Refutations Considered Unnecessary

[Tim May]

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 at 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