Joel J. Miller’s The Idea Machine – A Fascinating History of Books

I have been a subscriber to Joel Miller’s excellent Substack, Miller’s Book Review for a couple of years. He never fails to pique my interest in whatever he’s reading, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s a hell of a good writer. So, I was very pleased when he announced that Prometheus Books had agreed to publish his book, The Idea Machine. It’s premise is very simple: How have books changed the world, and what is the history of them? As Miller writes on page 1:

The book, as I argue in the pages ahead, is one of the most important but overlooked factors in the making of the modern world. Why this lack of appreciation – or even awareness? Arguably, the book is a victim of its own success. Familiarity usually breeds more neglect than contempt. We fail to recognize the book for what it is: a remarkably potent information technology, an idea machine.

So begins Miller’s history and appreciation for the written word. He starts at the beginning with ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets, through ancient Greek and Roman ways of storing and retrieving information on scrolls, the development of codices in Christian medieval Europe, to the explosion of books made possible by the printing press. Along the way, I learned all kinds of fascinating facts.

I did not know that the books written on scrolls in ancient times did have the commonplace things we take for granted that make reading easy, namely spaces between words and punctuation. Because of this, reading and understanding a text took a lot of energy and intellectual effort. Roman elites had literate slaves read books to them, and it was unheard of to read a book silently. The ancient Romans were not interested in having as many literate people as possible, because the ability to read denoted higher class. 

It wasn’t until the reign of Charlemagne that Christian monks and nuns took it upon themselves to create schools to teach reading to the masses. Christianity differed from paganism in that it was grounded in texts that were shared, copied, and disseminated as much as possible. 

If there is a thread running through the entire book (besides the history and development of the book as an information technology), it’s the various ways cultures developed to catalog the information contained in large collections of books. Scrolls were very unwieldy when it came to quickly finding a desired passage; the codex, which consisted of pages that were bound together like our familiar books today, was much better at yielding up its information. Once the printing press made books easy to produce, the problem became one of organizing and cataloging the huge amount of information that was available. Until the advent of digital computers, the best people could do was analog card catalogs, encyclopedias, and indices. Miller makes the case that with AI, we are on the verge of another breakthrough on a par with the printing press. AI will allow users to quickly find and summarize relevant works. 

If you’re wondering why Christendom quickly passed Islamic culture in terms of innovation and creativity, it’s because Muslim leaders banned the printed word, while Europe embraced it. As more and more ideas were written, printed, and spread, they led to even more ideas and insights. Thus, books were carriers of “viral” thoughts and theories that generated more creativity from their consumers. Areas under Muslim control missed out on this, because of their insistence on using hand-copied manuscripts. 

The Idea Machine also has a chapter on how Thomas Jefferson’s buying books in Europe and sending them to James Madison back in the American colonies had a profound effect on the writing of the United States’ constitution. Another interesting chapter relates the struggles enslaved blacks underwent to learn how to read and write. The southern plantation owners it quickly realized that if slaves could read, their entire economic system was at risk of collapse.

Miller includes lots of illustrations throughout The Idea Machine (see the above depiction of Pliny the Elder for an example), as well as a “Marginalia” at the end of each chapter. These Marginalia focus on one or two specific examples that expand on the theme of the previous chapter, and are always entertaining.

I love books, and reading has given much pleasure. I still remember how excited I was to be able to read a simple story in first grade. All of a sudden, entire worlds were opened to me. As Miller remarks in his chapter on the novel, 

Novels provide temporary leave of our specificity, an escape from the enclosed space of ourselves, the prison of our popular psychology. Literature brings us into the lives of others. If only for a few hours, we can appreciate their motivations and values; we can see what drives them, inspires them, and repels them. We can take the place of someone radically different from ourselves and engage the world as that self. (Page 254)

The Idea Machine is a wonderful history and analysis of books as a technology – without them, it’s doubtful human civilization would have ever gotten off the ground. Miller takes what could have been a dry and boring subject and turns it into an exciting tale of invention and discovery. Along the way, the reader gets to meet some of the most entertaining personalities in history. Any lover of books should add this one to their library.

 

 

 

Christine Rosen -The Extinction of Experience

Book number 52 of 2024

This book makes a good trilogy with Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy. Like them, it documents the alarming effects social media and other technologies have on our society. As Rosen writes in the introduction,

Our understanding of experience has become disordered, in ways large and small. More and more people mistrust their own experiences. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus. (p.2)

Like the late Neil Postman, author of Technopoly, who foresaw many of the problems technology would bring us, Rosen calls us to be aware of the biases each and every technology includes. Technology can provide wonderful benefits, but they always come at a cost.

Chapter 1, You Had To Be There, takes its title from the old cliché people used when lamely trying to recount some funny or dramatic experience. According to Google Ngram, the use of that phrase steadily rose in popularity from the 1960s to 2012, when it dropped precipitously. 2012 is also the year smartphone ownership saw its largest growth. Thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, et al., you don’t have to be there – vicariously watching a video is a good enough substitute, apparently.

Every day our experiences are guided by what we say and do online. Anyone with an Internet connection can see more vicarious experiences in one day than previous generations witnessed in a lifetime, and on a scale far greater than television or film provided. Is it any surprise that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is real and what isn’t, both online and IRL [In Real Life]? For an increasing number of us many of our memories are now of experiences that occurred online. (page 24)

Chapter 2 is titled Facing One Another. In it, Rosen argues for the importance of face-to-face communication. Humans have evolved into incredibly sensitive readers of small visual clues. If person-to-person communication is mediated by a technology, we lose those clues. For people who might be motivated to deceive others, that can be an advantage! For the rest of us, interacting with someone virtually makes it hard to measure the trustworthiness of him or her.

However, there seems to be a growing trend of people preferring less human contact. From self-checkout at the grocery store (I’m guilty of preferring this) to ordering from iPads at a restaurant to computerized hospital discharging, more and more tasks are being automated.

The flip side of this is the fact that companies are realizing that incidental in-person interaction is both cost-saving and productive. The exchange of ideas during a casual conversation can not be replicated in a videoconference.

Chapter 3, Hand To Mouse, is about the importance of authentic handwriting.

But we lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills (as we will see), and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another. We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word. We lose the ability to read the words of the dead. (page 58-59)

Interestingly, young children who learn and master handwriting become better readers. Once students are older, handwriting notes leads to better retention of content than typing them. As adults lose the ability to write in cursive, they may lose valuable cognitive skills.

Likewise, working with your hands is important.

The act of manipulating a tool or of drawing a bow across a string forces us to feel and do simultaneously, and the more skilled we become at the act, the less we have to think about what we are doing. (page 69)

I agree with this from personal experience. I have been designing and putting together stained glass windows for almost thirty years now, and when I get into “the flow” of a project, times passes without my having any sense of it.

Chapter 4 is How We Wait, and it is about how impatient we have become when faced with a line or a wait. Companies measure how long it takes their websites to load, down to the millisecond, because an extra three or four milliseconds mean lost sales and customers.

Rosen posits that filling every waking moment with distraction and entertainment via our devices robs us of valuable downtime that used to lead to daydreaming and free association.

Coping with boredom involves self-regulation. We must decide what to do with the feeling, so we counter desultory everyday experiences by reaching for technologies with assiduous abilities to distract us – so many distractions, each one a siren’s island where attention might founder. In effect, our devices eliminate boredom not by teaching us how to cope with it but by outsourcing our attention so we don’t have to cope with it. (page 95)

I found this chapter relatable – whenever I am in a situation where I am asked to wait, such as a doctor’s waiting area, I resist the temptation to pull out my phone. Instead, I use the time to collect my thoughts, focus on my surroundings and the people around me, and just relax. I am usually the only person not looking at a screen.

Chapter 5 is The Sixth Sense. This refers to our perception of our own and others’ emotions. In other words, our empathy. Unfortunately, most social media platforms amplify negative emotions like anger and hate, because they garner the most engagement. Meanwhile, researchers are developing ways of monitoring our emotional states, so that we can be more productive employees or more easily manipulated consumers.

What kind of world will this be once we have outsourced the job of emotional reflection? Pentland [MIT researcher] says this will be a “sensible” society where “everything is arranged for your convenience.” No need for inefficiencies or embarrassments of a bad second date. One day soon, perhaps, with sensors embedded on our bodies or phones, they will signal us within moments whether our affection is likely to be returned or not, and we can move on. As a representative from Google told a reporter, “We like to say a phone has eyes, ears, skin, and a sense of location…It’s always with you in your pocket or purse. It’s next to you when you’re sleeping. We really want to leverage that.” Eventually the sensors will take on the work of emotional awareness for us, if we let them. (page 131)

What is looming on the horizon are apps that can “read” your emotional state, as well as the state of the person you’re interacting with. Do we want to know if someone doesn’t like talking to us, while we’re talking with them? Do we want others to know our true feelings for them, 24/7?

Chapter 6 is Mediated Pleasures. First, the pleasure of travel is being transformed by technology. Instead of leaving home behind for a new, albeit temporary, adventure, we stay connected to our family and friends, sharing every stage of the journey. Travel is now tourism, which is very different. People are so busy trying to document their trips that they never truly experience them.

According to Rosen, other pleasures that technology has disrupted/corrupted include viewing fine art, sex (of course), games, and even food. In our enjoyment of all these things, the mediation of technology robs us of the visceral sensations we experience when we partake of them in real life. People take more pictures than ever of their experiences, yet they remember less and less of them. I know that one of the most annoying things about going to a concert these days are all the audience members who insist on recording the entire show on their phones. They can’t possibly be enjoying the actual performance, and I can’t imagine them taking the time to watch the concert again on a small screen.

The seventh and final chapter is Place, Space, and Serendipity. In it, Rosen is careful to distinguish between place and space. A place is somewhere people can gather and socialize face-to-face – where serendipitous encounters can take place, like in a neighborhood pub or restaurant. A space is an engineered area that can be real or virtual, but it is not conducive to relaxed and spontaneous interaction.

We are in the process of trading the spatial and social cues that once defined a particular place – a public square, for example, or a local meeting spot – for a more seamless and less physically bounded experience of space engineered by technology companies. The promise is a more efficient delivery of “engineered serendipity”, but the reality may end up being a more predictable homogeneity. (page 186)

I wish that I could say Rosen has suggestions for how to counter the deleterious effects of al this technological mediation, but she really doesn’t, other than going Amish and eschewing technology altogether. Her book is an important one, in that it is a clear-eyed warning of the path down which our society is headed. I’m nearing retirement age; the near future won’t affect me that much. I do worry about the world people under the age of 25 will have to navigate, though.

Neal Stephenson’s Fall: Life after Death, or Death after Death?

This is going to be a relatively long post, because it’s about a massive tome: Neal Stephenson’s Fall, or Dodge In Hell, which clocks in at 892 pages! As a matter of fact, it’s been sitting on my bookshelf since it first was published in 2019, intimidating me with its length.

I’ve been a fan of Neal Stephenson’s work since 1999 when Cryptonomicon came out. That sprawling novel bounced back and forth between WWII action and the late 90s, involving computer science, cryptography, and cryptocurrency. It was like nothing else I had read. I immediately picked up his Baroque Trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) which is a rollicking tale of how Isaac Newton, Gottfried Liebniz, and other characters came to establish our modern world. It encompasses England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, Louis IV’s attempts to conquer Europe, and some strange alchemical gold attributed to King Solomon that might have the ability to prolong life indefinitely. What is most fun are the ancestors of characters in Cryptonomicon showing up in major roles in the trilogy. The Waterhouse and Shaftoe families end up making cameos in several later novels, including Fall, or Dodge In Hell.

Stephenson is not afraid to span decades of time in his novels, and even though Fall is initially set in 2019, it soon jumps twenty years. The “Dodge” in the subtitle is Richard “Dodge” Forthrast, a billionaire who developed an incredibly popular online game, T’rain. We first met Dodge in a previous novel, Reamde. As a matter of fact, Fall could best be thought of as the sequel to Reamde.

Dodge goes to the doctor for a very routine medical procedure, where, for some unexplained reason, things go terribly awry, and he is pronounced brain dead. His loyal and trusted colleague, Corvallis “C-plus” Kawasaki, is the executor of his will, which stipulates that he is supposed to be cryogenically preserved until technology exists to map all of his neuron connections – his connectome – to some sort of digital server.

One of Stephenson’s quirks as a writer is to take side trips that superficially seem to have no bearing on the actual plot, but I love them. The first several pages of Fall are devoted to Dodge half-asleep in bed wondering why the length of time during his phone’s snooze function lasts exactly nine minutes, which leads him to consider the benefits of naps that allow him to drift off into dream sleep but not deep sleep, which then leads him into wondering about those muscle spasms that occur just when you’re about to fall asleep…. These tangents can be irritating or entertaining; I choose the latter, because they’re often quite humorous:

Pompitus Bombasticus was Richard’s favorite group. Apparently it was just one guy working alone in a studio in Germany; the philharmonic, the choir, and all the rest were faked with synthesizers. This guy had noticed, some years ago, that all inexpensive horror movies used the same piece of music—Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—in their soundtracks. That opus had become a cliché, more apt to induce groans or laughs than horror. This German, who had been living the starving-artist lifestyle while trying to establish a career as a DJ, had been struck by an insight that had transformed his career: the filmmakers of the world were manifesting an insatiable demand for a type of music of which Carmina Burana was the only existing specimen. The market (if the world of composers and musicians could be thought of as such) was failing to respond to that demand. Why not then begin to make original music that sounded like the soundtrack of the sort of movie scene in which Carmina Burana inevitably played? It didn’t have to sound exactly like Carmina Burana but it needed to evoke the same feelings.

Stephenson, Neal. Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel (p. 26). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Stephenson is a fascinating predictor of our near-future. Twenty years after his death, Dodge’s grand niece, Sophia, is a student at Princeton, and America as we know is unrecognizable. She and some friends are planning a trip to the west coast, and they decide to make a detour to visit some of her relatives in Iowa. Outside of the interstate highways and the major cities is “Ameristan”, which is populated by different tribes of people, like the Leviticans, who adhere to the strictures of the Old Testament book Leviticus. Sophia and her friends stop at a Levitican gathering, and they have to change clothes, because of the biblical injunction that no one is allowed to wear fabric that has more than one type of fiber in it.

Another interesting detail is how each person is expected to employ an “editor” – a person (if you’re ultrarich) or a bot that curates what information feed he or she receives and what is transmitted to others. Everyone wears smartglasses that pick up data about everything and everyone, so they are surrounded by icons and avatars that show others various aspects of their identities. You are swimming in data and media. As Stephenson explains,

In old movies sometimes you could see apparently sophisticated characters saying things like “I’m going online” or “I’m surfing the Internet,” which must have seemed cool at the time, but now it was a non sequitur, as if someone, in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation, suddenly announced, “I’m breathing air.”

Stephenson, Neal. Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel (p. 197). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Because different people and groups receive different media streams, they literally inhabit different realities.

A prediction that, unfortunately, seems very plausible, is that the gulf between the rich “elite” and everyone else has become unbridgeable. Because Sophia and her friends attend Princeton, they are guaranteed an enormous income. The rough and tumble inhabitants of Ameristan are reduced to barely scraping by, with all the professional class having abandoned them – no doctors, no dentists, etc.

While Sophia is visiting her relatives in Iowa, she helps rescue a “missionary” who had gone into Ameristan to see if he could get some of the inhabitants to abandon their meme feeds and rejoin reality. Their response was to crucify him. This missionary turns out to be Enoch Root, who has shown up in several other Stephenson novels, including Cryptonomicon – set in the 1940s and 1990s – and the Baroque Cycle – set in the late 17th century. In other words, Root seems to be an immortal who is often involved with the affairs of the Waterhouse/Shaftoe/Forthrast clans.

Sophia decides to devote her senior capstone project to seeing if she can make any sense of Dodge’s connectome. After discussing things with her family’s foundation and Corvallis Kawasaki, she is given the go-ahead to “flip the switch” and upload Dodge’s connectome to a quantum computer server farm. And that’s when the story really begins.

Dodge’s consciousness is initially only aware of static – chaos. Gradually, he is able to control parts of it until he creates a small world called The Land. He doesn’t remember anything about his past life, but since his background was in gaming, his self-created world is very much like the terrain of a videogame. As Stephenson describes Dodge (called “Egdod” in this virtual reality) creating his world, there are undeniable parallels to the creation account of Genesis. And as more peoples’ connectomes get uploaded to the server farm, they assume roles that are very similar to the mythical Greek pantheon. There’s even an episode that is like the Tower of Babel. What I have a hard time accepting is the proposition that these files of data existing in a quantum computer cloud are actual beings. Do they have souls? Stephenson describes them as having “auras”, and they have consciousness, but I’m skeptical.

Meanwhile, in reality, there is lots of legal and technological jockeying going on. A mysterious billionaire (and mentally ill psychopath), Elmo Shepherd, is not happy with the way Egdod has set up things in “Bitworld”, so when he dies, he is uploaded and confronts him. He goes by “El”, and he quickly expels Egdod and his pantheon from The Land – Paradise Lost, anyone? El begins developing a hive-like community for the millions of connectomes being uploaded now.

That’s Book 1. Book 2 begins with a boy and girl in a garden in Bitworld, whom El is carefully isolating from all outside influence. They are the progeny of Egdod and Spring (another member of Egdod’s pantheon) – the first beings created by uploaded entities. Egdod manages to interact with them, despite being banished from The Land. He suggests they name themselves Adam and Eve. When El finds out, he is furious, and throws them out of the garden, to fend for themselves. Any resemblance to Genesis is purely coincidental :).

The rest of Book 2 involves a quest some descendants of Adam and Eve undertake to overthrow El. By this time, the Hive is spreading all over The Land, and he has also installed Autochthons – created military commanders – to oversee things. If I were back on Earth, I definitely would not want to be uploaded to this grim feudal society.

The remnants of the original souls, some descendants of Adam and Eve, and other misfits are marginalized to “Bits” – landmasses which have broken off of The Land. The main protagonist of the aforementioned quest is a young woman named Prim, who has an interesting origin of which she is not aware. I won’t divulge it either, to avoid giving out any spoilers. Suffice it to say that there is a climactic battle and a happy ending.

Towards the end of the novel, we briefly revisit our reality, where there aren’t too many humans left. Robots and AI have taken over most tasks, and the virtual reality of Bitworld is more “real” than our world. Which, I suppose, was Stephenson’s point all along: are we living in a simulation?

Fall is a good return to form for Stephenson after the disappointing Seveneves, but I still think Cryptonomicon is his best book, closely followed by Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. Like other popular authors, I think Stephenson has reached the point where he’s a big enough name to pretty much write whatever he wants, regardless of what an editor might tell him. Fall is long…almost 900 pages, so it asks a lot of the reader. I could have done without a lot of lengthy sections, but on balance, it is worth the effort. One thing about Neal Stephenson – he is one of the most inventive writers working today; every book has a fascinating and incredible premise that he manages to make believable. I’m looking forward to his next one!

Math, Pre-Internet Style

One of my graduating seniors (thanks, Kendal!) just gave me an antique math text as an end-of-the-year gift. It’s a slim little volume entitled Formulas – Cube Root – Logarithms, and it was published in 1921 by the International Textbook Company.

As I was browsing the pages, I was struck by the sheer mental labor that mathematics required back then. Imagine a world without cheap scientific calculators, let alone one without computers and the internet. For example, look at the steps outlined in this book that are necessary to derive a cube root (click on the  image to zoom in):

There are 24 pages devoted to the single task of deriving cube roots, something any $10 calculator can do in milliseconds, or you can just type it into a website like wolframalpha:

I have new appreciation for those who did so much with so little technology.