Truth and political power are opposing forces. The execution of Socrates showed being a philosopher in Athens was a dangerous and often fatal pursuit. Aristotle, the smartest of the ancients, left town whenever the authorities paid him too much attention.

On one of these trips (346-343 BC), he went to Lesbos and invented biology. He started by dividing living things:

Does it move?

Yes -> Animal

No -> Plant

He subdivided the animals into vertebrates and invertebrates, and so on, until he had a taxonomy of known life on the island. His students continued this endeavour. At 1835, on different islands, the Galapagos, Charles Darwin put finches into different branches based on their beak size, then their tail length, then their plumage.

If Keanu Reeves placed Aristotle and Darwin in the same room, they could work together happily. Aristotle uses a quill and parchment, Darwin uses notebooks and moveable type, but they both model the world on paper with a strict binary hierarchy that branches with one variable at a time.

The leap between the modern mind and Darwin is larger than the two millennia gap between Darwin and Aristotle. We model the world with databases and multivariate analysis: each class of thing can have infinite variables. We can instantly look at the same data in different ways to ask questions that Darwin could not have imagined. What are the common genes that give echolocation to both bats and dolphins? What are the shared brain patterns between flying squirrels and frogs? To find out the answer on paper, Darwin would need a decade to write another taxonomy.

A handwritten or printed codex can exist only on one shelf. The age of physical libraries and bookshops required classifying written works into finely grained categories. Academic libraries use the Library of Congress Classification, local libraries often still use the older Dewey Decimal System, which was around in Darwin’s lifetime.

There is no objective way to categorise a book, it depends on the whims of the categoriser. The infamous example is that Dewey Decimal excluded books covering homosexuality for decades, then pigeonholed them under “mental derangements” then “abnormal psychology” etc. Today in the West, they finally moved them to “sexual relations”, for the rest of the world, look under “social problems” - in theory. In reality, this site already got blocked by the firewall for saying the H word and the books got burned.

On the topic of authoritarian regimes, when you browse in a big tech platform for an ebook, you are not looking along a shelf, you are querying a non-hierarchal multivariate database. The results are not a straight keyword search. Their proprietary artificial intelligent algorithms tailor them based on your purchases, browsing history, local laws, implied values, and dozens of other hidden factors that approximate a form of digital god-like omniscience. No one else on earth gets the same offering of titles as you. In this era, we must think differently about the written word.

I am Ezra Lane Ghent and this is my first post. I will offer reflections as above and document my tragic and misguided aspiration to become a novelist in the age where everyone has their brains wired into streaming services with more content than anyone can watch in a lifetime, and the general attention span for reading barely stretches to 280 characters.

I will add a discussion feature to this site so you can respond. For now, you can find me in the digital lunatic asylum known as Twitter at ezralaneghent. So far, I haven’t dared enter the Facebook drug alley, the Instragram lion den, the TikTok snake pit or any of the other (anti)social networks. If you have bravely sailed ahead into those strange lands, a post by you linking to this would be very helpful, so the unplacatable demonic robotic spiders might weave their webs to catch a few of the declining rare species known as fellow readers. Together, like the dodo bird or the tasmanian tiger, we may huddle together on this last island and tell stories to each other.