key: cord-0916792-nq2cwcly
authors: Hawley, Graeme
title: After COVID? Classical mechanics
date: 2021-07-09
journal: Libraries, Digital Information, and COVID
DOI: 10.1016/b978-0-323-88493-8.00036-7
sha: 08e38d7dce1812b56ec0fce7b65c6de4a916c40b
doc_id: 916792
cord_uid: nq2cwcly

COVID-19 has understandably been foremost in our minds over the last year and will continue to be for some time, but it is not the only urgent crisis that individuals, societies, and nations face. This essay looks at current events through the lens of Alvin Toffler’s publication The Third Wave, focusing especially on the accelerative nature of change today and how it increases complexity. Graeme Hawley, Head of General Collections at the National Library of Scotland, considers what accelerative change means in terms of the collections he is responsible for, and the extent to which COVID-19 is likely to impact accelerative change in the immediate future. The essay takes a broad look at topics that, although distinct in themselves, all share the qualities of velocity, and all seem to be happening at roughly the same time so that we can situate the post-COVID world in its fuller context.

1980) and am clearly still to recover from it. It is an exposition on accelerative change and one that has fundamentally affected the way I see the world around me. The second is that I am Head of General Collections at the National Library of Scotland, where I am responsible for publications that date from 1901. I should also say that while my employment influences my thoughts, this chapter is a personal reflection only and should at no point be read as a piece either by or on behalf of the Library. Finally, if at times it feels as though this chapter is trying to address too many topics all at once, that it is going beyond the scope of this book, and that it is overegged, that is a deliberate act of mimesis. I wrote this essay about accelerative change between December 7, 2020 and January 14, 2021, a period of time that history may well record as especially accelerative.

Accelerative change is so much a part of our lives that we may be forgiven for not fully comprehending how much so, but we refer to it all the time in little ways. The constant upgrades of mobile phone technology that frustrate are a good example of this. It took millennia to develop language, hundreds of years to develop systems of communication over distance, decades to work out how to send communication down a wire, years to turn a mobile telephone into a smartphone, and in the last three months I have had to do two software updates to make sure I have the right emojis. In the last week, two new memes have emerged on Twitter that I do not understand but which are dominating the shared creative outputs of the online world that I see. Ditto, everything. If this rings a bell and you want to delve deeper, then Toffler's The Third Wave is absolutely where you should go. What Alvin and his wife Heidi do in that jointly written book is to demonstrate that accelerative change affects everything that we do and think. It changes family structure, society, politics, the environment, and how we work, sleep, and eat. Childhood shortening? Accelerative change. Twenty-four-hour gyms? Accelerative change. Toffler defines the hallmarks of each of the three waves that human society has lived through and focuses in particular on the clash between the second wave (industrial society) and the third wave (technological society) (the first wave was agricultural society by the way). To get to the crux of all this quickly, in an act of self-indulgence I will quote a part of another essay that I wrote on The Third Wave:

What is interesting right now as opposed to any point over the last, say 250 years, is that younger people particularly are growing up having been born under the terms of a different wave. That's major, and it only happens at the points in history when two waves collide; in other words, not very often at all, and certainly not often enough for the human race to have mastered handling the process. (Hawley, 2019) If things feel difficult, tense, unprecedented, too fast to make sense of, it is because they are. Accelerative change is supposed to feel like this. Enjoying the ride?

Before I disappear down too many rabbit holes, I want to refer again to the Tofflers and a particular concept they associate with the third wave, that of de-massification. A process of atomization (or de-massification in Toffler terms) has been at work for some decades now. It has been affecting every aspect of second-wave societies. It is fundamental to everything from the development of more media channels and the shift to online music and entertainment, to the disruption of the nuclear family as the default model, to how and where we work, and increasingly to shared ideas and values, and even shared understandings about language. It is crucial to everything because what it ultimately means is the end of majorities, the end of shared reference points, the rise of individuals and individual experience, and everything else that goes with that. Alvin and Heidi Toffler are excellent on this, so if you want to understand the modern world, you know where to go.

The National Library of Scotland's collections are vast and span the centuries. We have approximately one million books and periodicals that were published between 1455 and 1901. We have approximately 15 million books and periodicals that were published between 1901 and now (14 million in print, and several million e-book and journal article parts that equate to about a million-total print-equivalent publications). In the past 7 years we have web-archived, along with the other legal deposit libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland, more than ten million websites. Charted on a graph, that would be an exponential curve; accelerative even. And, it is not just a case of having more content (scalar change) but more and different content (vectorial change). Over the same period, there has been an ever-increasing diversity of formats, subject areas, backgrounds of authors and publishers, and indeed audiences for these everincreasing works. Our collections are accelerative change and document…velocity.

5 Initial response to the lockdown When lockdown started, my instincts, and those of many of my colleagues at the Library and throughout the library and information world, were to do what we could to help. Publishers opened access to science journals; libraries pushed their online resources harder than ever; and, connecting people to knowledge and culture shifted to Zoom and the web. For my own part, I identified e-journal content on three platforms that spoke to what felt to me like the six most pressing broad topics: COVID-19 science; economics, employment, and the environment; health care; international relations; politics; and society. I identified over 60 organizations in Scotland that I thought might benefit from knowing about the remote access they could gain to these resources and emailed them. Eleven of the organizations emailed back to say how grateful they were. I still think this was the right thing to do and would like to make the time to perfect this kind of direct outreach (it needs some work). But equally, I knew that I was also receiving into my inbox from other organizations more and more online content, more opinions, more facts, more updates, and more information than I was able to keep up with. There were some amazing online events during lockdown I gather, but I missed most of them-there was simply too much to do justice to. The organizations I did not hear back from were very likely as snowed under as I was by an explosion of content and New Things To Contend With.

There is no doubt that COVID-19 has triggered a further acceleration in online output (think about how much you read on your phone in March and April 2020 alone), and although there may have been a corresponding decrease in physical publishing (likely, but too early to say), this may be adjusted over the next few years as a bubble of printonly lockdown novels, recipe books, poetry collections, and such like enter the collections. COVID-19 brought further scalar and vectorial change, with new science, new terminology (both official and vernacular), and new social experiences being written about at a totally different scale, especially online. The fact that vaccines have been approved and others are on the way, developed and manufactured at a fraction of the time it once would have taken is another example of accelerative change. In among whatever else that implies, I expect it to impact on science publishing in some way.

Dissemination of information and the broadcasting of culture to those who might benefit were only half of what was going on at the Library during the lockdown. The other half, crucial for a legal deposit library like the National Library of Scotland, was the collection of the information, ideas, data, knowledge, and writing about COVID-19 in the first place, under the terms of the Legal Deposit Act 2003 and Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print) Regulations 2013. A collaborative effort with the British Library, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, and Trinity College Dublin, we made our focus Scottish publishers, authors, and organizations, in line with the usual collecting practice.

This work is still ongoing. Web archiving was prioritized as soon as lockdown began, because of the vulnerability of publications on the web and the need for pandemic information on the live web to be accurate and up to date. The Library has archived over 4000 COVID-related Scottish URLs since March 2020, and a lot of the content on those sites has been archived multiple times because the content has changed multiple times. If you are looking for a good example of accelerative change, look no further than the Internet itself. We have pages in our digital collections that have not been on the live web for months. When researchers want to look back at what happened in March, April, May, June 2020, these collections will be a vital piece of that story.

Dominant though COVID has been, it is not the only thing I was doing at work in 2020. In July and August, I hosted a remote 6-week internship on the topic of AI-created content. This is a rapidly developing area of publishing and one that I need to keep an eye on. Another chapter would be required to do justice to this topic, but in short, algorithms and (ro)bots are increasingly a part of the thinking and writing process, and humans are already more engaged with this than they realize, from bot-triggered trading that makes pensions exist, to predictive text on your phone, and automatic translation software. Deepfakes of images and video and computergenerated art and music are already established, for good and ill. Over the summer, however, articles started to appear about GPT-3 (perhaps best to Google it), and the process of accelerative change has now kicked in with regard to text. By the time this article is published, you might need to be Googling GPT-4. We are moving very quickly to the point where bot-generated creative writing will be indistinguishable from human-generated content without some additional knowledge about what to look out for. It is a different kind of massive to COVID, but this development is, make no mistake, massive.

In November, I decided to look for evidence of COVID-19 on the collection stacks. Not the actual virus, but evidence of it in some of the publications that had been coming in routinely through long-established legal deposit channels. I went down to level 4 where our new periodicals acquisitions are stored. There was a pile on a shelf awaiting placing; a range of publications in no order other than that they had recently arrived and were to be shelved in this area: Copper Worldwide (ISSN 2046-9438), (ISSN 1356-0948) . Every single one mentioned COVID-19 on their cover or first page, with many carrying full features about the impact of the virus. Unlike the targeted collecting of websites and material culture relating to the pandemic, I think of this as incidental COVID-19 collecting, and it feels like a genre of its own.

When people ask to see our COVID collection in years to come, will they be expecting to see a trade journal about copper, a periodical about British chess, and the magazine of the ice cream alliance? Perhaps not, but that is the evidence of COVID-19 right there: the transformational impact on literally everything, from copper wire to raspberry ripple. It is highly likely that at least one issue of every periodical-that we have received since March 2020 will have made mention of COVID-19 at least once. Elsewhere, in our life-science periodicals, the density of COVID-19 will be like nothing perhaps we have ever seen before in our collections. I expect it to be genuinely incredible. And then there are the collections of the future that will no doubt come, in print and digital formats: the delayed publications that ended up with new chapters because of lockdown; the poetry collections; the photojournalism coffee table books of clapping for carers; the children's books about germs, loneliness, and loss; the heart-breaking accounts of frontline workers; the stories of those suffering from long-COVID. What is our COVID-19 collection, and when will we have received it? 8 More generates more 2020 was already set to be a year of accelerating change: climate crisis, an extremely bitter election campaign in the United States, Brexit negotiations, and continuing online rage around topics such as free speech and gender identity. COVID-19 at the start of the year, and Black Lives Matter protests in the summer following the killing of George Floyd, opened additional channels of discourse. These significant, multilayered topics, all happening together, generated more complexity, in turn generating more publications to add to our shelves or servers. In simple terms, more tends to generate more. But, is that a problem?

There is a web of complexity that accelerative change creates that is increasingly difficult to process. Even in 1980, the Tofflers were at pains to draw attention to the unsustainable decision-load that was being placed on people and institutions because of complexity. Writing 40 years ago, they were optimistic about the potential for technology to be used to assist decision-making. The processing power of the microchip would simply be better able to compute the exponential rise in complexity. But, computational outputs are dependent on the corpus of data they are fed and the algorithms they have been trained on. If bots inherit the biases of the people and companies that build them (discuss), then welcome to a whole new area of complexity, legislation, and protest.

Complexity is everywhere. Here is a sense of what it looked like the week that I started to write this essay. On Tuesday, December 8, I read an excellent article by Oliver Balch in The Guardian (Balch, 2020) about the environmental impact of lithium mining (the Library currently has an internship looking at the climate crisis). There is a lot to understand in this well-researched article, but this section (concerning Maria Carmo, a resident of a village in Portugal in an area earmarked for future lithium mining) nicely gets to the point of complexity:

After a three-year struggle, Carmo is exhausted and ready to give in. She feels the government is deaf, and that her fellow citizens aren't interested. "So much destruction," she said. "And for what? So eco-minded urbanites in Paris and Berlin can feel good about driving around in zero-emission cars.

The answer to petrol-polluting cars it seems is not lithium-polluting cars, but fewer or no cars at all, which in turn could mean: less travel; vehicle-based businesses being at a disadvantage; job losses related to cars and all upstream and downstream businesses dependent on cars and vans; a huge economic hit for some entire sectors; and any number of further unseen consequences and benefits. And the pivot-point of complexity that Carmo alights on, the tensions between those who are shaping the future, those who are paying a price for that, and those who will pay the price for an extension of the status quo, is also at play regarding political and social discourse across dozens of other topics.

9 Agreed facts and shared experiences I read that article on a rechargeable electric device full of polluting rare metals that I swap every so often, in an online newspaper that I did not pay for, despite knowing that investigative journalism like this does not come for free. Sustainable? Hardly. Also, what I have not done is research the lithium mining industry myself. I have trusted Oliver Balch and I have trusted The Guardian. We all do this kind of thing, putting trust in others, all the time. Anything else would be… unsustainable. But as complexity and de-massification makes the establishment of agreed facts and shared experiences less and less likely, knowing who or what to trust is being shaken to the core. Arguments, conspiracy theories, fake news, counter-fake news, and general chaos thrive in this environment and are hot-housed by the accelerative speed of social media, which generates digital publications, which then enter our collections.

Just as an aside within a series of asides, I have been thinking about the extent to which postmodernism might be a product of accelerative change, or a cause of it. I have only the most basic grasp of postmodernism and am not going to take this line of inquiry any further, but I would be delighted to read any thoughts about possible relationships between postmodernism and accelerative change. I would, however, like a moment to dwell on how postmodernism might impact publishing, particularly. The best example I can give here relates to a recent academic publishing hoax known as the Grievance Studies Affair (there is a good Wikipedia entry about it), the essence of which is that some academics submitted deliberately fanciful articles to journals to see if they would be published, and four were before the experiment was rumbled. The point to make here is that hoax and experimentation is everywhere, not just on Twitter, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to know when fake news has become something closer to art or a commentary on our times itself. If postmodernism and accelerative change are feeding each other, then is it any wonder that things are so, for want of a better word, messy?

On Wednesday, December 9, I read an article by Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic, which was a further addition to the growing amount of text that has been written about the trans rights/gender-critical divide. I saw the link to the article on Twitter because of the people that I follow. The article introduced me to several social media and publishing platforms that I was not aware of: Ovarit, Spinster, and Saidit. On Wednesday, December 10, I saw another link in my timeline. That link was to a piece either by or on behalf of Mary Kate Fain, but in the time between seeing it and getting to type my thoughts up for this chapter, it had disappeared from where I had seen it (it has reappeared elsewhere, but I haven't followed up on it yet, and may not get the chance to for a while, or ever-my list of things to read only gets longer). As far as I can remember, the article involved Mary Kate Fain, publishing all the email transcripts between her and Kaitlyn Tiffany (of The Atlantic) and a 90-min podcast between Fain and, I think, someone called Meghan Murphy. I think that the Fain piece was going to be a rebuttal of the Tiffany piece. A 15min article generated a 90-min film in under a day. Accelerative indeed.

While others may have been agreeing or disagreeing with the articles, I was mostly thinking "Are any of these platforms UK publishers? Are they in scope for web archiving in terms of The Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013? And, are any of these authors Scottish?" because that's what the Library does. My conclusion was that the immediate content that I had seen was not in scope, and no collecting action has been taken yet, but I now have these platforms on my collection development list to look at. We have an ever-growing collection development list just to say, and the exponential growth in digital publishing is largely behind this.

Digital publishing is especially challenging because the Internet itself is atomizing, breaking apart into new platforms that set out to represent particular groups or viewpoints, making the Internet itself more complex. Increasingly, when we talk about the Internet, it will be worth confirming which Internet we are talking about. And as the Internet becomes more complex, the discourse becomes more complex, and so, in turn, do our collections and the work that we need to do to bring them in. It is also worth noting here that what were once stand-up arguments in meeting rooms are all now committed to text on open public platforms. Whatever else social media has done, it has taken what might have been verbal abuse in the street or philosophical musings over pints in the pub in the past and turned them into collection items on the digital shelves (servers) of national collecting bodies. In short, our definition of what counts as a publication has changed radically in the last fifteen years or so.

(Today is January 14, 2021. President Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter and has been impeached for a second time on a charge of incitement to insurrection. He may well take tens of millions of his social media followers with him to brand new platforms. If any further evidence of accelerative change was required, then the first two weeks of 2021 are it. I didn't know where else to insert this piece of breaking news, so I have put it here. It is as good a place as any.)

Even if we accept that social media content equates to a digital publication (I think it does, but I am sympathetic to arguments that are made to the contrary), it does rather feel like what you get on Twitter as well as a finished article are the drafts, edits, publisher spats, and deleted chapters that traditional print publishing would spare you. This is publishing in the open, in the moment, and as tweets often degenerate into nonlinear battles, it is worth asking what it is that we learn from social media publishing. Although I am sometimes left where I began, the things I read introduce me to ideas, experiences, and differences of opinion that I would otherwise not have known about. But, another area of complexity is therefore emerging, between those aware of these discussions and those oblivious to them or turned off by them. Even if you follow social media, there is no immunity to accelerative change: missing a week on Twitter feels like missing a term of school. Factor into this the tendency for social media to form around or spawn echo chambers, and you have a complex scenario indeed. Current discourse on many key topics (including COVID-19) is affected by all the mores of social media, as well as by the matters of the topics themselves.

11 Accelerative language BAME (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) is a term that has a recent history and a very recent history. In the months since the death of George Floyd in the United States, I saw the usage of the term increase greatly, while also seeing growing numbers of people tweet about their discomfort with the term because of the ownership of it, who is applying it to whom, and the way it obscures the differences within and between the billions of people represented by those four letters. "Increase greatly"; "growing numbers"; not very scientific measurements, but then these observations are based on what I saw on my Twitter timeline. This is my own window on the world because of who I follow and who they in turn follow and what everyone is saying and retweeting. I think there is a good measure of balancing opinions in that timeline, although I might be fooling myself. But the sense that I got was that BAME as a term is already going through a process of rapid change, while other people are only just starting to become aware of it. It is possible that this term will come and go before some people have engaged with the term at all.

LGBT as a term has already changed considerably with the addition (and now also deletion) of letters. The atomizing effect of the third wave is played out everywhere, impacting everything from the economy to sexuality and gender identity. For me, the term LGBTTQQIAAP is not only about sexual orientation and gender identity (I am one of these letters by the way) but is also strongly linked with de-massification, commensurate with the shift to the third wave. All sections of society, including minorities, are atomizing across every facet of their lives. I should of course say that people are also being brought together through atomization and de-massification, just as they are also being broken apart, but there is less predictability as to who is grouping with who, and why. If people were looking for common ground to come together on, their shared experiences of the atomizing impact of accelerative change might be a useful place to begin.

I would like to suggest that most people like change up to the point that they do not like it anymore, at which point they would like change to stop or at least pause for a while. Where that point is lies on a personal sliding scale, and accelerative change makes it slide more quickly and without pause. You could map a political spectrum to this sliding scale, but underneath it is the classical mechanics of acceleration, velocity, and friction. On every topic: conservative angles, progressive angles, and every other angle in between and on the extremes of these parameters will continue to enter our collections. At a time when things are at unprecedented levels of complexity, discourse (be it on COVID-19 or any other topic) still tends toward a binary choice: you can have this or that, but you cannot have both. It is easy to see this at work in the debate (and anger) regarding decisions over the economy that put at risk public health/decisions over public health that put at risk, the economy. There is no national agreement on this, and even when the emergency around COVID-19 has passed, we will be left with all manner of unresolved tensions around the relationships between personal freedom, collective responsibility, and government control.

So, what are the COVID-19 pandemic and related social shifts with regards to accelerative change? When considered in terms of The Third Wave, several interpretations present themselves: the pandemic could be another example of a corrective on the second wave (intensive farming and intensive working practices as methods of viral transmission); an example of the flaws of the third (globalization as a means of global transmission); or a catapult back to the first wave (grow it yourself, live local). Discussion about the long-term impact of the virus began very soon in 2020, and the Library's shelves and servers will continue to fill with analysis about COVID-19 for years to come. It would not be too surprising to see more publications about things like universal basic income, social cohesion, and government power in 2021, along with a good crop of "grow your own veg" books. There is going to be a lot to read about the post-COVID world.

Early social and emotional responses to the pandemic were to see it as unifying. Clapping for carers, NHS rainbows in windows, anecdotal accounts of a surge in community spirit, and the shared restrictions on activity that lockdown brought were all seen as good examples of, for want of a better word, re-massification. There is no doubt that a restriction on individual freedom meant that people were suddenly forced into doing roughly the same things. But it also quickly became apparent that we were not having the same experience at all. Whether you had a garden or not; whether you had school-aged children or not; whether you lived alone or in company; whether you lived in a city or a village; whether you had Internet access; these all became new ways to de-massify. The preexisting social distance between people in different circumstances was really laid bare in 2020.

Is it a coincidence that all the above seems to be happening at the same time? Are the events of 2020 aligning with Toffler's third wave characteristics of de-massification, the breakdown of majorities, the growing importance of individual identity, the growth in working from home, and so on, because that is the trajectory of our time? We may never know whether home-working would have emerged so dominantly without the sudden need to work from home this year, but now that it has, is it likely to go away? The Tofflers identified home-working, home-schooling, and do-it-yourself as where things were heading 40 years ago. Make of that what you will. Alternatively, has COVID-19 provided an opportunity to shore up the second wave and thwart the third: centralization of government power, emergency laws, massive restriction of personal liberty-all Tofflerian hallmarks of second wave controls but also useful things to do to control the spread of a virus with no known cure. Is COVID-19 a braking action on accelerative change? It is difficult to know. The encouragement or discouragement of homeworking over the next few years might turn out to be an interesting litmus test.

So, why is this chapter in this part of the book? The post-COVID-19 world is going to demand changes of us all. But those changes were already upon us or already overdue, not because of a novel coronavirus but because of the overarching trend of our times: accelerative change. And crucial though the response to COVID-19 is, we were already struggling with the rate of change across many fronts long before the virus struck. Back in 1980, the Tofflers warned us in their final chapter to simply prepare for the coming "super-struggle" between the second and third waves. I ask myself, "how did I prepare for the coming super-struggle?" In my professional capacity, what I can say is this: I and my colleagues collected the evidence of it. In my team, in the Library, in libraries and archives throughout the world, we collected this emerging complexity, this accelerative change, over the last few months, and indeed over the centuries as it gradually emerged and continued to accelerate. We are trying our best to keep up with the accelerating pace of it. We were collecting it before we knew what it was and are collecting it before we know what it will have become. But there is a flaw in the plan.

There is clearly no shortage of people generating text, be that in print or digital format, full-length book or 100-word tweet (he says, adding 6300 more words to the pile). We are living at a point of exponential text. There is probably undercapacity to collect it all, but we can do our bit as a global community to collect and preserve representatively and cover as many bases as we can. But, there is absolutely no ability to read it all, let alone make sense of it. Even if we can collect it all, what, or who, are we collecting it for? That is not in itself the Library's problem-our duty is to collect, not to read. If it has not been collected, it cannot be read. But it is still valid to ponder what it means to be producing and collecting more than we can perhaps realistically consume.

What this essay is, therefore, is a squawk from a canary in a coal mine to say that over this year, years previous, and indeed the years to come, our collections (especially digital) have grown exponentially because the world of shared text has grown even more exponentially, and all that shared text is either a product of increasing complexity, a cause of it, or both. Acceleration is locked into our collections. In life, we can observe what happens when things go faster and faster: accidents happen, metal gets fatigued, bolts loosen, and wheels literally fall off. Animals can run fast for a period, but then need to rest. In short, there is usually a corrective to accelerative speed. Unlike COVID-19, which we all hope will soon be treatable and reduced globally to as close to zero as possible, accelerative change seems set to continue its trajectory for the next few months at the very least, and realistically far longer.

There is no agreement (or even any visible public debate) on whether accelerative change is desirable, what the coping mechanisms might be, or what the side effects are for any treatments for it. It may well be that it is desirable, and we may well be incredibly adept at coping with it: the astonishing turnaround of COVID-19 vaccines is reassuring in lots of ways beyond medical treatment alone, as is the widespread anecdotal evidence of community cohesion and human resilience that came with the first lockdown. I would be happy to posit that the Library's collections over centuries are evidence of not only accelerative change but how remarkable humans are at responding to it.

But, because accelerative change is exponential, I think that we need experts on this just as we have virologists studying COVID-19. Libraries need to be working with scholars of classical mechanics and experts on acceleration and velocity. We should be asking: can text output accelerate indefinitely, and what lessons from theoretical mechanics can we borrow, if any? Is it sensible to match accelerative publishing with accelerative reading? Might that simply keep feeding the cycle, and if it does, is that good or bad? Is there a tipping point in exponential text, in the same way that climate scientists are concerned about global temperatures? With exponential text now so closely tied to social media publishing, in the event of a sudden and mass withdrawal from those platforms (the mental health consequences of "doomscrolling" could easily become a tipping point for many), a rapid deceleration of text could take place very quickly. That deceleration may or may not coincide with wider decelerative activity beyond publishing. It could be one way to find out which is feeding which.

My instinct says that if there is more text, then we need more eyes on it, but what is lacking in this analysis is any measure of quality. There is certainly more quantity, but how much of it is "useful"? That is not something that legal deposit libraries typically concern themselves with-we are collectors of publications not arbiters of taste or literary or research merit. It also feels questionable to place social media publishing under a different set of standards to other types of publishing that we have been receiving for years. But, after a romp through some aspects of contemporary complexity and a sweep at the vastness of 21st century text output, I find myself considering whether a better approach to exponential growth might be to scale down. Compelling though it is (at least for me anyway) to try to understand the interconnectedness of things and to appreciate scale, it may be that this is now beyond the realm of humans, and that in such a massive dataset, only a computer can see the patterns and trends that are there but otherwise invisible. Perhaps, this is why GPT-3 has emerged at this point; accelerative change has brought with it its own analytical tool. Two years ago, I read a book that I am still thinking about. Perhaps it is time for me to read another. I will leave this chapter there.

The curse of "white oil": electric vehicles' dirty secret. The Guardian

Alvin Toffler and The Third Wave

The Third Wave