“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book, just as Kevin suggested,” writes Lanier in his book. “What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video.”

The issue isn’t one of taste. “I want to define a line,” said Lanier, “between subjective judgment of what future generations might like or care about, and just this basic functioning mechanism of civilization and culture. If it’s the case that future generations don’t like things the length of books, and prefer things that have a graph structure and are made of little pieces, then my hope is that whatever they do with that is done well. But what I think is crucial for it to be sustainable, and to be more than a single generation’s fling before the collapse of civilization, is that whatever they do respects the integrity of each personal point of view and grants the idea of personhood with an almost mystical stature.”