Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto [9780061733123]

Overview

“A strange, wondrous, challenging, enriching book….Beautiful and powerful…you will not encounter another book like it.”

—National Review online

In Digital Barbarism, bestselling novelist Mark Helprin (Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War) offers a ringing Jeffersonian defense of private property in the age of digital culture, with its degradation of thought and language and collectivist bias against the rights of individual creators. A timely, cogent, and important attack on the popular Creative Commons movement, Digital Barbarism provides rational, witty, and supremely wise support for the individual voice and its hard-won legal protections.

In this powerful writer’s manifesto, Helprin asks the essential question of our time: what is lost when the rights of the individual are sacrificed for the convenience of the collective?

• A Defense of Copyright: A powerful argument that copyright is not a monopoly or a tax, but a bulwark of civilization essential for protecting the individual voice.
• Critique of Digital Barbarism: An unflinching look at how the digital age, with its emphasis on speed and quantity, risks a degradation of thought, language, and the integrity of art.
• The Creative Commons Movement: A timely and important attack on the popular movement, revealing the collectivist bias that threatens the legal protections for individual creators.
• Property as Liberty: Reclaiming Jefferson, Helprin makes the case that the right of property is not antithetical to virtue but is, in fact, a pillar of ethics, morals, and individual freedom.