Paper is Technology - Silicon Valley Agrees

Mark Kurlansky has authored several bestselling deep-dive books such as one on salt. Recently, since he thought paper was a heading for obsolescence, it's the topic he chronicled in "Paper: Paging Through History."

Kurlansky described the journeys of paper and its predecessors, papyrus and animal-skin parchment, and what he describes as the "technological fallacy" on the Lapham's Quarterly podcast The World in Time. Partial transcript selections:

LL: Today I'm talking to Mark Kurlansky about his new book, "Paper". Mark, you've written best-selling books about history of the codfish and the oyster. Why now write about paper and printing? And why do you begin in the prologue talking about what you call the "technological fallacy"?

MK: That's because I kind of went through kind of an evolution working on this book. It's my 20th book. I don't think I've ever written a book where I've so changed my thinking as I did on this book.

And originally I thought well this would be a good time to write a book about paper because ... well the problem with history books is that a book needs a beginning a middle and an end, and history doesn't have any ends it just flows.

LL: Yes [laughter.] I know.

MK: And you never know where to start and where to stop. I thought well here's this story paper it has a beginning Ts'ai Lun every kid in China learns how Ts'ai Lun [inaudible] in the Han court in first century China invented paper. And it has an end because now paper is dying. This is where it started. And I fairly quickly came to understand that both of those are wrong. That archaeologists went to China 100 years ago and found pieces of paper that were 100 and 200 years before the birth of Ts'ai Lun. Which you know leaves the question why is Ts'ai Lund celebrated? He's really celebrated! His pictures is in homes on walls he's one of paper's Chinese considered they've made four great inventions and paper is one of them.

LL: What are the other three?

MK: Gun powder compasses and printing.

LL: All right.

MK: I also came to realize particularly when talking to people in the computer field, that paper wasn't dying out at all. I mean I also learned this from my own field, in publishing.

LL: We're publishing more books these days than ever.

MK: Absolutely. And there were a few years there people talked about ebooks taking over and the agent used to say well ebook sales increased 100 percent last year. You know if two years ago they sold one and last year they sold two that's 100 percent increase.

LL: Yes right yeah.

MK: And they [ebooks] just got to a certain level and they leveled off. Because people like to read books some people like to read some books in hardbook and some books in electronic and ... I came to understand. I started thinking about history and it's really very unusual for a new invention to appear and kill off something else. That rarely happens. It usually just creates an alternative. Now it may over a thousand years go in that direction, but, hell, the candle business is a multi-billion dollar business.

LL: Yeah.

MK: And uh. Remember when television was going to be the end of radio?

LL: I do. It's not.

MK: Yeah. And vinyl record sales are going up and up.

LL: Yeah.

MK: And the technology creates another alternative way of doing things but it does not wipe out the old way. Parchment, which was a predecessor to paper, is still used.

LL: You make the point that technology follows the need of the society. It's not something that comes out of nowhere. and shifts society in a new direction.

MK: Yeah this is what in the book I call the "technological fallacy." A "technological fallacy" is the idea that technology changes society. It just doesn't work that way. Society changes for all sorts of cultural economic all kinds of reasons. And as it changes it calls up technology to service those changes. Which is why inventions rarely appear in isolation. I mean when Gutenberg was working on the moveable type printing press so were a bunch of other people. A whole bunch of other people were working on telephones when Alexander Graham Bell was. Lots of lightbulb people besides Thomas Edison.

LL: You also make the point that paper like printing like the written ... language itself ... developed to facilitate the expansion of business.

MK: It developed for the expansion of business but also the growth of literacy, religion, some religions, and it emerged to answer a need because the things that were being written on before paper were not as practical.

LL: What were some of those things?

MK: Well papyrus, which really only works well in a very dry climate, and parchment, which is animal skin, which as you know was fine in Europe when they had very few books, but you have to kill 150 animals to make a book.

LL: Well let's take the story in a chronological sequence so we begin with the Chinese.

MK: Yeah OK so the Chinese...

Kurlansky takes us through paper's journey from the Far East to the Muslim world to Europe. Its goes dormant then explodes in popularity before and after Gutenberg's 16th century. He tells us American revolutionaries used British royal seal-watermarked paper -- at a time they were boycotting British goods -- to distribute broadside copies of the Declaration of Independence. Kurlansky says the Stamp Act, which taxed paper, turned American publishers against the British.

He finishes with Snowden:

MK: You know we're using paper we're going to continue to use paper. You ever see that movie about Edward Snowden?

LL: No.

MK: Well there's this movie about Snowden and the journalist that worked with him to break the story and they're meeting in these clandestine rooms and they're worried about bugging so rather than talking to each other they're sending messages back and forth on their highly encrypted computers. And by the end of the movie they're not trusting the encryption. So what are they doing? They're writing notes on paper, and passing them back and forth, and then burning them. You know, in this age of hacking, it turns out, I haven't heard people talking about this much but I think they're going to, it's the most secure communication. In fact an encryptor told me when they work out complicated encryptions they do it all on paper. So you know paper still has lots of uses.

LL: I like that. I like the note that the encryptions these days are being done on paper. 

MK: Yeah.

LL: I like that as a way to --

MARK KURLANSKY: But there's a lot of things. You know Mitch Kapor, a pioneer in software, he said to me you know, paper will at least be around until somebody comes up with a computer that you can crumple up and throw away, or fold and put in your pocket.

LEWIS LAPHAM: That's a happy thought. And on that thought, Mark Kurlansky thank you very much for talking with us today about "Paper, Paging Through History". It's a wonderful book.

Paper is Sustainable ->

-----------
Further Reading:

High-tech paperless tickets have some 49er fans fed up: sfgate.com

49ers go paperless at Levi's stadium. For some fans, that's not the ticket. sfchronicle.com