protected from it. Were it a weaker and more vulnerable thing rather than like a brutally triumphant Teuton drunkenly trampling the undergarments of the Vestal Virgins, it might deserve some pity. But it doesn’t.) The question remains, how do you attract attention to your “blog” when there are a hundred million others? You can concentrate on quality, fill a niche or a greater need, and invest the time, money, and work to make it stand out, as many have done, although with no guarantee of success. Or, you can make it sensational, appealing to whatever it is that for obvious reasons will immediately turn our attentions from just about anything to violence, threat, insanity, or sex. That is why television’s mainstays are dead bodies, teasingly exposed bosoms, and exploding cars. And so, in “blogging,” as in much else, begins the mad race to the bottom. Blogging’s anonymity makes it the intellectual twin of road rage. But unlike road rage it is not and cannot be subject to law. The only defense against its lowliness is to know it for what it is and call it thus.

In the great scheme of things, the reaction to my article is, of course, as unimportant as the article itself. This is not false humility. I am well aware of the place an op-ed article on copyright occupies in a world of limitless heartbreak and tragedy. But what happened illustrates a not-so-slow-moving phenomenon of crucial importance, for if this is how we have educated our successors to weigh and judge, they will spitefully pull down the walls of the shelter in which they were peacefully born, and which took their and our forbears thousands of years to construct.

Is it that they cannot read, that they do not read, or both? Despite the fact that the article specifically acknowledged and accepted the Constitution’s exact and reasonable command that copyright not be perpetual, and despite my taking pains to illustrate that it is not possible to copyright an idea—thus separating my argument from Jefferson’s concern primarily about scientific innovation and patents—the Times chose the title, “A Great Idea Lives Forever: Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” This is not the first time that a title—the editor’s sacred prerogative—argues with or wanders from the content it purports to represent, my favorite being the hypothetical story about the