I need to blog this somewhere

To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.

I’m quite concerned that in the future someone might not know what author they’re reading. You see that with music. You would think in the information age it would be the easiest thing to know what you’re listening to. That you could look up instantly the music upon hearing it so you know what you’re listening to, but in truth it’s hard to get to those services.

I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.

So in practice you don’t know who the musician is. And I think that’s what could happen with writers. … And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.

I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don’t see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don’t know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.

—The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class

Tangentially related, that day I had looked up the Onion article “Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia” article for angel, and found that it was no longer hosted on The Onion’s site, likely because it had been collected in book form, for $ale, but it was still available electronically, had been archived on several pages of “Internet humour.” Invariably, material had been truncated or added to this seemingly anonymously penned piece—which had in fact become a collective work—invariably not an improvement on the source material. But this isn’t even some snippet that originated from some long-forgotten poster on USENET in the ’90s—this is from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source! It should not be that hard to attribute accurately, and yet here it is, intermingled with the undifferentiated content pile-up that is the World Wide Internet.