Edit in Red (aug 21, 2010)
As we can now imagine an artificial intelligence which that [ref: http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/which.htm ] has at it's continuous real-time disposal the complete recorded history of human kind creations available (until current_time minus 1), a new form of literature becomes possible. A new opportunity occurs when a writer has at his search and paste fingertips the capacity to editorially insert preexisting content, to add an intertext to contextualize it, and revision the document in a manner where the reader is automatically and optionally immediately informed that a new version is available. That opportunity is further exploitable when the reader can navigate to that version and that such changes are propagated wirelessly (and in a manner that feels near telepathic as the book is increasingly hard wired into our brain mass). And that new writer has the capacity to enter freely into frictionless co-authorship agreements mediated by a robust form of automated royalty distribution network, where dictionary and encyclopedic commons is assumed hyperlinked to content before a single word is typed, pasted or procedurally generated.
This is the first volume of L-MEM, an attempt at producing an exhaustive reader exploring the outer-limits of the creative human mind increasingly challenged by computational capacities exceeding our analogic conceptual limits. We hope here to enumerate exhaustively the key aspects of redefining text in a pure digital world, and explore new literary possibilities, including the potential to create a book that is longer then anyone could ever read over the course of a lifetime (that saturates us), yet could be interesting, coherent, original and even unique. This “Book” is still on the horizon, yet we probably can sort of foresee what it would feel like by looking at large scale collections of entries such as the Wikipedia. If you accept the fundamentals of this book, it is conceivable that this book will have grown to one million pages by the time you complete it’s reading, if you start now.
This is volume 1 of L-MEM, where we primarly focus on text. This introduction attempts to enumerate the fundamental aspects of the problem needed by the 7 to 77 years old to envision the "Next Book" in the cultural evolution ladder, and the society it announces. The apparently silly sub-question of what it means to write a book larger not only than what represents an industrious production quantity feat no one has ever accomplished is also a context to evaluate something possibly more important, a compilation of content that no one could read in the traditional sense if all one did in his lifetime was reading that book.
A second purpose of this structured compilation is to allow us by proxy to evaluate the conceptual boundary formed by what many have described as the technological singularity, an era where progress as we define it now basically stops (as something we can actually directly perceive without instrumentation), and that some predicts to even be even less then 30 years away from now. Say 2037 was actually the cultural historical rupture point where we reach the state where a human can't in the traditional sense participate in said progress, what would be the transformative aspect of that? One possibility is that such post-sapiens humans would spend most of their time as "information pets" essentially in Q&A sessions with “The Book”. And by the end of this century we will all be writing the super-book we attempt to describe here, actually that's what we will mostly spend our times doing. It will be grafted as a function at birth (people will never learn to live without assisted brain functions). The Book that can talk back will become our main communication exchange modality, our interface to the rest of the universe.
Pierre Jasmin who is also a software developer and visual effects designer has been ambiently working on this project for 30 years, volume 1 is his first compilation of notes about the project (the second is volume 2). He reads-writes technical support emails, software code, documentation, fiction, creates website promotional content... pretty much continuously read and write in some fashion. He was born in what this book describes as the beginning of the Digitization Age (and will probably die before that age fully fades out), an era which proceeded (is proceeding) to convert analogical processes into digital processes and in so doing progressively transfer all human activity to a digital realm therefore with an Information Technology component thus subject to prophet Moore's law. The Digitization Age transition ends when that so-called singularity is reached. It might be that this next "super-white" era last many centuries and our lives will then be closer to the meditative lives of monks in a scriptorium, who knows, but it seems clear that all we will always be ON editing our books.
Intended Audience
Anyone who believes like me that to package text into a codex like the early Christians has now become an inconvenience will find a safe haven here.
Reading Requirements
This project has a fair amount of literary theory references and the contemporary computer networking glossary is used without restraints. It’s probably not adequate as a middle school textbook.
Reading Instructions
If you are reading the print version, this project is written using an outliner. To help the printed version navigation minimal “text block” visual coding is used.
This is Level 3
Note the visual difference of the title of this block from the preceding one. It’s a nested block within the previous.
L-MEM:Introduction / Instructions / This is Level 3.
Note again the formatting difference. If you read this book in semi-random order, note that Level 1 is what is referred to here and there as a logical page and the other levels are logical paragraphs. The logical pages are more or less self-sufficient modules, while the logical paragraphs although stylistically an attempt to make them say one thing if you like, are not always very efficient by themselves, removed of their context.
George Pérec “Especes d’Espace” (‘Species of Space’), Stephane Mallarmé “Grand’Oeuvre” (The Book of Mallarmé), Umberto Eco “L’Oeuvre Ouverte” his initial hypertext theories, Theodore Nelson “The Literary Machine”, David Marr’s Computer Vision book who was my introduction to OCR – optical character recognition, Jorge Luis Borges short stories including “The Library of Babel”, Maurice Blanchot “Le Livre”, Alberto Manguel’s “History of Reading”, Jacques Derrida “Dissemination”.
People who wrote this book also liked: Rudy Rucker’s fictions, R.U. Sirius, Philip K Dick, and spaghetti.
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