Worn Copy

"Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science. (The pseudo- and para-sciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science.) In this way, every new observation or bit of data brought into the web of science enhances the value of all other data points. In science, there's a natural duty to make what is known searchable. No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we've devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They're rewarded for the degree to which their work is cited, shared, linked, and connected in their publications, which they don't own. They're financed with extremely short patent monopolies for their ideas, short enough to inspire them to invent more, sooner. To a large degree, scientists make their living by giving away free copies of their intellectual property. What is this technology telling us? Copies don't count anymore; copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won't mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed, and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library."

— David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, 29-30

The Weather of the Weathermen

"Take for example the case of weather forecasts. Every day, often several times a day, many millions of people talk about the weather, make predictions, cite proverbs, inspect the sky. Among them, a large proportion listen to weather forecasts or glance at satellite maps of their countries on TV and in newspapers; quite often, people make jokes about weathermen who are, they say, 'always wrong'; many others, whose fate has been linked earlier to that of meteorologists, anxiously await forecasts before taking decisions about seeding plants, flying planes, fighting battles or going out for picnics. Inside the weather stations, running the huge data banks fed with satellite signals, controlling the reports of the many part-time weathermen scattered over the planet, sending balloons to probe the clouds, submitting computer models of the climate to new trials, a few thousand meteorologists are busy at work defining what the weather is, has been and will be. To the question 'what will the weather be tomorrow?' you get, on one side, billions of scattered commentaries and, on the other, a few claims confronted with one another through the telexes of the international Meteorological Association. Do these two sets of commentaries have a common ground? Not really, because, on the one hand, the few claims of the meteorologists are utterly lost among billions of jokes, proverbs, evaluations, gut feelings and readings of subtle clues; and because, on the other hand, when time comes to define what the weather had been, the billions of other utterances about it count for nothing. Only a few thousand people are able to define what the weather is; only their opinions literally count when the question is to allocate the huge funds necessary to run the networks of computers, instruments, satellites, probes, planes and ships that provide the necessary data.

"This situation creates a rather curious balance account: the weather and its evolution are defined by everyone on earth and the few weathermen provide only a few scattered opinions among the multitudes of opinion, taken more seriously in only small sectors of the public — the military, the ship and air companies, agricultural concerns, tourists. However, when you put all these opinions in one balance of the scale and in the other the few claims of the meteorologists, the balance tips on the side of the latter. No matter how many things are said about the weather, no matter how many jokes are made about the weathermen, the weather of the weathermen is strong enough to discount all the other weathers …

"A handful of well-positioned men of science may rout billions of others. This will happen only, however, as long as they stay inside their own networks, because, no matter what the meteorologists think and do, every one of us will still think it was a hot summer and make jokes, the morning after, about the weather forecasts which were 'wrong as usual' … [M]eteorology 'covers' the world's weather and still leaves out of its mesh almost every one of us."

— Bruno Latour, Science in Action (181)