The Flameless Burning of Books

My friend Trog Davis recently posted a blog entitled, The New American Oligarchy in which he worries that Amazon winning the right to operate the U.S. Intelligence Community’s cloud computing system may have unintended consequences. Davis raises questions about firewalls between data Amazon the retailer possesses and data Amazon, the spy-world cloud-computing operator, will have.

Amazon’s technological prowess is great. Its system for selling everything from e-books to shoes is a digital age marvel. The Amazon distribution system is superior to virtually all other retailers including Walmart and they have patented various e-commerce processes such as the one-click purchase. Although it sells many items, Amazon is at heart a technology company and that technical expertise clearly attracted the intelligence community.

So what does Amazon know and what will it learn? Currently, e-books make up approximately 30% of all book sales according to Forbes Magazine. Amazon’s Kindle e-books account for about 65% of those sales. Amazon’s effect on brick and mortar bookstores has been dramatic. Only half as many bookstores exist today than did 20 years ago. Amazon is by far the largest seller of used books in the country and because it tracks all those book purchases, it has more data on reading habits than anyone.

Knowing what books we read is only part of the story. Already some e-books can communicate with their creator, i.e. Amazon and other e-book publishers. They will know where you stopped reading, what portions you re-read, underlined, or highlighted. Kindle e-books even tell Amazon when you read. Some e-book publishers have announced plans to share this data with writers who can then write to the data. You like particular items in a fight scene, re-read it a couple times and you will see a similar scene in other books in the genre. Highlight a kinky sex act in your erotica and it will start the next porno craze.

Authors “writing to the data” is not the end of the world. Democracy will survive bad fiction, but not the limiting of ideas. Ray Bradbury’s classicFahrenheit 451 pondered a world where firemen burned books to keep the population quiescent while the rest of the populations watched vacuous program after program on “the wall”. The wall allowed the powers that be to watch citizens as they watched the wall.

Bradbury’s vision is chillingly close to fulfillment. Ubiquitous cell phones track our movements, while we blithely exchange grumpy cat pictures on Facebook. Our tweets detail our interests 140 characters at a time--all fodder for the “intellicloud” Davis speaks of.

So how easy would it be to burn books in such a world? Well, Amazon already has loner programs that delete your Kindle e-book after 30 days. Bothersome books could disappear with a keystroke.

End of Days

The HBO show, The Leftovers, based on Tom Perrotta’s novel, portrays a post-mass disappearance world struggling to understand this rapture-like event’s meaning. In previous decades, we have seen the Antichrist coming of age movies in The Omen series. In the 1970s, Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great Planet Earth and later books cast modern political events against a background of Biblical prophecy. The apocalypse never seems to lose its appeal.

In writing my novel Revelation 11, I’ve come across stories of people believing they were one of the two witnesses mentioned in Revelation 11 or the Antichrist himself. Of course, this is only the Christian side of the equation. Islamic eschatology also foretells Christ’s return, but with a different twist. Jesus returns to “break the cross”, a term used to mean that Jesus proclaims Islam to be the only true religion and Mohammed the prophet of God. For all I know there are adherents to Islam who believe they will play a role in the end times as well.

I cannot doubt the sincerity of people who believe they are destined to play a role in the Second Coming. My novel examines what happens when these people believe their time has come. My skeptic protagonist, Trog Davis, outwardly wants to have no part of it. When another character, Joe Stoner, asks him, “How would you act if you truly believed we were living the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy?” Trog realizes the people he is dealing with have a totally different view of reality.

So why is the apocalypse so fascinating? First, we know it is possible in some form. We have evidence of mass extinctions throughout the planet’s history and can conceive that humans can go the way of the dodo bird. The baby boom generation grew up knowing that nuclear weapons could easily lay waste to the planet. ‘Doomsday weapons’ was the quaint moniker for them before ‘weapons of mass destruction’ became the fashionable term. Now we face threats of environmental pollution and global warming. Jesus himself claimed divine intervention would be necessary to prevent humans from killing themselves— "Unless those days had been cut short, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short.” (Matthew 24:22)

Finally, the apocalypse fascinates because it is the ultimate conspiracy theory. Someone, supernatural or human, knows what is going to happen, and the rest of us are along for the ride. We will need a hero to get to the truth. However, unlikely a hero he may be, Trog Davis may just be the guy for the job.