An All-Digital World: A Fool's Paradise?

By Raanan Geberer Brooklyn Daily Eagle In the beginning, there was the LP, or long-playing record. You also had the lower-budget cassette. This was replaced in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the digital CD. Now, according to some recent reports, the CD is being phased out with the assumption that anyone who wants music will do it through online downloading services like iTunes and Amazon. Indeed, within the past decade the unthinkable happened: Virgin Records and Tower Records, both powerhouses in their day, both hit the dust. Devices like the Kindle are also all the rage, and in January, news reports indicated that sales of Kindle books have outpaced those of hardcovers (apparently, paperback books are still convenient enough to carry around). With Kindle, of course, you also download the books over the internet. And e-mail replacing written letters is an old story. So few people write actual letters, aside from New Year’s cards and such, that your mail is now likely to consist mainly of advertisements. No wonder the Postal Service is considering ending Saturday service. But before your clap you hands in delight and say, “How neat! Far out!” (or whatever exclamation that people say nowadays), consider this. After 9/11 there were thousands of government subpoenas for e-mail records and/or phone records, and in very many of these cases, the requests were granted. The government last year lost a court case about a request to access e-mails without a search warrant, but the issue hasn’t gone away. What happens if or when, in the distant or not-so-distant future, a totalitarian dictatorship comes to power in the United States and declares martial law? Then all of you hip, with-it, digital people will find that the government will know who you write to, what you write, what you buy online, what books you read, what you listen to. Already, many employers are spying on people’s ostensibly private Facebook accounts to find out more about prospective employees. I don’t pretend to have the answer, but maybe an all-digital, all-online world is a fool’s paradise.