In the Beginning...Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson Read Free Book Online

brilliant piece of work. Obviously it’s not an ancient Indian ruin, and some person or people now living deserve credit for it. But there are no signatures on the Maharajah’s game reserve at Disney World. There are no signatures on anything, because it would ruin the whole effect to have long strings of production credits dangling from every custom-worn brick, as they do from Hollywood movies.
    Among Hollywood writers, Disney has the reputation of being a real wicked stepmother. It’s not hard to seewhy. Disney is in the business of putting out a product of seamless illusion—a magic mirror that reflects the world back better than it really is. But a writer is literally talking to his or her readers, not just creating an ambience or presenting them with something to look at. Just as the command line interface opens a much more direct and explicit channel from user to machine than the GUI, so it is with words, writer, and reader.
    The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts—the only medium—that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media. (The richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn’t really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners.)
    But this special quality of words and of written communication would have the same effect on Disney’s product as spray-painted graffiti on a magic mirror. So Disney does most of its communication without resorting to words, and for the most part, the words aren’t missed. Some of Disney’s older properties, such as Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, and Alice in Wonderland, came out of books. But the authors’ names are rarely if ever mentioned, and you can’t buy the original books at the Disney store. If you could, they would all seem old and queer, like very bad knockoffs of the purer, more authentic Disney versions. Compared to more recent productions like Beauty and the Beast and Mulan , the Disney movies based on these books (particularly Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan ) seem deeply bizarre, and not wholly appropriate for children. That stands to reason, because Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature of the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers of Disneyfication like X-rays through a wall. Probably for this very reason, Disney seems to have stopped buying rights to books altogether, and now finds its themes and characters in folk tales, which have the lapidary, timeworn quality of the ancient bricks in the Maharajah’s ruins.
    If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. This sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology.
    If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that’s for sale in Disney World’s African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both. In this world, artists are like theanonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk