Almost 75 years ago, the city fathers of Portsmouth, Ohio, ordered the sewers opened so that high water from the Ohio River would inundate the town gradually rather than violently. As a journalist of the time commented, “The people knew better than to argue with the river.” Triggered by days of torrential rainstorms that astounded even many veterans of earlier floods, the waters in January 1937 would eventually crest 15 feet above flood stage and earn the engineering designation of “thousand- year flood,” one statistically expected to occur once in a millennium.

Farming tracts and urban neighborhoods long classified as safe havens were inundated. Railroad and highway traffic was interrupted and power stations stopped working as waters spread where planners had never imagined they could. (In this respect, the Ohio-Mississippi Flood of 1937 resembles the tsunami in Japan earlier this year as much as it does the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.) All told, financial losses were estimated at a billion dollars (roughly $15 billion today). A million people fled their homes. Hundreds died, mostly from pneumonia and other flood-related illnesses.

Yet today few remember the 1937 flood, though it was more severe than the famous Mississippi River flood of a decade earlier, remarks David Welky, an associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. National media, which were concentrated in the Northeast, Chicago, and California, gave the flood short shrift. But, as Welky suggests, the crisis has also been forgotten because the Flood Control Act of 1938 changed the perception of the Ohio (and other rivers) from “disaster waiting to happen” to “pleasant view.”

The flood has three interwoven stories. One is geographic. Land hunger had encouraged the construction of homes and businesses in areas known to be flood prone. The relatively steep slopes of the Ohio River make it potentially more volatile than the Mississippi —which, for all its power, overflows gradually during heavy rains. The physical conformation of the Ohio valley inhibits control of the river by dams, but also increases its scenic allure, drawing people to settle on its treacherous banks. Even after railroads and highways reduced the need for commercial ports on rivers, river towns concentrated essential facilities in known danger zones.

The second narrative is technical. In the 19th century, two influential civil engineers offered rival visions for managing the Ohio. The self-taught Charles Ellet advocated building reservoirs that would intercept floodwaters from the rivers feeding the Ohio while providing drinking water and power for industry. Ellet’s nemesis, the workaholic Andrew Atkinson Humphreys of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, published an exhaustive treatise in 1861 on the Mississippi and its management that attacked Ellet’s views on reservoirs in favor of levees located on riverbanks. Through his influence in staffing the corps as much as through his theories, Humphreys established a de facto national pro-levee policy that endured into the 20th century.

The most important story is political. President Franklin Roosevelt, influenced by theorists such as George Soule, saw the flood as an opportunity to establish a powerful, centralized expert body, based on the scientific regional planning embodied in the Tennessee Valley Authority (established in 1933), to manage the valleys of the Ohio, the Mississippi, and other rivers. He didn’t get his wish, but the Flood Control Act did create recreational and wildlife areas and hydroelectric power stations that helped to transform the Ohio valley, making the river for the first time “a friend, an ally, a boon, rather than an enemy.”

These efforts, however, also revealed the New Deal’s limits. Communities in the region were often highly stratified, divided into elite whites, “white trash,” and African Americans, and many—even forward-thinking cities such as Louisville, Kentucky—maintained these divisions when they rebuilt.

We are left with a paradox of memory. A highly successful response to disaster created a solution so lasting that the public has forgotten its origins. For 75 years, the measures introduced by the Flood Control Act of 1938—which called for the construction of flood walls to protect cities in flood zones, the installation of pumping stations, and the creation of scores of manmade lakes that largely vindicated Ellet’s emphasis on flood control reservoirs—have brought security to river communities, though Welky warns that new development on floodplains and overreliance on levees may yet spell disaster in extreme conditions. Vividly written and carefully documented, 

 masterfully brings a turning point in American history back to life.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (1996) 

 Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (2003). 

He is currently at work on a book about positive unintended consequences.

The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937

 by David Welky, University of Chicago Press, 2011, 355 pp.

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“The Thousand-Year Flood” masterfully brings a turning point in American history back to life.

Water Over the Bridge

When he died in 1983, Buckminster Fuller was the world’s most beloved de­signer, a pioneer of bold new geometric concepts in transportation (the streamlined Dymaxion Car), housing (the geodesic dome, a lightweight hemisphere of connected polygons), and ur­ban­ism (a supersized dome proposed to cover central Manhattan), a ­best-­selling au­thor and mesmerizing speaker, and a prophet of environmental stewardship. Two years later, in­vestigators named a newly discovered spherical carbon molecule, with a structure like the dome’s, the “Buckminster­full­erene” in his honor. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry they received for this work in 1996 helped create a new generation of Fuller admirers. But their prolific hero is hard to ­know.

Preppy nerd and ­buttoned-­down bohem­ian, green guru and globe-­trotting jet fuel consumer, a college expellee who relished honorary degrees, Buckminster Fuller

(b. 1895) proclaimed a new cosmos of struc­tural lightness and left a personal archive of 45 tons about it. It is indicative of Fuller’s paradoxes that the ­co­curator of the Whitney Museum’s exhibition of his work that closed earlier this fall, Harvard Graduate School of Design professor K. Michael Hays, should open and close his introduction to this catalog by underscoring that Fuller was not an architect.

So what was he, then? Hays shows how Fuller’s “lightful” plans of the 1920s and ’30s for new housing suspended from vertical masts were part of a Modernist reaction against the values of weight and solidity that had prevailed from antiquity to World War I. Fuller’s designs reflected the propagandistic architecture of the Soviet avant-garde before Socialist Realism’s triumph, as well as the expansive vision of the Swiss master of ­self-­invention and ­self-­promotion, Le Corbusier. What distinguished Fuller from these contemporaries, Hays says, were a lack of “reflexivity” (conscious references in design to architecture’s heritage), de-emphasis of stability in favor of dynamic relationships, and a denial that nature, humanity, and technology are dis­tinct entities. While a massive challenge to the uninitiated, Hays’s chapter clarifies Fuller’s complex symbiosis with Establishment architects and ­critics.

Buckminster Fuller was a preppy nerd and buttoned-down bohemian, green guru and globe-trotting jet fuel consumer; he proclaimed a new cosmos of structural lightness and left a personal archive of 45 tons about it.

An essay on Fuller as ­scientist-­artist, by Whitney associate curator Dana Miller, is more illuminating about the man himself, showing how much of Fuller’s secret was his gift for friendship. This magnetism helped make Fuller exceptionally resilient, and a catalyst of col­leagues’ work. The chairs he designed for an avant-garde Greenwich Vil­lage bar collapsed on opening night in 1929 and were replaced by benches built by a carpenter. But his renown among the tavern’s bohemian customers suffered not a bit; one patron, Isamu Noguchi, painted his studio silver following Fuller’s plans, and created a ­chrome-­plated bronze portrait head of Fuller echoed 35 years later in Boris Artzybasheff’s illustration for a 1964 

 cover. Elizabeth Smith, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, brings the story of Ful­ler’s legacy in contemporary art up to date, seeing his influence in the work of artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Irit ­Batsry.

Antoine Picon, also of Harvard, makes the case for Fuller as a prophet of today’s digital utopianism, as a brilliant innovator in the visual presentation of data (especially his geodesic projection of the globe), and as a pro­genitor of general-systems approaches to resource manage­ment. But Picon also rightly observes that Fuller was “at heart a traditional humanist.” Mega­structures such as the planned Manhattan dome, in Fuller’s view, were not op­posed to human scale but a means of lib­er­a­tion from “the mechanical enslavement of the industrial era.”

The great attraction of this book is the 175 plates and the other illustrations, superbly reproduced, that show the many sides of Fuller: geometric visionary, practical designer, and ­super ­sales­man. But Fuller’s contradictions remain un­resolved, and some of his greatest predecessors and successors are absent from the book. For example, Walther Bauersfeld, developer of the Zeiss projection planetarium, patented a geodesic dome for it three dec­ades before Fuller received his own dome patent in 1954. Hays reprints a 1928 photograph by László ­Moholy-­Nagy of a Zeiss dome under con­struction, without citing ­Bauersfeld.

As chronological documentation and visual inspiration, 

 will be an entry point for the study of this most unusual man. But the successors of the publics that responded so warmly to Fuller’s many sides during his lifetime, from Pentagon technocrats to ­Haight-­Ashbury hippies, will have to wait for a work that sets the real man in his own ­time.

 Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences 

 Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity.

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe

 edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller, Yale University Press, 258 pp, 2008.

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Edward Tenner reviews a biography of Buckminster Fuller.

Fuller's Earth

Amid the grand events of politics and warfare, the powerful trends of economics and demography, and the spread of religious and philosophical ideas, there is a more elusive aspect of history: the search for a meaningful life, the pursuit of common happiness. It takes an exceptional scholar, drawing on years of reading in original sources as well as today’s social science, to do the subject justice. Fortunately, Keith Thomas’s intimate knowledge of English life in the years between the Reformation and the American Revolution makes 

 the rare historical work that is as absorbing as it is ­deep.

The book begins with a paradox of early modern English thought. On the one hand, a consensus of the powerful and learned called for maintaining people in their stations and their immediate districts. Yet the same John Milton who, while advocating universal free education, appeared to oppose social and geographic mobility, elsewhere defended “the civil rights and advancements of every person according to his merit.” An undercurrent of individualism and ambition, fed by the constant movement of younger sons of nobility into the professions and business, could hardly be contained. The new grammar schools seated pupils by academic merit, not social ­rank.

The gentry’s status was changing on the battlefield as well as in the classroom. The early 17th century was still an age of ­“quasi-­chivalric” glory, when officers vied for recognition through conspicuous feats of arms. The rise of gunpowder did not end the upper class’s identification with martial ­valor—­even George II was a field ­commander—­but it replaced knights with a professional officer corps of more diverse origins. “Civilianization of the population” exempted most adult males from military service and left martial prowess to specialists. After the English Civil Wars (1642–51), the nobility and gentry abandoned the fortified castle and soldierly exploits for a civilian existence. By the late 17th century, English intellectuals saw their country as a securely defensible island power no longer in need of a great army like those maintained by countries on the Continent.

England’s elites invoked theological and social reasons for keeping the laboring classes at work as long and as hard as possible, and gave little thought to how satisfied these men and women might be with their lives. Yet artisans and tradesmen found meaning in their work more often than might be supposed. Derbyshire lead miners styled themselves “the ancient and skilful miners,” and, according to the diarist John Evelyn, proud English workmen rebuffed employers’ criticisms with expressions such as “Sir, I do not come hither to be taught my trade.” Today’s workers may well bristle at Thomas’s conclusion that “most of the modern British population have a more instrumental attitude to work,” emerging from the anonymity of the shop floor or the cubicle to find meaning as “ballroom dancers or bungee jumpers or builders of Salisbury Cathedral in matchsticks.”

In the early modern period, Thomas suggests, a taste for what would later be called conspicuous consumption united the great and the humble. The highborn were censured by their peers when their thrift defied norms of aristocratic largesse, and the working class sacrificed necessities to have at least one set of clothing for special occasions. Competitive display, within one’s own rank in society, was a source of honor and esteem. And this worldly pride, so often condemned by clerics and other moralists, came to be seen by early political economists, including Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, as a positive force for the com­mun­ity’s prosperity. Preserving honor and acquiring luxuries fed a sense of ­self-­worth that crossed class lines. Thomas reaches no conclusion about the continuing power of belief in heaven and hell in shaping belief and behavior. But he does illustrate how concern with renown in the here and now came to supplant the hope of posthumous glory evident in the often grandiose funeral monuments erected by earlier generations of the ­rich.

 is one of those rare history books that let us appreciate both the strangeness of early modern people and our own roots in their emerging individualism and consumerism. The author has an appealingly pragmatic outlook and a penchant for sar­donic ­humor—­he compares theologians’ visions of the damned being tormented by the glory of heaven to ­economy-­class passengers glimpsing the Champagne and hot towels of first class. If Thomas never really explains how values were transformed from Sir Philip Sidney to Adam Smith, neither has any other historian, social scientist, or philosopher. Since Americans share the Elizabethan heritage even as we pursue happiness in the ­18th-­century tradition, our cultural ancestors’ quest for life satisfaction can be at once amusing, poignant, and ­inspiring.

 Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (1996) 

He is currently at work ona book about positive unintended consequences.

The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England

 by Keith Thomas, Oxford University Press, 393 pp, 2009.

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What's It All About?

Two recent books on the future of media go against the grain of their authors’ professions. Nicholas Carr is a journalist who has written mostly for business and technology publications but has courageously challenged some of his readers’ most cherished assumptions. In 

 (2004), he argued that the transformative power of corporate computing is overrated. In 

 he goes further, questioning the faith of many computer industry leaders that the Web can enhance thinking and accelerate learning.

Clay Shirky, on the other hand, is a tenured professor at a major private research university, whose heart is clearly with the amateur upstarts who doubt the need for scholarly hierarchy. While Carr does not address Shirky’s earlier book 

 (2008) directly, he does cite a blog post Shirky wrote that dismisses the reverence for literary classics such as 

 as the “side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access,” before today’s digital abundance. Carr fears that Shirky’s remark reflects not just a provocative pose but an emerging “postliterary mind.”

The conflict exemplified by these two authors is, in Internet time, already old. It can be traced back at least as far as Bill Gates’s 

 (1995), in which the Microsoft chairman predicted that the Web would revolutionize reading and dedicated his millions in royalties to educational technology. The classic opposition salvo, Sven Birkerts’s 

, appeared even earlier, in 1994. Gates is still financing electronic learning, and Birkerts is still lamenting it.

 is the longer and more earnest. The center of Carr’s argument is that the current media environment is destroying the ideal and practice of rich, contemplative reading—not always realized, but a norm of Western education—with a steady diet of electronic distraction. Carr turns the early enthusiasm for the Internet on its head. Hypertext, with its ability to jump to new pages when a reader clicks a mouse on highlighted words, appeared ready to fulfill the dream of engineer visionaries such as Vannevar Bush of linking all knowledge. But in Carr’s analysis, the ability to navigate away from conventional text to richer but more distracting resources turns out to be a bug, not a feature.

Carr has assembled a formidable body of scientific studies on the negative consequences of new media. At the core of this research is neuroplasticity, the brain’s seemingly endless ability to reconfigure itself in response to new stimuli, as established in more than 30 years of experiments by the neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, whose work Carr deeply and rightly admires. Heavy use of the Internet, according to Merzenich and the neuropsychiatrist Gary Small, strengthens some of the brain’s processes and weakens others, as neurons and synapses are shifted to the functions in greatest demand.

Magnetic resonance imaging of people while they are using the Internet shows that intensive users of Google, for example, activate a zone of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, little used by Web novices. The speed of the brain’s adaptation is also remarkable. Beginners, after only five days of one-hour Web-surfing sessions, begin to use the same area as Internet veterans. MRIs performed on people while they read books show that they use regions linked to language, memory, and vision; surfers call on prefrontal sites of decision making and problem solving.

The cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has argued that the rapid-fire decision making required to pause, evaluate, and click on links impedes our ability to make the deep connections associated with reading traditional texts. And there is evidence that the distractions of surfing raise the barrier between short-term and long-term memory that must be bridged before we can achieve a rich understanding. Carr is right to contrast the technological impact of the pocket calculator, which freed the brain from its cognitive load and promoted the transfer of concepts to long-term memory, with that of hypertext, which taxes our working memory more.

Nicholas Carr argues that the Internet is destroying contemplative reading with a steady diet of electronic distraction.

Not all of Carr’s examples are as persuasive. Studies of road safety support his point that multitasking tends to degrade humans’ mental performance across the board, and it’s true that television viewers remember less when a news crawl and information graphics appear onscreen than when they see and hear only the announcer. But what does it mean if volunteers who watch a presentation enhanced with sound and video remember less and report less enjoyment of the experience than those who view the text alone? Results might be different with better media materials; think of the powerful impact of photography and video on the efficacy of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. And perhaps somebody who experiences an inspiring multimedia presentation will in the long run be more motivated to read deeply into a subject than someone who recalls more of a straight lecture or text—as in the old adage that education is what’s left after you’ve forgotten everything on the exam.

Carr sometimes implies that Web users have no choice but to click on every link they come across. That’s not my experience; in fact, I’ve found so many links to be trivial that I usually don’t bother following them. And for serious study, isn’t following a hyperlink less distracting than the old process of tracking down a footnote’s source in a book or bound journal? Carr cites a researcher who fears that London taxi drivers who use new satellite navigation technologies may weaken the area of their brains enlarged by memorizing geography before the introduction of GPS; doesn’t this suggest that the brain’s changes, at least in adults, are reversible, that neuroplasticity works both ways? (It’s true, though, as Wolf and others have urged, that we should be cautious about technology’s impact on young people’s developing brains.)

Clay Shirky shares Carr’s low opinion of television. But while Carr regards the Web as a failed attempt to rescue serious reading from the remote control, Shirky still takes the early cooperative idealism of the Web seriously. He reminds us that cultural critics such as Harvey Swados wondered whether the paperback revolution that began in the 1930s was going to increase access to classics or flood the market with trash. It did both. Information abundance multiplies the quantity of low-grade material and reduces the average quality of media, but it also enables the experimentation that is essential to keeping a culture alive and dynamic.

The Internet is a revolutionary medium in that it allows millions of people and organizations to share ideas collaboratively at low cost, as book readers, television viewers, and even telephone users cannot. Shirky rejects the notion, advanced by Carr on his own blog, that the work of YouTube and Facebook contributors is “digital sharecropping,” uncompensated and exploitive labor for the shareholders and executives of Web media companies. Shirky counters that social networking sites are sought for “sharing rather than production,” that contributors’ works are “labors of love,” and that users desert companies that abuse their trust. In Shirky’s view, the Web is enabling a new style of generous common culture as an alternative to the professionally created conventional media that prevailed in times of information scarcity. He sees the social Web expanding from personal expression to group mutual help, and ultimately to public and civic projects that can transform society.

Shirky, like Carr, overstates valid points. For one thing, he exaggerates the conflict between amateurs and professionals. Both have long helped and complemented each other in scientific fields such as astronomy and ornithology. Many “generous” contributors to the Web are really aspiring pros who still dream of attracting conventional agents and publishers. The nonprofessional volunteers who work on Wikipedia articles frequently insert calls for better documentation—in practice, that usually means the work of career academics and journalists. And lay collaboration is better for assembling facts than synthesizing them. That’s one reason for the survival of the print edition of the 

 despite all predictions voiced in the 1990s that it would become obsolete.

Both authors invoke history, but their examples don’t always support their points. Consider Carr’s technological determinism. He cites the early medieval substitution of space between words for the unbroken 

 of ancient Latin as evidence that media technology reshapes our thinking. Yet the change reflected not the advent of a new pen or writing surface but the need of early medieval Irish monks to teach Latin texts efficiently to speakers of non-Romance languages. Mechanical clocks arose as a result of religious orders’ quest for punctual observance, not the other way around. Nor did print-era cultural authorities always welcome reading as a form of mental self-discipline. In 

 (1998), which Carr doesn’t mention, Adrian Johns cites the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, who was prescribed romances to cure his melancholy, but found that fiction “accustom’d his Thoughts to such a Habitude of Raving, that he has scarce ever been their quiet Master since.”

Carr also reaches surprising conclusions on more recent media history. He considers Google a product of the efficiency movement instigated in the early 20th century by Frederick Winslow Taylor, when it is really the opposite in spirit, even if both are dedicated to reducing effort. Taylor preached benevolent imposition of a single scientifically determined method and tool for each job, disdaining workers’ individual and collective knowledge. As a search engine, Google rejects prescriptive, hierarchical library classification systems; it’s an organized anarchy (to quote a classic definition of the market) aiming to give users not necessarily what they ought to have but what most people entering a search term are looking for. Taylor’s procedures had to be followed to the letter; Google’s options encourage personalization.

Shirky, too, sometimes misdirects his historical examples. Printed vernacular Bibles may have initially interrupted “the interpretive monopoly of the clergy,” but Protestant leaders were soon persecuting Unitarians, Anabaptists, and others for their heretical readings of Scripture. London’s scientific Royal Society may have exemplified the cooperative spirit, but it was no protodemocracy; the society was originally limited to gentlemen and denied recognition to the craftsmen who actually performed many of the experiments it published. Shirky also argues that the gin craze in early-18th-century London ended with the social and political integration of the city’s poor. But his dates are fuzzy; the (male) working class did not get the vote until 1867, more than a century after the fad’s end. Rising alcohol prices had more to do with the change. Besides, there was another gin mania in London in the early 19th century.

It is in prognosis that Shirky has the edge over Carr. Carr holds out some hope of stemming the tide of distraction, but toward the end of 

 he confesses to backsliding into following social networking sites, a captive of his own technological determinism. Shirky, rejecting inevitability arguments, ends with a more nuanced view of the possibilities and some memorably epigrammatic advice (e.g., “Intimacy doesn’t scale” and “Clarity is violence”). Those who would save deep reading and a place for print need not more elegists but a Shirky of their own.

He is a visiting scholar at the Rutgers Center for Mobile Communication Studies and the Princeton Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

 by Nicholas Carr, W.W. Norton, 276 pp, 2010.

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Two recent books on the future of media go against the grain of their authors’ professions. 

No-Brainer?

Americans have become obsessed with the once esoteric topic of how to retard, suspend, or even reverse aging. Low-calorie diets, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, electronic scanning and uploading of the mind’s contents and powers, and the preservation of cadavers for ultimate revival are among the suggested antidotes. Ray Kurzweil’s book 

, in which the computer scientist predicts that humans and machines will merge and make immortality possible, continues to inspire media coverage six years after its publication. The time is right for a humanist counterattack against such radical technological utopianism. For polemical verve, the new death defiance has met its match in the prolific English political philosopher John Gray. The 

, in which Gray melds history with philosophy as he seeks to demonstrate the futility of pushing against death’s outer limit, is in a genre of its own.

The book appears at first to examine two seemingly unconnected groups: the small band of upper-class Englishmen and -women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who sought proof that the mind persists after death, and a group of Bolshevik theorists and officials who aspired to re-engineer the species. The English psychics (who included eminent figures such as former prime minister Arthur Balfour) were alarmed by Darwinian theory’s intolerable implication that humans were no different than animals and might be doomed to extinction; since most of them had given up on religion, they turned to science to prove that human personalities survive death. The Bolsheviks likewise rejected the notion that they were “the spawn of chance,” and set about remaking the human animal in an attempt to conquer death. Though they never succeeded in extending lives, they ended millions prematurely in their quest to destroy and then rebuild humanity.

In seeking evidence of mental life after death, the English group went beyond conventional séances to produce texts supposedly dictated by the spirits of the dead that, Gray argues, were merely projections of the living writers’ shared philosophy and culture. Their most spectacular project was the natural conception and birth of a boy they believed had been planned by the spirits of the dead to deliver a messiah for humanity in crisis. Only recently has it been revealed that a man and a woman of the circle, married to others, carried out this plan, possibly with the tacit knowledge of the woman’s husband. They never proclaimed their goal or told the child of his destiny, and he lived a conventional if adventurous upper-class existence as a Guards officer and spy, learning something of his origin only near the end of his life, after he had become a Catholic monk.

For the Soviets, the goal was not communication with the hereafter but physical transformation on earth. The so-called God-builders of the late tsarist era, who believed that science could be harnessed to cheat death, were influenced by the Russian Orthodox mystic Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov, who proposed reconstituting the bodies of all the earth’s dead and sending them into space to colonize the universe. Upon Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, the revolutionary Leonid Krasin established the Immortalization Commission of the book’s title to plan Lenin’s mausoleum. The memorial, which was erected in Moscow’s Red Square, was not just a public symbol of the dead leader’s continuing influence, but a laboratory for the conservation and eventual resurrection of his body and mind (though physical deterioration and invasive study of Lenin’s brain soon foreclosed that option). On a much grander scale, in Soviet hands the idea of overcoming death by remaking humanity became, Gray argues, an inspiration for human experimentation and eventually mass murder, which he recounts with bloody specificity.

Gray’s goal, revealed in his last chapter, is to expose cryonics, the Singularity, and other forms of modern immortalism through extremes of tainted lineage: English ineffectuality and Soviet carnage. To those who believe that by mid-century technology will achieve the God-builders’ goals, Gray’s book will seem the desperate expression of a doomed outlook. But others will find in 

 a darkly rewarding vindication of their suspicion that in “longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal.”

, a contributing editor of The Wilson Quarterly, is the author of 

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

(2003). He is a visiting scholar at the Rutgers Center for Mobile Communication Studies and the Princeton Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. 

"The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death"

 by John Gray, Farrar, Straus & Girous, 2010.

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In longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal.

Do You Want to Live Forever?

Writing for a living is a unique profession. It’s also a relatively young one, dating essentially from the 18th century; the literary historian Alvin Kernan has called 

Samuel Johnson’s 1755 letter to Lord Chesterfield

, in which Johnson proudly declared his independence of aristocratic patronage, “the Magna Carta of the modern author.” There’s a kaleidoscope of genres and a scale of incomes from effectively subminimum wages to seven figures. Most of all, writing is a profession that millions of people would like to join, at least part-time. To the alarm of critics 

, one survey revealed that more than 80 percent of Americans believe they have a book in them.

Today, many worry that technology, an ally of authorship since 19th-century innovations slashed the cost of printing, may no longer be so healthy for Samuel Johnson’s ideal of writing supported by the purchases of a growing literate public. Fifty years ago, almost a generation before the introduction of personal computing, the prospects for authorship looked bright. 

 reported in 1966 that publishing executives were concerned that their industry’s profitability might make them the target of hostile corporate takeovers. The next year, CBS paid a premium price of $280 million in a friendly acquisition of the venerable imprint Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. IBM and RCA had already bought into the burgeoning publishing industry, believing that the growth of college enrollments promised an expansion of the book market.

The Great Society era seemed a bonanza for publishers and authors, the vanguard of the new “knowledge workers” celebrated by the popular management guru Peter Drucker. Trade book publishers saw revenues grow 10 to 12 percent annually in those golden years, including an 18 percent jump in 1966 alone. Textbook publishers did even better. Books of all kinds were in high demand.

Sadly, the idyll was short lived. In 1969, when President Richard Nixon called for a large increase in federal support for the arts and humanities, he noted that many cultural institutions found themselves in “acute financial crisis.” By 1971, publishers were struggling with inflation and stagnant markets. Not only was the Great Society’s plan for leveling upward in trouble; the New Frontier’s notion of diffusing high culture downward to the masses was also losing ground. Campus protests and countercultural lifestyles had alienated many in the middle class from the universities and what they represented. It did not help that the style of youthful rebellion had changed, with early activists such as Mario Savio, leader of the mid-1960s Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, and 

a serious graduate student who went on to a physics scholarship at Oxford University

, giving way to the likes of the Yippie pranksters Abbie Hoffman (author of 

Today, publishing is the weakest link in the old media-entertainment-education nexus. Rupert Murdoch’s giant News Corporation is spinning off its lagging newspaper and book publishing operations from its Fox entertainment business. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a venerable book publisher, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year, laden with $3 billion in debts.

There are many other gloomy signs for the future of reading and writing. The plight of newspapers is well known, summed up in the Pew Research Center’s report 

: the papers’ print advertising revenues dropped by $2.1 billion in 2011, while online revenues increased by only $207 million — a 10:1 differential, even larger than in the previous year. Magazines have also been losing circulation and advertising, reaching 

 media correspondent David Carr has called

, with some exaggeration, “the edge of the cliff.”

Most authors consider retail bookstores a cornerstone of their effort to build an audience for their books — places where the personal recommendations of staff members and readers’ accidental discoveries can work wonders. (John Kennedy Jr., who once startled me with a telephone call inviting me to write for his magazine 

, explained that he had come across my book while looking for another in a store.) But bricks-and-mortar booksellers are reeling. The bankruptcy of the Borders chain last year shuttered almost 400 stores. The other major chain, Barnes & Noble, is struggling. The news is worse among independently owned bookstores. Their leading trade group lost more than half its membership between 1993 and 2008.

No wonder even some of the most commercially successful authors see the heavens darkening. 

In February, the popular novelist Jodi Picoult

 (50 million copies in print) told a reporter from The Times of London that the trend toward electronic publishing, with its lower royalties, has been reducing her income. “If you sell the same number of books now as you did a year ago you will make a third less money,” she said. “In America my sales are now just shy of 50-50 print to e-books this year.”

Some detractors of the publishing industry, 

such as the author and marketing specialist Seth Godin

, foresee a totally new world: “Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? … The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word [is] over.”

Such dire predictions are hypnotic. Cultural pessimism was a growth industry even in what we think of as print’s golden age a century and more ago, when a burgeoning literate public was not distracted by radio or Hollywood, let alone television. The taste for gloom is so strong that it even brings old books back to life. The philosopher Allan Bloom’s 

 (1987) became a surprise million-copy popular hit and was recently reissued in a 25th-anniversary edition. The critic Sven Birkerts’s 

 (1995) has likewise been reissued. These and other gloomy tomes have recently been one-upped (one-downed?) in curmudgeonly provocation by the science writer and cultural critic Nicholas Carr’s 

 and the English professor Mark Bauerlein’s 

. No wonder some psychological researchers believe that negativity bias is an innate feature of the human mind.

Yet despair is not universal. When I spoke with him by telephone, David Fenza, executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the largest academic organization in creative writing, argued that publishing is more vigorous, and more open to a diversity of voices, than ever. He rejected the idea that it’s harder for writers to succeed, observing that greater numbers of prose writers than ever before are able to sell 100,000 copies of a book, and greater numbers of poets to sell 10,000 copies. In many universities, the creative writing major has become an alternative to pursuit of the conventional English degree, attracting many students who love reading but not necessarily the latest hyper-specialized scholarly trends in the humanities.

That is only one reason to hope that a more vigorous and participatory culture is arising among at least some young people. The short story, which once flourished in popular magazines, has found a modest revival in 

 that now has 15,000 subscribers and will soon be 

complemented by a new publication for teenagers

. Book industry statistics also argue against cultural despair. American book publishers reported small but notable gains in the number of books sold (print and digital) and in net revenue during the difficult years from 2008 and 2010, according to 

. (The numbers have since remained essentially flat.) Children’s books have been a particular bright spot, thanks partly to continuing enthusiasm for the Harry Potter stories. Of course, pinched revenues are disappointing, and newspaper and magazine closings hurt writers and readers. But is today’s hyperangst justified, especially at a time when many industries would be happy to be in steady state? After all, 

, the revolution in digital music slashed recording industry revenues by 57 percent in just a 10-year stretch after 1999.

However, there are two sets of pressures that rightly concern authors: the squeeze and the crush. The squeeze is the result of technology’s dilution of attention time and spending power; the crush is the product of overreach by oligarchic intermediaries and insurgent information consumers.

The squeeze, a growing supply of words competing for limited amounts of reader time, is partly a reflection of the popularity of writing as a career. Technological change has lowered what economists call the “barriers to entry” in writing. This phenomenon helped push the number of books published in the United States from 240,000 in 2003 

. Technology has also allowed the already prolific to become more so. The invention of the typewriter in the 1860s made editors’ lives easier, but hardly changed the pace of writing itself. (Think of the literary output of Dickens and Thackeray, or the nearly 20,000 letters Thomas Jefferson is known to have written.) Computers have been a different story, as the experience of the masterly British historian Roy Porter shows. “The steady stream of books,” t

 “became an avalanche once he had mastered the computer.”

There is also more pressure on established writers and editors to generate content. Newspaper staff must now blog, tweet, and write Facebook posts in addition to doing their primary jobs, an existence 

 characterizes as a kind of journalistic hamster wheel

. The quest for Web traffic, he argues, has been diverting precious resources from the core mission of journalism. In 2010, Demand Media, operating sites such as eHow.com and employing thousands of minimally paid freelancers, published 4,500 articles per day, mainly on practical topics from health and careers to home repair, and drew more Web traffic than 

. The early assumption that high-quality professional writing would prevail on the Web has proved too optimistic.

If the squeeze is putting pressure on writers’ income, the crush is threatening it more radically. The crush is not the direct result of electronic publishing, which is not inherently good or bad for writing as a business. Indirectly, though, the electronic book brings with it two opposing but equally disturbing trends, monopoly and piracy.

Today, the challenge to writers is not so much oligopoly as the prospect of hegemony by a single company, Amazon. Until recently, authors could regard it as one of their best friends. It has let large and small publishers alike find readers, especially for backlist titles and other slow-selling books few retailers would stock. It has encouraged discussion of books among its customers, let authors set up personal pages on its site, and made it easier for customers to discover other books by favorite authors.

With the advent of Amazon’s aggressively promoted Kindle readers, the picture has darkened. 

 has been turning alpha Rottweiler. Unlike vendors of competing readers and tablets, including Apple and Barnes & Noble, Amazon wants to do more than sell platforms for reading the electronic content it sells. It appears to be promoting self-publication through its site as an alternative to — indeed, a replacement for — conventional publishing. (Seth Godin briefly worked with Amazon in one such effort to supplant traditional publishers.) 

In his annual letter to shareholders this year, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos argued

 that “even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” a jab at publishers. He was surely cheered when the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit charging Apple and five major publishers with colluding to keep the prices of e-books high and prevent price cutting competition between Amazon and its rivals. (Three of the publishers recently settled the claim.) Critics of Amazon argue that its ability to market bestsellers at a loss threatens publishers’ ability to promote new authors. They fear that the company will make nightmares of downward-spiraling compensation come true. 

Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has criticized the Justice Department

, arguing that “the suit could wipe out the publishing industry as we know it.”

The novelist Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, acknowledging that Amazon has been good for him

 personally and calling the Kindle “a great innovation,” has nonetheless warned, “It’s only rational to fear what they’re going to do with this accumulation of power.” 

: When the 500-member Independent Publishers Group refused to accept its demand for deeper discounts on IPG members’ products, it deleted almost 5,000 of the publishers’ digital titles from its site. One independent publisher in Texas declared what many publishers and writers have come to believe: “Amazon seemingly wants to kill off the distributors, then kill off the independent publishers and bookstores, and become the only link between the reader and the author.” At that point, writers could be almost completely at its mercy.

Piracy is the inverse of monopoly. Though there is disagreement about its extent, illegal e-book sharing hasn’t reached the levels of theft that plague film studios and music labels. For some writers, the real threat is not piracy itself but pressure to reduce prices to discourage illegal copying. A

s the novelist Ewan Morrison has suggested,

 “In every digital industry the attempt to combat piracy has led to a massive reduction in cover price: the slippery slope towards free digital content.”

Frightening as they are, the squeeze and the crush do not portend an unavoidably dark future. Previous economic and technological crises have been crucibles of innovation, spurring the emergence of new genres and drawing in new writers. Edgar Allan Poe’s puzzle-based mystery stories such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Gold-Bug” were a commercially minded response to the Panic of 1837, 

as the Poe scholar Terence Whalen has argued

, that introduced the scientific detective to literature. The Panic of 1893 hurt traditional subscription-based magazines but gave rise to a new breed of inexpensive, mass-circulation counterparts that placed heavier reliance on advertisers for revenues. Some of the greatest writing successes of the 1930s were businessmen who had been bloodied by the Crash of 1929: Yip Harburg, who wrote the lyrics of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and the songs in 

Benjamin Graham, who distilled the hard financial lessons he had learned in 

, now considered a canonical work on “value” investing.

It’s no less true for being a cliché that problems are opportunities. The travails of newspapers are due in part to the public’s impatience with chronic formulaic similarity. As the historian and director of the Harvard University Library, Robert Darnton, a onetime police reporter, observed in a classic 1975 ethnographic study of journalists’ tribal ways, “Nothing could be less competitive than a group of reporters on the same story.” Technology has exposed mercilessly what critics and insiders have long acknowledged.

The structural problems of journalism leave room for innovation, as they did more than a century ago, 

when the 38-year-old Chattanooga newspaper publishing prodigy Adolph S. Ochs

, nearly bankrupt after the Panic of 1893, somehow found backers for a takeover of the struggling 

, turning it into the first elite newspaper priced for the masses. Are there new Ochses in our midst? The greatest disciple of Benjamin Graham, 

Warren Buffett, has been acquiring newspapers

 even as Rupert Murdoch has been spinning them off.

Like newspapers, the print encyclopedia business had a chronic problem, in its case the impossibility of keeping many entries up to date. Yet the nemesis of commercial encyclopedias, Wikipedia, has its own structural limitations. Open editing may correct errors and pile up references and images, but it’s not suited to creating the kind of intellectual synthesis that 

 achieved more than a century ago. Could a 21st-century counterpart of that landmark work be the future of the encyclopedia?

What of the average writer? Nobody ever aspired to be an average writer. Apart from technical and contract writing, the profession has always been what economists call a tournament, a competitive environment with only a few big winners, whose successes motivate the rest. It’s very possible that the solid middle of the profession will erode further, and a few favored authors will pull farther ahead. The median may decline, but the glittering prizes will remain.

The future depends more on writers themselves than on technology. If they accept the proletarianization thesis, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they can show how copyright and good compensation are in the long-term interest of the reading public, if they can mobilize readers to help defeat would-be monopolists of various kinds, if they can use social media to enhance relations with readers, there will still be many disappointed writers, but there will also be new kinds of opportunity. Optimism may fail; pessimism can’t succeed. As the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose first book, 

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

 (1959), has sold 500,000 copies, put it when his Marxist colleague Alvin Gouldner complained of being treated like a commodity by the publisher they shared: There’s nothing wrong with being treated like a commodity as long as you’re an expensive commodity.

 (1996), is a research affiliate of the Princeton Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. He was a 1995–96 Wilson Center fellow.

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The future of writers — and the articles, novels, and nonfiction books they create — ultimately rests with those who read them.