I've been watching a lot of the TED talks recently, with horror. 'Ideas worth spreading' is their confident catchphrase. I can't help but thinking that many of the ideas would be disastrous if they caught on… and even more worryingly, they are being lauded by TED, hailed as the greatest thoughts of our society, and applauded eagerly by the audiences.
It seemed a good time to focus on this one, in light of the last post which mentioned (not favorably) Google’s Book Search project. Here’s a librarian ecstatically proclaiming that not only CAN we archive all of humanity’s creative works, but we SHOULD… nay, we MUST. At first pass, this fits in well with our neo-liberal mentality, referenced, in fact, by Kahle himself: this belief in the inalienable right of people to information. We shall be liberated by greater access to information!
I think this is a huge lie that we’ve been sold. We are no more liberated by information than we are informed by it. We are addicts to information that, as Postman explains in Amusing Ourselves to Death, is not even particularly interesting or informative. We want and we want, but irrationally so, because we are not made happier, or smarter, by all this information. Imagine if someone were able to consume all these works that the Internet holds (an impossible dream that would drive people crazy in the chase of this will-o-the-wisp). I would think that without any discernment, their intelligence would trend toward mediocre. Compare this to if everyone read all the supposedly ‘great’ works in the world – they would probably get smarter. But this statement is threatening to people, approaching heretical. Censor our archives!? How dare you! Who are you to decide what we keep and what we don’t keep? Who’s to say what might be important to someone else?
The thing is, we can collect anything in the world if we make the criteria ‘something that might be useful at some point in the future to someone.’ As my supervisor quipped, why not go out into the woods and collect all the leaves? We don’t know if they might be useful one day.
It’s painful for us to think of letting some works go, forgotten from the archives of human history. (I think it has to do with fear of our own mortality – that everyone wants to think that part of them is immortal and will be remembered.) But every household does a selective editing of their family history when they save certain items, donate others, and trash the rest. For example, finger paintings and crayon drawings are eventually taken off the refrigerator when the child grows up. Some are thrown away (they really were shit, as difficult as it is for us to admit it, because we love our children), and some of the more impressive ones are kept. Why are we so afraid to do this to our library archives?
This is not really the point. The point is that even if we decided that, yes, we want to keep everything, we would not be able to do this (I don’t care what Kahle says). Kahle seems to think the limiting factor is money. This is very naïve. The limiting factors include 1) our actually limited data storage space (cyberspace is not, in fact, infinite), and 2) the limit of energy we are able to supply to run these data centers (and the environmental costs of doing so). So although we may be able to archive all of the works ever created to date, we are fast-producing more and more. Eventually we won’t be able to keep up with our own data production.
Consider the enormous costs of archiving what we have so far! Google estimates there are 130 million books in the world. And if we multiply that by the approximate CO2 cost of a 300 page digital book, it works out to nearly 300,000 tonnes of CO2, and that’s just for the books! You also have to add all the music and the videos (at considerably greater CO2 cost). And you have to multiply that by multiple copies Kahle (rightfully) proposes we would need, so that our archives don’t go down like the Alexandra Library. Additionally, we need technologies to enable us to access and interact with the web, like Mobile Phones, eReaders, and computers, which all consume virgin materials, emit CO2 during their production and use, and contribute to eWaste.
And there are psychological implications of this as well. Firstly, of course, we have to question the ways in which this enables information pleonexia, and increases our anxiety as we attempt to keep up with the information now available to us (and fears that we don’t know it all!). Furthermore, this promotes the unsustainable notion that we can forever expand into cyberspace, and the false perception that doing so has no real world consequences; and as we become increasingly dependent on cyberspace as storage for everything we value, we are forever consigning ourselves to supplying energy to maintain it, unable to disengage when the environment inevitably compels us to do so. How terrifying it becomes to contemplate the thought of unplugging! The hard truth is that one day we just might have to do that. If we tell ourselves that we need to be connected to this much information in order to be human in this world, we won’t be able to cope without it.
There are obvious objections to what I’m saying, namely that digital alternatives in many ways seem more environmentally friendly. People say, ‘Well, doesn’t a paper book have a greater carbon footprint than a digital book.’ Yes. But paper books come from trees, so if we learned to moderate our consumption of them, they would renew over time (moderation is a difficult but necessary pill for us to swallow). When we store a digital book, we consume non-renewable fossil fuels, which makes them fundamentally unsustainable. So in one sense, cyberspace is unsustainable for the same reason that any fossil fuel-based product is. But there’s another important point, which we can make with the example of a disposable camera. These are awful environmentally. But their costs are easily visible – because we have to pay to use them, and we physically throw them away. In contrast, the digital conceals its environmental costs, and there are no financial incentives for moderation.
My point is that we have to make an informed – and painfully grown up – decision about whether this goal of dumping everything in cyberspace is worth the costs. It certainly isn’t without environmental and psychological costs above and beyond economic ones, so let’s not delude ourselves that it is risk- and cost-free in these respects.
