The Blind Giant (26 page)

Look again at the study Nicholas Carr points to which says that playing computer games and reading documents online foster an editorial and problem-solving faculty: what do those skills imply but an ability to cope with a world that was already becoming saturated with information, already out of control? The engaged use of digital technology teaches skills and creates architectures in the brain that are helpful in dealing with problems we already had when it became part of the world in the 1990s. Digital technology provides ways of using all the time we have, of being in more than one place at a time. It lets us adapt rapidly to changing situations: to call from the roadside to say we won’t make a given appointment because we’ve broken down, or to exchange information in a more serious crisis such as the London riots. It’s a way of managing time and space and of overcoming distance. It allows us to find people who are like us whom we otherwise would never know, which puts us back in a social context that we as humans actually do need, and which the nature of our society in the aftermath of
the Enlightenment’s application of doubt to its central pillars renders difficult. Digital
brings its own problems – our weaknesses are adaptive, as well as our strengths – but it is a strategy we evolved to resolve a set of crises we already had, and which are still playing out, rather more than it is the cause of a new one.

Imagine for a moment that the sense data you experience all the time – your sight, hearing, sense of balance and so on – arrived ten minutes late. You wouldn’t, for a start, be able to walk; the human method of locomotion requires that we fall forward and catch ourselves all the time. Balance is crucial (ask anyone who’s ever had Labyrinthitis). You probably wouldn’t be able to stand; even tiny variations in your posture would cause you to fall before you realized they’d taken place. Conversation and debate in real time would be almost impossible unless you were supremely gifted at synchronizing with the other person. It’s not clear that you’d continue to think in the same way as you do now; gradually you would become isolated, your priorities would shift. In the modern world, you’d be able to continue to function as a human being by using a computer to relay messages to others, but until the 1990s you’d have been reduced to writing letters to communicate with others in a linear way. You might easily go mad.

And yet this is the situation in which our society has been up to this point. The feedback from our collective actions has been too slow to understand and too late to do anything about. The vast collective strength we have has been rendered almost useless by the slow speed of our senses. Only when we have been enraged or assailed, when the state of affairs has been so unequivocal that we’ve been able to recognize it and hold fast to that understanding, have we been able to bring to bear even a fraction of the strength we have. In other words, the giant has been blind.

Digitization changes that in a remarkable way: we are abruptly able to appreciate what’s happening in something approximating real time. Our whole society is suddenly in the position of the
motorist seeing the sign displaying his speed. We’re not used to the flow of
feedback information, so it feels too fast, too much, too raw, at least when we don’t know what to do with it. Often, the statement of a problem arrives without a solution attached, and we don’t yet have a developed instinct towards solving it; that is, after all, what we have been taught to expect from our governments, though their track record is less than perfect. Increasingly, however, solutions are presented: collective actions such as the Riot Wombles or protests like the
Occupy movement. As we get better at understanding that the solutions must come from us, and at creating them from the ideas of a crowd, remarkable things are possible.

Several nations now consider Net access to be a human right, because the dialogue taking place online is adjudged sufficiently fundamental to the society we now have that deprival of it is a form of disenfranchisement. It makes for great tabloid headlines, and it strikes me as a contingent right rather than a fundamental one, but there’s an element of truth in the position. To be out of the loop now is to be to some extent out of the greatest discussion ever conducted. It is to be unrepresented in the creation of a new public sphere, a space where new identities and self-perceptions are being made.

If the development of writing and the spread of literacy were part of the creation of the modern mind, allowing individual humans to see themselves as complete and separate from their environment and the institutions of their time, then the development of digital technology does something similar for our understanding of ourselves as part of a larger group entity. It’s not that humanity is on the road to becoming a gestalt organism in which we are no more than unconscious cells, like the tiny individual animals that make up the body of a Portuguese man o’ war. Rather, it’s that we are aware of ourselves both as discrete persons, and as contributors to the interplay of forces that goes to make up the body sociopolitic. A fully functioning body
of this kind can, of course, achieve remarkable things, such as the NHS, or the US space programme. It is a mistake to think of such involvement as a kind of appalling servitude; there’s no implied diminution of the self in being a part of something greater; in fact, the evidence suggests that the reverse is true. It’s entirely in keeping with being human and how human-ness developed. Certainly it may be necessary to meet the challenges we have set ourselves and which the wider world will set for us.

It may also be true that the arrival of digital text alters how we think about the world in general. A world constructed on static, printed text is a world of received truth, hierarchical arrangements of society and laws that are, if not unalterable, at least securely fixed. It requires radical social pressure to force those in power to change the rules. By contrast, a world where text is editable and fluid is a world where laws can be rewritten not only by parliaments, but at the behest of the general population. Regulations are no longer understood as divine edicts, but as the written product of other human beings subject to the approval and rewriting of us all. This produces a culture that can seem over-indulgent towards its own sense of entitlement, but it’s also a culture that understands that law is made by consent, not decree, and that a political system constructed on the idea of representation in the seat of power should require representatives actually to be responsive to the desires and opinions of those for whom they stand rather than be benignly paternalistic.

What makes the biggest impact is perhaps the timescale of it all, not least because other timescales are also shortening. Just as medical research regularly uncovers possibilities that would have seemed miraculous even twenty years ago, so social change that was previously generational can be effected on a scale an individual human being can understand and appreciate – and aim for. Seeing one’s own part in the pattern is not disempowering, but
the reverse. And the ability to see where we’re going – or at least where we are now – affords the chance, for the first time in human social history, to start making real decisions.

I
’VE BEEN AROUND
the UK publishing industry effectively for my entire life. I sat in on discussions about book jackets and paperback royalties and the rest from before I could walk. I have had a worm’s eye view of some very interesting moments. Mercifully, I don’t remember specifics, but I do have a sense of the arc of the modern publishing story, and it seems to me that it is a useful microcosm of the wider context as culture, politics and society have moved through three fairly distinct stages (albeit with my perpetual caveat that nothing is clear-cut any more, if it ever was, and there are pockets of the old in the new and vice versa) or styles of doing business which you could think of as personal, professional and participatory.

In the old days – by which I mean the time when my mother’s corduroy trousers were my personal Pillars of Hercules, demarking the edges of the known world – publishing was a family industry. It was deeply embedded in local culture and social life, to the extent that publishers fretted that a given book might be too racy for the family shareholders, who would have to own up to printing something so filthy as
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
to their friends at the bridge club. D.H. Lawrence’s book was written in 1928, but was banned in the UK for over thirty years; even after that, you could still get ostracized for pushing the envelope of social acceptability. Publishing lived in pre-emptive fear of a collection of almost Wodehousian aunts and spinster sisters. The industry in Britain was essentially upper middle class, white, and
based not just in London but in a particular area of the city, although Edinburgh also boasted a number of independent presses. It was premised on the taste and judgement of a vanishingly small number of people, who effectively defined ‘good’ writing for the rest. You could see the defining feature of this style of working as personality: the identity of a publishing house was defined by the managing editor, who was in today’s term curating a selection of works that accorded with his (almost always) understanding of what was good and intelligent and worth putting out there.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, the operating environment changed. Publishing started getting treated as a business. Giants emerged and bought up the small houses, and a corporate culture was imported, although with only partial success. Publishing became a hybrid as the demands of business culture – making money, trimming excessive running costs, publishing on a regular schedule, making the maximum amount of money out of a given property – were grafted on to the long-lunch lifestyle of old publishing. Contracts, which in the 1960s could be a single page release, became lengthy legal documents. Serious marketing practices were brought in, and a publicity machine capable of some impressive hype was born. Celebrity biographies that might previously have been considered coarse and pointless were all the rage. The
Net Book Agreement was killed so that huge chains – essentially the supermarkets – could take advantage of economies of scale and bulk purchase to sell books more cheaply.

But the relaxed culture proved resilient. Publishing is still partly what it was; when I mentioned my Aunt Theory recently in conversation, one publisher from a major imprint flinched slightly and said not much had changed in that regard. Where Hollywood studios spend millions on testing movies before release and working out the demographics of their audience, it’s unusual for a print publisher to research who is buying a given
book, or to test it in advance in any formal way. The focus group simply isn’t a part of the landscape. Publishers were and are also unlikely to buy merchandizing rights, which movie studios will always do so that they can capitalize on every aspect of a film property – a lesson learned hard at the hands of one
George Lucas, who waived his director’s fee on
Star Wars
in exchange for the rights to the T-shirts and the toys, not, as he freely admits, because he thought they’d be a goldmine, but because he wanted to be able to publicize the film. As you might imagine, he more than recouped his loss leader.
¹

But the book trade has been, if not a little sniffy about that kind of exploitation, then at least less adventurous. There are working hours in publishing, but they are not measured in the way law firms budget the time of their fee earners and partners. When my wife was a commercial lawyer, her day was broken into a sequence of chargeable units, and she accounted for each unit at the end of every month so that she could bill her clients. A unit was six minutes. (Something to bear in mind if you should have cause to hire a lawyer: don’t spend six minutes talking politely about the weather every time you call – it may appear on your bill.) This extreme version of payment by time – made possible by the mechanical clock, of course – imposes the professional imprint on the mind from the moment of waking to the last thought at night. Six minutes is a short enough period that no hole in the schedule need be wasted in idleness. All but the smallest gap can be converted into money. The day becomes a sequence of slots and increments to be managed, each fragment can be owned by or charged to someone, and the division between fragments is rigid and precise. Publishing – understandably, perhaps – hasn’t gone that far. All the same, the ethos of the post-1990 house is professionalism.

While everyone was still struggling with the shift to mainstream business practice, another revolution took place. The flying saucer of digital technology crashed into the waving cornfield
of the book world and set quite a lot of it on fire. It took a while for the industry to accept this was happening, because books were protected by their design and by the fact that the paper book is actually a refined and usable technology with much to recommend it. When my first novel
The Gone-Away World
came out in 2008,
ebooks were still considered to be a possible but not definite future. It was hard to get anyone to pay any attention to them, although almost everyone would acknowledge that they might become something at some point. Perhaps in a decade or so. If the wind was blowing in the right direction. Now, of course, they’ve arrived, and the industry is playing a certain amount of catch-up; not just with the implications for the supply chain and the arrival of large, scary new kids on the
publishing block in the form of
Amazon, Google, Apple and others, but also with coming to understand that the heart and soul of the Internet is participation.

Publishing is traditionally a business which sells to other businesses – books go from publisher to wholesaler to bookseller. Actual publishers rarely dealt directly with consumers. Digital technology’s arrival has inevitably meant a lot of walls coming crashing down, and suddenly, whether they want to or not, publishers are in a relationship with the general public, with all the strangeness, frustration and waywardness that entails. It is publishers who must deal with reported (and unstoppable) violations of intellectual property, and whose existing business habits are scattered to the four winds by the arrival of the Net. The most obvious example is probably hardback and paperback publication. Customarily, books are published in two or sometimes three formats: hardback at a premium price for those who just can’t wait or who want a display edition for their shelves; and later paperback, which can be two releases: a soft-backed edition using pages printed to the same pattern as the hardback’s, followed by a mass-market edition in a smaller size.