If a visitor from the past arrived today in our civilized cities, one of the aspects that might surprise this ancient Gulliver would certainly be our reading habits. What would he see? He would see huge commercial temples in which books are sold in their thousands, immense edifices in which the published word is divided and arranged in tidy categories for the guided consumption of the faithful. He would see libraries with readers milling about in the stacks as they have done for centuries. He would see them exploring the virtual collections into which some of the books have been mutated, leading the fragile existence of electronic ghosts. Outside, too, the time-traveller would find a host of readers: on park benches, in the subway, on buses and trams and trains, in apartments and houses, everywhere. Our visitor could be excused if he supposed that ours was a literate society.
On the contrary. Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading—once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive—is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. As our visitor would eventually realize, in our society reading is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living entity than an inconvenient storage room.
During the student revolts that shook the world in the late 1960s, one of the slogans shouted at the lecturers at the University of Heidelberg was Hier wird nicht zitiert!, "No quoting here!" The students were demanding original thought; they were forgetting that to quote is to continue a conversation from the past in order to give context to the present. To quote is to make use of the Library of Babel; to quote is to reflect on what has been said before, and unless we do that, we speak in a vacuum where no human voice can make a sound. "To write history is to cite it," declared Walter Benjamin.240 To write the past, converse with history—this was the humanist ideal that Benjamin was echoing, an ideal which Nicholas de Cusa first put forward as early as 1440. In his On Learned Ignorance de Cusa suggested that the earth was not, perhaps, the centre of the universe, and that outer space might be infinite rather than bounded by divine decree, and he proposed the creation of a semi- utopian society that, like the universal library, would contain all humankind, one in which politics and religion would have ceased to be disruptive forces.241 It is interesting to note that, for the humanists, a correlation existed between the suspicion of unbounded space that belongs to no one, and the knowledge of a wealthy past that belongs to all.
This is, of course, the very reverse of the definition of the World Wide Web. The Web defines itself as a space that belongs to all, and it precludes a sense of the past. There are no nationalities on the Web (except, of course, for the fact that its lingua franca is a watered- down version of English), and there is no censorship (except that governments are finding ways to ban access to certain sites). The world's tiniest book (the New Testament engraved on a five-millimetre-square tablet242) or the oldest multiple-page codex (six bound sheets of twenty-four—carat gold in the Etruscan language, dating from the fifth century B.C.243) possesses qualities that cannot be perceived merely through the words it contains but must be appreciated in its full and distinct physical presence. On the Web, where all texts are equal and alike in form, they become nothing but phantom text and photographic image.
The past (the tradition that leads to our electronic present) is, for the Web user, irrelevant, since all that counts is what is currently displayed. Compared to a book that betrays its age in its physical aspect, a text called up on the screen has no history. Electronic space is frontierless. Sites—that is to say, specific, self-defined homelands—are founded on it but neither limit nor possess it, like water on water. The Web is quasi- instantaneous; it occupies no time except the nightmare of a constant present. All surface and no volume, all present and no past, the Web aspires to be (advertises itself as) every user's home, in which communication is possible with every other user at the speed of thought. That is its main characteristic: speed. The Venerable Bede, lamenting the quickness and brevity of our life on earth, compared it to the passage of a bird through a well-lit dining hall, entering from the darkness at one end and exiting through the darkness at the other;244 our society would interpret Bede 's lament as an act of boasting.
Since electronic technology is present in all our fields of leisure and labour, we think of it as all-reaching, and speak of it as if it were to replace every other technology, including the technology of books. Our future paperless society, defined by Bill Gates in a paper book,245 is a society without history, since everything on the Web is instantly contemporary; for writers, for example, thanks to our word processors, there is no archive of our notes, hesitations, developments and drafts. Walter Benjamin noted, shortly before the rise of Nazism, that "Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self- alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order."246 To this self-alienation we have now added the alienation of our own ideas, and enjoy watching the destruction of our own past. We no longer record the evolution of our intellectual creations. To a future observer, it will appear that our ideas were born fully developed, like Athena from her father's brow—except that, since our historical vocabulary will be forgotten, the cliche will mean nothing.
On 18 January 1949, an American by the name of James T. Mangan filed a charter with the Cook County recorder of Deeds, and under the state of Illinois attorney's authority claimed ownership of the whole of space. After giving his vast territory the name of Celestia, Mr. Mangan notified all countries on earth of his claim, warned them not to attempt any trips to the moon and petitioned the United Nations for membership.247 Mr. Mangan's ambitious enterprise has now, in a more practical sense, been taken over by multinational corporations. Their methods have been extraordinarily effective. By offering electronic users the appearance of a world controlled from their keyboard, a world in which everything can be "accessed" and everything can be had, as in fairy tales, by a simple tap of the finger, multinational companies have ensured that, on the one hand, users will not protest against being turned into consumers, since they are supposedly "in control" of cyberspace; and that, on the other hand, they will be prevented from learning anything profound, whether about themselves, their immediate surroundings or the rest of the world. Commenting in 2004 on the usefulness of the Web as a creative tool, the celebrated American comic-strip artist Will Eisner explained that, when he first discovered this electronic medium, he believed it to be an almost magical source of new artistic inventions, but that of late it had become "merely a supermarket to which consumers come to look for the cheapest possible product."248