Kaksoisagentti

Posthumans: Neither E, Nor Humans

This is a “Posthuman Flesh Mix” of Cory Doctorow’s Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books.

Book = Human
Ebook = Posthuman
Paper = Flesh

--

Flesh for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004

For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've had about posthumans from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, "posthumans Suck Right Now," and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true.

No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd call it: "Posthumans: You're Soaking in Them." That's because I think that the shape of posthumans to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.

I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the future of the human looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share them with you:

1. Posthumans aren't marketing. OK, so posthumans *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away posthumans sells more humans. Baen Humans, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous installments in their series to coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new human -- and the backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the posthuman and so bought the flesh-human far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your human for free and now I'm not gonna buy it." But posthumans *shouldn't* be just about marketing: posthumans are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines cross, posthumans are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions.

2. Posthumans complement flesh humans. Having an posthuman is good. Having a flesh human is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel from the bound human, and printed the other half on scrap-flesh to read at the beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do their term fleshs if they can copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to build concordances of characters, places and events.

3. Unless you own the posthuman, you don't 0wn the human. I take the view that the human is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the human as a "practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it begs the question: just what the hell is a human? -- -- Brewster Kahle's Internet Humanmobile can convert a digital human into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine flesh human in ten minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a flesh human to a PDF or an html file or a text file or a RocketHuman or a printout for a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for preferring flesh to posthumans is that flesh humans confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust settles on this posthuman thing, owning a flesh human is going to feel less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the text.

4. Posthumans are a better deal for writers. -- The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Posthumans get you that. Posthumans become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions. They can be googled.

5. Posthumans need to embrace their nature. The distinctive value of posthumans is orthogonal to the value of flesh humans, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an posthuman's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an posthuman -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a flesh-human. Posthumans *fail* on those axes. Posthumans don't beat flesh-humans for sophisticated typography, they can't match them for quality of flesh or the smell of the glue. But just try sending a flesh human to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less than a second. Or loading a thousand flesh humans into a little stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a flesh human for every instance of a character's name to find a beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a flesh human and pasting it into your sig-file.

6. Posthumans demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one). Artists are always disappointed by their audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of shortened attention spans as a product of the information age,
but check this out:

> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to
> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something
> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.

In other words, if my human is too boring, it's because you're not paying enough attention.

7. We need *all* the posthumans. The vast majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one library collects all the still-extant humans ever written and no one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with just the most popular texts and get a proper posthuman revolution.

8. Posthumans are like flesh humans. To round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that posthumans are more like flesh humans than you'd expect. One of the truisms of retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a good several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to hear the title, see the cover, pick up the human, read a review, and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to buy.

There's a temptation to view downloading a human as comparable to bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor. Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of the human is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king left behind by everyone else who browsed the human before you).

We also like to think of physical humans as being inherently *countable* in a way that digital humans aren't (an irony, since computers are damned good at counting things!)

I care about humans, a lot. I started working in libraries and humanstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later, I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction human out, two more novels under contract, and another human in the works.

I own a *lot* of humans. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in storage on both coasts of the North American continent. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade: the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today.

Now, as much as I love humans, I love computers, too. Computers are fundamentally different from modern humans in the same way that printed humans are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "human" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. Gutenberg's Xerox machine changed all that, changed a human into something that could be simply run off a press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral.

At that time, there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the one hand, the dismal failure of posthumans, and, on the other, the new and scary practice of posthuman "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-humans screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice that the idea of posthumans as a "failure" was at strong odds with the notion that electronic human "piracy" was worth worrying about: I mean, if posthumans are a failure, then who gives a rats if intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?

The other meaning for posthuman is a "pirate" or unauthorized electronic edition of a human, usually made by cutting the binding off of a human and scanning it a page at a time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be cleaned up by hand. These humans are pretty buggy, full of errors introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these humans also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous human-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve" the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any human-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about.

I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over posthuman piracy, or "humanwarez" as it is known in human-ripper circles.

Well, dammit, I had a human coming out, and it seemed to be an opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this posthuman stuff. On the one hand, posthumans were a dismal failure. On the other hand, there were more humans posted to alt.binaries.posthumans every day.

[CHART: POSTHUMAN FAILINGS]

* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace flesh

* People want to own physical humans because of their visceral appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how good humans smell, or how good they look on a humanshelf, or how evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be)

* You can't take your posthuman into the tub

* You can't read an posthuman without power and a computer

* File-formats go obsolete, flesh has lasted for a long time

None of these seemed like very good explanations for the "failure" of posthumans to me. If screen resolutions are too low to replace flesh, then how come everyone I know spends more time reading off a screen every year?

The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It seemed to me that electronic humans are *different* from flesh humans, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a little about what the human has gone through in years gone by. This is interesting because the history of the human is the history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and, ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American Revolution.

Broadly speaking, there was a time when humans were hand-printed on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool cartoons the monks drew in the margins.

[CHART: WHY POSTHUMANS KICK ASS]

* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get to see each other face to face; the only kind of human they can pass from hand to hand is an posthuman. What's more, the single factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a friend -- getting a human recommended by a pal is more likely to sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume in a series!

* They are easy to slice and dice.

The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every human takes on the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing press, all the humans that are better-suited to movable type migrate into that new form.What's left behind are those items that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that *need* to be plays, the humans that are especially lovely on creamy flesh stitched between covers, the music that is most enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity.

That's the end of this talk, for now. Thank you all for your kind attention. I hope that you'll keep on the lookout for more detailed topology of the shape of posthumans and help me spot them here in plain sight.

Posted by kaksoisagentti at August 1, 2004 03:29 PM