Thanks to interconnected computers that are able to compute and communicate at incredibly low costs, we have entered a time of what I’ll call deep automation. The story of modern economies has always been a story of automation, of course, but what what’s going on today goes far beyond anything that’s happened before. We don’t know what the consequences will be, but the persistent, high levels of unemployment in developed economies may well be a symptom of deep automation.

In a provocative article in the new issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur argues that computer automation has in effect created a “second economy” that is, slowly, silently, and largely invisibly, beginning to supplant the primary, physical economy:

I want to argue that something deep is going on with information technology, something that goes well beyond the use of computers, social media, and commerce on the Internet. Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically. They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. On the surface, this shift doesn’t seem particularly consequential—it’s almost something we take for granted. But I believe it is causing a revolution no less important and dramatic than that of the railroads … There’s no upper limit to this, no place where it has to end. Now, I’m not interested in science fiction, or predicting the singularity, or talking about cyborgs. None of that interests me. What I am saying is that it would be easy to underestimate the degree to which this is going to make a difference.

The computer system is, Arthur argues, “intelligent” in only the most basic sense of that word – intelligence defined as the ability of a thing to change its state in response to a stimulus. But, when spread across such enormous and enormously fast information-processing capacity, even that rudimentary degree of intelligence is enough to take over many traditionally human activities, even highly sophisticated ones: “Physical jobs are disappearing into the second economy, and I believe this effect is dwarfing the much more publicized effect of jobs disappearing to places like India and China.” So far, moreover, this new wave of automation, unlike the automation of manual labor during and after the industrial revolution, doesn’t seem to be creating large numbers of good new jobs to replace those it’s supplanting.

That means that, as a society, we now face a very different kind of economic challenge than we’ve faced in recent history:

The second economy will certainly be the engine of growth and the provider of prosperity for the rest of this century and beyond, but it may not provide jobs, so there may be prosperity without full access for many. This suggests to me that the main challenge of the economy is shifting from producing prosperity to distributing prosperity. The second economy will produce wealth no matter what we do; distributing that wealth has become the main problem. For centuries, wealth has traditionally been apportioned in the West through jobs, and jobs have always been forthcoming. When farm jobs disappeared, we still had manufacturing jobs, and when these disappeared we migrated to service jobs. With this digital transformation, this last repository of jobs is shrinking—fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs—and we face a problem.

Arthur is optimistic that we will be able to figure out a way to solve that problem, though the solution is by no means clear at this point. Distributing prosperity, as we’re seeing today, is not one of America’s traditional strengths – and, indeed, the entire idea is viewed with great suspicion. But if Arthur’s analysis is right – and if we don’t find a solution to the problem – Occupy Wall Street may be just a taste of what’s to come.

Even after I wrote a couple of posts about Amazon’s Kindle announcements last week, something still nagged me – I sensed there was an angle I was missing – and two nights ago it finally hit me. I woke from a fretful sleep and discovered a question pinballing through my synapses: What the heck does Kuzuo Ishiguro think about this?

Or, more generally: Whose book is it, anyway?

You might have thought that question was put to rest a few hundred years ago. For quite a while after Gutenberg invented the printing press, the issue of who controlled a book’s contents remained a fraught one. As is often the case, it took many years for laws, contractual arrangements, business practices, and social norms to catch up with the revolutionary new technology. But in due course the dust settled, and control over a book’s contents came to rest firmly in the hands of a book’s author (at least through the term of copyright). Which seems like the proper outcome. You probably wouldn’t, for instance, want book retailers to be able to fiddle with the text of a new book at their whim – that would be annoying, confusing, and wrong. And even if you did want it, it wouldn’t have been particularly practicable, as it would have required a retailer to invest in printing a special edition of the book or to have its employees go through every copy of the standard edition and mark it up with a Sharpie. Not only was authorial control over a text secured through laws and contracts, but it was also reinforced by the fact that printed books resisted easy emendation.

Case closed. Done deal. Everyone’s happy.

Until now.

At Amazon’s announcement last week, one of the things CEO Jeff Bezos introduced was the company’s new X-Ray feature – essentially a proprietary hypertext system for Kindle touchscreen ebooks. He demonstrated the feature by “X-Raying” Ishiguro’s acclaimed 1989 novel The Remains of the Day. With X-Ray, you tap on a page of a book, and you get a list of salient terms that appear on the page – character names, historical events, places, and so forth – along with a graph (an “X-Ray”) that indicates the frequency with which the terms are used throughout the book. You can then tap on a term to call up an explanatory article from Wikipedia (for glosses of facts) or Shelfari (for characters and other literary devices). To speed the hyperlinking process, Amazon does a technologically nifty trick: it bundles the relevant text from Wikipedia and Shelfari with the text of the book when it downloads the book to your Kindle. The company determines which supplementary text to include, as well as which terms to highlight, through a computerized textual analysis, which identifies what Amazon terms the “interesting phrases” in the book.

In one sense, X-Ray expands a feature that has been common in early ebook readers: the ability to call up a dictionary definition of a word. But X-Ray goes much further, both in augmenting the author’s original text and in integrating the additions into the reading experience. Some may see the additions as enhancements, others as irritants, but whether good or bad they represent an editorial intrusion into the contents of a book by a third party – a retailer, in this case. As such, they exist, I think it’s fair to say, in an ethical and perhaps legal gray area. That seems particularly true of novels, where the addition of descriptions of characters and other fictional elements would seem to intrude very much into the author’s realm. (I have to think X-Ray will make a lot of novelists nervous.) The fact that the supplementary text is sold along with the actual text makes the intrusion all the starker.

There are some obvious practical questions stemming from X-Ray, though I don’t see any evidence that Amazon or publishers have grappled with them yet:

Does the X-Ray system and its textual additions violate copyright controls or contractual arrangements?

Should Amazon be required to secure an author’s permission before X-Raying the author’s book? Should, in other words, X-Ray be opt-in? And if it’s not opt-in, should an author (or publisher) be able to opt-out?

Should an author be able to vet (or even add to) the supplementary information included with a book?

If, eventually, product recommendations or advertisements are included in the supplementary material triggered by X-Ray, should the author share in any resulting revenues?

There are also more theoretical questions, having to do with the aesthetics of literature, the integrity of works of art and craft, and the ethics of writing and reading.

I suspect that all these questions, and other related ones, will only become more salient and more complicated in the years ahead. Should X-Ray prove to be even a modest competitive advantage to the Kindle (or to Shelfari, which is owned by Amazon), we can expect other companies that provide e-readers or e-reading applications – Apple and Barnes & Noble, for instance – to introduce their own proprietary systems for amending and augmenting the text of a book. And we can expect Amazon to continue to extend the functionality of X-Ray. The intrusions onto the author’s traditional territory will only grow, and go deeper.

So whose book is it? Suddenly, that’s an open question again.

Now here’s a sight for sore eyes: Guided by Voices in its original (more or less) lineup recording Let’s Go Eat the Factory, its first new album since 1996’s Under the Bushes Under the Stars, in a basement rec room, with Robert Pollard singing in a doorway and bass player Greg Demos monitoring the TASCAM four-track cassette recording deck while sitting in a chair that appears to have been stolen from a kindergarten:

Pollard is one of the great American artists of the past 50 years, though I suspect it will be another 50 years before that begins to be acknowledged.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Lightning Boy, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

One of the essential characteristics of the printed book, as of the scribal codex that preceded it, is its edges. Those edges, as John Updike pointed out not long before he died, manifest themselves in the physical form of bound books – “some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained” – but they are also there aesthetically and even metaphysically, giving each book integrity as a work in itself. That doesn’t mean that a book exists in isolation – its words, as written and as read, form rich connections with other books as well as with the worlds of nature and of men – but rather that a book offers a self-contained experience. The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement. The book must feel complete between its edges.

The idea of edges, of separateness, is antithetical to the web, which as a hypermedium dissolves all boundaries, renders implicit connections explicit. Indeed, much of the power and usefulness of the web as a technology derives from the way it destroys all forms of containment and turns everything it subsumes into a part of a greater, ever shifting, amorphous whole. The web is an assembly not of things but of shards, of snippets, of bits and pieces.

An electronic book is therefore a contradiction in terms. To move the words of a book onto the screen of a networked computer is to engineer a collision between two contradictory technological, and aesthetic, forces. Something’s got to give. Either the web gains edges, or the book loses them.

How this collision will play out over the course of this century is not exactly difficult to predict. Here is Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, introducing the new X-Ray function for the Kindle Touch two days ago:

The video is something of a Rorschach test. A person of the web may see X-Ray as a glorious advance. A person of the book may see the technology as a catastrophe.

“When you reduce friction, make something easy,” says Bezos, correctly, “people do more of it.” The friction in this case is the self-containment of the printed book, the tenacity of its grip on the reader. The reduction of the friction is the replacement of text with highly responsive hypertext. What people do more of is shift their focus and attention away from the words of the book and toward the web of snippets wrapped around the book – dictionary definitions, Wikipedia entries, character descriptions from Shelfari, and so forth. It’s easy to see the usefulness of X-Ray, particularly for reference books, manuals, and other publications of a utilitarian nature. But Bezos is not X-Raying a cookbook. He’s X-Raying a novel: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. He is, in a very real sense, treating a work of art as though it were an auto repair manual. Which is, of course, what the web wants a work of art to be: not a place of repose, but a jumping-off point.

When Amazon delivers a copy of The Remains of the Day to your Kindle, Bezos goes on to explain, the company “has pre-calculated all of the interesting phrases” and turned them into links. My, what a convenience! As a reader, I no longer have to waste a lot of mental energy figuring out which phrases in a book are interesting. It’s all been pre-calculated for me! Here we have a preview of what happens when engineers begin to recreate books, and the experience of reading, in the image of the web. The algorithmical mind begins to run roughshod over the literary mind. Needless to say, there are also commercial angles here. Clicking on an “interesting phrase” will no doubt eventually trigger not just Wikipedia and Shelfari articles but also contextual advertisements as well as product recommendations from Amazon’s store. Removing the edges from a book also serves to reduce friction in the purchasing process.

Up until now, it’s been commonly assumed that a divide would emerge in the presentation of different kinds of electronic books. Reference works would get the full web treatment, tricked out with multimedia and hypermedia, while fiction and literary nonfiction would be shielded from the web’s manifest destiny. They’d go digital without losing their print nature; they’d retain their edges. That assumption always struck me as naive, and Bezos’s choice of a novel for his demo of X-Ray makes me even more dubious of the idea that literary works will remain exempt from webification. People aren’t going to purchase different sorts of e-readers for different sorts of books, and the reading medium will, as always, influence the act of reading. Updike observed that “the book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.” I don’t know whether or not Amazon’s algorithm would calculate that Updike’s words qualify as an interesting phrase, but they do seem prescient.

The future arrives wearing the clothes of the past. The first book that came off a printing press – Gutenberg’s Bible – used a typeface that had been meticulously designed to look like a scribe’s handwriting:

The first TV shows were filmed radio broadcasts. The designers of personal computers used the metaphor of a desk for organizing information. The world wide web had “pages.” The home pages of online newspapers mimicked the front pages of their print editions. As Richard Goldstein succinctly put it, “every novel technology draws from familiar forms until it establishes its own aesthetic.” It’s tempting to look at the early form of a new media technology and assume that it will be the ultimate form, but that’s a big mistake. The transitional state is never the final state. Eventually, the clothes of the past are shed, and the true nature, the true aesthetic, of the new technology is revealed.

So it is with what we call “electronic books.” Amazon’s original Kindle was explicitly designed to replicate as closely as possible the look and feel of a printed book:

When Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, introduced the Kindle in late 2007, he went out of his way to emphasize its mimicry of the familiar, bound book. Here’s an illuminating excerpt from a Newsweek cover story about the first Kindle:

“If you’re going to do something like this, you have to be as good as the book in a lot of respects,” says Bezos … Bounding to a whiteboard in the conference room, he ticks off a number of attributes that a book-reading device … must have. First, it must project an aura of bookishness; it should be less of a whizzy gizmo than an austere vessel of culture. Therefore the Kindle (named to evoke the crackling ignition of knowledge) has the dimensions of a paperback, with a tapering of its width that emulates the bulge toward a book’s binding. It weighs but 10.3 ounces, and unlike a laptop computer it does not run hot or make intrusive beeps.

To put it another way: the e-book, in its early form, used the metaphor of a printed book as the design concept for its user interface. But it was only a metaphor. The Kindle’s aura of bookishness was the modern equivalent of the Gutenberg Bible’s aura of scribalness. It was essentially a marketing tactic, a way to make traditional book readers comfortable with e-books. But it was never anything more than a temporary tactic.

Jeff Bezos is a businessman. He never really wanted to save the traditional book. He wanted to destroy it. And, in introducing the multimedia, multitouch, multitasking, app-tastic Kindle Fire today, Bezos has taken the “austere vessel of culture” out to the woodshed and whacked it with the business end of a mattock.

With the Fire, as with its its whizzy-gizmo predecessors, the iPad and the Nook Color, we are seeing the e-book begin to assume its true aesthetic, which would seem to be far closer to the aesthetic of the web than to that of the printed page: text embedded in a welter of functions and features, a symphony of intrusive beeps. Even the more restrained Kindle Touch, also introduced today, comes with a feature called X-Ray that seems designed to ensure that a book’s words never gain too tight a grip over a reader’s consciousness: “With a single tap, readers can see all the passages across a book that mention ideas, fictional characters, historical figures, places or topics that interest them, as well as more detailed descriptions from Wikipedia and Shelfari, Amazon’s community-powered encyclopedia for book lovers.” The original Kindle, now discounted to $79, is beginning to look like a dusty relic – something for the rocking-chair set.

The press coverage of the Fire has largely concerned its immediate commercial prospects: Will it challenge the Almighty iPad? But the real importance of the Fire is what it presages: the ultimate form of the e-book. Historians may look back on September 28, 2011, as the day the book lost its bookishness.

The desire for privacy is strong; vanity is stronger.