William T. Vollmann. No Immediate Danger (Carbon Ideologies V. 1). Viking 2018.
Carbon Ideologies also contains about 129,000 words of source notes, citations and calculations. I am sorry to say that Viking could not justify the cost of printing these. Therefore, Carbon Ideologies will be the first of my books to contain a component which exists only in the electronic ether (see https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/ carbonideologies). I will deposit a copy of that section in my archive at the Ohio State University. [p.v]
COMMNET
Carbon Ideologies, a two-volume doomer tour de force, is addressed to a future person in a world ravaged by climate change. Vollmann's editor wanted him to trim content from this sprawling book. He agreed to trim the list of references as long as all the content could remain. As Vollmann dryly points out, it is ironic to store references for this particular book in a system that will fail as soon as the grid fails. If Vollmann's gloomy predictions come to pass the single archived hard copy in Ohio probably doesn't stand much of a chance, either.
There is a digital preservation initiative at Stanford University with the acronym LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) but even that depends on a functioning grid to supply electricity for access to digital archives. The librarians at Stanford are aware of this weakness. The LOCKSS website says that, " technology failures, economic failures and social failures all pose threats to the protection of digital content." In Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake the grid goes down in a spectacular fashion. She satirizes digital libraries to explain why the entire history of human knowledge is lost in the "Waterless Flood."
Which raises questions with no good answer. What kind of library would be useful in the face of climate change? How should librarians approach preservation in an age when the imminant collapse of civilization is a realistic possibility?
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