Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto - Paperback

by Mark Helprin (Author)

"A strange, wondrous, challenging, enriching book....Beautiful and powerful...you will not encounter another book like it."

--National Review online

In Digital Barbarism, bestselling novelist Mark Helprin (Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War) offers a ringing Jeffersonian defense of private property in the age of digital culture, with its degradation of thought and language and collectivist bias against the rights of individual creators. A timely, cogent, and important attack on the popular Creative Commons movement, Digital Barbarism provides rational, witty, and supremely wise support for the individual voice and its hard-won legal protections.

In this powerful writer's manifesto, Helprin asks the essential question of our time: what is lost when the rights of the individual are sacrificed for the convenience of the collective?

• A Defense of Copyright: A powerful argument that copyright is not a monopoly or a tax, but a bulwark of civilization essential for protecting the individual voice.
• Critique of Digital Barbarism: An unflinching look at how the digital age, with its emphasis on speed and quantity, risks a degradation of thought, language, and the integrity of art.
• The Creative Commons Movement: A timely and important attack on the popular movement, revealing the collectivist bias that threatens the legal protections for individual creators.
• Property as Liberty: Reclaiming Jefferson, Helprin makes the case that the right of property is not antithetical to virtue but is, in fact, a pillar of ethics, morals, and individual freedom.

Back Jacket

Mark Helprin anticipated thathis 2007 New York Times op-edpiece about the extension of theterm of copyright would be receivedquietly. instead, within a week, thearticle had generated 750,000angry comments. shocked by hisyoung critics' breathtaking senseof entitlement and appalled by thebreadth, speed, and illogic of theirarguments, Helprin realized howdrastically different this generationwas from those before it. theCreative Commons movement andthe copyright abolitionists havebeen educated with a modern biastoward collaboration, which hasled them to denigrate individualefforts. Digital Barbarism is Helprin'scogent, powerful, and passionateresponse to those whose selfishdesire to "stick it" to the "greedy"corporate interests controlling thedistribution of intellectual propertyundermines not just the possibilityof an independent literary culturebut threatens the future of civilizationitself.