The Dark Mountain Blog
These companions that speak silently to our eyes
posted by Dougald Hine
10th January, 2013
‘So far, I have been able to recognise every book that was composed on a computer,’ Ivan Illich told his friend David Cayley. ‘It’s like reorganising a river by taking a piece of it from here and putting it somewhere else.’
The remark jumped out at me because I had heard precisely the same claim from Alan Garner. ‘The elbow is the best editor’ was his explanation.
There is a kind of naive sophistication to the commonplace idea that writing is writing, a text is a text, on the screen or on the page. Against this, I take the words of these old men as a clue to a subtle transformation that took place in recent decades, prefiguring the more noticeable arrival of the ‘electronic book’.
Illich found the word-processed text, with its ‘paragraphs that didn’t come out of an inner flow’, almost unreadable. ‘So I made a vow,’ he went on, ‘not to type into a computer anything, any sequence of sentences, which I had not first written out with a much newer invention, the felt-tipped pen.’
*
I thought of this on the afternoon in September when nine of us gathered in the upstairs room of a cafe in Liverpool for the first meeting of the Dark Mountain steering group. Of the items on the agenda, the one that raised passions was the question of whether the books we publish should also be available as eBooks. It was not simply that we disagreed with each other: we disagreed with ourselves! (I, for one, found myself arguing one way and then another.)
To begin with, Dark Mountain would hardly exist without the networked technologies through which many of us found one another. From Paul and I crossing paths on the comment threads of each other’s blogs to the crowdfunding campaigns that have made our books possible, this project is a phenomenon of the networked age. While it mattered to us that the original manifesto should be presented as a physical publication, its text has always been available freely through this website.
Yet there was a particular discomfort at the idea of substituting a file on a digital device for the weight of a book in the hand, its spine upright on the shelf. A website is a new kind of thing, someone said, but an eBook is part of the attempt to virtualise the physical world. And while the irony did not go unnoticed that our books are put together – and for the most part, I suspect, written – on computers, then transposed from the virtual to the physical, still we felt the tug of this distinction. Perhaps it has to do with the edge of animism that lingers in our relationship to these companions that speak silently to our eyes. ‘People hold books in a special way – like they hold nothing else,’ notices John Berger. ‘They hold them not like inanimate things but like ones that have gone to sleep.’
Those of us who owned eBook readers did not find them replacing the physical books in our lives. (I have a Kindle whose main use is to save me printing thousands of pages a year of submissions to Dark Mountain and the drafts of friends’ books.) Nor were we moved by the supposed logic of technological inevitability, according to which those raised with digital books will find our attachment to print impossible to understand.
It seemed to us that the eBook was not a technological improvement, but a poorer substitute: like a photocopy of a book, it may be convenient under certain circumstances, but that hardly renders the printed form obsolete.
It also seemed reasonable to suggest, as someone did that afternoon, that books will outlast eBooks. The life expectancy of digital media compares poorly to that of print, for one thing, while Amazon does not consider you to own your Kindle library in the sense that would allow you to leave it to your offspring. There is also the consideration that William Golding anticipated more than thirty years ago in ‘A Moving Target’:
Our world is voracious and still becoming more so. Sooner or later, unless we exercise a care and forethought which is seldom evident in the mass of human beings, we shall be left with little more than village or small town economy. It is worth noting, therefore, that the making of books can be a cottage industry. If the need is there, anyone could learn that careful swirl of the tray and flick of the wrist that distributes the pulp evenly over the mesh and gives us handmade paper…
I say all this because I sometimes hear people say that the age of the book is past; and I suppose these statements to come from people who have a couple of thousand television sets on their shelves. But it will be a very advanced village industry that can manufacture a television set. Tapes, cassettes, records, radios, television sets are with us, certainly; but he would be a wise man who could predict how long we shall be able to afford them.
Yet having voiced our various hesitations and misgivings, we were also aware that there are those for whom the price of the print editions of our books – particularly when combined with the cost of international shipping – can be prohibitive, or who for other reasons would benefit from the availability of a digital edition. So the eventual conclusion of our discussions was that we should share our mixed feelings and invite the views of others, while offering, for the time being, a digital edition of last resort.
For the next few months, then, we are making available for a donation a PDF of each of our three books. This is a deliberately makeshift solution: it contains the full contents of the print edition and will display well on computer screens or as a print-out, but has not been formatted to work well on eBook readers. It may be that our next step is to invest in converting these files into ‘proper’ eBooks, or that we return to solely print publication. For now, the PDFs can be found through links on the Dark Mountain shop, and we are open to your thoughts.
Meanwhile, I have been writing this blog post with a rollerball pen that was made in Japan. Although, after reading this blog post from The View From Hell, I may have to ask for a fountain pen for my birthday.
Posted by Dougald Hine on 10 January, 13
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Hmph. That author took a very long time to say there is an undefinable pleasure to using a fountain pen.
It is not just the nib on the paper, or the fact you can get any colour or scent of ink–as they say, there is a demandingness. You will get messy with a fountain pen, that is just how it is. You will run out of ink regularly, and that is also how it is. (I buy old-style Hero 329 pens off eBay. They are cheap enough I don’t panic about losing them, and so I carry them everythere instead of treating them as fetish items.)
I wrote about this regarding safety razors, but I just called it skill.
…we have taken all that is truly challenging and artful and demanding and given it to the machines. For the humans we leave the task of pressing the start button—cars that parallel park themselves, jigs to cut dovetails, gas fireplaces that never fail to light, razors with four or five blades—pressing the button, over and over again, at work, at home, all day long. It is like we are trying to systematically destroy anything that requires practise, anything that may require expertise. To fit with other design strategies like Design for Environment, Design for Disassembly and Design for Recycling, I call this Design for De-skilling.
Why get out of bed at all, let alone early, when all you have to look forward to is flicking the switch on your electric razor? The economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_and_economic_myths_(historical) wrote:
…we should cure ourselves of what I have been calling “the circumdrome of the shaving machine”, which is to shave oneself faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves faster so as to have more time to work on a machine that shaves still faster, and so on…
As with Slow Food, Slow Shaving stands against this de-skilling. It takes practice to make a good shaving lather. It takes effort to shave closely. Each of these things forces me to focus, brings me back to a challenge in my life, the challenge of making better lather, of getting the blade angle just right. When I stroke my chin in thought my reverie is broken by amazement at how smooth my face is. When was the last time you had that sense of amazement delivered by the space-age multi-blade razor? It feels great—satisfaction at a job well-done—like making perfect pie crust or getting nothing but net on a three-point shot. That is a feeling we could have much more often in our lives.
So. The book is clearly better. But, I support your desire to make the writing available to those with less money, or even for those with only interest, but not passion for the topic. PDFs are readable on Kindles, so I say that is good enough. You make a book, and if people don’t want to buy the paper, they can read the pdf. The slight imperfections of formatting are the demandingness that makes it worthwhile.
I would like to have been the pixie behind the pint glass to hear the discussion…it’s a very interesting one to be having. Sort of shows up our messy human contradictions and foibles. I myself stand with the idea of the book as a ‘sacred’ object in the way that an ebook, or especially a pdf(!) can never be. A thing of beauty and longevity. I don’t think the idea of the cost of books is the primary one, if you can afford a kindle you are likely to be able to afford the odd treasured tome. Most other books can be had for free loan at the lovely local library. The idea of reading the DM books in a downloaded PDF actually does make me giggle a bit….it’s definitely not for me. But I applaud your frank discussions and willingness to look at things sideways and upside down and from all angles and points of view.
It is such a pleasure though, isn’t it, to step away from the screens and machines and read a book in the shade…
Principles of Uncivilisation No 1 and No 7 must surely persuade you that it’s OK to present the words on paper or screen. And maybe better yet if the words matter to have them told and re-told in stoytelling.
Yes we live in the days of the talking copper wire. What about the Carbon Footprint between the two?
If only trees could talk.
Books are wholesome in a way that a screen can never be.
A book is all there at once, replete within its covers and as long as it has not been left lying face down by some barbarous borrower so that a particular page gets biased, it will open at random like an oracle and give you just what you need to read.
One certainly owes it to an author to read from front to back, but i love to re-read at random, it is a wonderfully holistic practice that only increases the depth and dimension of a good book.
A screen is for sure a useful convenience, some might say a necessary torture, but it can never offer up the pleasure of a good read in the same way a book does.
Here is a lovely article by a woman who runs a cottage industry making books from, amongst other things, sea shells…. http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2013/odelae/
A beautiful articulation of the rewards of demandingness can be enjoyed here, starting at 12:25. Then, do go back and watch all three videos, just because they are beautiful.
Now that is a very appropriate and timely reminder of another good reason why a book has it over a screen.
As a maker i do a lot of technical learning and although video instruction is plentiful and can be very pleasing it does tend to go in one ear and out the other; entertaining, maybe, but usually lacking in depth.
A reading of an instructional manual can be slowed down and repeated at will until the power of the words make sense. I t can be bookmarked and easily referenced as one goes between the instruction and the practical application; it can even be held in one hand while the other is busy.
Pictures on a screen are like dreams that slip too easily away and are forgotten while a picture in a book stays put and can be pondered at will.
Having said that….Thanks Ruben, they are wonderfully evocative videos and inspiring in my case as we have a pig out there destined for the chop.
Nevertheless i am looking for a good book on the subject….jim
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A subject I’ve been mulling for a long time and still haven’t managed to convince myself either way. I write poetry mainly and have started producing work for individual places to be left in that place, a piece of card or cloth, rolled up, left in a crack in a wall etc. At the same time I am producing e-books as guides to places, using GPS. This enables stories to “appear” when a reader arrives at a certain destination. So, there are benefits to the physical and electronic approach. One thing I do feel strongly about though is that 9 out of 10 books are not worth reading and its easier to press the delete key than it is to recycle a printed book.
As for the writing process, I use OmmWriter.
Hi Dougald
But shouldn’t you ask permission of the authors to share their work in electronic format?
Let’s not pussyfoot here:
Generally e-books means Kindle; Kindle means Amazon.
As long as you’re happy with that ????
Slightly surprised you’ve actually felt the need to have the conversation.
Andy – Not all e-books are owned by Amazon, as I understand it. You can read them on devices other than the Kindle, so you can avoid going through Amazon.
But yes, the ‘ownership’ of what people are reading by a few corporate giants was a big concern.
Robert – We don’t have written contractual agreements with our writers, so it’s never really come up. I’m not sure whether this would be necessary or not. Generally when journalists write for publications it’s on the understanding that their writing may be published in either printed or electronic format. But we’re very open to opinions on this.
Hi Paul
Yes, I understand — it would be pretty inconvenient to have to ask the authors of every contribution in the 3 books. But I think the contributors should be part of the discussion. Dark Mountain is all of us, if it’s anything.
For myself, I wouldn’t have written an article for DM3 if it had been a purely online publication. There is a value for me in having a printed book that you can put you hands on. It gives you the company of a collective of voices where an electronic screen gives only a tumult of disconnected information.
Kindles are for kindling.
I have more to say, but it will have to wait because I’m with friends and I have overloaded my brain with electrons already…
Of course in a purely literal sense, Kindles would be no good at all for kindling. Unless, that is, you are a Chinese peasant eking out a living by melting down electronic scrap over a brazier in front of your hut to extract the semi-precious metals.
OK. So I like books better than screens. I would rather be browsing the second-hand shelves than surfing the web. It seems to me that poetry, unless written in the pre-internet age, cannot exist at all on the web (it seems to have the soul sucked right out of it). And opening paper books at random can lead you to some amazing places.
But if, as I believe, Dark Mountaineers, and others, are trying to sketch a map out of the technological minefield-in-a-maze that most of us are trapped in for much of the time, then presumably that map needs to be available somewhere that people who are within the clutches of the machine can get their hands on it. Remember Gandhi finding a copy of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience in the library of a South African prison? That would be like finding an essay on Luddism online, I guess.
So, up with good books, up with free online sharing of those good books. Up with honorable piracy, down with egocentric copyright.
Above all, up with books that people will value enough to haul them around to real places — even, or especially, if that means hauling the book around until they have memorized the important bits and then leaving it around for someone else to pick up. And up with people caring enough to write those books.
Moses, i imagine, would have disliked books.
New fangled gadgets, you can carry around, only to get lost, burned, stolen. Borrowed…
For Moses, a stone inscription was the only way to go and you have to hand it to him, it was a good attempt.
“You’d never guess who i met on the mountain, and he told me to tell you.”
Who would have guessed how badly that one would backfire?
What do they say about the Road to Hell?
I personally would pitch for Mysterious Ways.
And doubtless there were thoughtful Sumerians sitting around with pints of – what, wheat beer? – arguing about the move from cuneiform to papyrus. “Clay…clay is wholesome in a way paper will never be…and the feel of the stylus in your hand as you carve the lines….”
Sorry, but this seems like a lot of argument over an abstract concept. All words are virtual, they all exist as mists in our heads and it’s there that the meaning is made. How they get there may be interesting, but since all of these words are coming to me on a screen, I don’t see what all the fuss is about.
Paul,
Thanks. Yes, agree mostly.
However, I’ve been trying to think about technology and Dark Mountain. Put crudely I see two strands. The first is technology that facilitates the de-concentration of power and control. So for example our internet conversations are allowing us to spread ideas through the relatively benign channels of the internet (put aside Google and surveillance for a moment). The second strand (and this is where I have a real problem with e-books and the like)is technology that seeks to concentrate power and control, for example in large companies like Amazon and Apple. E-books are a less universally produced and controlled commodity than paper books (I’d suggest)and so allow concentration of power in the hands of the few. It’s a bit like the ‘control’ debate around GMO’s and small scale, locally produced food. GMO’s is about nothing more than controlling the food chain. E-books (to me) are about nothing more than controlling how people get their reading.
So for me I’ll stick to the peasant grown, soil covered, organic Dark Mountain book. I guess if anyone wants the Monsanto produced Dark Mountain book, enhanced with the DNA from a salmon, that’s for their conscience to decide :)
Cheers
Andy
I’ve lent my DM books to friends, over and over, as well as giving both thumbed and new copies away on occasion. Were I not already prejudiced against e-books, this alone would settle the argument, for me. Since I belatedly cottoned on to the economics of e-publishing, and the way it monopolises further sharing of this kind, I’ve not heard any defense of its claim to be displacing paper that trumps that. More personally, anything that slides over into the digital realm, for me, becomes part of a mushrooming problem – the proportion of this brief life spent staring at plastic. I’d bear no grudge towards an e-DMJ,.but just as happened when the Ecologist went digital (temporarily), I don’t suppose I’d ever get round to looking at it, if I had a choice to hold a hard copy.
This is a great conversation. Thanks everyone!
Just to be crystal clear: if we ever did decide to produce ‘proper’ e-books it would never be as an alternative to print books, but would only be in addition. Speaking personally, I’m very happy at present with our PDF techno-compromise, which seems to give the best of both worlds, as far as that’s ever possible.
Robert – I agree with what you say about the writers (though I disagree about copyright), and if we ever did decide to produce books in e-format too we would have that conversation: indeed, beginning that conversation is the purpose of this post! But like I say, we would never go ‘e-only’. Producing physical books is for me the heart of what this project does. Andy mentioned the Ecologist, a magazine of which I was once deputy editor, and its move to an online-only format (which happened long after I left) was its death knell. It was very sad to see.
It is true, isn’t it, that true poetry can neither be written or read online? I find that very telling. I sometimes think that poetry is the only true form of writing left: it is so resistant to money and marketing and even the Poet Laureate can’t destroy it. That it doesn’t mix with the blingy, quick-read-through digital world should tell us something.
“It is true, isn’t it, that true poetry can neither be written or read online? ”
I subscribe to lots of poetry journals and feel the tyrannical presence of the poet/editor in most of them! Lucky to find 10% of poems I want to read. And my shelves are getting clogged up with mags I only keep for perhaps a single page. Very few are well designed. Some of the online poetry resources are fantastic. Poetry archive etc
I actually find it odd that most major poets only publish a single poem on their websites. Can’t be for financial reasons can it.
In terms of writing them online – I presume you mean on a computer, in Word etc. The last thing a poet needs is twitter messages flashing up as you write, but there is software like Ommwriter which is beautiful to use.
If I use pen and paper I find my diabolical handwriting offends my aesthetic so badly I rarely get to the end of a piece without transferring it to the computer!
Having said that my own personal ambition is to do something along the lines of Armitage’s rain stones. Rocks are the best places to publish poems.
There’s too much noise – on paper and online.
I subscribe to lots of poetry journals and feel the tyrannical presence of the poet/editor in most of them! Lucky to find 10% of poems I want to read. And my shelves are getting clogged up with mags I only keep for perhaps a single page. Very few are well designed. Some of the online poetry resources are fantastic. Poetry archive etc
I actually find it odd that most major poets only publish a single poem on their websites. Can’t be for financial reasons can it.
In terms of writing them online – I presume you mean on a computer, in Word etc. The last thing a poet needs is twitter messages flashing up as you write, but there is software like Ommwriter which is beautiful to use.
If I use pen and paper I find my diabolical handwriting offends my aesthetic so badly I rarely get to the end of a piece without transferring it to the computer!
Having said that my own personal ambition is to do something along the lines of Armitage’s rain stones. Rocks are the best places to publish poems.
There’s too much noise – on paper and online.
Typical – computer said no then published the comment twice . . .
An idea for DM – team up poets with stone carvers and create guerrilla poetry. Stone-carved poems to be left in places, mountain tops, beaches, streets, bridges.
Thats probably how Moses did the shalt nots, and it really is high time somebody had a bash at a good positive collection of shalts.
I rather assumed Paul was being intentionally provocative. Either that or having just come from the eleventh century, was having an attack of romantic balterdoshes.
Technology always demands we come to a conclusion regarding whether we should do something just because we can. Some of the issues regarding ebooks have been aired in the piece, including the way ebooks are currently dominated by Amazon, with their “rental” philosophy, the tactility of physical books, (who would describe an ebook as “beautiful” the way Kelmscott’s “The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer” has been described?) and the sense of loss in the event that ebooks usurp the printed word. As ebook use gains momentum, so the difficulties and cost of making physical books will increase, and as that happens, the longevity of the printed word becomes questionable. Large corporate control of copyright also has an effect here, with extensions to copyright periods almost always for purposes of corporate control allowing books which might survive in the public domain (Project Gutenberg, for instance) becoming unavailable.
Perhaps, like Morris, we need to understand better the changes brought about by the Enlightenment and the Reformation and make a distinction between a physical creation and the ideas that go with them.
And in the meantime, we should make the socio-political and ethical decisions about the way technology is often used to establish control over markets and people in a way that may not be in keeping with the intentions of the original creator of a work. For that reason, DM’s PDF interim option is not a bad one, recognising that the answers are not yet readily apparent. It’s interesting that the PDF format, while being a standard and theoretically universal format, was originally very much under the control of one company, Adobe. Things change quickly in the technology world and we have not yet got to grips with how to manage that change for longevity of content.
For that reason of uncertainty out of our gift, or being imposed externally, it is right to remain cautious, but not timid, regarding the technological changes of our time.
It just occurred to me that i recently heard a recording of the 1953 Under Milk Wood and it started me thinking that i havent heard anyone mention audio.
I guess writers hear it all in their heads before they work it out in writing. I know they are inclined to give readings of their work and i would expect, especially poets, enjoy putting it out in the way they want it to be heard. So is not computer technology fully capable of providing an intimacy that, maybe doesn’t go deeper than the written word, but certainly bypasses the convenient but, i think we are all agreed, somewhat indigestible experience of staring at the plastic light screen?
Of course i am not suggesting an alternative to pdf, e-book, paper book and certainly not stone inscriptions. I just started wondering why we are not talking about it? Recorded songs are big, but the difference between song and poetry is (debatably) the music. We identify strongly with ‘story telling’ and I am sure the festival provides this in the raw. There are also Dark Mountain readings that work as an intro to the books and they sound like fun. Are there recordings?
QL,
“And in the meantime, we should make the socio-political and ethical decisions about the way technology is often used to establish control over markets and people in a way that may not be in keeping with the intentions of the original creator of a work”.
Yes, good point. Rather like Oppenheimer and the Los Alamos project. Good people don’t always do good work.
Morris is well worth a fresh look at. As is Ruskin (more so I think). Their work and thinking has rather fallen out of favour and it’s easy to discredit what they did do (as it is the whole of the Arts and Crafts movement that was inspired by them, amongst other things). In my view they were the right voices at the wrong time (i.e. when the Industrial Revolution was at full throttle). Look at what they said then in the context of where we are now and you get far greater resonance. We’d do well to start thinking along the lines they talked about particularly with regard to human fulfillment.
The other thing I’d argue is that humanity does not only have to look forward. Looking forward is so ‘fossil fuel era’ :)That’s the contemporary view and I think what you suggest in the paragraph I have copied into this comment. There is as much, arguably much more, to be gained by looking back and re-interpreting the best of the past. I’m sure humanity does have a reverse gear.
Cheers
Andy
Andy – yes, to a large extent that’s what I was getting at. However, I think that “looking back” is too easily dismissed and potentially not helpful, so my own view is that we should alter our mindset from one of “progress” to one of “continuity.” The example of the original piece is quite apt, looked at from this point of view, and it may be said that a search for continuity is what Dougald Hine was putting forward.
Re Ruskin, yes, I’d agree he’s worth a look, though in this day and age, his personal life will inevitably get in the way of any analysis of his work and views!
We all love paper books – we seem to agree. I’d miss the smell of a book. I used to pick new reads out in the library by smell – a book that has been well thumbed smells completely different to one that has been abandoned, and thus is likely to be a better read. I wonder if they will ever try to produce an olfactory Kindle?
I shall nonetheless give the digital copy a fair trial, and benefit of the doubt. As you say, it could be a good solution for some people who can’t manage the stamp cost.
QL,
Thanks. Yes, agree his personal life was (er) interesting. Not sure that diminishes the philosophy he was expounding. He did too much astonishingly brilliant work to be easily dismissed. Morris’s life was pretty bonkers at times as well (the anarchists and the pepper for example).
I actually don’t understand what continuity is I’m afraid. If that means the ‘same’ then we are buggered. If it means ‘like the same’ then we again are stuffed. Paul’s talked about crises being the discontinuity that (only ever) creates real change. I’m talking about the intelligent anticipation of crises and then the proactive seeking out of new solutions (in anticipation of this) from ‘the best of the past’s’ learning.
You’re right that ‘looking back’ can be easily dismissed. That does not make it the wrong thing to do though. If you talk about it in general terms then you are leaving yourself open to being dismissed. Talk about it in detailed terms, with examples, and then it starts to come alive. This might arguably be part of where the green movement has gone wrong – it never gave any details !!
So much of contemporary ‘progress’ has done no more than marginalise and alienate huge chunks of society that I suspect there will be people only to willing to listen to a different narrative if told with humility (rather than the over zealous, know it all rants of many in the ‘green movement’) and in some detail. To be simplistic for a minute; a conversation with a man on the street about a great little micro-brewery that has opened would probably be a meaningful one. What is a micro-brewery (generally)if not someone re-interpreting how beer used to be made in the past (locally and arguably using much less energy than the brewing behemoths that we now have)? This re-interpretation process is allowing the micro-brewer to take the very best of the experiences of the past (be that quality ingredients from small producers, the sheer joy of actually making a craft produced product, selling through small, independent outlets, dealing with the consumer face to face and adopting the brew to suit individual tastes, etc, etc). More ‘alive’ than any big brewer’s story, and far more relevant to an age of diminishing resources I’d argue too.
Cheers
Andy
Cheers
Andy
Andy –
“I’m talking about the intelligent anticipation of crises and then the proactive seeking out of new solutions (in anticipation of this) from ‘the best of the past’s’ learning.”
The second part probably means that we need to position change in relation to experience to determine its goodness. But the first part plays to one of a human being’s weaknesses – we really aren’t very good at anticipating crises. I would suggest the security researcher Bruce Schneier as a good source for documented instances of how hard we find understanding real risk versus imagined risk.
But I suspect that we are saying similar things. Continuity builds on where we are, or where we have been, while for some reason we like to think of step-changes in life as being significant (they really are often only step changes with hindsight.) We tend to elevate significant points in history to the detriment of understanding the build-ups to those notable peaks, for example. Regarding the issue under discussion, I travelled a lot in the mid 90s, and used to use my old Palm Pilot (remember those?) with e-books from Project Gutenberg, though we did not call them e-books, or refer to the Palm as an e-book reader. Now, 20 years later, we are wrestling with the potential of the “recent” phenomenon of the rise of e-books to do damage to the known-good aspects of physical books. At the sam time, we often deplore the environmental aspects of tree felling for the paper pulp industry. Which is the worse “crisis?”
Re the example of the micro-brewery, I would suggest that the micro-brewery would be a Ruskian response, while Morris’s response could be the path I choose – to brew my own beer, at home.
Back to “progress,” though. The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers made astonishing progress across a swathe of thought and ideas, yet even at the time, some were concerned that they had taken a wrong turn at some early point, and built upon the presumptions of that wrong turning. By that time, the genie was well and truly uncorked, and there was no way back. We still seem to give way to the concept of progress to such an extent that change is assumed to be progress. Sometimes, it’s just change, and only our handling that change positively is the progress we should accept. From the original piece – “It seemed to us that the eBook was not a technological improvement, but a poorer substitute…” That statement may or may not be true, but it is a valid conclusion to draw at present.
I can see how our history has been rushed along by perceived progress whether we like it or not. The changes large, small, coerced or consequential, seem to come in steps that we inevitably have to make the best of, whatever best might mean to us as time passes. There is never a decent plan encompassing the all round good, although the Moors of Southern Spain had a good shot at it for some hundreds of years and it seems had a good organic based culture helped along by an advanced low technology that was successful enough to support a culture where the concept of art was applied to widespread functions but who of us knows anything of that or what happened to it. Where are the books? We know what happened next: The Inquisition, and the lust for gold.
Intelligent responses to the flood and flow of bullshit that passes for our european colonial based efforts, the Ruskins, Morrises, and Ghandis are more easily seen in the perspective of hindsight as they can then be weighed against the failures they were seeking to avert, whilst during their time they were sadly only recognised and valued by special interest groups. This has long been the case while the mainstream carry a gung ho banner of benefit from progress.
But all this would seem to me to be taking on a more confused and volatile pattern as the sheer weight of acceleration and crisis telescopes information and events into our present time. There do seem to me to be a lot of people out there who are saying “What the fuck” and how would i get to know that since i am way out of the mainstream? Am i just aware of the special interest groups. Or is this some kind of groundswell of discontent looking for a substantial sense of new meaning that could readily be found in the ‘best of the past’. We don’t for the time being, practically speaking, need wooden wheels to move our water but the technology and skills employed to make one is an enormously satisfying turn on for someone wanting the satisfaction of using his hands. Also a neo-peasant existence of shared responsibilities and no thugs dragging the pigs off to the castle is not simply, not so bad, but downright satisfying, if you can get it, especially if it includes information technology.
Sadly, around here, we don’t have micro breweries and if i had the time i would more than likely have a shot at it myself. But the farmers all make their own wine which they all rate as the best, though most of it i would personally not touch with a donkeys tail. I do though, know one guy who makes comparatively excellent wine and i trade him.
Back on the subject of books…We don’t rally need so many books. A great many books are crap anyway and would be superfluous in a more intelligent society and as we have agreed, they can be passed around and borrowed and could be the basis of a wide ranging small industry that would be akin to and arguably as important as micro breweries. A localised fibre industry based on plants such as hemp could provide plenty of pulp and be positively reconstructive for farm land. Proper sewage systems could also provide pulp for local paper industries. We anyway need to plant forests and whilst major trees are left to their long term cycles, shepherd trees for coppice provide materials for all manner of low tech needs…..There is a lot of stuff that is doable, blah blah, and whether it gets taken up by the mainstream, by way of ‘transition projects’ we shall see. Yes of course they need details. Anyone talking theory who can’t come up with relevant details that hang together to make a substantial picture is whistling in the wind. which is pretty much what progress is doing anyway.
Jim,
I think you are absolutely spot on. Especially regarding the groundswell of discontent. It seems simple to me (that this should be the case); the more you exclude people, the more they will look at other ways of existing. There’s always a time lag but it is happening…………and it’s the simple stuff we need.
Cheers
Andy
Interesting conundrum. Here’s a bit’o Virilio and his concerns: http://fields.eca.ac.uk/deaua/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/virilio.pdf
Pen or computer, I would just like to have seen the article edited for grammar before its being pulished.
*published* lol
Ah excellent, thanks a lot for this! I’m extremely pleased about the ebooks. I’ve enjoyed your first couple of festivals and the first book, but I’ve not been able to read the others. I can see why it would be a contentious issue for Dark Mountain and I love real books as much as most people, but for some of us, homeless wanderers such as myself, ebooks are the only way we can read them. I’m the other side of the world from home for the next few years, travelling while it’s still feasible and gradually trying to learn practical skills and the craft of forest gardening. I don’t know where I’ll end up yet (I don’t plan to return to live in the overcrowded over-urbanised UK) and I’ve chosen never to learn to drive. In my circumstances, buying books while journeying by bicycle is impractical, but I can carry tens of thousands of books on my mobile phone and charge that by cycling through my dynamo.
Another argument that occurred to me for also having the ebook copies is additional resilience. Books last a long time and ebooks are reliant on electronics and electricity. However, I can imagine possible circumstances where future disruptions and crisises (climate, resource depreciation, economical collapse, ect) could force some people to flee their homes and books at short notice, perhaps for good, and having ebooks emailed to oneself or carrying a smaller-than-fingernail-sized Micro-SD card with a library on could be good back-ups to still access them.
I suggest you should keep them available electronically and hope you do the same for volume 4 and future volumes. Pdfs are fine for me personally. Sorry that I couldn’t afford to pay much for the first volume which I’m re-reading now, but I’ll try and contribute more for the others in future.
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