Lawrence Lessig reviews Mark Helprin’s ‘Digital Barbarism’

Comments:

• Michael Pastore says:

  May 21, 2009 at 2:43 pm

  Thank you, Chris, for this link and your comments. Lessig’s long book review is captivating reading. It’s the most crushing critique I’ve read since Mark Twain’s hilarious essay: Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.
  

  Helprin and Lessig are just about at opposite ends of the argument about copyright laws.

  Here is an excerpt from Lessig’s review:

  Mark Helprin is an angry man. His book rages against the machine. It rages against modern education. (“[M]odern education promotes collectivism verses what it perceives as destructive, self-promoting individualism.” (53); “Intense ‘communitarianism’ is continued through elementary and secondary education, and then nailed firmly into the wood by experts, ideologues, and lunatics in the university.” (54)). It scorns collaboration. (“Collaboration, collective punishment, and group responsibility are now the watchwords of the classroom. As the chairman of the Oxford History Faculty Board, Christopher Haig, recently put it: ‘Historians used once to work alone, reading in archives and writing in college rooms. History is now a more collaborative exercise.’” (53)) It hates just about everyone it describes. It practices an arrogance that assures ignorance. It teaches absolutely nothing about the hard and important questions of copyright.

  It would be interesting to get these two authors together at the same time, in a live debate about this issue of copyrights.
• Chris Meadows says:

  May 21, 2009 at 2:58 pm

  Interesting in the Chinese sense? Make sure there are no throwable objects in the vicinity?