It’s been a long time since I last held a cage match here at nouspique—where I throw disparate thinkers into collision with one another and see if anything shakes loose. With the furor which has arisen since Jonathan Franzen’s disparaging comments about ebooks, I have decided to resurrect the practice. And so … in this corner, weighing in with two volumes, The Correction and Freedom, we have American novelist, Jonathan Franzen. In the other corner, weighing in with the 1989 CBC Massey Lecture, The Real World of Technology (revised in 1999) we have Ursula M. Franklin, metallurgist, feminist, Quaker, peace activist, and cultural critic.
At the sound of the bell, Franzen is out of his corner and makes a quick right jab to the ebook. Franzen delivers a talk at an author’s festival in Columbia and makes remarks at a press conference, and all these comments get conflated (and maybe taken out of context) in news articles posted in The Guardian the The Telegraph. He says that words in ebooks are ephemeral. People crave the permanence of ink on paper. It gives them comfort and a sense of continuity. He says that ebooks are damaging to democracy and freedom. They promote a culture of ephemera when what we need most right now are enduring values. Somehow, he ties this all to capitalism and says the world feels out of control.
The crowd goes wild. Some people throw popcorn from the stands and call him a pussy Luddite for failing to embrace new things. Some call him a hypocrite, since his novels have sold well as ebooks. The guy at the beer concession points out that Franzen is a “literary” writer whose concern for permanence—ascending to the pantheon of the classical canon—betrays either narcissism or a fear of death, or both. Joe, who’s driven down to the cage match from Timmins, says that in the winter, when he’s snowed in and can’t get to the nearest bookstore, he still has his internet connection and can download the latest from his favourite authors. “Fuck him,” he says. “I like my ebooks.”
Others rush to Franzen’s defence. Ewan Morrison says the epublishing business is just another bubble and soon will burst. More people have made money selling ebooks on how to make money selling ebooks than have actually made money selling ebooks. Because the ease of publishing an ebook has removed the barriers to entry, the ebook market is now glutted with piffle. It’s damaging to democracy, not so much because of its impermanence, as because it is the clanging of a noisy gong that drowns out meaningful conversation.
As a pacifist, Franklin doesn’t come out of her corner at all. The referee stops the fight and explains to her that the notion of a cage match is metaphorical and there will be no real fighting. Once she’s satisfied that a fight with Franzen won’t actually hurt him, she enters the ring with fists of fury. She lands her first blow with the observation that Franzen’s is a gendered view of technology. You’re such a man! she says. Technology is not a thing you hold in your hand. It’s a practice. Technology is not a discrete object, like an ereader or an iPhone. It’s a system. Discrete objects are embedded in contexts. Objects and contexts influence the development of each other in ways that are unpredictable and such development may be blind to the human beings who are the “beneficiaries” of the technology.
Franklin lands a body blow with her distinction between holistic and prescriptive technologies. Holistic technologies are those in which a single person controls every stage of production. Artisans and crafts people often use holistic technologies to manufacture and sell objects, like the pottery and paintings one might see at a craft show. Prescriptive technologies restrict control through division of labour or by removing human labour from the process altogether. The assembly line at an auto plant is a paradigm of prescriptive technology. Individual workers have no view of the entire process and little autonomy within that segment of the process where they work. Franklin observes that “[i]n political terms, prescriptive technologies are designs for compliance.”
The way in which we deploy technology is determined by public policy and shared values. Although there is no outcome preordained in any of this, we have come overwhelmingly to favour prescriptive technologies. This is an understandable consequence of the fact that our policy and value choices arise from within the context of capitalism. Prescriptive technologies produce more efficient outcomes. Never mind that such outcomes may also be dehumanizing and unjust. Capitalism removes such considerations from our public debate. In fact, we have so internalized the dominance of prescriptive technologies (this is the way it ought to be done) that we tend to ridicule holistic technologies as backward or hokey.
Although Franklin was writing before the advent of social media and ebooks, her discussion of technology provides a useful framework for considering Franzen’s comments about ebooks. I have an impression of Franzen as a holistic technician railing against the incursion of prescriptive technologies into the domain of his craft. But ink and paper novel-writing has never been an entirely holistic technology. While novelists have traditionally asserted a huge measure of control over the production of their work, they still must relinquish some control to editors, designers, lawyers, marketers, booksellers, reviewers, etc. At the same time, the ebook is not entirely a prescriptive technology. In fact, it is easier now than ever before to engage book production in a holistic fashion. From the first scratches on a pad of paper to processing a credit card payment, I can do it all on my own web site. But such a practice is anomalous. Overwhelmingly, we have chosen to treat the ebook as a prescriptive technology.
We see the consequence of this choice—and it is a choice—in the way large organizations (with access to capital) have deployed the ebook as a design for compliance. Amazon has embedded the ebook in a vertically integrated organization that aims to freeze out every worker in the traditional publishing process except the writer. Even the writer is in jeopardy as titles appear for sale that may have been cobbled together by algorithms. Apple offers authors a take-it-or-leave-it EULA that makes it questionable whether the author owns their own work. Even small players like Smashwords have automated the production process. And DRM prevents people from sharing what they’re read, limits library lending, and provides a solution to that most subversive of anti-capitalist organizations—the used book store.
What would Franklin say to Franzen’s concerns about freedom and democracy? I’m inclined to think that identifying the ebook as the source of the problem is a bit like taking a symptom for the disease. In fact, one could argue the opposite: it is ink and paper books that threaten freedom and democracy, for, as Franklin notes, there is a strong relationship between written text and orthodoxy and fundamentalism. If ebooks are a problem, it is only because they can be manipulated in ways that deliberately curtail freedoms and enforce compliance with capitalist structures. So, for example, while there is nothing necessarily ephemeral about the text of ebooks, it becomes ephemeral if our ability to access it is restricted. What happens when planned obsolescence makes an ereader useless by deprecating its operating system? In this scenario, technology is manipulated to force compliance with the demands of an endless consumption on which our capitalist structures depend.
That is not an ebook problem. That is a problem with unregulated economic systems. Perhaps that is the proper target of Franzen’s criticisms.