Creative Destruction, By the Book
Double
Fold:
By now we are all familiar with the destructive power of technology. We are especially familiar with the havoc it can wreak on the distribution of information. And finally, we are all familiar with Luddites.
It's tempting to stop right there in assessing Nicholson Baker's Double Fold. Here's a man who is worried about the fate of, for instance, old issues of a Laramie, Wyoming, newspaper called Republic and Boomerang. A man whose distrust of technology begins with microfilm. Here's a man, you could say, who is stuck in the past. Who cares what he has to say about information's future?
Baker is a novelist and essayist whose work — The Mezzanine, Vox and others — is remarkable for its obsessiveness. This quality, it turns out, serves him well in Double Fold, an impassioned, book-length argument, and a surprisingly persuasive one; it’s a pleasure to find Baker’s formidable command of language unleashed in the service of something truly substantial. Beyond his immediate plea to halt the removal of newspapers and certain old books from library shelves in near-"bibliectomies," he has something to tell us about our simple faith that the new will invariably prove better than the old. We’ll return to that momentarily, but first let’s pause on the specific case at hand.
In libraries, the contest is a fairly straightforward one. For decades, the question has been: Which is better? Physical copies of books, journals, magazines, newspapers? Or miniaturized reproductions of them, captured on film, or perhaps on optical disks or other formats? Well, that hardly seems a contest at all. The miniature copies, on microfilm and so on, are easier to store, easier to transport, and far more durable. They contain the same information, and yet they are not turning to dust like the dying old pages they replace. The future works better and the past takes up a bunch of space; why not just junk it?
It is Baker’s belief, fervently held and expressed, that almost all of this is wrong. Much of what is said to be disintegrating simply isn’t, which is why old newspaper runs chucked out by libraries are often bought by knick-knackers who fillet them and sell their "vintage" advertising and other parts. "Librarians have lied shamelessly about the extent of paper’s fragility" for some fifty years, Baker charges.
He goes on to share many astonishing stories of the fiascos that followed, tales that include mummy-burning, at least one explosion, and a brief cameo by APANET creator J.C.R. Licklider. This is all good reading, but the main villain is the advance of microfilm, which is unarguably more space-efficient, and seemingly more durable. But apart from aesthetic questions of how well microfilm really duplicates the experience of reading physical paper, there’s the more troubling fact that a lot of early microfilm has, for various reasons, deteriorated to a state of unreadability. Baker says the change agents of the library world would have been better off doing nothing.
In our current backlashy times, "we would have been better off doing nothing" is an argument we are likely to hear a lot of. But one of the interesting lessons here is not that librarians are evil people bent on ruination — as the bad guys (and gals) in Baker’s narrative sometimes seem to be — but that it's just plain hard to sit back and do nothing. Many of us have a tendency to romanticize, and maybe even fetishize, new technologies, which seem like the very essence of progress. By way of explaining what motivated Microfilm's early zealots, Baker borrows a phrase from the former editor of Microform Review and notes that they were "blind as lovers" to the fallibility of the newfangled medium. This is a handy idea: Even if Baker is right that they were willfully deceptive, it's hard not to believe that these people meant well.
Even so, it's good for the forces of change to run up against resistance and be asked to prove that they will make things better, not merely different. Baker means well, too, and in the end his struggle strikes me as heroic. (He does have kind words, by the way, for the digital duplications produced by Adobe CEO John Warnock’s Octavo Corporation, www.octavo.com.) As Baker has it: "The truth is that certain purificationally destructive transformations of old things into new things seem to excite people — otherwise polite, educated, law-abiding people — and it's up to other normally polite people to try to stop them."
Change has a way of associating itself with lofty
missions, grand visions and highfalutin ideas. Baker reminds us of something
easily forgotten in the heat of creative destruction: Creativity can be
amorphous take a long time to prove itself, but destruction is immediate,
and forever.
A shorter version of this review appeared in the April 16, 2001, issue of The Industry Standard.
