1 - We're
told that, to remain competitive economically, we need to forget
about the humanities and teach our children "passion" for
digital technology and prepare them to spend their entire lives
incessantly re-educating themselves to keep up with it. The logic
says that if we want things like Zappos.com or home DVR capability –
and who wouldn't want them? – we need to say goodbye to job
stability and hello to a lifetime of anxiety. We need to become
as restless as capitalism itself.
Now
it's hard to get through a meal with friends without somebody
reaching for an iPhone to retrieve the kind of fact it used to be the
brain's responsibility to remember. The techno-boosters,
of course, see nothing wrong here. They
point out that human beings have always outsourced memory – to
poets, historians, spouses, books. But I'm enough of a child of the
60s to see a difference between letting your spouse remember your
nieces' birthdays and handing over basic memory function to a global
corporate system of control.
2 - Amazon
wants a world in which books are either self-published or
published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews
in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own
promotion. The
work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the
money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for
them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who
became writers because yakking
and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms
of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to
communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and
permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of
writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality
control and literary reputations were more than a matter of
self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able
to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and
phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this
kind of writer, Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the
kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its
warehouses, labouring harder for less and less, with no job
security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they're
the only business hiring. And the more of the population that lives
like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices
and the greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when
you're not making much money you want your entertainment for free,
and when your life is hard you want instant gratification ("Overnight
free shipping!").
But
so the physical book goes on the endangered-species list, so
responsible book reviewers go extinct, so independent bookstores
disappear, so literary novelists are conscripted into
Jennifer-Weinerish self-promotion, so the Big Six publishers get
killed and devoured by Amazon: this looks like an apocalypse only
if most of your friends are writers, editors or booksellers. Plus
it's possible that the story isn't over. Maybe the internet
experiment in consumer reviewing will result in such flagrant
corruption (already one-third of all online product reviews are said
to be bogus) that people will clamour for the return of professional
reviewers. Maybe an economically significant number of readers will
come to recognise the human and cultural costs of Amazonian hegemony
and go back to local bookstores or at least to barnesandnoble.com,
which offers the same books and a superior e-reader, and whose owners
have progressive politics. Maybe people will get as sick of Twitter
as they once got sick of cigarettes. Twitter's and Facebook's latest
models for making money still seem to me like one part pyramid
scheme, one part wishful thinking, and one part repugnant
panoptical surveillance.
3 - But
apocalypse isn't necessarily the physical end of the world. Indeed,
the word more directly implies an element of final cosmic
judgment. In Kraus's chronicling of crimes against truth and language
in The
Last Days of Mankind,
he's referring not merely to physical destruction. In fact, the title
of his play would be better rendered in English as The
Last Days of Humanity:
"dehumanised"
doesn't mean "depopulated",
and if the first world war spelled the end of humanity in Austria, it
wasn't because there were no longer any people there. Kraus was
appalled by the carnage, but he saw it as the result, not the
cause, of a loss of humanity by people who were still living. Living
but damned, cosmically damned.
E muito mais, aqui.