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[integer at www.god-emil.dk]

>A response to Robert X. Cringely's article, Resistance is Futile, posted 
>here recently.

he om!td mone!
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>----
>
>Poor Mojo's Almanac #111
>http://www.rant.poormojo.org/cgi-bin/gennie.pl?Rant
>
>CrapLongStories.com: where publishing might go, you know, maybe
>by Fritz Swanson
>
>What I am going to say will require that you go read this column by 
>Cringley first (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20021128.html), 
>which I know is painful for some people, but for the sake of knowledge 
>needs to be done. Or you can ignore me. That happens all the time.
>
>The short version of what Cringley says is that Peer To Peer technology 
>will kill book publishing and music recording, but only hurt Hollywood. 
>People will still want to see epic movies on ths big screen, so $100 
>million movies will still get made, even if the DVD market will die. Unlike 
>the movies though, amateurs can write books of high quality and record 
>music of high quality without a capital intermediary.
>
>And I agree with this. I also believe the "editorial control" theory of 
>publishing/recording relevance is bullshit. Media comkpanies have become 
>power-mad oligarchies whose knowledge of, let alone interest in, editorial 
>control is virtually non-existent. Small lit houses generally don't need a 
>lot of editorial control, while big super-star firms where the likes of 
>John Grisham reside haven't ever seemed to excercise any "editorial 
>control." If that is true, what exactly is editorial control protecting us 
>from?
>
>But editorial control is a sidetrack, utimately. The existance of The 
>Backstreet Boys is proof enough that the "learned gatekeepers" are either 
>dead or mythical or both. So, let's set that aside.
>
>Naturally lacking "editorial control," P2P has or will soon have everything 
>that the recording and publishing industry have. I assigned Citizen Kane to 
>my class this fall. No one showed up to my free showing because they had 
>downloaded it on Kazaa. Some of my students have stopped buying some of 
>their books. They may not be able to find DeLillo yet on BookWarez, but 
>Salinger is no problem. And though I don't teach pop music, when we have 
>pre-class chit-chat about rap or college rock, the uninformed students are 
>always writing down artist and song names so that they can rush back to 
>their dorm rooms within the hour and download the latest track. I see 
>culture licking out through the discussion like a slow moving flame.
>
>It won't be long until 9 Stories is really just 9 individual stories 
>available on Grokster, along with all of the unpublished Salnger writing 
>that his lawyers--- I'm sorry, the Learned Editorial Gatekeepers--- have 
>kept from us lo these many years. And I swear to you that yesterday was the 
>last day anyone on a college campus knew the definition of the word "album" 
>when not preceeded by the word "photo."
>
>But, like with the whole editorial control thing, this isn't an essay about 
>that. The Gatekeepers are non-existent and the future hardly needs 
>predicting. Print and Recordings are dead businesses as we know it. Movie 
>is a bit of a toss-up, but TV and VCRs have foregrounded that 
>stable-instability for more than fifty years, so it is less interesting to 
>speculate.
>
>As a writer I think this evolution is really interesting. Movies have gone 
>through a century of unending format wars. Music likewise is close to 
>running out of paradigms that it can shift. The radio-star is so dead he is 
>forgotten, almost erased from the cultural landscape, his tombstone ground 
>up into gravel for a certain highway that we have heard a lot about recently.
>
>But print, unassailable print, has seen only three major format struggles 
>in the last TWO THOUSAND YEARS. Scroll to codex, handwriting to moveable 
>type, and the cheap paper revolution of the late nineteenth century that 
>brought novels to the masses. Ceasar, Gutenberg and... I don't know, let's 
>say Hearst.
>
>So, while it took 100 years to go from Edison cylanders to all those RPM 
>speeds, to reel to reel, to eight track, to casette, to CD, to MP3 (and 
>then OGG, and AAC and Microsoft Whatever), it took print 20 times as long 
>to get to the Berners-Lee revolution (the Great Man theory of history, 
>while laughably innacurate, does afford us the pleasure of giving 
>revolutions personal names, and so here I have chosen, arbitrarily of 
>course in order to keep with the form, the name of the inventor of the 
>World Wide Web).
>
>And the Berners-Lee revolution, the mass revolution of digital print, is 
>only the fourth rev, the eight track or so of the print world. This makes 
>this revolution particularly interesting. We're used to changing formats 
>for our movies and our music. Both are so young to begin with, at least as 
>portable concepts, that culture hasn't really had to re-roganize the way 
>that it thinks.
>
>But books, print, the written word. It was always protable, and in it's 
>very specific way. Text on paper is as old as the pyramids. So when we 
>change that, we are changing something in a big way.
>
>What has been lost in all of this, by Cringley especially in his column, 
>but also in general, is that we have been comparing books and movies and 
>music on an equal field. But it isn't true. Music and movies had their 
>revolution, and both of those revolutions started in Edison's elephant 
>killing laboratory. For the first time we could replicate and transport 
>what had before been the ephemeral events of theater and song. After doing 
>that on celluloid, everything that followed was a series of format debates. 
>But books were already portable replications of the ephemeral mind of the 
>author. Theater and Music had only just caught up with books. So while 
>Music and Movies are still going through permutations of the same basic 
>change, books might be going through something new.
>
>I have shifted from Print to Books to draw an important distinction. 
>"Print" is not dead. Hello, reading a written column! What has changed is 
>the whole material landscape underneath it all.
>
>What this change reveals is that printing, whether in books or on the 
>screen, is not entirely a sellable commodity. Sad, perhaps, but I think true.
>
>There is a fourth art, you see, that we are ignoring in this debate. Static 
>visual imagery. What was once called painting/illustration until 
>photography came into the mix. SVI was as stable a marketplace before 
>photography as books are today, it was an industry (albiet a cottage 
>industry.) But Dr. Daugeurr, another arbitrarily chosen "great man", 
>screwed everything up for the town portrait painter. Once George Eastman 
>gave us the Brownie, the coffin wasn't only sealed, it was buried in a 
>concrete vault and a shopping mall was built over top. Photographs are so 
>easy to make that we have little respect as a culture for even the finest 
>practitioners. Painting, on the other hand, is left with little to do in 
>the face of that, because if it is naturalistic we wonder why a photo 
>wasn't just taken, and if it is abstract we accuse it of trying to trick us 
>into believing it has any quality at all.
>
>Static Visual Imagery had its technical revolution in the mid-ninteenth 
>century and by Picasso (the last "great man" of painting that anyone in the 
>mass culture can remember) the SVI cottage industry had all but died. 
>Forgive me, my paiting and drawing friends, but it is true. Whether the SVI 
>is composed by Ansel Adams or Monet, the principle popular use of it will 
>be to accent a couch. Movies still move people to fear and gasping. Music 
>can make the most uneducated bastard cry. Even books can make people laugh. 
>But SVI has nothing as a standalone art. There are no true superstars of 
>the form, no Updikes or Kings or Elvises or REMs or Kubricks or Spielbergs.
>
>And what does that mean? Does that mean that photography and paintings, 
>like sibling sharks in the womb, slew each other before they could reach 
>mass appeal? Does neither one alone carry the weight of the artform? Why 
>did books rise to such popular prominence in the twentieth century? Why did 
>music? Why did movies?
>
>Because of atoms. SVI has always been too easily duplicated. Built into the 
>very concept of photography was the ability to duplicate images with a new 
>image. You no longer had to travel to the Louvre because someone with a 
>brownie could go on ahead of you and snap some shots. Photographic 
>reproduction, whether corporate or amateur, basically killed the market for 
>Static Visual Imagery. Before photography, the bread and butter of any 
>painter (Vermeer, Rembrandt, the local canvas man) was portraiture. After 
>photography this was first taken by the studios and then finally by 
>individual Brownie owners. Beyond that, all of the other uses for SVI 
>became specialized, and thus the good ole SVI cottage industry, with a 
>photographic studio on the Main Street of every town and a portrait painter 
>in every hamlet, breathed its last.Before all the painters and 
>photographers out there get huffy, let me be clear: Am I saying that Static 
>Visual Imagery is without artistic merit? No. I'm a saying the common man 
>doesn't crave the sort of aesthetic noursihment provided by a Sally Mann, a 
>Edward Hopper, a Lucian Freud? Not a chance. But let's face it, most people 
>can meet their own aesthetic needs with personal snap shots of their 
>children doing funny things with the dog.
>
>We are facing the death of the music industry and books for the same 
>reason. We can make our songs, record them, share them with friends. We can 
>write our own books, email them to loved ones. My dad works in his spare 
>time on a history of our family, the personal print version of portraiture. 
>A third of Shakespeare's works were just family histories.
>
>But what is dead in the static visual arts? What have we really lost? Not 
>images. We produce millions of snap shots a day, each town probably 
>exceding the entire life output of just one of the Great Men of the 
>Renaissance. And the learned art scholar will say, "but not the quality" 
>and the local boy who has just taken a picture of Mr. Ruffles wearing a 
>sailor suit will say "Huh? So what?"
>
>No, what is dead is the age of the Updikes, the Kubricks, the Picassos and 
>the Preselys. Corporate sponsored superstars are dead. They may still be 
>walking around for a while, but that coffin in the concrete vault with the 
>shopping mall waiting to drop down overhead is waiting for them.
>
>P2P killed the Corporate star.
>
>And what does that mean for books? Print isn't dead, but expensive mass 
>market binding is in danger. Well, in the face of photography a lot of 
>painters said "It isn't about the images, it is about paint itself." And so 
>was born abstract expressionism. Paint for paints sake.
>
>Go to your local independent bookseller and check out Stephen Dixon's I, 
>publsihed by McSweeney's Books. Look at any McSweeney's book. Or look at a 
>Modern Library edition of a public domain classic. In both cases, the text 
>is irrelevant. It isn't about the images, it is about the paint. It isn't 
>about the print, it's about the book.
>
>Cheap glue bound paperbacks are dead. Dover is dead. Paper for paper's sake 
>is dead. We face a brave new world of saddle stitching, faux leather 
>binding, gilt and inlay, hand emrboidered ribbons for bookmarks, die-cut 
>covers, pull-out tipped in maps, library editions, collectors pieces.
>
>That's on the one hand. Small presses will flourish as botique design houses.
>
>On the other hand, the email novel awaits. And Cringley is wrong, we will 
>take tablet PCs to the crapper . . . maybe not the first rev, but in ten 
>years when they are dishwasher safe and come in blister packs by the 
>thousand, we will all be avid readers of CrapLengthStories.com and that is 
>where the new Faulkners and Whartons and Salingers will flourish. And who 
>will pay them is anyones guess. Nobody pays me.