G. A. Henty, 1905, read as a Project Gutenberg e-text from manybooks.net

This is actually a collection of action/adventure stories; only the first of which has anything to do with Malay pirates. I’d dismiss the collection as forgettable adventure fluff, except for the fact that several of the stories have flights of pedagogical exposition on the part of one character or another which give a fascinating insight into some British end-of-the-empire ideas and beliefs.

W.B. Yeats, 1902, read as a Gutenberg Project e-book from manybooks.net

A collection of folk stories, reminiscences, poems, and observations of the Irish countryside as retold by William Yeats, read in preparation for our upcoming Ireland trip.

Jean Shepherd, Doubleday 1966

I arrived at this book via the now-obligatory film Christmas Story. The film is not only adapted from the book, but is narrated by Shepherd.

The movie, it must be stated, is cobbled together from numerous unrelated episodes from the book, and yet forms a much more cohesive narrative arc than the book. The book is a collection of reminiscences, but the thread that ties them together is meandering stream-of-consciousness rather than a telling of a particular story.

The various episodes vary in their impact and quality. Shepherd’s talent for exaggeration and consciously creating mythic trappings for the mundane is the source of some of the humor; self-deprecation, an occasional winking (to let you know that he knows you’re in on the joke), and a real sense of which details are important supply the rest.

Shepherd’s approach is more successful for some stories than others. Some, however, are profound. “Leopold Doppler and the Great Orpheum Gravy Boat Riot” gives insights into human nature, the Great Depression, and manages to create the very distinct feel of a specific time and place.

Haruki Murakami, Vintage, 1997

This isn’t the first time I’ve read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It may not be the last.

Wind-Up Bird seems to me the culmination of Murakami’s prior work. It has all of his hallmarks: a strangely detached narrator, dreamworlds that intersect with reality in nysterious ways, people responding to unseen forces, wells, and teenage girls of questionable mental stability.

by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Oxford University Press, 2006

This interesting three-part book describes the evolution of the Internet from an academic network governed by utopian techno-idealists into an increasingly partitioned collection of networks under the control of national governments. It also predicts that the future will continue in this direction of many localized nets.

The overall conclusion of the book is that this evolution is a (mostly) Good Thing[tm], as human beings can’t be trusted to conduct business without the treat of violence. The assumption that the purpose of the internet is to facilitate business is not really questioned. Of course, I’m oversimplifying their case. There is also discussion of the value of information, its relationship to proximity, and the desire to allow enforcement of local standards.

I remember many of the events described in the history — most notably, the transfer of the DNS Root and its aftermath — but can’t say I really appreciated their significance at the time. I do recall being impressed with the anarchic, cooperative culture of the early internet. The philosophy of the Cypherpunks (e.g., “information wants to be free”) is a compelling idea, except when it comes to my credit card number. John Gilmore’s famous saying that “the net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it” is also a sentiment I still feel is powerful, but I fear that the mechanisms of censorship are getting ever more sophisticated. I also still have hope that ubiquitous communication can help humanity.

However, Wu and Goldsmith’s points are well made. I remember, in particular, believing in 1995 that the internet was going to connect everyone in the world, and promote an unprecedented era of communication and peace. After all, I was in communication with people all over the world using the internet (in English, of course). Then, in December of ’95, I embarked on a trip through Asia and the Middle-East. Something about these utopian beliefs kept nagging at the back of my mind as my travels progressed, and I met people in different countries and from different backgrounds. It wasn’t until months later, on a bus ride through the Sinai Peninsula, where from my window I could see Bedouins struggling against a mini-sandstorm that the realization broke through. Yes, these people and I share a common humanity — but then, that was about the limit of what we shared. If I were to visit with them, I could perhaps learn of their beliefs, culture, hopes, expectations, and so on. But simply tapping words into a keyboard from half a world away, such an exchange would be nearly impossible. How could I begin to understand their world without seeing, feeling, and smelling it?

Well, today, I have friends I have never personally met, throughout many nations that I have never visited. I chat with them, some daily, as I work on projects. I communicate with them mostly in English, a little bit in German, and even less in Spanish. Does this contradict my pessimism above? Well, yes and no. We have a common starting point (e.g., the projects), and, to be frank, relatively common culture: we are, for the most part, Europeans, Americans, Australians.

So maybe the internet is not the borderless world we once hoped for, but it’s also not (yet) the parochial collections of fiefdoms that it could become.