This is a lesson about cultural expression nowadays that hasapplications to everybody. This is part of living in theInformation Society. Here we are in the 90s, we have thesetremendous information-handling, information-producingtechnologies. We think it's really great that we can have groovyunleashed access to all these different kinds of data, we canown books, we can own movies on tape, we can access databanks,we can buy computer-games, records, music, art.... A lot of ourart aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants tobe digital... But our riches of information are in some deep andperverse sense a terrible burden to us. They're like a cognitiveload. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we haveto artificially invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is thereal explanation for the triumph of compact disks.

Compact disks aren't really all that much better than vinylrecords. What they make up in fidelity they lose in groovy coverart. What they gain in playability they lose in presentation.The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget allyour vinyl records. You think you love this record collectionthat you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice,the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing youdown. You're never going to play those Alice Cooper albumsagain, but you can't just throw them away, because you're aculture nut.

But if you buy a CD player you can bundle up all those recordsand put them in attic boxes without so much guilt. You canpretend that you've stepped up a level, that now you're evenmore intensely into music than you ever were; but on a practicallevel what you're really doing is weeding this junk out of yourlife. By dumping the platform you dump everything attached tothe platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What arelief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have ittake up disk-space in your head.

Computer games are especially vulnerable to this because theylive and breathe through the platform. But something rathersimilar is happening today to fiction as well.... What you seein science fiction nowadays is an amazing tonnage of productthat is shuffled through the racks faster and faster.... If ascience fiction paperback stays available for six weeks, it's amiracle. Gross sales are up, but individual sales are off...Science fiction didn't even used to be *published* in book form,when a science fiction *book* came out it would be in an editionof maybe five hundred copies and these weirdo Golden Age SF fanswould cling on to every copy as if it were made of platinum....But now they come out and they are made to vanish as soon aspossible. In fact to a great extent they're designed by theirlame hack authors to vanish as soon as possible. They're clichesbecause cliches are less of a cognitive load. You can write awhole trilogy instead, bet you can't eat just one...Nevertheless they're still objects in the medium of print. Theystill have the cultural properties of print.

Culturally speaking they're capable of lasting a long timebecause they can be replicated faithfully in new editions thathave all the same properties as the old ones. Books areindependent of the machineries of book production, the platformsof publishing. Books don't lose anything by being reprinted by anew machine, books are stubborn, they remain the same work ofart, they carry the same cultural aura. Books are hard to kill.MOBY DICK for instance bombed when it came out, it wasn't untilthe 1920s that MOBY DICK was proclaimed a masterpiece, and thenit got printed in millions. Emily Dickinson didn't even publishbooks, she just wrote these demented little poems with a quillpen and hid them in her desk, but they still fought their wayinto the world, and lasted on and on and on. It's damned hard toget rid of Emily Dickinson, she hangs on like a tick in a dog'sear. And everybody who writes from then on in some sense has tomeasure up to this woman. In the art of book-writing theclassics are still living competition, they tend to elevate theentire art-form by their persistent presence.

I've noticed though that computer game designers don't look muchto the past. All their idealized classics tend to be in reverse,they're projected into the future. When you're a game designerand you're waxing very creative and arty, you tend to measureyour work by stuff that doesn't exist yet. Like now we only havefloppies, but wait till we get CD-ROM. Like now we can't havecompelling lifelike artificial characters in the game, but waittill we get AI. Like now we waste time porting games betweenplatforms, but wait till there's just one standard. Like nowwe're just starting with huge multiplayer games, but wait tillthe modem networks are a happening thing. And I -- as a gamedesigner artiste -- it's my solemn duty to carry us that muchfarther forward toward the beckoning grail....

For a novelist like myself this is a completely alien paradigm.I can see that it's very seductive, but at the same time I can'thelp but see that the ground is crumbling under your feet. Everytime a platform vanishes it's like a little cultural apocalypse.And I can imagine a time when all the current platforms mightvanish, and then what the hell becomes of your entire mode ofexpression? Alan Kay -- he's a heavy guy, Alan Kay -- he saysthat computers may tend to shrink and vanish into theenvironment, into the walls and into clothing.... Sounds prettygood.... But this also means that all the joysticks vanish, allthe keyboards, all the repetitive strain injuries.

I'm sure you could play some kind of computer game with veryintelligent, very small, invisible computers.... You could havesome entertaining way to play with them, or more likely theywould have some entertaining way to play with you. But thenimagine yourself growing up in that world, being born in thatworld. You could even be a computer game designer in that world,but how would you study the work of your predecessors? How wouldyou physically *access* and *experience* the work of yourpredecessors? There's a razor-sharp cutting edge in thisart-form, but what happened to all the stuff that got sculpted?

As I was saying, I don't think it's any accident that this ishappening.... I don't think that as a culture today we're veryinterested in tradition or continuity. No, we're a lot moreinterested in being a New Age and a revolutionary epoch, we longto reinvent ourselves every morning before breakfast and nevergrow old. We have to run really fast to stay in the same place.We've become used to running, if we sit still for a while itmakes us feel rather stale and panicky. We'd miss thosesixty-hour work weeks.

And much the same thing is happening to books today too.... Notjust technically, but ideologically. I don't know if you'refamiliar at all with literary theory nowadays, with terms likedeconstructionism, postmodernism.... Don't worry, I won't talkvery long about this.... It can make you go nuts, that stuff,and I don't really recommend it, it's one of those fields ofstudy where it's sometimes wise to treasure your ignorance....But the thing about the new literary theory that's remarkable,is that it makes a really violent break with the past.... Theseguys don't take the books of the past on their own culturalterms. When you're deconstructing a book it's like you'repsychoanalyzing it, you're not studying it for what it says,you're studying it for the assumptions it makes and the culturalreasons for its assemblage.... What this essentially means isthat you're not letting it touch you, you're very careful not tolet it get its message through or affect you deeply oremotionally in any way. You're in a position of completepsychological and technical superiority to the book and itsauthor... This is a way for modern literateurs to handle thisvast legacy of the past without actually getting any of thesticky stuff on you. It's like it's dead. It's like the nextbest thing to not having literature at all. For some reason thisfeels really good to people nowadays.