At 3:52 PM -0500 1/10/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 10:06:25AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
e) Brin's book would be just another drop in the ocean, anyway. His vision of the future is unlikely in the extreme (t.v. cameras in police offices...sure, whatever), so refuting his "bad memes" is just a waste of time
Right. Everyone's forgotten it; books like that (and Crypto, and Database Nation) have a short half-life.
And of course there are at least a _dozen_ books on the general issue of "privacy." One of the Kennedy's co-authored one (or at least agreed to have her name put on the cover, perhaps). Whit Diffie co-authored one. And so on. A dozen, at least. Nothing new, either. There are even a bunch of recent popularizations of crypto, steganography, PGP, etc. Do they really matter? At the margins, sure. Some kid in junior high school is perhaps discovering Singh's book on "Secret Codes" (or whatever the exact title is) the same way Whit Diffie read one of those early crypto books when he was a kid. Ditto for political books. It's not that I'm jaded, it's that there are TOO MANY DAMNED BOOKS out there. I spend a lot of time in Borders and Bookshop Santa Cruz, two very large and well-stocked bookstores in my town. (Declan can confirm this, though he may not have seen the new Borders yet.) I browse, in the classical sense, the New Books section most times I'm in there. The turnover is incredible. The range of topics is incredible, from climbings of an obscure peak in the Himalayas, to what women want in their sociology classes, to what the AOL-Time Warner deals means for prospects of peace on the Korean peninsula. And, every month, new books on quantum weirdness, new books on online privacy, new books on the history of the Web, etc. A flood of writers, a flood of books. The topics get more specialized in the same way Ph.D. theses have gotten so specialized. The grand unifications are few and far between. Who reads this stuff? We are drowning in a sea of factoids and well-researched books on obscure Beat Generation poets and books on the impact of technology. Big deal. Very few current books actually are _important_. (There are some, IMO. "The Elegant Universe," "Noah's Flood," "Emerging Viruses," in recent years. The novels of Stephenson, Vinge, Gibson, in past years. "Atlas Shrugged," whatever flaws it may have. Etc.) With the reported declines in reading amongst school children (various reasons, from poor schooling to lots of other choices like videos and games), and this explosion of titles, and with bookstores bigger than they ever were when I was a kid....hmmmhhh, lots of interesting forces about to collide. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns