[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

From Alan Kaufman
Will someone on MOBILE SLEAZE please, please, please respond to any of the points I've addressed in any of the essays, whether here or on Huff Post or by skywriting airplane.

You don't deserve it, but here goes.

Your position is not based on reason, or rational argument; there is little indication you are interested in a critical analysis or interpretation of the role of technology in reading, or in society in general. Instead you constantly push the "Nazi button" like a Skinnerian pigeon and presume your readers will collapse into a blubbering heap, begging to be protected from the "Big Bad."

(For your reference: people have invoked Nazism in trivial manners and matters for almost the entire history of the Internet. By now, it's not viewed as a serious position, nor does it even have any shock value; it's a joke. Hence, even Jewish people are decidedly unmoved by, or openly offended by, your obsessive attempts to associate ebooks with Nazism.)

From what I can tell, your positions appear to be:

1. Technology is evil by association with Nazism and Nazi ideology.
2. Technology is inherently evil.
3. Selected specific aspects of ebooks are detrimental.
4. Proponents of ebooks in fact "hate books." The Nazis also hated books; therefore ebooks are evil.

The first point is clearly fallacious. Technology and innovation long pre-dated Nazi ideology; it's patently obvious that, for example, Nazi scientists were absorbed into the US in spite of the moral quandaries or potential political fallout because Americans already valued their abilities (and recognized the Soviets would exploit those abilities, if the US did not).

More to the point, "Evil" is not a contagious condition, nor is an idea evil based on the sole criteria that "the Nazis admired and/or utilized it." If Hitler declared support for the gold standard, this association is insufficient to cause or prove that "the gold standard is evil." Conversely, one does not need to know that "the Nazis were racists" in order to make a moral judgment of racism and racist acts.

As to 2., the evidence is abundantly clear that this is not the case. Tools are morally neutral; it's the actions a human being performs with the tool that has a moral dimension. A knife is not inherently good ("I use knives to eat my food") or evil ("I use knives to torture and kill people"). It doesn't matter if I try to torture you with a thumb-screw or a stun gun; the moral issue is my intent and/or the results ("causation of pain"). Physical objects are not moral agents and thus do not have intentions, duties or necessarily produce specific ethical consequences. It's the person who uses the tool who is the proper subject of a moral judgment.

On a related note, you present the claim that the Nazis proposed to eliminate the Jews because of a technology-based mindset, e.g. Jews were "obsolete" and thus ought to be eliminated. I don't style myself as an expert on the Holocaust -- nor am I interested in a huge debate on the topic -- but I'm going to take a wild guess that a few millennia of European anti-semitism might be regarded as a far more critical motivation. And again, numerous other mass-murders were not fostered by pro-technology ideologies, or even technological advances. Cf. Mithradates' attack and purge of Romans (political and ethnic in origin, and decidedly low-tech); the Armenian genocide during WWI (ethnic in origin, low-tech in implementation); the Khmer Rouge massacres (the KR was trying to revert Cambodia to a lower-tech rural/agrarian society); the Rwandan genocide (which was largely carried out using machetes and was clearly ethnic and political in nature).

Next, there is the claim that "technology makes you less human." I find this rather odd, especially since to my perspective, some of the most egregious acts that we could characterize as "dehumanizing" are the institutionalization of slavery by low-tech societies such as ancient Rome and the antebellum United States.

Further, this claim not only bluntly ignores the numerous benefits of scientific inquiry, it ignores the patently obvious fact that paper books are just another technological device. This is a common oversight by people who react negatively to a disruptive technology; e.g. someone who decries the cell phone as a "dehumanizing influence" would be decidedly upset if you removed their land line. There is also no Golden Age of human authenticity free of technology; it's a fiction, and a detrimental one at that. Humans have depended upon tools since the moment we arose from the Darwinian muck with a club in one hand and a stone knife in the other. I.e. a book is every bit as much a tool as a Kindle, books just don't need batteries.

I might add that you probably would not enjoy life in the types of nations where technology is heavily restricted, e.g. Burma, North Korea and Saudi Arabia. The only way to ensure that technology is controlled in a society is, well, to heavily control that society via totalitarian measures. (Haranguing the public rarely works; it hasn't stopped people from buying Japanese cars, cheap socks made in China, hiring illegal immigrants, and so forth.)

By the way, I recommend you refrain from mistakenly presuming that my position is that technology is exclusively or inherently positive. Rather, you need to apply moral standards and judgment to the person, not the thing.


So now that we have dispensed with the idea that technology is "guilty by association with Nazism" or that "technology is inherently evil," what about specific objections to ebooks?

From what I can see:

a. Ebooks will concentrate information into a small number of organizations, allowing for manipulation and control.
b. Your reading habits are now highly trackable.
c. Proponents of ebooks "hate books."
d. ebooks represent a "cultural destruction."

Corporate consolidation is an ongoing process, but that's the case anyway regardless of any technological changes. However, the low cost of distribution of digital content opens up the possibilities for multiple repositories of information, and an open and democratic means for content creators to present their wares. For example, the vast majority of books that I have on my Kindle are public domain books that were digitized by Project Gutenberg. PG is a non-profit and volunteer-driven organization and an early leader in ebooks, which currently provides free, legal, open and unlimited access to over 30,000 titles. Ever school, library and private citizen can copy and distribute an electronic version of the collected works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, and basically any other book published prior to 1923 for free. To anyone. At any time. Without restrictions. Without tracking. Without DRM. 100% legally. Without Amazon or anyone else having the ability (legally or technically) to permanently remove it from my device. So, I for one have a hard time seeing how this results in "more control" or is in any way, shape or form a negative outcome.

Or, to illustrate it another way: There's a pretty good chance that 20 years from now, every English-language text-based book ever written and every piece of music eve recorded will fit on a single hard drive the size of a trade paperback. Once that happens, it's going to be extremely difficult for any single agency to genuinely suppress content. (In fact, the difficulty of controlling content gives rise to digital piracy, which some anti-ebook individuals view as a major issue.)

Even before the advent of ebooks and other forms of modern technology, it wasn't that difficult for a powerful central ruler to manipulate, suppress and destroy content. E.g. Catholic suppression of what we now call "gnostic" texts almost completely eliminated hundreds of early Christian gospels; we only found one copy (the Nag Hammadi texts) by sheer luck. And Qin Shi Huang successfully ordered the destruction of countless scholarly works (and scholars) in medieval China.

As to tracking and oversight of content, I fully concur that this is something to be aware of. There may even be numerous benefits to adopting stricter controls on how corporations and governments can use various forms of information (cf. EU legislation relating to privacy rights). However, it's worth noting that now, pretty much any item you purchase with a credit card, or any book you read with a library card, is eminently trackable in the event that you run afoul of the authorities. If "being tracked" is your concern, then I suggest you chop up your credit cards, buy all your books in cash while wearing a disguise, destroy your books as soon as you're done reading them, and never mention them to anyone. Oh, and don't write any emails, don't surf the Internet, don't write paper letters, don't save paper letters, don't own a computer, etc etc....

And as to the idea that "proponents of ebooks hate books," this is patently false. Many of us prefer ebooks because we are the heavy readers, who gain the most benefits from the transition to digital. No one is suggesting that paper books should be banned, made illegal, used in campfires or even stigmatized. Many MR posters even lament the social changes that are already underway. So spare us your straw men.

Last but not least, is your claim that the digital transition is "a cultural crime and prefigures a totalitarian condition that could lead to genocide."

The reason why we do not accept this premise is because it is laughably histrionic and demonstrably false.

1) Totalitarianism does not require modern technology. Oppressive political control has been a constant in human societies.
1a) Methods of societal control (i.e. ones not specifically political in nature) do not require modern technology (though it often does try to exploit new inventions). Again, read some Foucault and maybe some Chomsky.
2) Genocide and mass murder does not require modern technology. (Per my earlier post, read up on the history of genocide.)
3) Many of us are familiar with disruptive technologies by now, and know that we can critique them intelligently without going completely overboard and insisting that they will lead directly to another Holocaust.
4) Many of us are aware that in many ways, the advancements of technology can lead to a decentralization of social and even political power.
5) "Books" are not going away; they are just changing form, and as such will be more widely accessible, more convenient, and more affordable.
6) To put it in far more charitable terms than you have earned to date: You have a lot to learn about how to persuade people to your point of view.

Oh, as to the irony: You're using a method you decry as patently evil and leading to totalitarians and genocide to.... stop people from using the communication method you just used. It's like a man using a megaphone to declare that megaphones are evil and should be abandoned. I mean, really, do you expect anyone to read your blog entry on a Kindle, and then just throw it in the trash?

Expedience does not resolve the contradiction. And hyperbolic broadsides against technology do not provide specific, practical, rational, workable ways to ameliorate any specific problems that arise due to the transition to digital content.

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

The point is: create discourse, not spew. But all you do is react, insult, thoughtlessly, with utterly asinine tripe.

It is also exactly what you are doing.

Read your own posts. You swan in and declare that we are all basically genocidal mass-murdering totalitarian Nazis because we like ebooks. Is that your idea of "thoughtful discourse?"

Your own posts here are rife with insults, disrespect, sweeping mischaracterizations, insulting presumptions, inflammatory rhetoric, and largely devoid of rational argument or critiques. You get what you give.