0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room  (Page 11/12)

One more anecdote and I have done. This one goes back to 1981, when I was first introduced to computer processes at the California Institute of Technology. I took a position at Caltech to help design a program of general studies in humanities and social sciences for their undergraduates—but that’s another story.

Our division used Vax computers that ran Unix. I was mesmerized by the command-line world and its powerful abstract operations. I decided I had to learn how to use these machines and the chance finally came a year later. I had just finished writing—on my typewriter—two short books, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism and The Romantic Ideology . A young colleague in the division, an economist, was also completing a book and he had a programmer friend who was writing a computer typesetting program. His friend needed people to test out the program so we both agreed.

It was a painful experience—but that too is another story.

In the end I actually got a handle on the program, designed the two books—one decently, the other badly—set the type, and produced camera-ready copy for U. of Chicago Press, who published the books in 1983.

I tell this story for two reasons. First there’s this. Since I‘d done so much of the publisher’s work myself, I was pleased to think we could reduce the cost of the books dramatically. You’ll recall that academic book prices at that time were beginning what would soon become their dramatic, and ultimately catastrophic, price escalation. When I asked what kind of price reduction I could expect, I was told by the press: “Very little.” “What? How could that be?” “Because”, I learned, “the market expects a certain price for books of this kind. If we drop the cost on your books it will skew the whole price structure of our book list.”

Had I been a more imaginative person I might have seen the dark future hidden in those words. But what did I know then, what did any of us know, or foresee? The academic book market was still years away from the crisis that now engulfs it. The three persons of our one institutional god—the library, the academic press, and the institutional community of scholars—were still, to all appearances, unam, sanctam, cotholicam . But then came the (digital) Reformation. Now everybody wants to know how we’re going to put our Humpty Dumpty together again.

But there’s also something else. While I was wrestling with the bugs and deficiencies in the code and talking with the programmer, he entertained me with a little piece of black comedy. His main job was at Caltech’s famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He said the problems we were having with his typesetting program were endemic to his work. He needed us to beta test the program so he could correct and improve it. I still remember his wicked smile when I told him I was glad to help. It amused him no end, he said, to think about the complex programming he and others were doing for JPL “You realize, don’t you,” he said, “that there are always fault lines and errors in the coding. Therein lies the joy of the hacker’s life. And the more code we write, the more we correct and extend its functionalities, the more deeply we imbed the errors. As we improve the code, we also make it more difficult to see its weaknesses.” Being a literary person I thought of Thomas Hardy’s reflections on the voyage of the Titanic :