A few months ago, I went to a professional conference and was inspired, or at least interested enough, by the keynote speaker and conversations with friends that I went and placed holds on a pair of non-fiction titles at my library: Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Clay Shirkey’s Here Comes Everybody.

I recently finished them both, back-to-back as it turned out, and though I learned a few things from each, I was disappointed that I had been sucked into reading about ideas that were already familiar.

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point probably started it all. At the time, I thought his books were the Harry Potter of non-fiction: popular, large margins, oversized type, and snackworthy. What I didn’t realize was, just as J.K. Rowling is purported to be leading kids to a lifelong love of reading, Gladwell would be my gateway author to popular non-fiction books dealing with some combination of business, economics and technology.

This year alone I have read Lawrence Lessig’s Code, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, and Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. I also checked out Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, but after reading a few chapters, I returned it in disgust.

Counting Ariely and Shirky, I’ve read five of these in the past nine months, and given that it takes me two to three weeks to read a book, the genre has made up a significant portion of my recent literary consumption. To try to compensate, I am making the resolution not to read any more non-fiction until January (I am lapsed already; I’ll say more in a few days).

Besides elbowing out my time to read anything else, I started to notice all the ways that these books were similar, with the exceptions being that Ariely talks about behavioral economics and not much else, and Lessig talks about the law. Lessig’s book is the only one I would really recommend to anyone at this point.

What the books all have in common is that they are all discuss the Great Change in the World, and they all go about doing it in the same way. They usually begin with an anecdote about the internet which demonstrates how different things are today and will eventually be referred to throughout the book and put into the proper context by the book’s thesis. The opening chapters loosely tie together several world-changing phenomena - possibly the Magna Carta, the discovery of the new world, the Rosetta Stone or the fall of the Berlin wall - but they always they cite Gutenberg’s printing press and the internet in their stories. Next there is a whole chapter dedicated to Wikipedia, and the heart of the book is an explanation of how things will change/are changing/have changed. Like their authors, their audience is probably 30-50 year old men in suits; i.e., besides the suit, I am in the target demographic for these books.

So if I think I understand this genre so well, I thought, why not write my own book? I present to you National Non-Fiction Book Proposal Writing Month, or nanofiboprowrimo.

Working title The world as we knew it : how the quantum information age will change everything

Note to literary agents, editors and publishers: the title intentionally mixes verb tenses in order to demonstrate the thesis of the book, that we can either know the world or know its future, but not both.

This book will define the great technologies in the history of the world and thread them loosely together. The Wheel, the Bible, Fire, The Great Library of Alexandria, movable type, railroads and Web 2.0 are just the beginning. The world is on the verge of the next information revolution that will change the worlds of business, education and entertainment forever.

Preface: an Example of How the Internet is So Amazing

Lots of people who voted in the November 4, 2008 US presidential election used Twitter to say who they voted for, where they voted and how long the lines were. In this way, information about the election was distributed but never collected, except by Twitter, who doesn’t know what to do with it and probably doesn’t care.

People in Oregon were cut out of this process because they voted by mail. The world had changed, and Oregon had not changed with it. Only time will tell what the effect will be.

Chapter 1: the Great Library

The Great Library of Alexandria was a famous building full of stolen documents. Most contemporary historians focus on how we will never know what knowledge was lost when someone burned it down, but in fact it was Eastern scholars, the people that would one day be Muslims, who succeeded in preserving the wisdom of the ancients.

In those days, information was passed from person to person and by heralds making announcements in the piazza. Ships sailed randomly wherever the wind took them and commerce on the silk road turned at the pace of mighty cart wheels.

Flash forward to 2009: the internet is the way we transport information, from websites and cellphones to twitter and the DarkNet. And yet, our ability to preserve information is inversely proportionate to the speed at which it moves.

Chapter 2: Benjamin Franklin and the Public Library in America

In which it is proven that libraries are about books, but libraries’ real importance was in their collection of printed information. Printing information is what Benjamin Franklin did as a revolutionary spy, hence the title of this chapter. For 200 years, printed information was shared and collected easily in libraries. It was the golden age, but that day is no more.

Chapter 3: Traditional Media is dead: Dawn of the DarkNet

We all know that newspapers are going out of business and that cable networks are struggling to keep up with the internet. Comcast is blocking BitTorrent, broadcast television is trying to figure out the HD thing, and the top-down approach of in-person conferences is subverted by Twitter backchannels.

On the DarkNet, peer-to-peer file sharing is alive and well. Child pornography, illegal music and even DVD bonus features are regularly transmitted between trusting partners.

The irony is that in order to be Dark, the DarkNet has to be not used by that many people. As soon as it is popular, as with Napster of the 90s, DarkNets self-destruct. YouTube is also used for sharing porn and music, but this is tolerated because of the range of legitimate uses for the site and because it is controlled by the Google.

Chapter 4: Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a utopian experiment in education* which we all know is rife with error. The interesting thing about Wikipedia is that it preserves all the changes made to it. But this doesn’t really work for the internet-at-large because Wikipedia is not the Web. And even if it were that way for the whole Web, we would be leaving out the DarkNet

Other internet preservation techniques, such as Google’s cache, the internet archive and Project Gutenberg are all other shots in the dark at the problem. We can’t really trust a corporation, even Google, to preserve the world’s information, goofy non-profits are just as bad, and no one is even thinking about preserving the ephemeral Tweets and DarkNet transmissions.

Chapter 5: Beyond Wikipedia: Quantum Physics and the Information Age

Quantum physics tells us that we can either know a particle’s position or it’s velocity, but not both. The very act of observing the particle changes it.

Indeed, we are entering the Quantum Age, where we can either share information or preserve it, but not both. The very act of transmitting the information changes it, leaving the preserved copy inaccurate and useless.

Chapter 6: Research in the quantum age

There is so much research published these days that no one has time to read it all critically before conducting and publishing their own research. New library research methods are evolving to cope. Instead of reading papers, people judge papers on how many times they have been cited and which papers they cite.

Not reading all the prior research has two consequences: we stagnate by repeating work that has already been done, or we make leaps in bounds in the wrong directions. Ironically, this problem is worst in the field that is best positioned to solve it: Artificial Intelligence.

Chapter 7: Business in the quantum age

Without being able to preserve and consult our past, the economy of the future will be bigger and longer cycles of boom and bust, of poverty and prosperity. We will make the same mistakes over and over and have the same successes over and over.

Chapter 8: Entertainment in the quantum age

Entertainment will follow similar cycles to the economy; we are currently in a cycle of great individual creativity and will soon enter another cycle of mass consumption and production, with a few media giants holding onto the reins of the entire shebang.

Chapter 9: Sledge Hammer

It will come to a point where the only tool we have is a sledge hammer. It’s not all doom and gloom, really. It’s just a new way of thinking and a new way the world is, and smart people and smart companies are going to make a lot of money with it. Invite me to give your corporate board a seminar and I’ll explain more.

Postscript:

I’ll write something reassuring here … does it really matter? You’ve read this book before.