THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 71
wringing, he tried to have it both ways.
He translated the misogynistic passage
into English and reproduced it in full.
But, instead of placing it in its original
context, in the Socrates chapter, he put
it in the middle of his epilogue, as if to
quarantine it.
As soon as he made his decision, he
attempted to rationalize it. In the rest of
the epilogue, he seemed to imply that
he wasn’t a gatekeeper after all—that, al-
though he was clearly a publisher, his
printing press should be treated more
like a platform. He was merely serving
his customers, he suggested: they de-
served to hear all perspectives and make
up their own minds. Besides, anyone who
was offended should blame Socrates, not
Caxton. Better yet, a reader who disliked
the passage could “with a pen race it out,
or else rend the leaf out of the book.”
I
n the twentieth century, as early packet-
switching networks evolved into the
Internet, a generation of futurists and
TED talkers emerged, explaining the new
system to the laity in a spirit of wide-
eyed techno-utopianism. They compared
it to a superhighway, to a marketplace of
ideas, to a printing press. Anyone who
was spending a lot of time on the Inter-
net knew that many parts of it felt more
like a dingy flea market, or like a park-
ing lot outside a bar the moment before
a fight breaks out. The techno-utopians
must have been aware of those parts, too,
but they didn’t mention them very often.
In 1998, James Dewar, a policy ana-
lyst at the RAND Corporation, wrote a
paper called “The Information Age and
the Printing Press: Looking Backward
to See Ahead.” He had a rosy view of
the past, and he extrapolated this into
hopeful speculation about the future.
“The printing press has been implicated
in the Reformation, the Renaissance and
the Scientific Revolution,” he wrote.
“Similarly profound changes may al-
ready be underway in the information
age.” Near the end of the paper, he ac-
knowledged that “we are already seeing
some of the dark side of networked com-
puters.” He listed a few examples, in bul-
let-point form: “New and interesting
ways of breaking into computer sys-
tems”; “Chain letters (that are both il-
legal and bandwidth intensive)”; “‘ Tr o l l -
ers’ are posting to newsgroups.” Yet this
brief qualification, which appeared in a
BRIEFLY NOTED
A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves, by Jason DeParle ( Vi-
king). Thirty years ago, as a young reporter intent on docu-
menting stories of poverty, the author moved in with a fam-
ily living in a shantytown in Manila. His host, Tita Comodas,
and her relatives are at the center of this thoughtful examina-
tion of the causes and the consequences of global migration.
For decades, millions of Filipinos—Tita’s husband, daughter,
and niece among them—have left in order to earn a living by
fulfilling the growing demand for labor overseas. As DeParle
charts their paths to Saudi Arabia and Galveston, the clan’s
generosity toward him enables him to provide a vivid win-
dow into lives that have been transformed by the remittance
economy, the feminization of labor, and political nativism.
The Outlaw Ocean, by Ian Urbina (Knopf ). The disturbing sto-
ries of “global oceanic pillage” compiled in this record of life
on the high seas demonstrate the often dire results of the fail-
ure to police international waters. The ocean’s vastness com-
pounds the problem, presenting opportunities for both ex-
ploitive commercial interests and idealistic vigilantes. Untended
waters are rife with fishing boats whose laborers, sometimes
shackled to the decks, work in wretched conditions. Environ-
mental activists, concerned about widespread pollution and
declining fish populations, take advantage of the lax surveil-
lance to document coral reefs, while humanitarians offer abor-
tions off the shores of countries where the procedure is illegal.
The Ten Loves of Nishino, by Hiromi Kawakami, translated
from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell (Europa). Ten women
recall their relationships with the same man, Yukihiko Nishino,
creating, in this novel, an intriguing appraisal of romantic at-
tachment. While the details of his professional life are un-
specified, his romantic behavior is scrutinized. In the accounts
of his former lovers, who include a teen-age schoolmate and
a woman with a newly empty nest, Nishino embodies both
courtesy and savagery, honesty and infidelity. He emanates a
slick indifference, yet satisfies “a woman’s desires that even she
was unaware of.” Nishino’s yearning for connection is hin-
dered by his fear of a narrow life, and the women, in their
narrations, betray their own anxiety and ambivalence about
falling in love.
Marilou Is Everywhere, by Sarah Elaine Smith (Riverhead). In
this strange and gripping début novel, a lonely teen-age girl
assumes the identity of a classmate who has gone missing.
The narrator, whose own mother sporadically disappears, leav-
ing her and her “feral” brothers to fend for themselves, is driven
by a desire to redraw the contours of her life by growing more
confident, and by experiencing maternal love. Captivated by
what she gains in the absent girl’s place, the narrator ratio-
nalizes her actions by telling herself that the girl’s mother,
who suffers from memory loss, cannot tell the difference. But
this radical remaking eventually becomes indistinguishable
from erasure, as the narrator realizes, “I was being this slip-
pery person I invented who could disappear in so many ways.”
