Law in the Internet Society

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LinusKatzenbachSecondEssay 4 - 09 Jan 2025 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Conclusion

In conclusion, it seems to me that the critic that "the youth doesn't read anymore" is too one-sided. A distinction has to be made between ever-important skills that are being stolen from teenagers by the attention economy of their digital devices on the one hand, and other aspects of traditional reading that are no longer contemporary and, in the context of a changing world of work in the Internet Society, are rightly no longer prioritized by today's students, on the other hand.

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Very good so far as it goes, but the present draft is about the device and the job, not the mind. Someone who reads few or no books cannot have read much history, or acquired any literature. Not to have read all of Shakespeare is not substituted for by having watched a lot of tikTok or YouTube. To claim that external memory substitutes for internal memory is an evident fallacy: a search engine can find a phrase for me wherever it may be, but everything I have read and remembered affects how I write, which nothing I haven't actually read can do. (Perhaps that's why people who will never read Milton, Austen, Dickens, or Henry James think that ChatGPT's stochastic parrot shit is writing.) That's why removing 5km of books from a law library changes forever the nature of all legal minds produced by the law school. The best route to improvement of this draft is to think that through.

But can you? You don't read books either, do you? Your draft is well stocked with what a search engine can find. It could have been written by a bot. But where is the resonance that only a cultivated literary sensibility can make? "A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect." No doubt Google can tell you instantly where the words come from. But if you will never read Guy Mannering, much less even some of the rest of Sir Walter Scott, what will it mean to you?


Revision 4r4 - 09 Jan 2025 - 16:06:16 - EbenMoglen
Revision 3r3 - 04 Dec 2024 - 05:58:55 - LinusKatzenbach
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