Great Pyramid © Hopes

For seasonal reasons I managed to be offline for a few days while the news broke: Egypt intends to adopt the 'our ancestors made it, someone might be prepared to pay to replicate it, so let's claim a monopoly' model of intellectual property and copyright her ancient relics. There's been some interesting commentary from William Patry and Digging Digitally, and I'd like to quote the latter:

This is another case of how the public domain is a highly contested concept, being undermined by intellectual property maximalists in the developed world and being questioned by some developing nations and indigenous community organizations. Instead, it seems that this is just an attempt to monopolize the global popularity of Ancient Egypt. Since tourism is so strategically important for Egypt, I suppose any competition in the tourist experience of Egyptian antiquities may be something of an economic threat. Alternatively, the continual use and expression of ancient Egyptian styles, motifs, and references may be more valuable to the Egyptian state, since this continued expression may help keep ancient Egypt alive and relevant in the popular imagination, and may generate more interest to travel to the source of Egypt’s glorious past.

Given my thoughts about where heritage value is located, i.e. in the networks of ideas and motifs which can be manifest in both originals and derivatives, I'm predictably of the view that the proposals are not only ridiculous (and hopefully just the thing to expose the dodginess of intellectual property maximalism) but not even 'good' for Egypt's own heritage. I don't deny, of course, that funding the upkeep of Egypt's ancient sites is a genuine and serious problem. But reinforcing their exclusivity with an IP monopoly wouldn't really add anything. We already think originals have some special status, Walter Banjamin's 'aura'; the Louvre stays in business despite all those prints of the Mona Lisa. So is it 'good' for the heritage of Ancient Egypt to be limited in this fashion, when one of the most famous and indeed irreplaceable monuments has already had its nose blown off? The assumption seems to be that the heritage is paradigmatically located in the (original) relics; but we approach those relics with certain preconceptions about the significance of antiquity. In a sense, Egypt is already everywhere, and this too is a real aspect of her heritage.

I do wonder whether we're seeing a permanent shift in the significance of IP, beyond linear maximalism: increasingly pragmatic and ad hoc efforts at justification, combined with transmutation into a direct political tool where a group or its 'culture' may be identified as the originator of a work, idea or item of 'traditional knowledge'. Perhaps this is an unprecedented case of 'intellectual property nationalism'.

Hopefully we in the enlightened West won't be rushing to reciprocate; but with IP one can never be all that confident, so I'd better tell the masons to hurry up with my calendar.

Another Excuse for My Twisted Mind

Coursework in religious studies GCSEs has been scrapped because of concerns children are being left to study 'sensitive' topics unsupervised...

"When we went out to consult with a huge number of teachers and members of the public, the concern was that young people would be dealing with sensitive topics without teacher guidance.

"This would have meant students going out to do their own research on the Internet and in library books."
BBC News

For the curious, my coursework topics back then were war in Christianity and death and the afterlife in Islam. I think I was just slightly older when I was reading The Republic and The Prince for pleasure.

I'm not sure what's more disturbing: the idea that people almost old enough to leave school can be kept from finding things out and drawing their own conclusions, or the idea that they should. The word 'guidance' takes on a very sinister colour, little suggestive of intellectual broadening and exploration.

Know Them By Their Fruits

If these walls could talk, what stories they would tell!—assuming a suitably anthropocentric architectural psychology. My conjecture, though, is that it would be helpful to be interested in Dulux, shelving and picture hanging.

Putting the re- back into 'reform', caricaturing the young as always, and some fruit-looking things, just because

Parties are not trusted to appoint new peers on merit... The committee's report said a formula should be devised to draw up the size and party balance of seats in the Lords, based on the proportion of votes a party won at the last election.

This is the fundamental contradiction: parties aren't flavour of the month, but the magic that transmutes occasional voting into the perception of representation still holds enough psychological sway to ensure that parties get in there somehow. Formula gives us formulaic, and running appointments through an 'independent' blender will weaken already faltering magic, without adding any more credibility than any think tank possesses.

What we need is a white magic that more effectively counteracts the blizzard of Bills from the Lower House. But nobody knows how to conjure it up; 'merit' is a smokescreen, mere technical competence which we ought to be able to expect of anyone, and sagacity is hard to come by. The problem everyone has with Lords Reform is that it's a technical problem that demands a magical solution, but we can't afford to have a technical failure.

Excruciating quotation of the day: 'Eno told the BBC Radio 4 World at One programme his work as a record producer meant he had credibility with young people.'

Song of the moment: 'I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore'. Not because I've anything against this chap (I don't know who he is), but because it's so nice to be 'old' in student terms and therefore feel that this kind of patronising drivel is somebody else's problem.

It's the point at which I look for something apolitical or at least non-gloomy to finish off... This is quite far from gloomy, but with the source site down for maintenance I'll just have to guess at what it is. Unfortunately my first guess involved the 'fruit [that] was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss' in Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space; so much for a gloom-free ending.

‘Please Sir, may we have our ban back?’

Being neither a lawyer nor privy to the machinations of the BBFC I'm not well placed to predict what form their appeal for a judicial review regarding the fate of Manhunt 2 will take, but I shall be interested to learn what approach they take. Apparently they're 'contesting the [Video Appeals Committee's] judgement because in the Board's view, it is based on an approach to harm which is an incorrect interpretation of the Video Recordings Act'. That suggests the argument will be essentially about what the law means, making me wonder how fully the direct question of how it applies to Manhunt 2 will be addressed.

I think it's likely this will be the contentious wording...

Video recordings: suitability

(1) After section 4 of the [1984 c. 39.] Video Recordings Act 1984 there shall be inserted the following sections— “4A Criteria for suitability to which special regard to be had

(1) The designated authority shall, in making any determination as to the suitability of a video work, have special regard (among the other relevant factors) to any harm that may be caused to potential viewers or, through their behaviour, to society by the manner in which the work deals with—

• (a) criminal behaviour;
• (b) illegal drugs;
• (c) violent behaviour or incidents;
• (d) horrific behaviour or incidents; or
• (e) human sexual activity.

(2) For the purposes of this section—

• "potential viewer" means any person (including a child or young person) who is likely to view the video work in question if a classification certificate or a classification certificate of a particular description were issued;
• "suitability" means suitability for the issue of a classification certificate or suitability for the issue of a certificate of a particular description;
• "violent behaviour" includes any act inflicting or likely to result in the infliction of injury;

and any behaviour or activity referred to in subsection (1)(a) to (e) above shall be taken to include behaviour or activity likely to stimulate or encourage it.

...but while it leaves plenty of room for questions and differences of judgment about its interpretation (what's 'horrific behaviour'?), it does so because it opts for a rather vague, inclusive list of material requiring particular attention, rather than making much of an effort to provide a general definition of harm. It's part of our regulatory framework that much gets left to the BBFC's judgment; the Board itself has a policy of taking public mores into account. On this occasion the Board finds itself overruled, and complains that the 'VAC judgement, if allowed to stand, would have fundamental implications with regard to all the Board's decisions, including those turning upon questions of unacceptable levels of violence'—which is, one might think, the point. (How ironic: the censor questioning the judgment of a higher authority.)

Kotaku probably has it about right: the BBFC's reputation has taken a dent (and the contrary decision of the ESRB won't have helped), and they're worried that a consistent application of the standard established by the VAC would cast doubt on the judgments they've been making across the board. Not having handled this affair in the subtlest of manners, they're going to be arguing a point of law, but with an eye on public perception. If they lose, they'll be dented further (although I wonder how many people will actually notice or care); if they win, we'll have a watershed judgment, the actual meaning of the Video Recordings Act may be a little clearer... and the U.K. will still have banned a game which can be purchased (albeit watered down from the original build) in the U.S.

Silent Night

Term finished days ago, sweeping the undergrads. away with it; parts of College are frenetic with conference activity, but I live in a zone of deathly silence that feels uncannily like the build-up of suspense early in a Silent Hill game. Back when I was working on the phenomenology of aloneness this would have been a useful opportunity: my familiarity with this place as lived-in, even though mostly it's a quiet part of College anyway, now makes me experience it very much as empty. I think the biologist at the end of the corridor is still around – occasionally I hear people pass the door – but postgrad. biologists keep odd hours.

I'm occasionally tempted to wander off in search of a better-equipped kitchen: the one near my room lacks certain desiderata, like a grill; and a pile of used and unwashed bowls in the corner, abandoned I know not by whom, intrudes on my solitude. (Contemplated note to leave beside them: 'I stand here in the evenings, doing my own washing up, and look in melancholy upon these objects which destroyed my innocent faith in the existence of Brownies.') Sometimes I venture out to purchase supplies. Mostly I proceed with my usual insularity, which proves to have been excellent practice.

Distances become weird when I'm coccooned like this: Durham marketplace feels neither more nor less distant than usual, but the MCR seems further away somehow through this warren of barely inhabited corridors.

‘An organism that was apparently dead...’

Since the FFVII International debug rooms actually provide a veritable Rosetta Stone in the form of a full or nearly full character list, and enough work has been done on the field files' format and compression method already to have made the English text readable, making a table file for the Japanese version proceeds as straightforwardly as matching kanji to hex numbers is ever going to get. Kana, punctuation and alphanumeric characters were easy, and a few initial kanji showed things were on the right track.

[Image link]

I started with a reference table someone made for the English version: as it turns out not that many values are shared between the two (and I have yet to track down the Japanese version's colour change characters), but a few important ones like 'end of line' are thankfully consistent. (I get the impression there was an effort to use only single-byte characters for the English version, hence the rearrangement.) Tracking down the character list produced a big block of hexadecimals, which could then be arranged to correspond to character positions on the screen. With the kanji for 'Shinra' and 'Mako Reactor' in, testing with another map file showed things were basically working...

[Image link]

...and that just left 1000+ kanji to identify and list in their Unicode forms. Thankfully GlitterBerri now has enough time free to work on this.

So far, kanji listing for the main game is well underway, but the Sampler CD demo uses some different values from the final version; I'll have to examine the ATE files closely later to see just how many are different. Kana are mostly the same, but not entirely. (ヂレット, which is what the table made for the final game produces for Barret's name, should be バレット. Yes, PCs' names are written out in full text in the demo instead of being represented as the {CLOUD} and {BARRET} special characters.)

It was possible to spot this in the Sampler CD files:

「だれだ。きさまら!」{END}

Probably the apparently unused line 'Who goes there?' (which appears in translation in the files of a later demo). Since it comes first, and the script seems to run sequentially from then on until entering the Reactor, I conject that it would have been used on the platform when the red-clothed guards get attacked.

 デモプレイはここまでです。{EOL}
 12{K}の{K}{K}をお{K}しみに!{END}

The kanji are missing from the second part (marked with {K}s), but the first part is 'The demo play is as far as here'. GlitterBerri thinks the second part may turn out to look like this...

12月の発売をお楽しみに!{END}

...meaning 'Look forward to the December release!' Since the text isn't used in the demo – instead there's a version of the FMV with the reactor exploding in which text in (not overlayed on) the video reads 'Mission Complete'; 'Final Fantasy VII'; 'Coming In December' – I'm guessing that Square put it in and then changed their minds, or that it's from some earlier version that might have been sent to journalists, or something like that.

Switching attention back to the main game files, we have our first fully translated segment of text which was blank in the English files (as checked using Loveless.exe on the PC version):

「とりあえず、チェックしとく?」{EOL}
    列車到着へ!!{EOL}
    南魔晄炉破壊作戦へ{EOL}
    ぬけちゃう!{END}

Which GlitterBerri translates as:

[Check it just in case?]
    To the train arrival
    To the South Mako Reactor destruction plan
    Escape!

This is from the Cargo carriage on the Midgar train; I was hoping it would shed light on the 'Cargo' outtake, but although it seems to be debug text it's still heartening to see it working.

Apparently There Was a Consultation On the Samurai Sword Ban...

...which completely passed me by. Of course, it was a Home Office consultation anyway, which never bodes well.

What sort of person would single out a very specific type of blade for a ban, create a sub-category of no less dangerous implements to remain permissible, and deem 'the import, sale and hire' of these items – the BBC article doesn't mention possession, interestingly enough – worthy of 'six months in jail and a £5,000 fine'?

Home Office minister Vernon Coaker said there was a clear danger to the public posed by easily-available swords.

Ah. All is explained.

I have a hunch that people with a will to maim and kill will not be greatly inconvenienced by the lack of a cheap and non-genuine katana with which to do it. Back to the chainsaw massacre plan...

“This your first time in a reactor?”

These stairs from an imagined industrial complex look familiar: maybe ALMACAN was inspired by Mako Reactor architecture. Or perhaps it's just an obvious association for me by now.

Thanks to NexuzJannis and GlitterBerri I've been able to look at three pre-release PSX demos of Final Fantasy VII: English and Japanese versions of the Sampler CD, and the English version of the PlayStation Underground demo.

The Sampler CD distributes data among files differently from the final game: where in the demo's \NARITA\ directory one sees e.g. ELEVTR1.ATE, ELEVTR1.BSC, ELEVTR1.CA, ELEVTR1.ID, ELEVTR1.MAP, ELEVTR1.MIM, the correspondingly named files in the final game's \FIELD\ directory are ELEVTR1.BSX, ELEVTR1.DAT, ELEVTR1.MIM. So programs built to view the text in the game's DAT files will be of no use with this.

The Grenadiers were removed from the final game (though their palette looks like the Underwater MPs'), and I still haven't managed to fight any of them in the Japanese version of the demo.

The PlayStation Underground disc has a similar file structure to the final game (so I can use text viewers). There's the usual redundancy in the dialogue files: all but one of them are identical, containing all the demo text and some snippets from scenes not in the demo. Other files include a vast amount of material not required for the demo scenes. \ENEMY6\ has battle models for the whole party, including Sephiroth, Vincent's Limit Break monster forms, HICLOUD.LZS (presumably his final battle form), three versions of Vincent's model and four of Barret's. (These alternative versions have no differences I've been able to spot, but the filesizes vary slightly.) \ENEMY1\ has sixty monster models, rather more than the demo requires. \MOVIE\ has some MOV files which seem from the filenames to be from the Gold Saucer, as well as BIN and STR files with names related to Junon and Bugenhagen's observatory. \MENU\ has files like PATYMENU.MNU and NAMEMENU.MNU, suggesting that the data for full menu fuctionality are present. \MAGIC\ has files for a large number of spells, including quite a few Summons, and the tantalisingly named LASTBOSS.LZS.

The PlayStation Underground demo also has two debug rooms, albeit partly disabled ones. (There's more translated debug room text in the files than is actually accessible here.) 8009A098 0000 is the code for the STARTMAP (main) debug room.

Yuffie is here, as in the full game. The Japanese character set has been removed, possibly by someone who hoped the full game would feature Macs. The warps are all disabled, so getting to the other debug room requires the code 8009A098 0001. (8009A098 0002 produces the end-of-demo FMV with the release date, and higher numbers lead to the regular maps.)

This is Kitase's room before the party started: Cloud's 'walking in water' effect helps to give it away. Tifa's model is used instead of Cid's, though (despite the fact that CID.BCX appears in \FIELD\).

The only things that work are 'opening' and 'feel wind': in the demo the latter takes you to just outside the map where you set the bomb. Everything else cancels.

These pyramids aren't from the demo; they're what you can fight by selecting an option in STARTMAP in the final game. A while ago I speculated that a video of an alternative version [Update: removed 'due to terms of use violation'? The mind boggles...], with Cloud fighting actual Deenglows in an arena with a burnt orange sky and a giant Shinra logo for a floor, might be a product of GameShark wizardry; in fact, it's how the test battle appears in the demo. [Update: apparently it's also like this in the original Japanese version of the finished game; I have FFVII International, which has the pyramid version, so I'd assumed all forms of the finished game did.]

The first time I accessed this the game stopped accepting commands and produced error messages (fully translated); unfortunately I haven't been able to replicate that.

Another interesting thing to finish off with: NexuzJannis found an advert featuring beta footage on a French site, and happily it turns out to be on YouTube too. Aeris looks almost blonde at one point: she reminds me of Terra in the SGI demo.

The Philosophy of Hinting

To hint: to refrain from conveying a message clearly in favour of a performance of obfuscation, steering with every appearance of accident into giving one's interlocutor reasons to infer what one will not say, but being always careful merely to arrange, never to turn one's nudging into saying.

Sometimes, true misdirection is directed only at some unescaped third party: the signs are so crafted as to be quite apparent to the target, and completely invisible to the chaperone. Elsewhere, however, this most curious exercise develops: I will not speak 'openly', for some reason, so I set myself this task of obfuscation. But my task as obfuscator must be to fail, since I desire to be understood. Yet I cannot be understood, for if I were understood then I should have been unmasked as the deliberate conveyor of my message; therefore I must not be understood, and so I obfuscate, a hanger of signs who must not be caught signalling.

If in the face of this legerdemain my interlocutor fails to draw the expected inference—how could this oaf fail to draw that obvious conclusion from those obvious signs? But of course the proper object of irritation is myself, an obfuscator of excessive accomplishment and thereby a failed hinter. The scenario is more poisonous still if it is out of faith in our mutual trust that my interlocutor remains oblivious: we who scour political speeches for all marks of pseudo-promises and loopholed convictions cannot in good faith approach our friends through such suspicious instincts. How can I blame him who denies to himself what seems possible in my manner because he trusts me to tell it directly?

It's not 'bad faith' as such, but the flavour is there: in one and the same act I seek to lie (no!—but yes, to deceive) and to speak truly. (Or worse by far, to hide a lie within a lie—and you're left with no claim against me, because you freely drew the inference. Cf. Kierkegaard's seducer.) The further paradox is that the demand I make of my interlocutor is precisely that he should act freely—so long as he follows the lead; his freedom becomes a means to an end.

Too many 'Act like a human!' moments, not enough humane ones—

Constraints

The plot thickens.

Think (instead) of the children; think of the environmental effects of archiving; think about Oulipo

Sinister quotation of the moment: 'There are games that not suitable [sic], games which are sinister, dark and thought-provoking; parents instincts [sic] to be concerned are right. There are games that should be out of the hands of the children.'

'Thought-provoking' games as a class are worrying? This is out of 'did she really say that?' land.

More on the will to record, now set up against environmentalism.

So is the anthropological project of preserving ourselves really worth its environmental effects?

Are we saying that the planet may soon become unrecognizable, even uninhabitable, because of runaway climate change, and yet at least it'll have lots of really great archives...?

I can think of worse eventualities, certainly. It's an ironic situation, given that my interest in holistic value in cultural heritage, in the importance of regarding the whole with its interdependence and interplay of sometimes individually insignificant components, has its origins in ideas developed in environmental ethics.

I don't want to say much in response here, but it does strike me that recognisability is a strange criterion to appeal to (though maybe not without precedent, since it reminds me of appeals to natural beauty): maybe we just have conflicting ways of being anthropocentric.

Let's finish on a happier note with another bookish topic that tickles my fancy: Oulipo is fun to say, and the linked article has brought me into contact with some other interesting literary notions:

It's impossible to imagine a writer like [Raymond] Queneau, for instance, eventuating anywhere but in France. His first novel began as a playful translation of Descartes into spoken French; in another, a character escapes its book and, like Gogol's nose, roves all about Paris having adventures, pursued by its desperate author; his Exercises in Style relates the same incident in ninety-nine versions ranging from anecdote to reportage to haiku to philosophical treatise.

Oulipo? Literature made artifically difficult for the author, not just in ordinary ways like applying a rhyme scheme, but voyaging into realms of greater flair: 'sonnets written in such a way that, as with books of heads, bodies and legs for children, any line may be juxtaposed with any other', or the S + 7 method of composition by replacing nouns with those found seven places later in a given dictionary.

I look forward to future waves of Oulipo-based Interactive Fiction, and the advanced culture of augmented beings that will partake of such recreation.

Somewhat Organised Notes

In which I continue to investigate the nature and value of information in heritage objects. (For people who like their heritage less heavy, Lego offers some interesting potential... Oh, and Curious Expeditions posted an article on castles in Outsider Art some time ago.)

It strikes me that this work is so much of its time that either I'm very fortunate in having the right intellectual background and cultural milieu to see things previously more obscure, or what I'm doing is throughly historically contingent and will be overturned within a generation. Either way, onward—

I've mentioned value in organisation: in libraries, museum collections, and so forth. But there are lots of ways of organising things: Professor Scarre's told me quite a bit about disputes over approaches to museum exhibition, notably how accentuating the visual beauty of an exhibit may involve de-emphasising its status as an object of archæological study. In libraries material is organised so that it can readily be found whatever the purpose; on the other hand, an exhibition in a museum or art gallery can operate as something of a specific narrative. Besides this sort of practical organisation there's the purely conceptual, i.e. concepts like 'Outsider Art' which form part of our getting to grips with the world. We can arrange our ideas and their instantiations in a whole host of ways, and the question is then: if there's value to be found in at least some organisations, what exactly makes them valuable?

Generally we organise things to be useful, and possible uses are legion: 'Who is to say that what is printed today and discarded tomorrow by the majority of people will not fulfil some important role in historical research in the future?' (Ephemera: A Book On Its [sic] Collection, Conservation and Use, p. 2) Information is broader than content: for example, leaflets might be used as evidence of the development of typography.

Newly discovered antiquities are 'mixed goods.' They have a physical component (the object itself) and an intangible component (the archeological and historical information associated with the discovery).

Looking again at the argument about information as part of the heritage object qua locus of value, it's not just that we tend to be valuing information (e.g. historical information) when regarding things as heritage, therefore heritage information is (at least sometimes) valuable; it's also that in undertanding objects as fit for e.g. archæological or anthropological study we regard them as windows into certain domains of knowledge, so their potential for informing us is built into our (theoretical/scientific) ways of approaching them. A conceptual category like 'Outsider Art' is part of our apparatus for getting at the potential of objects and thereby unlocking their value; for that matter, so is theoretical work involving those categories and objects.

Now the category 'Outsider Art' looks especially tricky, not simply because it's imprecisely defined (although it is), but because it looks like something we impose on the world quite contingently. Outsider Art is defined in contradistinction to 'mainstream' 'art', so it doesn't look like a natural kind: the concept helps to organise disparate things more than it picks out an independently existing group of properties. (Professor Scarre put it to me that one might ask whether objects gain value by being classified as 'mainstream art'; it's a good question, since my instinct there is to think it's the 'art' aspect that's important. Of course, classification in terms of 'the art of the insane' is partly an affirmation that such works are not merely psychological evidence and byproducts of mental trauma but products of aesthetic creativity.) The theory of Outsider Art (and art generally) influences what works are classified as such, while the discovery of works influences the theory... and it's in cases like these that my thoughts about value in organisation and classification look less immediately enticing.

In theory I should be fairly well equipped to deal with tricky categories, having previously suggested that for the purposes of assessing heritage value it's e.g. a given artifact and the archæological information embodied in it together which have value, and therefore it's an artificial move to separate them; but in this case it's not a specific, discrete object but some objects 'as categorised' that are the possible value-bearer, and (certain interesting aspects of) the objects are what lead to the very development of the category, while the category defines the specific interest we might have in the objects; so the category seems to float somewhere between straightforwardly picking out empirically discoverable aspects of objects and being simply a pragmatic device for organising things, and that makes it tricky to work out how to talk about value in terms of that category without a risk of double-counting.

Now this reminds me rather of Kant ('sensations without concepts are blind', etc.), and one move I might make is that of denying that we ever do have 'direct' access to any sort of value in objects 'behind' the concepts in play—in the case of heritage value especially that looks pretty plausible, and my holistic approach was already shifting emphasis onto groups of related (physical and abstract) objects as paradigmatic value-bearers. I've even been wondering whether putting such an emphasis on relations between objects could be defended with some sort of transcendental argument about the necessity of organising them; but that takes me back to the question of what makes a given organisation merited, and why some approaches should seem less arbitrary than others. ('Concepts without sensations are empty.') Presumably we talk about 'Outsider Art' because we think we're picking out something worth talking about in general terms: something characterised in terms of other concepts, like 'mainsteam art'. (Possibly there's a degree of creativity in the delineation of such a category, but it purports to pick out significant relations between certain objects in the world.) Hence the thought that 'Outsider Art' is a non-arbitrary category. But that brings me back to the point that it does look like a contingent piece of apparatus for organising disparate items as a conceptual collection.

Such an approach is clearly going to face some difficulties: I'm using a very weak sense of 'necessary' (it's necessary for us to approach heritage by means of some conceptual structures, but not even necessary for us to approach heritage in the first place), and that raises the spectre of cultural relativism. I think what I need to do first is examine the problem from some other angles.

‘To be forgotten is worse than death’

On the topic of the British Library's expanding storage facilities a reasonably reflective BLDGBLOG article links to a Grauniad piece that wants to be fluff: I get the impression the reporter had neither the resources nor the inclination to follow up the question of just why digitation isn't a magic panacea (or what technological and legal complexities limit the digitisation of recent works), so librarians come across as something of an arcane sect who react to bright young things rather pityingly. In all fairness, though, it's always going to be hard to explain to someone who isn't in love with books why they, collectively, need to be cherished, or to tell someone who doesn't yearn for knowledge why there can never be too complete a collection of sources.

BLDGBLOG compares the archives of less-consulted texts to the tombs of the Pharaohs, and in their way they are monuments, the pandemic version of Horace's 'I have raised a monument more durable than bronze'. But of cource that comparison brings out the poignancy: books aren't meant to be left undisturbed in secrecy, they're meant to be read. So if nobody ever does read a particular work, does it matter?

In policy terms, it's a matter of possibility and potential. We don't know whether anyone will ever use what we preserve. Our successors might busy themselves with bringing about their own violent extinction, or develop a culture so alien to our own that only specialist historians can even comprehend us, or decide that all evidence of the precursor civilisations should be eliminated as a distraction from the new world order... On the other hand, they may be interested enough in their past to get really good at investigating it, within the limitations of what evidence we leave for them. We're giving them the opportunity.

Despite the rather abstract and technical flavour of much of my work on heritage ethics, I think there must also be a place for humbly admitting that we may not be terribly good judges of where lasting value might lie in our creations. To sit in such total judgment over posterity, not only exalting certain works as great but denying future-dwellers the chance to reach their own conclusions... the word that springs to mind is 'hubris'.