One of the finest public-interest projects anywhere in the modern era is the humble Project Gutenberg, “a library of 79,631 free eBooks” (though that number is forever rising). The premise of Project Gutenberg is simple: They digitize books, mainly those whose copyright protections have expired, and make them freely available in multiple, easy-to-access formats.
■ Changes in technology and in language have long caused problems with transmitting information. The quest to unlock the mysterious corners of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or to recover or reconstitute lost literary works from history both speak to the enormous frustration that results from knowing that content once existed but has escaped our present reach.
■ Most of human history (and our documentation of it) predates the Internet, and yet the ease of accessing digital content means we spend enormous amounts of time engaging with screens and much less with print. The result means that many people are almost exclusively immersed in contemporary content, with almost no exposure to anything even modestly old. (It doesn’t help that streaming services often ignore classic content entirely.)
■ The result tends to make people insufferably myopic, a little like the college freshman who reads Karl Marx or Ayn Rand for the first time and thinks they’re the first to ever really “get it”. Yet, to borrow a line from Ecclesiastes, “Nothing is new under the sun!”. Bringing older texts across the digital bridge to where they are accessible now on equal footing with social media, websites, and streaming media platforms really is a work of enormous public good.
■ Project Gutenberg, The Internet Archive, and like-minded digital archivists deserve thunderous applause and generous funding. Circumstances may vary from age to age, but most aspects of human nature don’t. That’s not a curse, either: It’s reassuring that none of us are really exploring life alone, as long as we’re aware of the resources left behind by so many others across the generations.
■ Written language has been with us since sometime in the realm of 3200 BC -- which means something like 175 to 200 generations’ worth of knowledge has been documented somewhere. The more of it we can find, dust off, and make available to our contemporaries, the better.