18 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
CROWD-SOURCINGDEPT.
PARCHMENT
A
dozen or so friends from the In
ternet gathered recently at Soth
eby’s in Manhattan to buy a first print
ing of the U.S. Constitution (estimated
value: fifteen to twenty million dol
lars). The group, who called themselves
ConstitutionDAO, had just spent a
week raising millions of dollars on Twit
ter, TikTok, and Discord from anony
mous screen names: recent immigrants,
college dropouts, the greatgreatgreat
greatgreatgreatgreatgrandson of
someone who fought in the American
Revolution. (The “DAO” in “Consti
tutionDAO” stands for “decentralized
autonomous organization”—a leader
less corporate structure that resembles
an online chat room with a bank ac
count.) They raised four million in the
first twentyfour hours. Then some
one pitched in another four million, in
Ethereum’s currency. By the next eve
ning, the project had gone viral: seven
teen thousand donors had given more
than thirtythree million (median con
tribution: $206.26). “I feel like I’m part
of an organism!” a twentyeightyear
old contributor wearing a green fur
coat and leather sandals said, excitedly,
in the Sotheby’s lobby. “It’s fucking
awesome.” Nearby, a man named Sean
Murray, dressed in a military jacket,
white breeches, and a tricorne hat, held
up a homemade sign reading “I’M BUY
ING THE CONSTITUTION.”
Another man walked up to Murray
and introduced himself: “I was wonder
ing if anyone else would show up!” Mur
ray looked down at his getup and said,
“I gotta be different, right?” He laughed.
“I’m glad it’s a reallife thing. You don’t
want to come out here and figure out it
was Twitter bots the whole time.”
The item the D.A.O. planned to bid
on that evening was one of only thirteen
surviving first printings of the U.S. Con
stitution. It belonged to Dorothy Gold
man, whose late husband purchased it,
in 1988, for a hundred and sixtyfive thou
sand dollars. The document—Sotheby’s
Lot No. 1787—was typeset by David
Claypoole and John Dunlap, in Phila
delphia, on September 17, 1787. (Dunlap
also typeset the first printings of the
Declaration of Independence.) “It was
a very laborintensive process,” a Sotheby’s representative said, in a film dis
tributed to prospective bidders.
On the third f loor, several of the
group’s “core contributors”—the leaders
of the leaderless organization, who prom
ised to return everyone’s money if the
group didn’t win—had assembled in a
climatecontrolled gallery to inspect the
document, which was encased in glass.
“It doesn’t look like whatever million
dollars it’s gonna go for. It’s just a piece
of parchment!” a software developer from
Brooklyn said. He wore a Fat Albert
buttondown and rainbow Pumas.
“The letter ‘S’—it looks like an ‘F,’”
a man in a tan hoodie said. “‘Blessings’
looks like ‘Bluffings!’”
Across the room, Liliana Pinochet,
a seventyfiveyearold woman who had
just finished a cancer treatment at a
nearby hospital, asked the group what
they would do with the Constitution.
“We’re talking to museums about
where would be best to host it,” Nicole
Ruiz, who wore a long plaid coat, said.
She explained that the donors wouldn’t
actually own the document, but would
help determine its future. “The whole
group gets to vote!” she said.
“I’m glad it’s not going to private
hands,” Pinochet said. “It’s a pity when
things go to the banks.”heart sunk,” a fretful mother says in a
Youngkin campaign ad, after discover
ing that her son, a highschool senior,
was reading the Pulitzer Prizewinning
novel “Beloved,” by the Nobel laureate
Toni Morrison, in an A.P. English class.
Progressive legislators, parents, and
school boards, too, have called for the
removal of books, including “The Ad
ventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “To
Kill a Mockingbird.”
No book has a right to be on a read
ing list. Teachers frequently change what
they teach. Parents are likely to take an
interest in what their children are read
ing. Booksellers decide what books to
sell. And pious attacks on books are very
often absurd. What’s new is that lately
some senior staff of organizations founded
on a commitment to freedom of the press
and freedom of expression appear to be
wavering on upholding those principles.
Last year, when Target briefly stopped
selling Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Dam
age: The Transgender Craze Seducing
Our Daughters,” a much admired deputy
director of the A.C.L.U. tweeted sup
port on his personal account for “stop
ping the circulation of this book and
these ideas.” (He later deleted the tweet.)
This summer, the American Booksell
ers Association, a longtime sponsor of
Banned Books Week, whose theme this
year is “Books Unite Us, Censorship Di
vides Us,” sent copies of Shrier’s book to
seven hundred and fifty bookstores, and
then apologized: “This is a serious, vio
lent incident that goes against ABA’s
ends policies, values, and everything we
believe and support.” The apology proved
insufficient to many booksellers. “We’re
dealing with a historically white, cis or
ganization in a white supremacist soci
ety,” a member of the A.B.A.’s diversity
equityandinclusion committee told
Publishers Weekly.
The bookban battle isn’t about to
end anytime soon. And it’s a battle that
conservatives will win if progressives
agree with them about the righteousness of banning books, disagreeing only
on which books to ban. In the year of
the fatwa, the fuss over “The Lorax”
played out differently. The Laytonville
Unified School District convened a
committee to consider the Baileys’ com
plaint. It voted to keep the book on the
requiredreading list, with the superin
tendent arguing that the book isn’t about
the timber industry but about “greed
and the depletion of a finite resource.”
Then the school board said that, if a
parent really had a problem with a read
ing assignment, that parent could fig
ure out a substitute. “No one ever sug
gested that the book be banned,” Bill
Bailey said. And Geisel told the Asso
ciated Press that he didn’t believe that
no one should ever harvest a tree. “I live
in a wooden house,” he said. “I’m sitting
in a wooden chair.” His book was also
printed on paper made from trees. And
so far, at least, it has resisted the Super
AxeHacker.
—Jill Lepore