Remembering Rotting Books in a Digital Age

“When it was proclaimed that the Library comprised all books, the first impression was one of extravagant joy. All men felt themselves lords of a secret, intact treasure. There was no personal or universal problem whose eloquent solutions did not exist—in some hexagon.”

Such were the optimistic beginnings of “The Library of Babel,” the Jorge Luis Borges story where all the books of the universe exist in a library composed of limitless hexagonal galleries.

But the dream of infinite knowledge soon proves a curse, as the scholars wandering the library’s vast holdings search in vain for a single meaningful sentence. In time, the marbled halls become overrun with disease, banditry, and mass suicide.

Now is a particularly good time to remember Borges’s library in all its prophetic glory and ruin. Only a few weeks ago, Google’s dreams of digital book dominion of Babel-like dimensions were dashed on the rocky shores of copyright law. But I’m not interested in discussing here the thorny issues of copyright infringement and the corporate monopoly of knowledge.

Instead, let’s consider the dream itself—the dream of a digital world library.

Google is only one possible player in this quest for the online unity of knowledge. Historian and Harvard librarian Robert Darnton has been an outspoken advocate for a free digital public library. Surely, this dream of a single accessible source for the whole of human knowledge, a dream that goes as far back as the Encylopedists of the Enlightenment, is shared by all literate and humane people. Everyone believes that putting the world’s books at our fingertips would be a democratic step forward for humanity, right?

Of course. Yet, deep down, part of me balks at this dream of unified digital knowledge, even though I can appreciate its many obvious virtues. At the risk of sounding like a premature crank, I’ll confess: the death of print and the rise of the universal digital age reasonably unnerve me.

Why? Because with every advance in technology comes loss. Modernity, as much as it appears to be an upward arc of progress and invention, is equally one of continual extinction and destruction.

Take, for example, the prosaic wonder of email, which puts us in instantaneous communication with the globe. But its instantaneous capabilities not only diminish the content of our letters—they also encode our words and thoughts in an immaterial form that, unless one has enough foresight and ego to print them out, will likely vanish into the ether.

As someone with a perhaps unhealthy love for reading the letters of dead men, I find the idea of a future bereft of the legacy of human correspondence deeply depressing.

We don’t need to think in great stretches of time here to appreciate this sense of loss. How, in 2060, will you reread all those romantic “love emails” (a comically vulgar term) you sent your now elderly wife back when you were wooing her in college on your long-terminated university email account? And how will all your witty emails speak to posterity after your own wit has withered to dust?

With the silence of ones and zeros, that’s how.

Read the rest of this post here at HyperVocal.com