Some books beg to be read; others beg you to stop reading them. Mark Helprin's new book, Digital Barbarism, could have been an example of the former—how many popular works set out to defend the idea of copyright, argue that life plus 70 years isn't quite long enough, and attack Creative Commons as a wicked Commie invention? For sheer audacious ballsacity alone, Helprin's screed should have been a wonderful read, a well-argued polemic from an excellent novelist.

Instead, we get... this.

"Their authors write the way Popeye speaks, though with less polish" (p. 65). "The vast bulk of this ["free culture"] army may be just a bunch of wacked-out muppets led by little professors in glasses, but they will do more damage to the underpinnings of civilization than half a million Visigoths smashing up the rotted, burning cities of Rome" (p. 18). "These are not sensible people. By now I have read far too much of what they have written not to know that though they eschew style, wit, punctuation, proper spelling, capitalization, and accuracy, they are functionally literate. Nonetheless, they cannot read." (p. 41). "'Crowd-sourcing' was invented by sheep" (p. 163). "It would be one thing if such a revolution produced Mozarts, Einsteins, or Raphaels, but it doesn't. It produces mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down; Slurpee-sucking geeks who seldom see daylight; pretentious and earnest hipsters who want you to wear bamboo socks so the world won't end; women who have lizard tattoos winding from the navel to the nape of the neck; beer-drinking dufuses who pay to watch noisy cars driving around in a circle for eight hours at a stretch; and an entire race of females, now entering middle age, that speaks in North American chipmunk and seldom makes a statement without, like, a question mark at the end? What hath God wrought, and why didn't He stop with the telegraph?" (p. 57).

To which the only sensible response is, "Please, God, make it stop."

But it doesn't stop. For more than 200 pages, novelist and sometime New Yorker writer Mark Helprin churns out a truly astonishing pastiche of the pretentious and the profane, not bothering to address hundreds of thoughtful writers, but content to lambast (over and over and over again, in some horrible parody of Neitzschean "eternal return") anonymous commenters on blogs.

Digital Barbarism:

A Writer's Manifesto Harper 256 pages $24.99

Standing up for copyright term extension isn't popular at the moment, unless you're a lobbyist, but that's exactly why Helprin takes the topic on. As a writer, he has a personal stake in copyright, and he wants to leave his copyrights to his grandchildren just as he might any other piece of property.

One can't help but suspect that the best way to achieve this goal is not to turn out this book, however, which sadly makes Helprin look (variously) petty, uninformed, angry, unfair, curmudgeonly, and downright misanthropic.

What else to say about a man who boasts of looking at a computer screen "as little as possible," puts the word "blog" in quotes "to quarantine it because it is so ugly," compares wikis to Soviet rulers, says that he "has never been to a party" except once in tenth grade, and who finds socializing with other people a "torture so exquisite that I sometimes imagine my heart will burst"?

The danger of writing New York Times op-eds

Digital Barbarism began with an op-ed. In 2007, Helprin wrote a New York Times piece in which he railed against the fact that his "property" (copyrights) would be taken away from him 70 years after he died, the sort of grotesque unfairness one doesn't see with small businesses or the family Bible, for instance.

Helprin isn't a man into "community;" in Digital Barbarism, he argues that community is capable of "regimenting the life of the individual," "encouraging conformity," "saddling mankind with various brutal and destructive abstractions," and promoting action by decree rather than in voluntary association." In the presence of more than two people who are not family members, "I slowly begin to disintegrate."

Given his temperament, it is unsurprising that he is no fan of "giving works back to the community," which happens when they fall out of copyright. But he recognizes that no less an authority than the Constitution says that copyrights are "for limited times" and are meant for the advancement of the community's art and science. What to do? In the op-ed, Helprin made a modest proposal.

"The genius of the framers in making this provision is that it allows for infinite adjustment. Congress is free to extend at will the term of copyright. It last did so in 1998, and should do so again, as far as it can throw. Would it not be just and fair for those who try to extract a living from the uncertain arts of writing and composing to be freed from a form of confiscation not visited upon anyone else? The answer is obvious, and transcends even justice. No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind."

Or, to sum up: Just keep on extending copyright, baby!

Because he avoids computer screens and has a disdain for technology bordering on the pathological ("May your BlackBerry rot in hell"), Helprin did not immediately recognize the controversy his work had stirred up online.

As controversies go, it was fairly minor; it received blog coverage and the sorts of predictably negative comments that one might expect from blog commenters. But Helprin took it pretty personally, and instead of engaging with thoughtful critiques of the current copyright regime, he decided that attacking the dumbest comments he could find on the subject was worth doing... in book-length form.

To Helprin, the "collectivist ideology" of the anti-copyright faction is nothing less than an assault on 1) property rights and 2) the "individual voice."

He admits that most copyrights are worth very little, but still wants to lock up creative works for at least a century. It's about control, the kind of control that allows Helprin to pass his copyrights to his heirs, who at least have an interest in safeguarding his words and work. Without the sort of control represented by tough, lengthy copyright terms, the world would descend into a "bloody nightmare" of remixes that would be "infinitely worse than being in a hippie commune in which anyone who wants to can use your toothbrush—or your diaphragm."

Also, a "million geeks in airless basements" would "rewrite Doctor Zhivago to make it more like 'Dungeons and Dragons.'"

In case you're not quite getting the point, Helprin doesn't want the unwashed masses anywhere near these absolutely exquisite (and copyrighted) insults he's hurling onto the page. Removing the barrier of copyright would suddenly dissolve the individual voice in the acid of community; remixes, mashups, copying, cutting, pasting—where would it end except in the destruction of individual identity within "an indistinguishable and instantly malleable mass"?

Which is, of course, an issue that has already confronted every single work ever to slip out of copyright, yet somehow we still know who wrote Middlemarch and have managed to preserve the text whole and undefiled.

The My Little Pony brigade



Those who don't inhabit Helprin's dystopian nightmares are ridiculed, or, if not ridiculed, insulted—usually with comparisons to tyranny and murder.

"Electronic nudniks" now display a "certain sinister, angry, off-the-rails quality (think the Unabomber) which is perhaps to be expected from the kind of person who has spent forty thousand hours reflexively committing video-game mass murder and then encounters an argument with which he finds himself in disagreement." (p. 32). "Both the Soviets and the wiki builders imagined and imagine themselves as attempting to reach the truth. But both have in common the great ease of changing what once was firmly set upon a page" (p. 65). On a statement by Lawrence Lessig: "Why does this remind me of Idi Amin?" (76) On abolishing copyright: "Because those who recommend it are so often what I believe are called 'dorks'; it seems not quite as threatening, like a My-Little-Pony version of the Khmer Rouge" (p. 84). Copyright is only unnecessary in "the target end-states of Marxism" (p. 169). "The various forms of assault upon the independent voice and the incentive to create... [are] the same sort absurd maneuver Adolf Eichmann tried when he brazenly claimed to have expedited the acceptance of hundreds of thousands of Jews into heaven" (p. 209).

While Godwin's Law has not quite been triggered here, Helprin's doing pretty well: Khmer Rouge, Marxism, Unabomber, Idi Amin, the Red Army, and Eichmann.

Where is all this coming from? It turns out that Helprin is kind of—how do I say this in terms he might understand?—an asshole. When an editor once suggested changing the word "expensive" to "pricey" in one of his articles, Helprin objected. It's fair enough, as a writer, to stand up for your words, even the least of them—I've done it myself for magazine articles—but the pretentious jerkishness of his response must be read to be believed.

Helprin explained to his poor editor that "I don't use the word pricey, that it's the kind of word that may be suitable for Crocodile Dundee but sticks out of a sentence and stops a reader cold, that it sounds cutesy even if it isn't, that it reminds me of the phrase palsy-walsy, which I also do not use, and that I would give up my odd and always perilous career in journalism and starve to death rather than put it on record as something I had written" (pp. 60-61).

When, from a rowboat, he once spotted someone on shore mimicking his rowing motion, he imagined this person thinking, "How stupid can you be to row five miles in the heat when you might never move a muscle, eat cupcakes and pork rinds all day, smoke like a volcano, and sit in your bass boat hooked up to an oxygen bottle?"

Everything is too much, too strong, and badly targeted. Helprin has it in for Lawrence Lessig and Techdirt—and that's about it. He rants against those who would "abolish" copyright, but has almost nothing to say about the far more interesting and plausible proposals to reform fair use, change the term of future copyrights, deal with orphan works, scale back statutory damages, etc. It's as though they simply don't exist. (Perhaps they were murdered by the My Little Pony regiment of the Khmer Rouge.)

It's too bad, because Helprin is an excellent wordsmith, and he has something to say about the importance of individual creation, the moral right to exert control over one's work for a limited time, and loss of tranquility in modern life. But his utter inability to address serious opposing arguments or to see even some benefit in things like open source software and Creative Commons unfortunately ruins the book, rendering the very project incomprehensible.

After all, if your opponents are nothing more than "a crowd looting a supermarket, or a junkie taking a hit," erudite jeremiads certainly aren't going to sway them; they won't even be read. Certainly, they don't invite any sort of measured response.

Upon closing the volume, I was left with the sad impression that, as at so many times in Helprin's life, the man speaks only to himself.