"While she had gathered he was an omnivorous reader, it seemed he owned nothing printed but drew entirely on the public database." (p. 57)
Exactly. Privately owned printed books become redundant with instant screen access to any published work. All literature can become as free as air as also can every other necessity of life. Tangible copies of texts can still be printed out if wanted.
Sf writers sometimes envisage such an apotheosis but nevertheless continue to describe their characters as earning a living or making a buck as if still at an earlier stage of socioeconomic/technological development.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I've said this before, I think hard copy printed books will still find a niche even in a high tech future. Esp. if the reader has a HOME or residences in which he could leave printed copies of his favorite books. Which is what we see Nicholas van Rijn doing, for example.
Hebo was an INVETERATE wanderer or traveler, with no fixed abode, which places a premium on traveling as lightly as possible. So naturally he would use the futuristic equivalent of the Internet to google works of interest.
And I do expect people to work in the future, either from need or choice. That would esp. be the case on colonized worlds which might need some time would be needed to get as up to date as the most technologically advanced planets.
And, absent something like other worlds humans could colonize, we might well face the kind of dangerous situation seen in "Quixote And The Windmill." That is a high tech future wealthy enough for most people to live pretty comfortably on "citizen's credit," but with nothing REAL to do. Boredom, frustration, ennui, despair, anger, a turning to fanatic ideologies would become real dangers!
And I really don't think most people will care about art, literature, philosophy, pure science, or even chess playing, in which they could make use of such a high tech future. Such things will never appeal to to more than a small minority.
Sean
Note that living in the contemporary US or UK makes the basic economic challenge of our ancestors for uncounted generations -- not starving or realistically fearing starving -- not a serious concern. Even very poor people generally get enough basic foodstuffs, or can unless they're somehow severely dysfunctional.
A century before I was born, people were dropping dead of starvation in the streets of Stockholm. One of my great-uncles died of hunger in the 1930's. As recently as the 1940's, severe malnutrition was a normal part of the life-cycle for a large minority of English people -- that is, it routinely happened at certain points in life, if not all the time.
Yet we don't -feel- that we're living in effortless abundance, though to our ancestors that would appear to be the case.
I suspect that this will continue to be so.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, the situation we see in the most advanced countries of RELATIVE abundance for most people is historically unique and unusual. I also agree that most of us will continue to NOT feel that we are living in effortless abundance.
And only free enterprise economics in conjunction with a limited state which is not too heavily oppressive can enable this relative abundance to continue. And I agreed with Poul Anderson that only getting off this rock in a REAL way to exploit the resources of the Solar System can enable this abundance to continue, long term.
A start would be Elon Musk founding a permanent colony on Mars! Which he hopes to start doing in 2022.
Sean
Paul:
There's one very, very big problem with reading from a public database: you're getting that data on sufferance. If the government, or the operating company, decide they don't want you to read thus-and-such ... it's gone. Or it's rewritten to what they want it to be. Down the Memory Hole, to use the 1984 expression.
I've pretty much always been against ebooks for just this reason. Today I saw a news article (The Register, 28 June) that says Microsoft is closing down all ebook access. Quote:
"If you bought an ebook through Microsoft's online store, now's the time to give it a read, or reread, because it will stop working early July.
"That's right, the books you paid for will be literally removed from your electronic bookshelf because, um, Microsoft decided in April it no longer wanted to sell books. It will turn off the servers that check whether your copy was bought legitimately – using the usual anti-piracy digital-rights-management (DRM) tech – and that means your book can't be verified as being in the hands of its purchaser, and so won't be displayed.
"Even the free-to-download ebooks will fail....
"You would imagine that Microsoft considered other options: figuring out how to remove the need for DRM validation for those books; seeing if it could provide a non-DRM version; selling its database of DRM books to another company; or keeping a skeleton DRM system in place.
"The fact that it decided against all these options and to simply kill the whole thing off should be a very big warning sign to anyone who has bought, considered buying, or will consider buying an ebook in the future."
Kaor, DAVID!
And this makes me feel vindicated in PREFERRING hard copy printed books!
Interesting times, but not always in good ways!
Sean
David,
Of course, I envisage a time when all knowledge is held or owned in common and no group has any right to censor or suppress information, including the wording of an already published text.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And there will NEVER be such a time as what you envision. Because I argue there will be times when both private persons and even gov'ts can legitimately withhold information. But, I did not have already published texts in mind when writing that.
Sean
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