Politics as usual hasn’t been as usual lately as it used to be. Were he still among the living, even our 20th century Nostradamus, Mr. Orwell, might be surprised to learn that Oceania has finally and definitively lost its war with Eurasia, and is presently hiding the rump of itself under the skirts of a demented real estate developer with delusions of grandeur. Definitely not the Big Brother Mr. Orwell promised us, this one, although the red hat rubes hardly seem to have noticed. Eastasia, meanwhile, is licking its chops, oblivious to its own vulnerabilities, doing its unctuous best to look as inscrutable as western racists expect.
A couple of degrees more of global warming, a nuclear exchange or two between idiot regimes, and even Elon Musk and his sycophant armies might find themselves roasting rats-on-a-stick over burning rubber tires somewhere where angels fear to tread. That, my fellow deeply concerned citizens of the First World, is actually how it’s going, and you didn’t even have to sit through a commercial to hear about it.
I could hear blast door bolts slotting home behind me, but there wasn’t any use trying to pretend I’d come through before it closed. The woman standing next to the captain’s chair in the center of the hide—short hair, sand camo, half-drawn sidearm—was looking straight at me, her you gotta be fucking kidding me reaction turning lethal before either of us could blink. Except for the obvious crew at stations to my left—I counted six of them—the hide seemed to be jammed all the way to the back wall with raggedies of every age and condition, probably survivors brought down from the ruins of the Strip.
“How the hell?”
“Grepped by your portal north of the Wynn—what’s left of it anyway. You were after someone else?”
“Wasn’t us.”
“Unfunny either way. Any idea who hates us both?”
“At this point? Damned near everyone. Where’s the rest of you?”
“Name, rank, and serial number, all you get.”
The sidearm was all the way out now, the business end glowing. “Think again.”
The air around me rippled briefly like a stone tossed into a pond, and suddenly my whole crew was formed up between us, the better part of a heavy weapons squad already in full on search and destroy mode. “Hold!” I shouted, and well-trained fingers came off half a dozen triggers. “Make a hole.” Pushing a couple of nasty-looking muzzles aside, I stepped to the front. “This is the rest of us. I don’t know why we’re here. Do you?”
She shook her head slowly, the sidearm already back in its holster. “So now what?”
“I’m thinking what our betters call ‘a frank exchange of views.’”
“Works for me. Let me get these people someplace first.”
I nodded. She unshipped a handheld and tapped at it briefly. Somewhere beyond the huddled masses at the far end of the hide an airlock began to cycle. “Okay everybody, 20 at a time into the lock. Gunnery Sergeant Walker there will monitor. There’s secure shelter at the farside end of the tunnel—beds, food, water, and sanitary facilities including showers. Changes of clothing will be handed out as and when. Anyone needing medical attention or prescription meds see the corpsman on duty. We’ll get you back topside as soon as we can.”
Took a while, but eventually there were just us grunts in the captain’s hide—half hers, half mine. We signaled them to stand down while we were off sorting out our uneasy truce.
Her ready room, built for speed, not for comfort. A table with four chairs, a sitrep holo over the center that blanked as we entered. She gestured. We sat. We talked.
“You are?”
“California. 1st Armored Cav. You?”
“Texas. 415th Force Recon out of Corpus Christi. Also a handful of stray Hoosiers and Jayhawkers from that KC sigint battalion got mauled last month up around Pahrump. Some awful shit went down there. Here too. I used to fly over from home with the sigo for a show, now I hate the fucking place.”
“Not really a place anymore, though, is it? Not much left but latrines, body bags, and rubble. I figure we’re just about done here. Some papers’ll get signed, some razor wire’ll get unrolled, a few mines and flagpoles planted. Then the fuckers in charge’ll declare it a demilitarized zone, and anybody left alive’ll finally get to go back home and start over.”
“Yeah, probably got in mind going all ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ for the coastal stringers. Not this time, though, not with all the broken parts getting shipped back home to the folks.”
“So…wasn’t you grepped us?”
“Wasn’t. I been asking myself who pulled it and why, but I keep coming up with nada. If it wasn’t my people, and it wasn’t yours, who the hell else has the mooch to grep half a fucking infantry squad halfway across a city this size with most of what’s left of it still under fire? You want a beer?”
“You got beer?”
“Liberated a dozen cases of longnecks a week ago from a half-wrecked convenience store behind our perimeter. Been doling them out for good behavior, but I’ve still got a dozen or so left. So yeah, I got beer.”
“Bring it, then, and let’s see can we figure this shit out.”
We never did figure it out. I said maybe some do-gooder NGO put us together on purpose, see if a couple of ground pounders’d make love not war. She said no fucking way, just blind luck we didn’t waste each other on sight. We were still scratching our heads at 1650, when both our handhelds started to flash. Armistice signed, all hostilities to cease at 1700. And that was that.
Around sundown, I raised one of the last two longnecks, knocked it against hers. “I hope you’re right about this time being different. Sad we have to live in hope—probably what guarantees we stay at the bottom of the foodchain where we are. Hope or no hope, I’m thinking I oughta get my people up top before reporting in. Just in case.”
She upended her bottle, drained it, slammed it down on the table next to mine. “Until the next one, then, Califa. ¡Que te vaya bien!”
When the Fearful Symmetry’s shuttle silently terminated its descent, and extended its boarding ramp for him, he’d already been standing quietly at the entrance to the village for nearly an hour, a lumpy canvas duffel at his feet and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses clinging precariously to the end of his nose. As the wave of dust displaced by the shuttle’s shield envelope began rippling around his ankles, he reluctantly gave up on the pocket-sized vademecum of the prophet’s sayings a local elder had pressed on him earlier that morning, and slipping it into an empty side pocket, reached down for straps on his now thoroughly dust-coated duffel.
Squinting a little as his eyes adjusted, he pushed his glasses higher up on his nose and turned toward the ramp. He’d dressed that morning as he always did, in the vest and shalwar kameeze of the locals. Only a brief metallic glint at the end of his sleeve as he hefted the deceptively heavy duffel hinted at the temporamores he was now wearing underneath them.
The villagers, who, despite their uncertainty, had remained at a more or less respectful distance from him throughout the morning, now shuffled even farther back, the men arranging themselves according to age and dignity as custom dictated, and the women, now partly under the shade of the village bus stop’s extended roof, tending to what women always tended to. The mothers and older sisters herded the younger children away from the edge of the road. The grandmothers, abandoning their furiously whispered disapprovals of a morning wasted, raised their kerchiefs against the dust that suddenly threatened to envelop them. Two teenaged boys in the middle of the road, hands resting firmly on their motorbike handlebars, glanced nervously at each other, already poised to thumb their engine starters and speed away.
He pivoted back toward the gathering as he reached the near end of the ramp, giving them a brief wave of acknowledgment, of farewell. Then he turned and walked briskly up the ramp into the waiting transport, which had begun rising even before the ramp had fully closed behind him. It paused briefly a dozen or so meters above the ground, and then, without any warning at all, disappeared with a sound not unlike a pair of very large hands suddenly clapped together.
“They weren’t exactly waiting for a bus, were they?”
“No. They were waiting for the future.”
“And you promised them a sneak peak at it? That won’t go over well.”
Frank Herbert’s Dune seems to have been written by a man who’d read too much Gibbon. Max’s DUNE Prophecy, on the other hand, seems to have been created by people who’ve watched too much TikTok.
Viewed from a certain critical perspective, both are satirical masterpieces, and like all such masterpieces, feel eerily appropriate to their times.
Despite its birth in slavery and genocide, there was always some hope that the United States would one day live up to the aspirations of its founders rather than continue to turn a blind eye to the evils inherent in some of their political compromises. Even when we were certain we wouldn’t live to see that day, we had reasons not to feel like fools when looking forward to its eventual arrival.
Today, as Trump and his sycophants begin gleefully making plans to burn our books and chisel our names off the nation’s monuments, we should take a moment to remind ourselves what will inevitably become of them once their political orgasm has spent itself. Winning won’t magically make them any less ignorant, any more capable of coping with anything more complex than their own appetites for self-aggrandisement. While they’re busy gloating, grifting, and genuflecting to their preposterous version of the Christian god, the Chinese or Russians may very well show up to eat the lunch so cluelessly laid out for them, or what is even more likely, climate change may finally turn Arizona into hell with the fire out, and blow down or drown everything in Florida from Mar-a-Lago to Tallahassee.
In the meantime, we should mind how we go. Remember that they don’t own the future—many of their children will come to hate them soon enough, especially their daughters. Ignore the taunts, save the bullied wherever and whenever we can, and never, ever forego an opportunity to pour a cup of virtual sugar into a coal-roller’s gas tank.
Part Two has been in progress for a painfully long time, but the future is proving to be an even more elusive beast than I thought when I first began this somewhat speculative apologia.
In its issue of April 4, 1994, the New Yorker published an article by Nicholson Baker, Discards, which called into serious question what he was convinced was an unwise rush by libraries to replace traditional card catalogs with a computer-based approach to information access and retrieval. Baker’s article was widely read in academic library circles, not only because it was critical of the work librarians were doing, but also because it had appeared in the New Yorker. Specialists working in fields as obscure as technical librarianship aren’t normally accustomed to reading such critical assessments of their work from outside the profession, especially when those assessments turn out to be as accurate in their details, and as forthright in their judgments as Discards was about our bibliographical stewardship.
When I first took up Baker’s article that April, I admit I found myself wishing that it hadn’t been quite so accurate, or quite so forthright, and for good reason. At the time, I was employed in the Cataloging Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara Library, where for the preceding ten years I’d been supervising the work of something called the Catalog Maintenance and Retrospective Conversion Section.
Catalog maintenance, the section’s traditional responsibility, meant managing the card catalog—adding new cards to the drawers as new books arrived and were cataloged, correcting errors in the existing cards, and updating them to reflect revised entries whenever the Library of Congress made changes to its subject thesaurus, or altered its preferred form of an author’s or editor’s name.
The retrospective conversion assignment had been added in the mid-1980s, at the point when all current cataloging was finally being done on our new computer system. To complete the transition from a card-based catalog to a computer-based one, we were tasked with entering the older, manually-produced contents of the card catalog into our digital cataloging database. Once that nearly decade-long task was complete, we discarded both the cards—some 10 million of them—and the cabinets which had housed them, and replaced them with public access computer terminals. Access to the new digital catalog could be provided first on dedicated terminals within any library in the University of California system, and then, after a surprisingly short interval, to anyone anywhere in the world who had UC library privileges, an Internet connection, and a Web browser.
That was what retrospective conversion meant and what it did, and that was precisely the activity, carried out by my section from the mid-Eighties to the early Nineties, and repeated in libraries all over the world, which had given rise to Baker’s article. He thought that what we were doing was not only short-sighted, but barbarous—an offense against civilization itself—and was saying so in no uncertain terms.
Despite his obviously careful research, his passionate indictment of our project—in the pages of the New Yorker, no less—struck me at the time as being perverse, perverse in the sense that he seemed much more determined to condemn us for what he believed we were destroying than to evaluate what we believed we were creating, or our success in creating it. In Bakers’s view, it seemed, far from being the responsible stewards of the world’s intellectual patrimony we’d imagined ourselves to be, we were in fact vandals, the moral equivalent of those universally despised vandals who’d once set fire to the Library of Alexandria. Was this a fair judgment? I certainly didn’t think so, but just as I was deciding that the situation was unprecedented enough, and the outcome uncertain enough, not to take his judgment personally, on the very last page of Discards, I encountered this:
(U.C.S.B., incidentally, finished throwing out its main catalogue late last summer.)
Incidentally. Certainly not a word that I’d have chosen. UCSB was my library, throwing out its catalog was my job, and I could have told him, had he asked me, that there was nothing incidental about it. Arguments about intent, though, were apparently beside the point. What concerned Baker was not intent, but consequences, consequences which he was far more certain about than we were. I put down my copy of the New Yorker and recalled the end of Dr. Frankenstein’s career. Was I really a vandal? Would there be a mob of concerned citizens with pitchforks and torches waiting for me in the library parking lot after work?
Given that Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist in 1994, I really didn’t have anything to worry about. An indictment and trial of supposedly philistine librarians in the court of a public opinion generally indifferent to abstract policy squabbles was highly unlikely. Yet if Baker’s attempt at framing a public policy indictment of our work seemed perverse to me, his instinct that some sort of public policy questioning should be taking place was valid enough to be taken seriously. Indifferent or not, the public was clearly going to be affected by the technologies of the coming digital age, not just affected, but shaped by them. The disappearance of card catalogs from their libraries was, if anything, merely the thin edge of the coming wedge.
Thirty years later, deep into the age of Amazon, Google, and Wikipedia, of LLM, ChatGPT, Simon and Bard, it’s hard to recall precisely what form my testimony might have taken in the event that Baker and the New Yorker had actually succeeded in putting us all on trial. All I can remember now with any precision is my certainty that printed books were already becoming an anachronism, that libraries were already in the process of becoming museums of the printed word, and that librarians would have little future except as their curators. All of this, I was convinced, would happen sooner than even Nicholson Baker feared, and would turn out in the end to be even more radically disruptive than many of my colleagues, committed as they imagined themselves to be to our digital future, could bring themselves to admit.
I haven’t spent more than an hour or so in the UCSB library—nor any other library—since I retired in late 2003, nor have I kept up with library journals, or the professional literature in general. As a consequence, I have only the vaguest of notions what, if anything, has changed in the intervening twenty years in the mission of libraries and librarians as viewed by librarians themselves. I can’t imagine that they still think of themselves as principal actors in the digital transformation of information storage and access, but I do hope that they’ve remained principled stewards of the triumphs of the past, and skeptical about some of the more outrageous claims made those who are now in charge of the digital transformations of the 21st century. In any event, what happens now in libraries is no longer mine to judge. If there’s a problem, I’m willing to concede that I had a part in creating it. If there’s to be a solution, I’m well aware that I won’t have any part in devising it.
Ten years ago I was privileged to witness the emergence of a dragonfly from its nymph form. A creature that at first glance had seemed like a beetle to my untrained eye had crawled laboriously up from my back yard, attached itself to the side of the concrete step leading to the sliding glass door to my bedroom, and remained there, unmoving, tempting me to believe it had died.
I don’t remember exactly how long it remained there, but it was long enough for me to pass it a number of times on my way back and forth to the alley behind my house. Then, the last time I started to pass it, I discovered to my surprise that the back of its carapace had split open, and the dragonfly it had become was perched atop the empty shell that had sheltered it, had been it, and was now unfolding its wings in the afternoon sun. I watched until the wings, now fully dried, suddenly began to vibrate, then powered a beautiful, iridescent liftoff and arrow-like disappearance into the distance, a movement almost too fast to follow with the naked eye.
Being a child of the 20th/21st centuries, my first thought at witnessing this astonishing sequence of events was that any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic, my second that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Being a child of the 20th/21st centuries, I didn’t find those two thoughts to be incompatible. Now, ten years later, I still don’t.
For an old Mac guy, John Gruber, bless his heart, has always done his damndest to be fair in his judgments about tech. After several days of watching some of my favorite tech columnists lift their legs on iPads in general, and the new iPads in particular, reading his review of Apple’s M4 iPad Pro pretty much made me jump for joy.
I’m typing this on my new M4 iPad Pro with a nano-textured screen, and I don’t care what anybody says—the little girl in Apple’s “What’s a computer?” ad of 2017 got it, and John Gruber, prince of the grumpy old Mac diehards that he is, also gets it. He’s made my day….
Full disclosure: I’m 30 years older than John, and far grumpier, but the iPad still has the power to make me want to live another hundred years. That little girl—and John—speak to me, and for me, and I suspect I’m not alone.
Apple is certainly guilty of at least some of the transgressions it’s been accused of by Margrethe Vestager, the principal finger-wagger of the European Commission. Arrogant corporate behemoths are a tax on the general welfare, right enough, but so also are vengeful bureaucrats whose principal complaint seems to be that Americans got to the future before the French and Germans had a chance to certify it.
There are lots of smart people on both sides of this unfortunate culture clash, so I suppose it’s possible that some sort of quasi-equitable justice will eventually be done, but I’m not optimistic. I mean, c’mon people, really—does anyone at this late date actually want a cell phone designed by the European Commission?
