A Statement From Alan Kaufman, author of 'THE ELECTRONIC BOOKBURNING' To MY Mobile Read Critics (
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html)
STATEMENT
We are slowly dissolving in a catastrophe of blandness. A stainless steel tableau of screen-mummified generic looking clone people placidly seated in the sun on perfect lawns of Astroturf, gaping at laptops and ipods and Blackberries. A fear-constricted world painted in the fading pastels of distraction- benumbed senses. A world in which fewer and fewer people bother to read books that engage you. I don't mean Harry Potter or James Patterson. I mean The Brothers Karamazov. I mean Madame Bovary, Sound and Fury, War and Peace, Bleak House. . A world in which corporate-driven electronic internet promotors, with the smug certainty of the true believer, and the sort of determination incited by the smell of money, have launched a savage assault against the book, feverishly working to find a replacement for the physical artifact, performing massive legalistic maneuvers on a war-sized scale to outflank author rights while driving in upon the print matter culture itself, book publishing, newspapers, magazines, in a concerted campaign to render them obsolete, transfer all reading material to the internet, and socially condition humanity, beginning in their earliest youth, to prefer technologically driven experience over human interface.
We in America are now trained not only to favor devices over the book but to prefer them to reality itself, so that en masse we now spends the majority of our lives seated before screens, staring and surfing, typing and gaming, twittering and viewing, punching keys, pressing buttons. We who are manipulating the mouse that confers upon us the illusion of supreme control are ourselves the
mice.
Naked reality without these buttons to press seems virtually unimaginable, even unlivable to most people today. In point of fact, a decision not to engage with electronic technology guarantees ones exile to a Devil's island of chilling isolation . Ia a world where everyone communicates through Facebook, twitter, blackberries, laptops, MySpace, to decide not to engage is to move in a deaf and dumb zone of uncommunicative zombies mesmerized by the visual stunts of the latest app and disinclined whatsoever to even note your existence.
What is this world we are making, in whch writers, now are told by the culture that they must beg at the internet portal for their existence? What is this world in which anyone with an arsenal of one hundred words may declare oneself an author by signing on for a blog, sprucing it up with graphics and pontificating about what they had for breakfast and what they think of Alan Kaufman? These poseurs, have their audiences. yes. Their audience are the other illiterates like themselves who have been cookie-cut by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Kindle.
Many have called this a Gutenberg moment, a global paradimgne shift akin to that which occurred with the invention of the printing press and the subsequent transfer of knowledge to the average man.
This is not a Gutenberg moment: it is a Nuremberg moment--a linguistic and cultural mass murder of the human mind; an economic Krystallnacht against the book, book culture, literacy, human freedom. We are witness to the ghettoization and deportation of our language and literature to the internet,where it will surely perish. No, there are no visible brown shirts posted outside the bookstores that have shut down all across the U.S. But our national illiteracy rate is now at 25% and climbing. The corporations are producing a generatiton of machine-addicted barbarians. The efforts of techno-fascists to make the Book into the reviled Jew of our culture is no less insidious then the campaign waged in WWII by Nazi Germany against my people, the Jewish People, the People of the Book, and I say this as a child of a Holocaust survivor, sensitive to the horrors that such allusions summon and not lightly given to make such comparisons.
I cannot forget what the great German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine said: when we burn books, next we burn people. When I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit. I think of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 I see a population losing its humanness, individuality and character; becoming socially-condition drones of distant hidden invisible greed-driven Corporate Gauleiters and Furers. And as we watch the Orwellian electronic book burning underway across this nation, the plummeting of the American mind into ignorance and addiction, we may well wonder what form of efficient demonic technology will next be used, not to indoctrinate but to incinerate our illiterate bodies and those of our children and their children in the coming collective burnings on behalf of the future Corporate State.