Table of contents

1. The Internet, lies and multimedia
• The medium of the message
• Good news
2. From the library of paper to the Library of Babel
• A little meaning machine
• The volatile book
• Censorship of censorship
• Babel's Encyclopedia
• The inert signs
• What is reading?
• Types of readings, types of readers
• The highway
3. Rip van Winkle in 1997
4. Internet: a Latin American province

The legend goes that the first English Rothschild hired a steam boat to be present at the Battle of Waterloo. When the fight ended, he was the first with the results in London, which he didn't let anyone know. But he made a terrifying gesture: an expeditious and public sellout of his shares. This fooled the brokers - who knew whence this Rothschild came from - into the specious hint that Napoleon had won. Meanwhile, and in the rear stage, his own brokers bought and bought in the middle of the financial panic. Next day, when the real news arrived, the shares went up. But then many of them were in Rothschildís hands, including the few he had sold and were bought back by his agents. That way the English Rothschild branch was founded in England: cunningly and infamously using a new-sprung technology - the steam boat - that gave him a strategic edge over the predictable businesspersons. I cannot assure that this episode is real, but the fact that it is been told is meaningful enough, because if in that time the still exiguous technological innovation was strategic, it is even more so today, when it changes every minute.

The present equivalent of the steam boat is the Internet, an instantaneous and universally accessible information channel. My purpose here is to vent some of its consequences.

1. The Internet, lies and multimedia

1. Text.
2. Sound.
3. Still and animated images: films and cartoons.

Thanks to this integration, Nicholas Negroponte, the leader of the MIT's Media Lab, has proposed to rather call them unimedia instead of multimedia. It would bring about a new universe of expression: today we watch meteorological reports in movement taken a few hours ago by a satellite. In your house, with a modem and a computer.

When the Lumière Brothers invented cinema, there was no other idea than recording real events. It was a paradigm, that is, the horizon of what was conceivable: cinema, like photography, was a replica of reality, not part of it. Its only purpose was copying reality, at best it consisted in redundantly duplicating it, to enhance its effects so that persons distant in time and space could watch it. Its purpose was reinforcing memory. It was a window open to mobile reality, but displaced in time and space, because I could see here and now what happened there and yore.

But then a genius - I call genius a historical pivot - emerged: the French circus "magician" Georges Méliès. He found he could film lies, so he created fiction film-making. The new invention, cinema, had permitted the creation of a new mode of doing something old: telling lies - and truths - in chronicles, epic, sagas, novels, songs, journalism. Lies and truths took a new look through cinema, which allowed telling the life of citizen Kane as no novel or play or epic poem would have told. Cinema integrated all that and transformed it because the whole, once again, was greater than the sum of its parts. Méliès was the first to find it out. Every new medium opens new frontiers to the old need of expression and esthetics. Today - I hope - there must be a genius comparable to Méliès who is lurking somewhere about to invent a new expression of old and new things through multimedia.

Douglas Adams, author of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, has declared that

Technology is just technology. Art is just Art. It's when you bring the two together that explosions happen. First cinema, then radio and television. Now we have technologies beyond the dreams of science fiction and when the real creative artists finally get to grips with them, earthquakes will happen (Apple Computer press release, February 9^th, 1996 <pressrel@thing2.info.apple.com>).

Julio García-Espinoza said that "the four mass media are three: cinema and TVî (ìLos cuatro medios de comunicación son tres: cine y TVî, Casa de las Américas, Havana, January-February 1977). But when García-Espinoza wrote his article in 1977 there were no multimedia in the then predictable future. Today he would perhaps say: "The one thousand expression media are seven: the computer," as we shall see in a moment.

1. The medium of the message

Until now the technical limitations for the mass media had led us to make virtue out of necessity. Newspapers can print text, but the images they reproduce are low quality and they cannot convey films. Television does, but it is inadequate for broadcasting text, except as a support of the audiovisual content, a sort of "anchor" for the image, precluding the drift of sense, as Roland Barthes would say. The text prevents the imageís sense from going berserk. But who would read a book on a TV screen? The newspaper, on the other hand, is valid for only one day - and that only during the first hours - except in libraries, where we spend hours, days and months looking for an information that perhaps is not there. It is Sisyphus drudgery, because the bigger the importance and volume of the newspaper the bigger is the chore. Television has no archives accessible to the public. Cinema has film libraries, but its access is restricted and is not comparable to public libraries, where you can read about any book. Only books have indexes, libraries and cards that organize them, but we cannot always find them where we can look at them and sometimes they are in inaccessible libraries, so the references we publish at the end of books or papers are just a wishful thinking, for even if the referred texts are there in the library it is hard work to check them out. There are too many books and only Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel could shelter them («La Biblioteca de Babel», in Ficciones, Obras completas, Buenos Aires: Emecé, p. 465-71).

This is the reason why we have been unable until now to integrate these media: audio, cinema, book, press, radio, television and telephone. We understand as such the following:

4. Audio. Every recording of sound, since Thomas Edison and Charles Cross' gramophone to the present digital records. (The case of Thomas Edison and Charles Cross is meaningful. Edison in the United States and Cross in France had the same idea, a few days apart. The gramophone was "blowin' in the wind").
5. Cinema. Every production of animated images destined to be projected in movie theaters, even if they can be broadcast through television and distributed through video tapes, and sometimes produced purposely for television. It is a case in which two similar media have begun to fuse in one, though imperfectly. Some TV producers create films expressly for television broadcasting so as to give the programs the look and feel of cinema, i. e. has the prestige of the movie theater, even though the original quality is lost when broadcast through low definition TV. It is what has been called "TV cinema." It is an incomplete and parasitic integration. But it is possible to conceive in the future a complete integration of these two media on a common ground: the capability of registering movement, provided their respective technologies and their audiovisual effects become indistinguishable.
6. Book. A fixed sequence of signs. As to its supports, a book is every bound paper material, containing texts, images and music scores. Some special books contain text in Braille script. Others, for children, are made in cloth, cardboard, plastic and other materials. In the primeval times books were stored in the brain memory as oral literature. They were in general poetic and cosmogonic productions, where basic myths were fixed through ritual and spellbinding words, that is, fixed words, the first inert signs (see 2.5 The inert signs). Then, after the alphabet, books were stored in diverse materials: stone, bronze, papyrus, parchment, and finally, paper. Today they can be stored in various electronic media: diskettes, hard disks, CD-ROMs, etc. A book is independent of its medium, in spite of our tendency to confuse the book with its media. When we mention the word book a bundle of paper is immediately and inevitably evoked, yet books have been made of paper only for a relatively short time. It has lived no more than six centuries in Europe, while papyrus lasted for well more than a millennium.
7. Press. Every printed and periodic material: newspapers, weekly magazines, yearbooks, etc. Some of them may have no regular apparition, which does not invalidate their recurrent nature.
8. Radio. Every radioelectric broadcasting of sound.
9. Television. Every radioelectric broadcasting of sounds and images.
10. Telephone. Of all these media the only one to enable person-to-person contact was the telephone. But it was only an extension of the voice, the depth of permanence was missing, except the tape recording of calls, most of the time a wicked practice. The telephone is illiterate: it is in the same condition of the person able only to speak. Its only superiority was its ubiquity, the intercontinental extension of the illiterate voice. Today it is an insufficient vehicle for the Internet, because its lines were not created for it, but for the naked voice. It is like running cars in the old ways that were built for horse-pulled chariots. But when the world gets encircled by optic fiber - something that will be done in incomparably shorter time than it took to be covered by copper wires - the telephone will have a bandwidth wide enough to cover the present demands of the Internet. Then it will become something else, swallowed up by the new medium.

These media have appeared in the first place because of their technical possibility, and because only in that way a more complete and complex need of expression could be fulfilled. For instance, when a book evokes a musical excerpt it can only print a fragment of a score, even though the ideal would be to be able to listen to it. Teresa de la Parra, the Venezuelan novelist, said that dialogs should be accompanied by a score to exactly reproduce the pitch of each character. The present paper books are the result of a feasible technology, it is less expensive and more convenient than the bulky papyrus rolls, which were difficult to transport, read, index, store and preserve. Many papyrus and parchment books were lost because of that. The integration of paper books with other media is difficult or impossible. It has been only done with photography and, through it, with the visual arts.

The Internet is the equivalent of concrete in architecture. It has permitted an infinite plasticity that has pushed the imagination to its limits. The Internet can produce a phenomenon similar to the communications and of a deeper impact because it covers much wider fields.

The Internet book, the hyperbook, will demand and will be accompanied by a system of references to navigate the ocean of linked information. This system will lead the readers, if they do not want to be swamped in a sea of trivialities, to count on a more refined navigational algorithm than the present ones: the indexes and library cards. The future readers will have to be more radically expert and masters of their conditions, that is, more sovereign than the present average reader.

The Internet allows and enhances that access without conceivable limits. This integration not only blurs the boundaries of these seven strategic media, through which we become political animals, that is, social beings, but enriches every information with the advantages of each medium with the disadvantages of no one.

1. Good news

Let us imagine two scenarios that will be possible in a historically short time: we are looking for information on farming. We are not interested in agronomic theory or science but in the treatment given to farming by the public opinion in a certain country during a given period. The present technology provides the means of storing every information, organizing it in hypertext, by means of keywords, by author, by date, etc., in a WWW page on the Internet. The reader seeks, say, the words Venezuela, farms and policy between 1993 and 1996. The WWW page from the newspaper is designed and programmed to instantly give us not only the information of that day, but all the information linked to the country, subject and period we are browsing. It is easy, inexpensive and enriching for the reader and for the newspaper, that becomes more attractive and marketable. Aware that this medium lets thread every kind of cross-references and hyperlinks, the journalists and editors can quote the source of their information - bibliographic, journalistic or even other WWW pages. In this manner the reader can jump to a book, photograph, graph, film, or an illustrated conference pronounced by an expert three hours ago in a symposium, say, in Melbourne.

Today the press, radio or TV information is limited to the peremptory surface that only brings us the news of a given day. The Internet lets the reader go beyond The New York Timesí slogan: "Al the news that's fit to print." A long press conference is summarized in a few paragraphs. It is an inevitable and desirable feature of the press: informing, orienting, summarizing. But many readers need going beyond the limits imposed by the growing cost of the paper, and because it has no sense to print newspapers weighting two tons to satisfy the information needs of every reader. But today we can, for instance, via the Internet, read the complete text of a press conference, the press conferences that the newspapers have to abridge in a few lines or are simply ignored because the newspaper has no space left and because the editor thinks that only a small band of readers will be interested in them. And, of course, they might not only be wrong about the general interest, but even being just a few those readers lose the chance of satisfying their information need. The new press via the Internet can overcome this limitation and offer the best of both alternatives: the summary and the entirety. You only need to click a mouse and there appears the whole press conference, perhaps in video. Every newspaper will become a living encyclopedia, as a very original "Air Encyclopedia" broadcast by a Venezuelan radio station during the '50s. Every week hosts and listeners exchanged live every information available on the subjects evoked by any listener. In this program everybody could participate, including the experts. The Internet is the same, only it can be permanent and infinite.

The newspapers will not be the same, because, among other reasons, they will not be strictly newspapers as we conceive them today - only a small part will be a periodic updating, not necessarily daily but minute by minute or according to a previously agreed regularity. There will be a more intricate exchange among the journalists, columnists and readers, and many readers will be able to share their own informations and reflections. The boundary between producer and reader blurs. The mass media will not be one-sided anymore. Every news can - and must - generate a sequel, a thread of discussion among readers and journalists. It happens in the present Usenet newsgroups, in which every message can the answered by other participants, who receive other responses. A newspaper will not be a group of persons who inform other persons, but a group of persons who organize the way in which other persons receive and exchange information. These persons will not depend on the bias of the first to publish or not to publish an information, flaunt it or not, or warp it or not. Anyone can become an information medium, instantaneously available all over the world, at a minimal and dwindling cost.

Radio and TV stations have similar limitations. They cyclically repeat the same news, annoying us with the same news twenty-four times a day. This is because the stations never know when the viewer will tune them up and they have to assure that everyone sees everything. By storing the informations on the Internet the tedium is unnecessary and nobody has to watch news that are not interesting for him or her, because it is not necessary anymore to display the space in time: the Internet can display the space-time in a virtual space. Anyone can dig down in the news they are interested in. It is the difference between information pushed on the reader, and the information the reader pulls, as over the Internet (cf. interview with Steve Jobs in Wired, February1996 <http://www.wired.com/wired>).

Until now these seven media have succeeded only partial fusions: radio and audio, cinema and television, book and press, radio and television - for the broadcasting of operas, for example: the image is broadcast by TV and the sound broadcast through FM stereo. Today, though, it is possible to attain the integral and ecumenical fusion of all those media, and with them literature, photography, theater and visual arts, that had previously been fused with them. There will not be audio, cinema, book, press, radio, television and telephone because they all will be one - so much for the better.

11. From the library of paper to the Library of Babel

The Encyclopædia Britannica failed. Cybernetics and the Internet made it obsolete. The same thing happened to the Facit mechanical calculators - do you remember them? They ignored the new technologies. They disappeared even from museums, but now we calculate more and better than ever. While the Britannica is less sold, the number of the services that can distribute books over the Internet (the WWW pages) duplicates every 53 days.

I usually avoid the word revolution when I talk about technology. A new toothpaste with an outlandish color appears and they claim it is a revolution. The same thing has happened with buzzwords like multimedia or total quality. They become jokers. Now everything is "multimedia," from computers to panties. But the invention is there: the first to get hold of it owns it.

This time it is serious. I bet everything on this statement: the paper book will disappear. Do not panic: it happened with papyrus books too and nobody misses papyrus books today. Its disappearance did not imply the twilight of the book but its strengthening. With paper and the printing press the book multiplied and traveled the planet. It was not necessary to make a chastity vow anymore to become a monk and spend years copying a book - then came some bold guys to tell the monk that that book was wrong. The Inquisition was perhaps right to burn them after all... after the printing press it was never more an insolence to correct Aristotle because he said women had more teeth than men. The printing press brought free thinking and universal literacy - it was at least the idea - and we came out of the Middle Ages. This secularization of the book will be even more radical: the paper book still enjoys a formidable defense: try to destroy a book, throw it away in a trash can, burn it... An anecdote: a person meets another who carries a book. This first person is interested in a certain page in the book. The person carrying the book says it is quite simple and tears off the page to give it to the interested person. It causes shuddering. At least for those who read books, these paper things are a laic ceremony with a religious origin. Cf. the chapter of a novel by Victor Hugo in which three small children rip off a valuable book (Le quatrevingt-treize, book 3, V-VI)

It is not the same thing to take a paper book and throw it into the trash can than taking one in the virtual desktop of the computer and throw it into the trash icon destined to represent the deletion of an item. The ceremony is abridged and weakened, as much as it happened with the paper book in face of the pre-printing press books, that had to be read in a monastic, solemn and awkward library, like the one described in The Name of the Rose, the novel by Umberto Eco. To throw away a paper book it has to be mechanically destroyed, while in a computer it is electronically - virtually - erased. This is not a trivial difference (2.2 The volatile book). In electronic destruction there is no drama, no shock, nothing. Only an electronic operation, frequently a game in which an icon is entered into another icon. The electronic text does not have the solemnity of the paper book. Paper books bestow respectability even to Buckingham gossiping if it takes book form. On electronic support only the words deserving respectability will have it, not any trash hiding behind a cover.

Nevertheless the United States government has proposed a copyright law that pretends to make illegal every copy or transmission of any material - book, computer program, picture, film - copied through the Internet (Bruce Lehman, Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure. The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, Washington: Secretary of Commerce, 1995 <http://iitf.doc.gov/>). According to the project promoted by Hollywood and the publishing industry, not even a paragraph can be copied and sent directly or through the Internet, or a similar medium, to anybody, without the authorization of the vendor. It is like the famous claim of the Disney Studios against Sony because it built video recorders that made possible the copy of films. The U.S. Supreme Court finally decided that the copies made for personal use, with no commercial purpose, were legal. Will it happen again? Perhaps. But let us suppose that this draft is approved. Unenforceable laws are nonsense. How to forbid that millions of people copy films or computing archives? Is the government to appoint a policeman to take care of every likely lawbreaker? Will they jail mankind?

Laws that pretend to stop a strategic technical development disappear leaving no trace. Perhaps there was a law against the wheel as much as the Roman Catholic Church tried to make a law against the moving earth and Darwinís discoveries (see 2.2 The volatile book).

1. A little meaning machine

• lower cost - no paper is used, so no forests are cut down; there are no printing house nor book shop. You pay directly to the author, who perhaps will not ask for it. Or perhaps he will at last get some money, considering the behavior of many paper publishers... And
• electronic handling, which allows for rapid convenient, complete and complex seeking: through hypertext, for instance.

1. The volatile book

The Internet is incompatible with the present concept and practice of copyright and intellectual property. When you buy a paper book you pay for the book shop, the publisher, the author, and indirectly to the printer, to the paper mill, etc. If I read a book in a public library, the library pays in my place. When I read in a public library I do not acquire the book, that is, its material support, but I access its essence, its signs, its bits. As on the Internet. Behold the origin of the discord.

John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation <www.eff.org> and composer for the rock group The Grateful Dead, has produced A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in which he declares, addressing the U.S. government from the cyberspace:

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter. There is no matter here <http://www.eff.org/homes/barlow.html>.

Is there no matter in the cyberspace? Electrons are not matter? A new vulgar and hazy spiritualism has been hatched in the thick of cybernetics, a sort of animist doctrine, according to which 'matter' is only its mechanical expression. Electronics is free from the discredit of weight and the slothfulness of tact. Electronics, being logic supported by electrons, acquires the airy façade of the spirit. It is airy, that is made of air, in more than a sense: for the ancient Greeks spirit was pneûma, that is, 'air,' exhaled when we died. For those remote Grecians the air-spirit was non-material, as electrons are for some cybernauts.

Our denunciation of this new and rather poor version of the philosophical dualism spirit versus matter is not a question of principles. It is not necessary to stop to make clear that, whatever matter is, electrons are as material as paper. We prefer the opposition suggested by Nicholas Negroponte between bits and atoms (interview with Nicholas Negroponte in the electronic review Meme N° 1.07, October 1995 <http://www.reach.com/matrix/>). Bits are an intelligible portion of matter - the atom -, built in the system of representations created by the Internet and cybernetics. The bit, as a minimal information unit, is a metaphor of the mental representation of atoms.

There is not a person in this room who would argue against the public library. They are good for our children, they are good for the country, they are good for our neighborhoods. But why does a public library work? It works because it is based 100% on atoms. When you borrow that book the shelf is then empty. Now, we take the library made of atoms and we convert it to bits. What happens? Two things. First we don't have to take our atoms down to the library anymore. But more importantly, when you borrow a bit, there is always a bit left. So bingo! You now have 20 million people who can borrow that same bit, and just by changing the atoms into bits you violate copyright law, and in countries without copyright law, you violate a sense of intellectual property (quoted by Meme, 1.06 transmitted on 23 November 1995, <owner-meme@sjuvm.stjohns.edu>).

The book on the Internet is made out of bits, while the one in paper is made of atoms, apart from bits. There is an adherent weight of the paper book that has nothing to do with its nature. Its essence is signs, which have permitted its commercial exploitation. When you pay for a paper book you pay mainly for that: for paper, for an object made of atoms that serves as a support to speculate with the bits created by someone else. It is what the Venezuelan philosopher and poet Ludovico Silva calls 'ideological surplus value'(Silva, Ludovico, La plusvalía ideológica, Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela-EBUC, 1970), perhaps ëintellectual surplus value.í Otherwise it would be impossible - in the context of the present practice of the copyright and intellectual property - to speculate with the creation of an author. You write a novel and a paper publisher issues it. What the publisher sells on my behalf is paper with ink on it and then bound. What he pays to you is a small percentage of the price of each copy óthe editor has to bargain to sell paper and ink by offering bits trapped in atoms, otherwise nobody would by the atoms. The paper, which is only the support of your novel, leaves a proof of that commercial transaction.

But if I sell the book through the Internet, the mechanical weight of atoms vanishes. The electrons travel as bits, from a computer to another, from a corner of the universe to another corner of the universe, what we now call the global village. The reader pays for ideas, not for paper. But those bits are pregnant with matter: either on paper or on electrons, they can become exchange value, that is, commodity. To buy electrons is an advantage nevertheless: it is less expensive, more accessible and universal. If bits demand material support they would rather be congruous with the papyrus or the parchemin, which were more congruous than stone or bronze, which were more congruous than the live voice. Live voice's reach was only the scream's, and it could not be recorded. If we had had telepathy we would had had no need of alphabet, papyrus, paper or the Internet. One of the goals of civilization is fulfilling the need of telepathy.

But not all is advantage: what happens when a publisher disappears for any reason? If it is a paper publishing house its books remain in the libraries. Paper gives them continuity and a support in the historical space-time. Mechanical weight is not always bad or shameful. But if it is an Internet publisher, books evanesce when it evanesces. If there are copyrights to pay, nobody can undertake its legal distribution without the consent of the owner. And even when there are no legal limitations, those books should need a friendly hand that decides to preserve them. Or perhaps another publishing house acquires them. Those are hazards the paper book is free from.

Another problem: how do we place books in cyberspace libraries, in this new Library of Babel? Paper libraries buy one or more copies of a book to lend them. It is a maneuver hardly appreciated by publishers, but social pressure has led them to resign to it. In the end they earn something as there are many libraries and they must buy many copies if the book is in high demand. An additional mitigation is that the reader does not get the atoms, but the bits, which are the essence of the book. But the publisher did not sell but paper (or mainly paper in any case), which thanks to commerce, to the exchange value, becomes a perverse metaphor of the bit. The book becomes something it is not: pulp. In short: it perverts itself, it corrupts its nature, it alienates, it prostitutes itself.

Let us try to understand this through a play of medieval air: a wanderer stops to sniff a barbecue that a street vendor is selling. The merchant protests and demands that the wanderer pays for the odor. A wise Judge arrives - medieval judges were wise so it seems - and asks the dealer how much the rambler owes him. The businessman says the rambler owes, say, a penny. The Judge asks a penny to the rover, who gives it in after much protest. The Judge tosses the coin on the floor and asks the cook if he heard the ring. The barbecuer, puzzled, admits he has heard the sound.

"Then," the Judge sentences giving the penny back to the traveler, "you are paid, because the coin's ring is the equivalent of the meat's odor. If he had eaten the meat, the substance, the mass, he should have to pay with substance, with the mass of the coin, that is, the coin itself."

Wise man: odor equals sound. Information equals information. A coin, in contrast, equals meat.

Commodity inspires imagination, as Marx said in the second chapter of Capital, which is the reason why I can change a shirt for a chair and money for anything:

A born leveler and a cynic, it [commodity] is always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with any and every other commodity, be the same more repulsive than Maritornes herself. The owner makes up for this lack in the commodity of a sense of the concrete by his own five and more senses (Capital, Part I, chap. II).

In a library readers "smell" the signs printed on paper. But on the Internet readers should obtain from the publisher the same they would get from the electronic publisher: bits, but without paying for the electrons. On the Internet meat and odor, that is, paper and bits are not different. It would be impossible, in the context of the present copyrights to store books in electronic form in public libraries accessible through the Internet. In those libraries the book itself, that is, its signs, its bits, its contents, would not be enclosed in a piece of matter, like paper, heavy and palpable. It is instead in the ubiquitous and labile form of a stream of electrons, which would circulate, even illegally, in a materially free manner through cyberspace. The electron is conceptually more congruent with bits than paper. The electron does not turn the book into a hostage, as paper does (as well as papyrus, parchment, bronze, tablets and stone did).

How can these problems be solved? As I said, the present concept and practice of copyrights contradict the nature of the Internet. It is what happens with the illegal copying of software and when a friend asks me to copy for him a record into a cassette, or that I photocopy a book for him. In most legislations it is illegal. Even though the pirated program resides in diskettes or in other media, even though the music is enclosed in a cassette, even though the still signs rest in a photocopy, what was transacted there were bits. The diskette and the cassette and the photocopied paper are only containers. When not only still signs circulate through the Internet, but music, cinema, etc., capitalism in its present form will have a problem with the private property of bits. The capitalist will cease to be the total owner of the means of production, as in the past he was the owner of the publishing house, the TV station, the recording studio and the distribution services. Now the medium will be in the authorís hands as an Internet service (interview with Steve Jobs in Wired, February 1996 <http:www.wired.com/wired>): electronic mail, WWW page, FTP - a medium for transferring data: documents, computer programs, images, sounds -, Gopher, Usenet, etc.

There will be a conflict between the present owners of the bits (publishers, recording companies, cinema producers, software vendors) and the creators and users of those bits. Capitalists will own the companies that make computers and software, companies that organize information, that will proliferate on the Internet. But they will not own all the means of production. An electronic publisher cannot prevent that someone transmits to someone else the bits sold by that publisher. It will be declared illegal because capitalists control the state, but it will be an unenforceable law, that is, paradoxically it will not be de facto legal.

Perhaps the solution is there: the publishing house as we conceive it now will have to become an organizer of information. What the publisher will sell will be the organization of data, so he will not be concerned if I copy those data or not. I hire an organizer of information to help me find some data about a subject, then the organizer will indicate me where to find them and which characteristics and intellectual value they have. I pay for that service, and the organizer can give out those data without payment and will not send me to prison if I traffic them. The organizer will not necessarily sell the data (bits: books, reviews, images, films, etc.) He will rather indicate me where to obtain them, bought or given out for free. I cannot resell the customized service - the addresses where I can find the bits - because it is only useful for me. I cannot resell a medical prescription, which is a most personal thing. I can resell the medicines, but not the recipe. That is why NeXT has decided to declare its object oriented software public dominion for individual users. It will only charge companies (interview with Steve Jobs in Wired, February <http:www.wired.com/wired>).

The vendors' vulgar materialism pretends that if I buy a computer program I can use it only in one computer. It is as if I had to buy a record for every record player I have. Quino, the Argentine author of the Mafalda cartoons, tells us about Manolito, the shopkeeper friend of Mafalda. He meets Mafalda, with his vulgar materialism:

Manolito: What did you give your mother for her day, Mafalda?

Mafalda: A book.

Manolito: CímonÖ Really, what did you give her?

Mafalda: But, a book, really!

Manolito: A book, yes..! Now Iím a fool! You think I didnít know she had one? (Quino, Mafalda 6, MÈxico: Promexa, 1984).

Manolito thinks that books are interchangeable because they are interchangeable commodities, that is, they only have exchange value, not use-value. As if it were the same to read a book by Shakespeare as one by Joyce. Manolito thinks that when I reread a book I have to buy it again, as a chocolate ice-cream. The bit as a commodity has a different dimension. Its material support is not the bit itself. In this case, again Marx, "the substance as value of commodities has a purely social reality" (Capital, chap. I, 3).

I do not know how this conflict will be resolved. I am not an attorney and it is not my role to foresee anything. I am not a historian of the future as to foretell how this conflict of interests between humanity and a powerful group of that humanity will be decided. But I think something will occur, similar to what happened to the Disney Studios (2.4 Babelís Encyclopedia). I hope that to overcome this problem of capitalism we will not have to reenact the horrors of Stalinism.

2. Censorship of censorship

The Inquisition got nothing radically important with its Index. The forbidden books continued to circulate, clandestinely or openly, slowly or rapidly wearing down the ancient regimes. The Spanish Empire forbid Rousseau in its Latin American colonies. To no avail, because the Social Contract rushed into the colonies camouflaged under the cover of religious books. These were useful to make possible the circulation of Voltaire's denunciations against the Church. There was the French Revolution, the U.S. and Latin American Independences, Industrial Revolution and scientific development. The Index could not prevent them.

Once a book was printed it was impossible to totally control its distribution and its effects, because it was not only the text itself: there were also the thought systems it inspired and multiplied in a few people first and then in many. At best they were obstructed, its effects were perhaps delayed, but here we are in this 20^th century thanks to entire libraries of forbidden books and in spite of the medieval preaching of the many churches.

In the Soviet Union there was the samizdat, a clandestine publication reproduced with poor means, particularly carbon copies. The Soviet authorities imposed the matriculation of typewriters to track down the authors of samisdats. The mere alphabet was subversive, and eventually brought down the Berlin Wall.

Printed books cannot be burned down, at best they are kindled for a while, but once published there is always a pertinacious copy read by Simón Rodríguez who teaches it to the young Simón Bolívar, who then liberates five nations from Spain at the beginning of the 19^th century. In the same manner the Soviet Union fell down in spite of so many prohibitions. Samisdats were more powerful than the Berlin Wall.

The same will happen with the Internet. Beginning 1996 a judge in Germany demanded that Compuserve prevented its clients access to the Usenet newsgroups discussing sex. Compuserve had to deactivate all the newsgroups the world over to all its clients. Prudishness won. Freedom lost. And commercial services like Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy and other similar services, can be controlled and prohibit the publication of "obscene" material. America Online had the naive perversity of forbidding the word breast, and then had to restore its use because some groups could not discuss breast cancer.

That kind of restriction is ultimately impossible on the Internet. Some Republicans ó and many a Democrat ó in the U.S. pretend to do it through the Communications Decency Act (complete text at: <www.cdt.org/policy/freespeech/12_21.cda.html>). This naive and perverse law forbids the transmission of

Any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs, regardless of whether the user of such service placed the call or initiated the communication (the WWW page of the group Voters Telecommunications Watch thells the story of this act at <http://www.vtw.org/>. See too David Bennahum's editorial on <davidsol@panix.com>, published by The New York Times, at <http://www.reach.com/matrix/nyt-gettingcybersmart.html>. See too other WWW pages on this subject: <http://www.cdt.org/ciec/>, <http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/>. Or the following mailing list: <listserv@cpsr.org>.

The Communications Decency act prohibits to mention the excretory activities or organs that it is mentioning in its own text, it is infringing itself... The final paradox of the censor. For information about the Supreme Court Hearings see <http://www.aclu.org/issues/cyber/trial/sctran.html>.

It will be difficult and in the long run it will be socially impossible. But let us suppose, for the benefit of the argument, that they do it within the frontiers of the United States. Let us suppose that the U.S. Supreme Court admits the constitutionality of this unenforceable law: how can they stop U.S. users who are interested in that kind of material eventually get it from Internet servers placed out of the U.S.? How can they stop groups of U.S. citizens to organize around a server computer placed in a permissive foreign country if one of Internet's most obvious features is being geographically independent? How to prevent the Cubans from copying software, documents or pictures from servers in the U.S. in spite of the U.S. laws prohibiting commerce with that country? It is the same naiveté of the South Korean government menacing its citizens with prison if they access North Korean WWW page <www.kna.co.jp/>. What the Southern authorities were able to do was creating their own page <www.unikorea.go.kr/>.

But Republicans ó and many a Democrat ó are persistent and versatile in their ignorance. They are like the Brazilian military officer who was told by an engineer that a certain dam could not be built because of the Law of Gravity. He answered with an aplomb I have always envied to Barbarians:

"No problem: I abolish that law."

I never knew if they could build the dam.

Look at this:

BELGRADE, Serbia, Dec. 7 - When President Slobodan Milosevic, faced with large anti-Government demonstrations, tried to shut down the last vestiges of an independent news media last week he unwittingly spawned a technological revolt he may soon regret

Tens of thousands of students, professors, professionals and journalists connected their computers to Internet web sites across the globe.

The independent radio station that was forced off the air for two days by the Government, B-92, used that time to begin digital broadcasts in Serbo-Croatian and English over audio Internet links. And its web site took over the reporting on the protests, which were set off by the Government's annulment of municipal elections won by the opposition (<http:www.dds.nl/~pressnow>. The New York Times, December 8^th, 1996, p. 1).

They will try something anyway. The situation is that they have privatized the concession of the official register at the Internet, its name is InterNic. It is controlled by Network Solutions, a company that was bought by another: Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), two weeks after the privatization was announced. Coincidences. SAIC derives 90% of its two billion dollar business from defense, security and intelligence deals. SAIC's board is ideal for an espionage novel: Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense; General Max Thurman, commander of the troops that invaded Panama under George Bush; Don Hicks, former chief of research and development at the Pentagon; Don Kerr, former boss of the National Laboratory at Los Álamos. That board was integrated until recent times by Robert Gates, former director of the CIA; John Deutsh and William Perry, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense (Wired, February 1996, p. 72). How will they control the Internet? They will devise something. But I doubt they will attain more than what the Inquisition did when it instituted the Index: obstruct and delay.

How can one belong to the Republican Party? They are not only ignorant but nearsighted: Hollywood failed to make illegal the use of video recorders; it lost the battle but won the war against its will: today Hollywood earns much more money selling and renting video tapes than through the movie theaters.

3. Babel's Encyclopedia

The Encyclopædia Britannica is doomed. It has to adapt, as will have to do the publishers who want to avoid the fate of the mechanic calculators. It has to become a guide in this unmanageable Library of Babel: the Internet. To reinvent the vocation of the librarian, the Great World Librarian, the Archive Keeper of the Global Athens, the Librarian of Alexandria. The old, wise and friendly counselor, who oriented and helped us in the localization of the bundle of papers we were looking for, will now be wiser, more patient, more powerful and will have to be more aware of his or her trade. The job of the new librarian will display its incumbency all over the world. The 1996 edition of the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia in CD-ROM links on-line with information sources that are updated all the time on Compuserve. Not bad, but it will be better on the Internet, which is infinite.

Donald Duck's nephews belong to a boy scout club, there they have a manual conceived as an infinite encyclopedia. It is infinitely small because it fits any pocket and it is infinitely big because it is omniscient, like God: it is everywhere and knows everything. One day they get lost in an arcane mountain unknown to "civilized" people. There they find the Gubis, a tribe of pre-Columbian Indians that had never met "civilized" people, much less civilized ducks, something that is irrelevant in Disney's surreal world. These Indians ate gold and spoke a totally unknown language. Well, almost totally unknown, because its grammar and entire vocabulary were in the manual. Columbus would have loved that manual. It is a derisive version of the global project of every encyclopedia: a window open upon reality with no human intervention: who could have written that grammar and dictionary of a language spoken by people nobody knew?

The ideal encyclopedia contains all the existing information about everything. The Theory of Relativity and the incident you had with a nagging neighbor this morning. It is, I insist, God, because it knows everything that can be known before it is known by any mortal. Donald' nephews' manual is its caricature. Real encyclopedias have to select the information they contain and offer fixed data about changing realities. Ideal encyclopedias change with the reality they represent. They are like the Imperial map described by Jorge Luis Borges, the greatest caricature author of all times:

...In that remote Empire, the Art of Map-Making attained such a degree of perfection that the map of just one Province occupied a whole City, and the map of the Empire, an entire Province. In time, those Immense Maps were not satisfying and the Colleges of Map-Makers built a Map of the Empire that had the size of the Empire and exactly coincided with it. Less addict to the Study of Map-Making, the Next Generations understood that that enormous Map was Useless and not without Impiety abandoned it to the Inclemency of the Sun and Winters. In the Western deserts remain the shredded Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in the rest of the Country does not exist another relic of the Geographic Disciplines.

Suárez Miranda: Travels of prudent men. Fourth Book, Chap. XLV, Lérida, 1658 (Jorge Luis Borges, «Del rigor en la ciencia», in El Hacedor, in Obras completas, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974, p. 847).

To be accurate it had to coincide with the Empire, because no matter how congruent, a scale reduction would be a distortion of reality. But it was a static map: it did not reflect the relentless changes of time. Its wholeness was only spatial, not chronological. It was a synchronic map, not a diachronic one. Had it been diachronic it would be reality itself, but that perfect map would be useless ó it would be reality itself or a redundant reality; tools have been developed just for that purpose, the intelligible distillation of reality, to which it owes unconditional fidelity. Our knowledge has not to be reality itself but an abstract from it, that is, a pertinent and useful distortion.

The Internet begins to approach the myth of the manual of Donald's nephews, but without its caricatural nature: the overwhelming and jumbled reflex of reality, with its contradictions, trivialities, glories, complexities, controversies, enigmas, miseries and deceits, as a big Library of Babel. It all will be there soon, and the map of the Empire will end up being not only bigger than the Empire but more real. The Internet, as any collection of signs, will not be a reflection of man's reality, but a strategic part of it. It will contain not only the truths of the Empire, which are its size, but will have to become big enough to contain its falsities and fantasies. It will not have the form of a map, but it will be its linear fantasy, its delirium, its deep structure, its user's manual, and its refutation, everything together, including itself. It will be a duplication of reality in itself, by itself, within itself, and upon itself.

The Editors of the Britannica are wise, they will find a way out. For the time being it is already on the Internet. It will be more powerful than ever. Like books.

4. The inert signs

It is not an obvious activity. For millions of years humanity lived with which we now know as writing. It did know the poetic rhythm, measure, which somehow helps inscribe in the mind what we speak, because it facilitates memory. The permanent record, out of the body, out of the mind, was not an obvious task and it was not born from a unique initiative. It was a drift that lasted for millennia, until Mediterranean, Asian alphabets were created, together with the pre-Columbian recording media.

Writing, that mouthless voice, installs itself in trade, but also in the realms of the sacred and the legal, which are usually the same thing. What was first written was what had to be remembered: business, liturgy, law. As business are business, as business is impersonal, inert signs were necessary to validate its objective nature. Accounts were maintained and perhaps the first contracts were drafted. Writing was good for taking other people in their words: "Here says you agreed." Writing was good too to invoke superior entities; God addresses us in written form. Moses endorses with written tablets the word of God, which was eternal, permanent, accurate, unmovable, like writing. What is written is a proof that the divine word was eternal and that word was a proof that what was written would last to the end of time, with the durability of stone or bronze. No alphabet, no law. Sacred words were so powerful that they engraved stones and molded bronze. And finally, as a consequence of the first covenant, writing was good to make certain the common norms that ruled social life. It is said in written form, so there is no manner of refusing it, quia verba volant, scripta manent ('because words fly, writing remains').

The written word was proof, verification, hence the prestige of letters, which are permanent, eternal, transcending death: that is, transcending the individual, traversing and threading times. Herodotus was impossible without writing. With script history ceased to be legend, gossip, myth, terror of the arcanes, to become laic chronicle, independent account. Because words have that double power: the alphabet sacralizes, implants God's word, but it secularizes too. Hence history ceased to be epic and became a review devoid of the solemnity of chronicle until it resulted in daily and cordial journalism.

Science was possible too as a jewel stringed in the line of script, that was wisdom transcending time and space. Science is written; superstition is spoken. Anyone buys a treatise of molecular biology; nobody buys a manual of superstitions as such, because superstition does not dare to tell its name. Superstitions are heard, from word of mouth, without sign crutches. They do not have the privilege nor the prestige of the timelessness that informs us of the form of the Earth or the chemical structure of gonadotrophins.

The first written words, inscribed in stone, bronze, parchment, papyrus, paper, had to be magical. To read was to learn to speak again, as when children find one day that they can be understood when they pronounce the word water, that people understand they are thirsty and in fact give them water. When someone wrote something it took the mien of a proclamation, of a superior entity, which is impartial, eternal, transcendentó i.†e. inhuman. It was someone else who spoke. Writing was inscribing. It took time to learn that paper can bear anything, the same as was learned that anyone can officiate a mass, which was a later discovery.

Mohammed respected Jews and Christians because they had their respective books. He called them "the men of the book," which was largely the same one. He respected them because he himself had one, Al Quram, that Allah had revealed personally to him, His prophet. If Mohammed had not had an alphabet he would had had to invent it. In other words: Mohammed was possible because there was writing. Otherwise Allah's word would have stagnated in the ears of the few proselytes who were at Mohammed's voice reach. With a book Allah's word circulated through the known world: the gods talked with the then latest technology. Now they talk through the Internet, where all the sects swarm. Christ, they say, wrote only a few enigmatic words on sand, but he had apostles who were overflowing in inert signs. He had the same chance Socrates had. Socrates had disciples who wrote his sayings - real or conventional - so they transcended time and space up to the Internet, where Plato speaks together with all those who have written and still write.

The alphabet, then, gave us overseas commerce, religion, law and science. It was so important that Plato was horrified by it, because its signs were exceedingly inert, and then because, paradoxically, they were movable and could slide the ideas they invoked toward persons who did not enjoy the privileges earned through knowledge, as he told Phaedrus:

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves (Phaedrus, ß 275d).

Word needs institutional frameworks to defend and interpret it: Platonic academy, Aristotelian Lyceum, churches, sanhedrims, political parties, sects, universities, courts, commercial records, notaries, libraries, that take in charge the detained signs.

Writing is at the seat of power. The domination of writing guarantees the keywords that rule and thread property, faith, knowledge, legitimacy. There were - there are! - people who encapsulate the scripts in their scholastic minds, and learn by heart the transcendent texts, the exanimate signs. It gives them power, because through their mouth the most puissant words circulate. They are divine words, preferably said in Latin, which is a deceased language that can be known only in written form, because nobody chats now in Latin in corners, clubs, and gossiping coteries. But if they are Latin, they must be polysyllabic words, that is, words taken from books. Then you talk about implementing contingent plans, that the contraction of the market is provoked by the inelasticity of the offer, that the resident programs conflict with the high RAM, or that nobody can be disinherited except ab intestatum. They are generally words incomprehensible for those have not read the appropriate books. They are the words of power and everyone has power according to the access to books or to the persons who have accessed them. They say that the Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez ó who governed from 1908 through 1935 ó was not celebrated as an avid reader. But he knew only very well to whom turn to in order to have the writings fitting his power. They were those who knew which scripts were to be countered to the oppositionís scripts, as the opposition was integrated too by people acquainted with books. That was why they had to be placed under the hold of power: some of them in the government palace, others in dreary dungeons, others in exile, all under its control. Having them down there loose in the streets was playing with power, and power is not a toy.

Later on, writing, which was made with letters (literæ), suitably became literature and we still study letters at college (I did), that is, the mastery of the written words. It was first the transcription of primeval locutions, and Per Abat transcribed the Poem of MÌo Cid and then romances and legends. In the same manner an unknown copyist did with Iliad and Odyssey. Then it was the trade of writers themselves, who were not scribes or scritptor, but auctor, auctoritas, who seated at their desks, the scriptoria. They composed their own writings and words to tell us tales or dictated themselves the poems of their inspiration.

Finally, no, reading is also intranscendence: tabloids, word puzzles, insipid joke, comics, pornography, yesterday's papers. Scriptures that challenge and infuriate intellectuals, because they are the negation of the transcendence of scripture, of which intellectuals have appointed themselves as trustees, custodians, and curators. No matter that those frivolous words are there forever stored and fixed in libraries. It is in any case our purpose, "to the last syllable of recordèd time,î Macbeth said. Or ìtant que la langue vivraî ('as long as language livesí), Flaubert said.

5. What is reading?

Reading is when we recover from fatuous words, to make certain the transcendent and monumental entities. Imagine: God - no less. What counts (commerce), what is professed (religion), what is known (science), what is decreed (law), what is beautifully said (poetry). Reading is communicating with great minds, embark oneself way up to destinies that run through perennial times and vast spaces.

It is founding a communion with the biggest possible humanity, the one who lived thousands of years ago, the one living at the other side of the planet, the one that will live in the future - that time that puzzles and overpowers us with its clamorous silence. To that future humanity we want to leave the testimony of our expectancy, our version of life to orient it and to relieve us in the anxious search of the supreme sense. Reading is to decode and appropriate the most distant, the most composed, the most ambitious.

It is religion, in its root religio, 'tying,' 'linking,' as in the ships tied to a common harbor. That is why religion is frequently authoritarian and lethal, out of sheer anxiety of seeing the heretics go away to other manners of faith and the pagans stubbornly refusing any covenant with God, whoever He is, that clinging to a grand sense and as such unimpeachable. No matter if they are a few heretics and pagans who persist in abandoning God. Hence the historical and perpetual root of every reading: a resolution of total religio with the total humanity, integrated in a one and only conjoining. When I read I am absorbed in a complete and definitive copulation, which is why I am alarmed by the books I find false and mistaken. I feel they mislead the great humanity I want tied up with me, to face together the desolate and vast silence of the universe, that utter cruelty of existence. Hence my joy when I find a book I repute right because it binds me in a happy, definitive and complete copulation with another spirit who found truth for me and for all. A book that says the truth helps me feel less forlorn.

It does not matter to fail in that manner. Even if we greatly fail by reading a bad and clumsy book. We opted for the grand and obstreperous, the resounding, the vast, the splendid, the magnanimous. We do not resign to what we were, like Phaeton, like Icarus, who wanted to fly with the Sun or up to the Sun. Perhaps we profess an erroneous doctrine, a mistaken theory, a misleading principle... but if we find it in a book it has to have a certain grandeur that we share. We did not perish at the next corner of the familiar street. We passed away in the Yukon, in the Fountains of the Nile, we perished, all right, but we went far away, like Icarus, like Phaeton. It was not with a dessert chat that we were mistaken, with a somnolent bar gossip. We were mistaken with indexes, tables of contents, illustrations, quotations in Latin or Greek and with highbrow ideas, meditated for a long time. The paper book is there, intact, to back up whatever it is filled with.

But... what if we hit the mark? What if the book we read says the truth? It is the enigma of the Library of Babel. In some book can be our philosophical stone. In some concealed passage of the millions of books there must be a concept that turns us around, that changes the course of our existence or of many existences or of all humanity: "A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of Communism," "Let children come to me," "God is dead," "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing!"... They are the great sayings and the great subjects, the great moments of reading that one day can happen again, who knows in what definitive destination. And, why not?, perhaps magi are right, perhaps there is an ultimate word that evokes the key of the universe, maybe the name of God, the Devil, or your real and secret name.

6. Types of readings, types of readers

We can read to be informed, to have fun, to know God's word, to understand the intimate nature of the universe, to learn about my aunt, or about Madonna, to know how I disassemble a carburetor, to program my computer, to know what I am accused of, to know if my beloved accepted me, if I sign up this agreement, if I laugh at Don Quixote or learn what the gods say.

We all read, even the illiterate. But for analphabets reading is "natural." It implies no effort: they do not read letters, but they read as we all do, as the illiterate humanity read during centuries: they read faces, images, gestures, dresses, vestiges.

We, readers of inert signs, know that it implies wok, that we have to learn to stay immobile for hours, a bizarre pleasure that requires inertia! That is why saints think reading is a spiritual thing, that demands the immobilization of the body to let the signs reign within our pure spirit. We have to become as inert as the sings we read. The illiterate think that it is magic, like that Indian who put a Bible on his ear to hear the word of God. He threw it away because what the priest had announced did not happen (John Wilkins, Mercury. The Secret and Swift Messenger, London: Nicholson, 1707, p. 3-4). Once upon a time there was an analphabet lady. The doctor told her that she had to use eyeglasses "to read." Next day she went back to return the eyeglasses.

"These eyeglasses don't work, doctor. I tried to read the newspaper and I didn't understand anything."

It is a meaningful anecdote, as an illiterate man who told me: "I never learned to read because I never understood that a letter speaks to the other." Perhaps that man would have been a poet, he spoke with so much beauty about his incompetence. He would have been a writing poet, I mean, because out of pure fetishism I have finished by thinking that poetry is only ink and paper.

But the readers can be diverse. That is, between the one who reads about how to disassemble a carburetor, and the one who finds that life is a tale told by an idiot, there is an unmeasurable abyss. That is why readers can be classified according to what they read: tell me what you read and I will tell you who you are. And tell me what you do not read and I will also tell you who you are not.

It is true that we can read many things, but it is true that we specialize in reading mainly certain things. Mainly, no matter if it is not exclusively. That is why we are attorneys, doctors, engineers, poets, repairers. Or ignorants with no professional affiliation. Because there will not be a single book, nor millions of books, but many types of books that we will never read. Thermodynamics, the cult of Osiris, the history of some arcane commune, the endless story or the book of things that never existed. Books whose existence we will never know or whose circuitry we will never know. Because reading is not only tracing the lines of inert signs of any book, but establishing its networking with other books. Books lead us to other books, they speak to each other, like letters. That is why there is religio.

Books were always hypertext because no isolated book has ever existed, it is unthinkable. So books will live at ease in the Internet. It is a threefold articulation, analogous to the double articulation of language: first the sounds among them, then words among them, and finally books among them, those collections of words, ideas and images. Because we never arrive to a book by chance, there is always a path to it, no matter how tortuous and uncertain it is.

The cultural order in which books mingle must be our commitment when we train the young arriving unaware of so many things at the library, to organize them as readers, to affiliate them to a universe of readings, to let them appreciate the cleanest sense of the words of the tribe. ìDonner un sens plus pure aux mots de la tribuî, the French StÈphane MallarmÈ said. Those who read ignoring that travel plan read in short circuit and as a consequence they understand nothing, because books speak and explain each other. And they ignore each other as well, and reject and refute each other too. That crowd of voices, that highbrow and sometimes cacophonous chorus leads us from the Altamira caves ó that first bid to arrest the flow of reality through still signs ó up to word processors. At the entrance of the Library of the Universidad Central de Venezuela there is a big prehistoric stone where some Indian hand engraved signs that nobody has been able to decode since then. José Vicente Abreu wrote a wise and beautiful text to designate that stone as the first book of that library. It is exposed there to wait for the lucid glance that one day, hopefully, will decode for us all what those strokes mean and will link them to the verbal stream of all humanity. It cannot be understood because it is not linked to any other book. Before that unreadable rock we are all romantics.

The future belongs to writing. The idea of the audiovisual imperialism, that will cover and stifle everything in a hell made of dumb television and hopeless video games is not the only perspective offered to us. The word, and the written word, is still the human destiny. If it is not on paper it will be on the computer screens. Reading had never been so necessary as today. In no time before the present there was so much reading. More than a human life is necessary to read all the new novels published in a single year. Imagine coping with all the output of one day in the world: all the radio and TV broadcasts, all the daily journals, all the magazines, books, leafletsÖ How many centuries a person would need to face all that? In the Middle Ages only a small group of literati was necessary to make the world work. Even the monarch could be illiterate. But today, with the expansion of the tertiary sector of the economy, where the production, circulation and use of the information are placed, almost everything that is important is in the written word. We cannot know how long the paper book will last. We can guess it will be for a short time, but we know too that the future human world is impossible without books, even if they are not made of paper.

But why must they be books? It is true that a book is a fixed collection of inert signs, that books existed well before the alphabet. People wrote books on their memory. They are all books, from the street leaflet to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But between them and through the electronic stream may exist a myriad of fragments, figments of text, inventions, other modes of the verb and of making signs. They are not all books ó as intellectuals usually think, those paper fetishists who have stupefied intelligence. Man is capable of much more and sheltered poetry and every saying in ink and paper because he could not find, until the Internet, a more decent and durable mode of doing it. There is also painting, cinema, tapestry, posters, frescoes, vases, banners, mimic, clothing, ceremony, theater, ritual, gesture ó there is a world of signs that is not on paper. Every time we find a new technology to mount a system of signs, we open a new horizon of expressions, from the Altamira caves to multimedia. Some people invent tapestry, others invent enameling, others create the pyramids, others cast bronze and carve stones and there was one who cried before a stone that he made to resemble Moses: ìAllora parla!î That way stones learned to speak. There are more than books in human life. There are other modes and means for expression, where no dice toss will abolish hazard (ìjamais un coup de dés ne abolira le hasard,î Mallarmé said). And for the word itself there are other possibilities that now we can only vaguely infer: electronic mail, WWW page... Imagination must not be imprisoned in books, which can become jails for the thought when they become fetishes. A book is a formidable tool to enhance thought, not a fatality and a condemnation with no appeal.

7. The highway

1. Rip van Winkle in 1997

• Digital personal assistants.
• Jet planes.
• Electronic calculators.
• Audio cassettes.
• Solar cells to generate electricity.
• Digital audio tape (DAT).
• Personal and laptop computers ó mainframes existed in the í50s.
• Digital compact disks for music (CDs) and information (CD-ROMs).
• Optical fiber.
• Electronic photocomposition and graphic design.
• Electrostatic copiers like the Xerox.
• Electronic photography and painting.
• Genetic engineering.
• Laser.
• Space ships.
• Liquid crystal screens.
• Digital clocks and watches.
• Robotics.
• Artificial satellites, including the geoestationary communications satellites.
• Cellular telephony, the answering machines and the direct dial for long distance calls.
• Color television.
• Professional video tape and home video and cameras.
• Digital video discs.

• Agriculture.
• Elevators.
• Cinema.
• Synthetic food.
• Medical knowledge and technology.
• Home appliances.
• Electric light.
• Metal industry.
• Electronic typewriters.
• Synthetic fabrics.
• Stationary.
• Plastics and other synthetic materials.
• Industrial production.
• Broadcasting.
• Better contraceptives.
• Profusion and quality of color printing.

1. Internet: a Latin American province