It won’t scale. But nice try.

Only copyright laws stop us from taking matters into our own hands. No one can control a decentralized digital archive. No one can censor sneakernet.

Library science was one of the first targets for the Gramscians, and it shows. The whole thing is sickening–The cultural memory hole these assholes have created is stunning in it’s depth and depravity.

I went looking for a bunch of the referenced works in John English’s On Infantry, and what did I find…? Even queries to Canada, most of the books he used as sources for pre-WWI tactical thinking are now unavailable, even through Google.

Personally, I think the issue of knowledge preservation is going to take off as a problem for us all. Consider who’s in charge of it all–Once the crowd running Twitter and Pinterest get done de-personing all the wrong-think people, where do they go next…? Yeah; the digital archives. And, since all the hard copies are so much pulp?

Mark my words: The years around us, starting with the earliest digital efforts, are going to come to be seen in the same light as the years where the library at Alexandria was burnt, because there’s going to be that much destruction. Our remote descendants are only going to know much of our culture due to scattered references in the vast digital wasteland we leave them, which will have been curated by the “politically correct” assholes we put into power by using Google and all the other “services”.

I left Toronto in 1997 and have had many hundreds of books in a document storage place there for 22 years. Refuse to let go at least until I can ship them up and go through them to look for survivals. I remember a few specific books I want.

I’ve also got right now books in boxes packed in a 2003 move and books packed in 2012. All, Allah willing, are about to move again.

It’s a disease. But sometimes I think of it as my little war against the circumstances of my life. Surrender is not an option, at least not yet.

But you’re right. My time for that is coming soon enough.

On the larger point, I would be an early adopter for a machine one could just put a book in and scan all its contents without flipping pages. Until that is invented, I say technology has failed of its promises.

Life is short and time is precious. This is a hard truth for a bibliophile to accept. You can’t read everything. Not even all the good stuff. You have to prioritize.

Journal articles seem to be better if you have such access or are willing to pay through the nose as a private citizen.

I therefore worry that this drive to use only digital source might be impoverishing these students’ studies. But, again, they may have campus access to resources I don’t.

I truly await the day when all books ever published, or surviving rather, are available digitally, easily. Not holding my breath.