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by Charlie Loyd, blobtag.com, May 2009
These days we would call the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz a computer nerd. He lived two centuries after Gutenberg, when fresh knowledge, especially about how to create more knowledge, was sluicing around Europe. He saw this very clearly, and a lot of his practical work was on library science – he had the best library on the continent, , and invented the modern idea of library catalogs. Many of the smartest people of his time were annoyed or even outraged by the explosion of printing, and published articles about how too many people were spamming the formerly austere set of things worth taking the troble to copy by hand – the bible, Aristotle, Augustine, etc. But Leibniz thought it still wasn’t enough. Around 1689, he wrote:
As far as the unwritten knowledge dispersed among people of different professions, I believe it much exceeds in quantity and importance all that we find in books, and that the better part of our treasure is not yet recorded. There is even that which is unique to certain people and is lost with them. There is no mechanical art whatsoever so small and contemptible that it cannot furnish some remarkable observations or considerations, and each profession and vocation has its own ingenious techniques which are not easily found but which could yet be used to loftier ends.
It keeps getting easier to do stuff online. You can track the breakthroughs by watching what people complain about. In my memory: blogs are stupid, YouTube is stupid (I said this), Facebook and MySpace are stupid (I still say this), texting is stupid, Twitter is stupid, and so on. Before my time, things like e-mail addresses, Usenet, BBSes, MUDs, IRC, the web, and images on the web were stupid. Wherever people are wailing that the internet is being overrun by teenagers and barbarians, that’s where the internet is growing.
(Think of a ridiculous lowering of barriers to communication and you have a good shot at predicting the next big thing. Maybe a camera that records as long as you hold the button, uploading to the web as it records. It’s no sillier than Twitter sounds to my grandmother.)
Keats’ tombstone reads “Here lies one whose name was writ on water”. On one hand, what a stupid thing to say. His work, and the context to understand it, would survive a full-scale nuclear war. When vertebrates are gone and cockroaches, mantis shrimp, or velvet worms reach consciousness, they’ll find tundra libraries with enough books to learn English, including pronunciation; they might not like his stuff, but they’ll know it.
On the other hand, maybe he meant that his experience was ephemeral.
Keats’s name will probably be more lasting than Homo sapiens and possibly even than the planet Sol3. Even if there’s a full-scale nuclear war, his work and enough context to understand it will survive and be of interest to whatever species next appears. It’s not necessarily that Keats will be a "top 10 poet". It's that he's known. So is the closing price of Ford Motor on 1938-08-12. Bucky Fuller quote about how knowledge only increases. It's not true, but let's make it more true.I produce a few gigabytes of photos a month, and Most things never make it into people’s minds, and most things in people’s minds are never expressed, and most things that are expressed are not remembered.