BURN ALL BOOKS! Why ebooks kick the shit out of treeware BY: DIzzIE [antikopyright 2008] Most graveyards are already unnecessary. Libraries, art museums, and academies are not worth the noise of one car gliding down the street. As a test, try sniffing the abominable stench behind the piles of books--how many times superior is the fresh scent of gasoline! --Hirato Renkichi, Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement Public book burnings--why should rednecks & Customs officials monopolize this weapon? Novels about children possessed by demons; the New York Times bestseller list; feminist tracts against pornography; schoolbooks (especially Social Studies, Civics, Health); piles of New York Post, Village Voice & other supermarket papers; choice gleanings of Xtian publishers; a few Harlequin Romances--a festive atmosphere, wine-bottles & joints passed around on a clear autumn afternoon. --Hakim Bey, Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism The rotting treeware tome sits dying either on a shelf or in the hands of a pacified reader, there is no difference. Symptomatic of a closed propertarian culture, jewels of the diseased decadent who denigrates the dissemination of information to physical adornment, a gold-trimmed trophy to place upon mountainous shelf before which the starry eyed gawk upon when embarking on a pilgrimage necessary to merely gaze upon, let alone read, the corpus of corpses they have no actual interest in engaging with. The treeware is by its definition, indeed by virtue of its very inception, a dead object, a closed and passive entombment of the world's lore; and thus like a tomb, it is the treeware tome itself which actively serves to suffocate all semblance of recombinant reemergence of an erudite fresh-air, thus let this text itself be the bellows by which we shall burn this drudgery to the ground, and in doing so will see rise a fiery phoenix that no rotting corpus shall ever cage again. Upon unwrapping this always-already dead body presented to us, flipping through the pages, the knowledge seeker is immediately locked into the passive role of reader, subject to the authorial whimsy of the god surrogate who wear the crowns of Author, Publisher, or Editor. Designed to be read, consumed, absorbed as one absorbs pacifying medication akin to hemlock. Contrast all of this morbid drudgery to this, the vibrancy of the ebook, a shining techno-ekstasis marked by unbridled data exchange, wherein recombinant resurgence reigns supreme, the bits and bytes of digital flotsam being free to the wildest manipulation, free not only from all commercial entanglements along the lines of bookstores and publishing houses, but much more significantly, free from all attempts to channel or otherwise restrict the flow of information. Enough of this congealed pulp drudgery, this cancerous growth we carry around. I used to steal books from libraries, but I see now that it was an insufficient tactic, a furtively inadequate maneuver that did not strike at the root of the prevalent disease. The treeware tome is a shackle that must be overcome. Make no mistake about it, this is an open call to proclaim every day Burn a Book day, to raid publishing houses and place their whole hard drives online, free to all, and to scan in all remaining books that cannot be similarly expropriated, and then--and then!--firebomb every single bookstore, library, and publishing house, burn the motherfuckers to the ground. Smash every single printing press, that great lie of the Enlightenment which succeeded only in its goal of locking down information, how marvelously treacherous to thusly blend euphoric Luddism with staunch laudation of technophilic data flow! Burn all the books, these wretched shackles of congealed authority, and inhale the fumes of the resultant erudition, finally free in its vaporous state of transcendence. Oh but don't fret, the firebombs I call into existence subside only on the plane of aesthetics, for practically this would indeed be a most illegal venture (and of course this proves the point...for how could existent State and Corporate structures willfully allow the destruction of their stranglehold on information?). Realize that if you support information sharing, unbridled data dissemination, then congealed treeware tomes and all who support them are your greatest enemy. Yet you are still not convinced? You still cling to the same dreary defenses, the dying rallying cries of the Old Guard of the Printed Tome? Well then, let us engage you for the briefest of spells in your game of pragmatics so as to perhaps attempt to rouse you from the spell which has been cast upon you by those who wish to commodify and otherwise control information. As distasteful as this rot is, let us find the bone... Portability. The greatest lie touted by the treeware fetishists is their insistance on the supremacy of their bellowed pulped abortion in the decidedly pragmatic field of portability. 'Try cuddling up in bed with your computer screen!' they cry. Ah, but is the discussion not one of ebooks, not computer screens? The ebook itself exists as pure data, momentarily presented on any screen onto which it is loaded. From laptops to desktops, from MP3 players and portable game consoles, from tv screens to projectors, from PDAs to specialized ebook readers, the ebook is the very essence of portability. And where, pray tell, can you read a treeware tome, besides, well in the treeware tome? You, in all seriousness, actually dare to venture a suggestion that, say a PDA, to take but one form of the plethoric overabundance of possible ports of the ebook, holding say a hundred books, is less portable than a single paperback? I laugh at you as I sneak into your home and set fire to your bookshelf, merrily skating in the gasoline as I watch my jizm sizzle as it snakes down your spine, dear vaunted tome, yes I talk to the dead! Searchability. Have you ever hunted for that charge Rakitin fires at the young Alyosha (In your family sensuality is carried to the point of fever. Ha! What a stark, pathologic betrayal of form to speak of sensualism in a congealed treeware text!) through that voluminous monster of a tome, flipping across pages until your meaty fingers are shredded by paper cuts? Ever searched for particular formulae or flipped furtively back and fro from the index to the body of the text? Tried to find the context for a particular euphemism you memorized as a schoolchild? Within an ebook the matter is as simple as typing in a few keywords and instantly being presented will all such instances and occurrences. Yet, perhaps you like to piss away your time in such a manor, much as you grow aroused when you refuse the aid of a magnet in searching for that one pin in a pile of horse shit. Malleability. Are you perhaps an old fool, blinded by madness, who has wasted away your years squinting at the tiniest of pictograms which typesetters swear to you do indeed formulate tangible letters? Do you, perchance, yearn to live in medieval times, and are thus content to scribe your commonplace book by rewriting twenty-page long passages? Why, then the ebook will similarly suit you just fine! For, fret not, you can make the text as small as you want, and likewise you can still manually transcribe the text as you wish! The only difference is that, unlike your necrophilic object of attraction, you are free to modify the ebook as you wish, as is anyone else, is that what really ails you? The lack of authoritarian imposition, for you have indeed grown comfortable with the cages and chains afforded to you by treeware. Change the font size, the font, the background and foreground colouring, the tint and contrast, all manners of spacing, extract countless passages with the click of a button, or rewrite them to your like with a few keystrokes more. Everything is permitted. The ebooks allows all of this, the treeware book allows none of it. Durability. Books burn. That is, indeed, their only real benefit in my pyromaniacal eyes, but for those that actually care for at least the potentiality of the information contained therein, tell me if there happens to be a fire in your domicile, what is easier to save-- a shelf full of treeware, or a USB key that contains thousands of shelves of ebooks? The book rots, necessitating that it be preserved in expensive humidified prisons, which further implies that access to those particularly sickly tomes is tightly regulated; knowledge denied even more so than other similar specimens. The ebook can of course also mistakenly be deleted, and yet it can be brought back with yet another click of the button using free undeletion software, or the problem could altogether be avoided by easily making multiple copies of the digital text, which, quite literally, take up infinitesimal amounts of space when compared to that required to house multiple copies of their leprous treeware companions. As a dying last throe in the name of durability, the pulp puppets finally resort to historical longevity. Treeware has been around for centuries, ebooks for less than half! And yet, to stick to your rotting corporeal realm, has not paper been around longer than plastic--of what consequence is this in the least when comparing durability? Sustainability. What's that? You say you simply cannot read text on a screen lest your eyes start to bleed and your poor head begins to throb like my presently engorged phallus? Ah, poor reader, but do you not spend your days reading news stories, blogs, twitter and RSS scrolls, instant messaging conversations, phone texting friends and coworkers, exchanging emails, doing calculations, glazing over stock exchange scroll and news headlines, browsing random websites, and reading forums? Not only must you then be a celestial archetype of Purity incarnate (you will doubtless notice this is itself contradiction of terms, to be sure), but you also actually bothered to print this dreck out prior to reading it? How delightful, I only hope that you extend me the courtesy and burn it in disgust! Yet if indeed this is true, and you do neither of the aforementioned examples of reading digital text, then perhaps the problem merely lies in your inexperience. Do you see the little knobs on the edges of your screen? Yeah, that's it. Try turning them a notch or two, and you should soon see your screen pleasantly dim to a most unobtrusive glare imaginable, or at the very least certainly less than that glare produced by candlelight reflecting off the pages of your despicable treeware antique. Thus, if it is not already clear: to all those who insist on expatiating upon the woes of reading screened text, chances are that you either already do, or you are merely doing it wrong, as I can now perhaps similarly complain that reading treeware hurts my eyes when I try to read the book by slicing the pages through my eyelids, as it is indeed most difficult to read a treeware tome when ones eyes are overcome with reddened rage. Availability. 'But not everyone has access to ebooks, or the Internet, or electricity!' bemoan the treeware troops, curiously suddenly downing the most selfless of all altruistic demeanors, a transformation indeed made all the more curious by the fact that these are often the same creatures who expound upon at length of the aesthetic arousal they experience from high-quality editions that line their bourgeois bookshelves, whom you recall we met at the outset of this tract. But nevertheless, let us gag them with a simplistic rejoinder: but not everyone has access to printing treeware books, or printing presses, or ink! Thus, please, do not fault the ebook for any lack of a sufficient infrastructure that would easily facilitate ebook distribution. I will only ask what is easier, to venture to an internet cafe and download thousands of books onto a portable USB key, or to journey to a library to find that it has less books there than online? This is of course not to mention the fact that when one takes an ebook, nothing is missing, one merely procures a replication, yet when one purchases, borrows, or otherwise procures a treeware tome, that book is no longer available to anyone besides the current holder? Yet another outcry against the digital that approaches visibility from a different angle, humbly observes 'but you need electricity, batteries, power, oh my!' This is undoubtedly a truism, at least thus far in our technological development, and yet, you cannot read treeware after sunset sans technological assistance either, no? 'But there is candlelight and hand-powered flashlights,' the bookworms screech! So too, my friends, is there solar power and reserve generators. And then of course there is the dubious question of how your precious treeware is itself produced, if not through a staunch reliance on industrialization. Let us see the power conserved by shutting down all industrial printing presses, all publishing offices, bookstores, warehouses, libraries, and all other power- absorbing facilities and equipment involved in the treacherous treeware trade, and let us see what happens when we instead divert that energy to the production and dissemination of ebooks! But enough of this, listen closely and you may now hear the mildewed bookworms yell back, for while it is decidedly true that they always scream the loudest when they are set alight, even in this instance their shouts amount to naught more than a dying whimper. SMASH THE PRINTING PRESS - RAID PUBLISHING HOUSES - FIREBOMB BOOKSTORES AND LIBRARIES - BURN BOOKS - FREE INFORMATION. - Comments? Get in touch: xcon0 @t yahoo \/d0t/\ c||o|m (or call +1 (610) 887-6072) For more knowledge check out www.rorta.net and www.dizzy.ws