As we transition our lives wholesale into Facebook and Twitter and communicate more with email than face to face, what does it really mean to own something or even to “be” in the purely existential sense of Hamlet in his soliloquy? What does it mean as our books shift to the cloud from our trusty wooden bookshelves and from neat or perhaps messy stacks next to our beds? What does it mean as our media—our books and songs and movies—are no longer real-world things with any substance that we can feel with our fingers? What does it mean as we move our memories online into social networking services or as we post our photos onto websites like Flickr instead of printing them out at the pharmacy and putting them into photo albums?
These questions persist and will only grow harder to answer over time.
All the papers, all the records and receipts of our lives, will go digital next. There’ll be ways of browsing them, handheld devices that we can use to browse our own lives through these collections of bus tickets and love letters that once meant so much to us.
I think it’s a stretch to say that we’ll live out our lives entirely in the digital world like cyberpunk authors of the 1980s would have had you believe, that we’ll sell off our furniture and live instead with bare-bones lamps and beds made of origami that can be crushed underfoot when they’re no longer needed, that we’ll live in small shacks like U-Stor-It lockers, jacked into computers, and that we will only care about our avatars and the clothes they wear. It’s a stretch to think that we’ll live this way, but nobody knows. What it means to be alive in a digital sense is still up for grabs.
Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about the seven wonders of the ancient world. In particular, the fact that some still exist. I’d thought that the Pyramids of Egypt were the only wonders of the ancient world that still remained, but actually, there are remains of almost all the other monuments from antiquity. There are chunks of masonry of the Lighthouse at Alexandria in the Mediterranean Sea, remaining from when the lighthouse was toppled by an earthquake. There are fragments and sculptures from the Temple of Artemis held at the British Museum after being recovered by early archaeologists.
There are still ruins of the basement levels of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and you can go there and walk among the ruins of an ancient wonder. It’s even said that the base that supported the Colossus of Rhodes still survives at a church a mile away from the bay where the Colossus was said to have once towered. And who knows? One day, there may be a cuneiform tablet unearthed that contains a plan for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Though the Old World has been scoured by archaeologists, they’re always turning up new things. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the last of the seven ancient wonders, no longer survives, but the workshop where it was built was recently uncovered.
I’m surprised that remnants of the ancient wonders have persisted for millennia, and I’m encouraged, because if brute stone can survive, surely a digitized person can survive, as well. We should all be able to float down the eons in a Pharaonic funeral boat, immortal in a way that the ancient Egyptians could never dream of.
Perhaps I’m in an elegiac mood these days, but I wonder what would prompt people to build a digital version of themselves. Could I build a digital monument to myself, a digital Mausoleum of Halicarnassus? Would it be something that merely baffles my friends and family, or would it live on as a testament to a madman’s desire for immortality, as mad as the Pyramids or a forty-foot-tall silver statue of Zeus?
Could a version of my digital self become a companion for people in the future, a confidante, someone they could talk to? Could my digital self gradually learn from itself or others and subtly reprogram itself in the same ways that I myself might? Will there be a place where digital personas can congregate together, some digital mortuary grounds or Second Life where they can talk about who they once were or argue about ideas?
I’m not sure. But I’ve got the mad Pyramid-architect desire to try and find out, to see what happens, one way or the other. A digital self, if it can avoid bit rot, is a kind of immortality. It’s the oldest dream of them all, the Faustian dream of living long enough to know and observe everything. Except that there’s no devil in this Faustian pact—or at least, no devil that I’m aware of yet.
In the telling of the story, the devil granted Faust all the knowledge he wanted, with the catch that his soul would one day be claimed by the devil. The knowledge was limited only by death, which of course explains the motivation for Faust to cheat the devil and live on. Sadly, in both Christopher Marlowe’s and Johann Goethe’s versions of the story, Faust inevitably dies.
His tale is ultimately a moral one, the message being that we can’t live forever. We can’t come to know everything. And that’s fine. I know I won’t live forever. My body and mind are frail, just like yours, like everyone’s. But that’s okay. Because surely through my digital self, I’ll live on—right?
And this, in fact, is the final digital frontier. The digitization of memories and minds themselves. It might take a hundred years before the heirs of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs figure out how to digitize human brains and make them available for purchase and download. But once that happens, it would be an amazing experience to download the personality of your deceased grandmother and to speak to her for a few hours. Or perhaps you could have a conversation with yourself as you once were. Or speak with any of the great minds of history and have a dialogue with them or argue with them.
For example, I’m reading a classic sci-fi book now called Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick, and I’m stunned at how good it is. If I could download the author’s personality and start talking to him about his book, I’d feel overjoyed. The closest I can come now is to talk to other readers or post to the dead author’s Facebook fan page, but it’s clearly not the same as a genuine conversation with the author.
Of course, in all likelihood, the minds of wealthy entertainers or technology early adopters will be digitized first. Theirs will be the minds available a hundred years from now as public domain recordings for people to download for free. And while theirs will be the first minds to be digitized, the quality will be poor, like that of wax cylinders or early ebooks.
Though created with the best that technology could once offer, they’ll eventually be seen as grainy, more lo-fi than other hi-fi brains available for download later in the future, so they’ll be relegated to public domain archives that hardly anyone ever visits, the equivalent of the Department of Special Collections at the University of California. And who knows, maybe Jeff Bezos will convert one of his data centers into a building to house his digital brain. Heck, if I had the money, I would do this too.
You don’t have to take my word for this; you can read any contemporary sci-fi book to see the same insights and impulses toward living digitally in a disembodied way. Because these ideas are now part of our culture’s currency. But for now, you and I are as analog as it gets. We get hangnails and wrinkles on our feet. We drink entirely too much beer and suffer entirely too much of a hangover the next day. It’s all part of being analog, and there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, I like it—wisdom lines, headaches, and all.
Perhaps I only like it because I have no choice in the matter, and I choose to look the other way when I suffer stubbed toes or pimples in ungainly places like the insides of my ears. Or perhaps I like living in the analog mode because of all the great feelings I can experience, what cognitive scientists call “felt states”—the sun on my skin, the taste of a fresh blueberry, or the wonderful, fresh smell of a spring morning. I’m as happily analog as I can get, and I will be for a long while.
And though I may be embodied in an analog form, I can still read great digital ebooks.
Those who read this in the future may sometimes forget that books weren’t always digital. They may look back upon us with disdain because we don’t have brain implants to post live Twitter updates. They may look down upon us because we have sex with one another instead of using electronic Orgasmatrons. They may
frown upon us with the face of history because we’re no more than apes who type software and emails with fingers of skin and bone, because we’re pitiful creatures who wrap rags around our frail bodies as we walk to and from work.
I can only plead with those in the future who read this to remember that if not for us, there would be no digital books today, and the future would be less rich and nuanced. If not for us, future readers wouldn’t be floating as brains in an etheric vat, surrounded by digital books and videos and music as they sample from all of human culture like it’s one vast buffet for the mind. Those who read this years from now, please don’t forget that the future wasn’t always digital and that books weren’t always electronic.
Because without the ebook revolution, the future could never have happened.
» » »
The ebook revolution is the story of a small group of people who set out to change the way the world reads. I mentioned before how I found it at once eerie and amazing to be in a meeting with Jeff Bezos, scrutinizing the number of lines that should appear on an ebook’s page, because it was the same kind of thinking Gutenberg used more than five hundred years earlier. And like Gutenberg’s team, this small group of people at Amazon worked their way up from square one to reinvent reading. And we succeeded. Reading has not only been transformed but also rebooted.
But this success came with a cost. There were unintended consequences of this success, which meant that many ebook features had to be shelved at Amazon. It became important for Amazon and other device makers to keep up with their competition, which meant that certain innovative features were deprioritized so that resources could be spent on the arms race of keeping up with competitors. These ebook features will eventually be built; I’m not worried about that.
Amazon launched the ebook revolution, but now, the future of books is being tended to by people outside Amazon’s walled garden. By innovative publishers or venture-capital-funded startups or iconoclastic propeller-heads. Innovation is out in the world now. It’s out of the hands of Amazon and other technology giants. I believe the smaller, more nimble, more purpose-driven groups will succeed in building these features out. And of course, as always, the readers ultimately win.
Innovation sparked the ebook revolution. And while companies like Amazon and Apple are now raging bulls whose horns are locked in competitive combat, that innovation has gone out into the world. Publishers, as well as authors, are able to innovate. Readers themselves can innovate.
We ourselves, as readers, can reshape the future of the book!
We can reengage the way that books work in our own lives and fan the flame of reading again. In my generation, books have lost people’s attention spans, lost them to TV and movies and video games and the internet. But now books are being revitalized. Reading has never been more interesting, and it’s all thanks to ebooks.
I said earlier that, to the brain, there’s no difference between the words in a book and the words in an ebook, but ebooks introduce us to more than just words. They introduce us to other people and let us talk to our friends and family, right in the margins of an ebook. New life is being breathed into reading by the ebook revolution. If reading can be saved in our ADHD culture, then it’s thanks to innovative ideas from Reading 2.0 and to pioneering publishers and retailers and tech startups large and small.
I’m happy that I had a hand in making the ebook revolution happen. I did a lot for digital books. I turned the Kindle flywheel a few turns. I turned a page of the history book, turned books into ebooks. I burned the printed page and fanned the flames, helped to kindle a revolution.
I’m happy to have participated in the Kindle, along with a bunch of others. They’re people I sometimes miss and sometimes don’t, but all had charisma and character. There were enough characters on the Kindle team for a new font. At the very least, there was enough of a cast on Kindle to make a movie about it. BlackBerry-addled vice presidents, Jeff Bezos’s endless array of executive assistants, and engineers with barbeque stains on their shirts debating death matches between killer whales and tigers. They were all part of this ebook revolution, all part of something—well, something magical. Something revolutionary. As revolutionary as the invention of books themselves in Gutenberg’s day.
We don’t know what it was like in Gutenberg’s workshop, of course. But we can imagine the darkened interior, perhaps see the lampblack and soot. We can imagine the sounds of molten metal being poured into molds or the occasional scream as someone scalds himself, a spattle of molten metal on his skin, or perhaps it was someone’s finger that got caught in the printing press. We had it easier at Amazon; there were no molten metal mishaps, but we kindled a revolution nonetheless.
What we achieved will have consequences in the decades and centuries to come. But inevitably, Amazon will become just another name in the pages of the history books—or rather, history ebooks. Perhaps in the future nobody speaks of Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. Perhaps in the future, corporate entities are treated as people and our history is written by the likes of Apple and the Internet Archive and Google. Perhaps history is written about corporations by corporations. And it may well be in such a distant future that nobody really recalls that people like you and me brought digital books to life, that we made this quiet, bloodless revolution happen. That’s fine. We did it, even if nobody else will know about it.
We did it. And I wish that for just once in corporate culture, people took time to celebrate in a human way. I wish that just once Jeff Bezos brought us all together in a big ballroom, everyone on the Kindle team. I wish that just once he said nothing about flywheels, nothing corporate.
I wish that just once we all paused to celebrate what we achieved, that we wordlessly reached out to one another, held each other’s hands, and laughed like children, dancing in a circle. We could put aside our paychecks and all the politics, put aside our differences, and everyone could simply hold hands and pause before bowing to the audience, as this chapter in the history book closes, like a curtain falling over the stage.
And in this dream I have, it wouldn’t just be Amazon people. No, in the ballroom next door there’d another party where everyone from Apple has come together. Everyone who cared an ounce about ebooks and the iPad are likewise celebrating. No more corporate platitudes or PowerPoints, just corks popping, wine flowing, people eating and dancing and laughing and just plain celebrating with all the honesty of early-childhood innocence. And yes, the next ballroom over has employees from Google, and the next one has everyone who worked on the Nook. Everyone is celebrating, everyone past and present.
We all stumbled onto a great thing with ebooks. But we’re all echoes, opportunistic echoes from an earlier time, all the way back to Gutenberg’s time when books as we know them were first invented. In my mind, as visions of ballrooms fade, I can see, out on the landscape beyond, a summer’s afternoon in the 1450s and a ghostly scene of Gutenberg and his workers coming out of his workshop. They come out with ink stains on their hands, smudged fonts on their shirts. Maybe Gutenberg himself has a glass of blackberry wine or a stein of beer, raised now to celebrate the first Bible that started it all, everyone celebrating these thick-inked books that now soar into the clouds.
http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/23.html
About the Author
Jason Merkoski was a development manager, product manager, and the first technology evangelist at Amazon. He helped to invent technology used in today’s ebooks and was a member of the launch team for each of the first three Kindle devices. Trained in theoretical math at MIT, he worked for almost two decades in telecommunications and e-commerce with America’s biggest online retailers, and he’s worked with publishers large and small to shape the future of ebooks. As a digital pioneer, he wrote and published the first online ebook in the 1990s. As a futurist, he’s equally at home in Seattle or Silicon Valley, although he’s drawn to the high desert of New Mexico, where he can string up his hammock and stare into the clouds and see ancient petroglyphs.
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Copyright © 2013 by Jason Merkoski
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