But for what it’s worth, I’m glad that Random House sealed the deal with Penguin. Penguin is a great resource, with those distinctive, lovely orange spined paperback volumes and their focus on classics and should be classics (not that I always agree with their choices for the latter). And it might have been nice if they’d stayed on their own, the British-based bastion. But when I heard that Rupert Murdoch might be getting his culture crushing, deceptive, and just plain nastily evil arthritic claws on Penguin, I was horrified.
Bertlesmann (Random House’ parent company) is broad-based German media company and while anyone should be nervous at the idea of 25% of publishing being controlled by one company, it’s not nearly so unnerving as the monopoly on distribution that Amazon is in the process of constructing. And the europhile in me trusts a German company to be better caretakers of the cultural ideal and symbolism that books possess. I trust Rupert Murdoch and News Corp to publish risible editorial opinions, tap my phone, and lie to my face. See the difference?
But there other, more depressing ways to view this whole thing.
I point to this piece only to note what c–p it is.
‘In the face of the openness and honest labor of engineers, the priestly class closed ranks.’
So, authors and publishers were the ‘priestly class’ (Pharisees?) interfering with these yeoman engineers. Nothing at all about the fact that their intellectual property, which is also their economic property, was being put online to used however one like without the creator having any ability to control its publication nor receive compensation. And a (I don’t say the) reason, let’s face it, was for Google to make money. To make Google to source for one more thing (literature), thereby making their ad sales that much more valuable.
The essayist tries to create the unsubstantiated straw man argument that the ‘priestly class’ acted out of some kind of luddism, a refusal to accept change (some pointless crap about literature becoming data; correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t ‘data’ really just information, knowledge? and was there ever an argument that, Great Expectations, for example, contained words which conveyed information and knowledge?), when it was actually about something far closer to theft of future economic value.
I wanted to draw your attention to the iPhone photo I took of Monday’s WSJ. Keep in mind, this was on page one of the Marketplace section.
Now read that second paragraph. Let it roll on your tongue.
What if the social-networking company is able to scoop up a few dollars per user per month, instead of the paltry few cents it does now?
Now, let’s play mad libs to show just how god awful stupid this formulation is.
What if I could c–p solid gold, instead of the feces I do now?
What if McDonald’s employees made a million dollars a month, instead of the minimum wage they do now?
What if Todd Akin were a rational human being, instead of the brainless misogynist he is now?
You can do this all freaking day.
So yes, Wall Street Journal writer, what if? What if something that’s true now, were very different in some future time? Things would be different, wouldn’t they? I should write that down in case I forget: ‘Note to self – if things change in the future, things will also be different.’ That’s some mind-blowing stuff. I hope someone gets paid money to publish it.
the coffee philosopher 