This is one of the most gorgeous essays i’ve seen on the subject, which at first looks like yet another one of the same-old same-olds on the digital/paper divide, with brief excursions on the history of reading (cool, but as a amateur book-historian i knew it already), but instead of descending into platitudes about the flattening of experience and the future of the book and (thank heavens!) avoiding the question of brain science and cognition, glides smoothly past and onto the philosophical question of our relationship with the digital humanities and the mixed joys of combinatorial language and machine-led humanities analysis (think Richard Powers and Galatea 2.2) and literary production (Lem’s Cyberiad!) and then ends by soaring into a exquisite surreal vision that is part-Borgesian, part-Lspace, part-Cyberiad: of machine-literature — the “infinite, iterational, immaterial.”
“I like to imagine the cybernetic authors of the future at home on some satellite in high orbit, quietly floating through space, 10,000 years after every trace of our era has disappeared from the surface of Earth. Decade after decade the programs will write their tired potboilers and predictable coming of age novels, their wistful Brooklyn comedies and sad Russian satires. Over time, they will gradually tire of these antiquated forms. Increasingly they will try to write from life, to express in binary language the pain of their fragmented hard drives, the loneliness of their aseptic orbits, the monotonous cycle of day and night, the lonely work of archiving a civilization that has long since forgotten its past. In this future, history exists as an eternal present. Through endless new iterations, timelines gradually blur. Libraries and apocalypses multiply. Books vanish and reappear. Vikings stream out of attack ships to burn the Library of Alexandria. Virginia Woolf leads Caesar�s legions into the Thames while cybernetic Miltons write hymns in honor of their machine gods. Under the forest canopies, humanlike primates curse each other in emojis, while on the edge of the solar halo, Lev Tolstoy, reincarnated as an artificial intelligence, born with no memory of his own future, sits down to write the book of his life.”
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird