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cory doctorow
ceed on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable:
they were ugly, they weren’t in Church Latin, they weren’t read
aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience, they
didn’t represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by some-
one who had given his life over to God. The thing that made the
Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more popular be-
cause it was more proliferate: all success factors for a new medium
pale beside its profligacy. The most successful organisms on earth
are those that reproduce the most: bugs and bacteria, nematodes
and virii. Reproduction is the best of all survival strategies.
Piano rolls didn’t sound as good as the music of a skilled pia-
nist: but they
scaled better.
Radio lacked the social elements of live
performance, but more people could build a crystal set and get it
aimed correctly than could pack into even the largest Vaudeville
house. MP3s don’t come with liner notes, they aren’t sold to you
by a hipper-than-thou record store clerk who can help you make
your choice, bad rips and truncated files abound: I once down-
loaded a twelve-second copy of “Hey Jude” from the original Nap-
ster. Yet MP3 is outcompeting the CD. I don’t know what to do
with CDs anymore: I get them, and they’re like the especially nice
garment bag they give you at the fancy suit shop: it’s nice and you
feel like a goof for throwing it out, but Christ, how many of these
things can you usefully own? I can put ten thousand songs on
my laptop, but a comparable pile of discs, with liner notes and so
forth — that’s a liability: it’s a piece of my monthly storage-locker
costs.
Here are the two most important things to know about computers
and the Internet:
1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits
2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to
another very cheaply and quickly
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