Editing Philosophical Research:Apocalypse Manual (section)

== On printed books ==

In principle, printed books should be excellent at following Apocalypse Manual, and one of the most reliable repositories of information. A printed book requires no power beyond sufficient light to read it. A printed book can be preserved for decades without any electricity aside from any possible concerns about temperature changes. But in practice books are not all they're cracked up to be. Books take up physical space, which can be at a premium in a crisis situation. Homeless people have nowhere to put books, or very few places. Many people find their local libraries do not have space for the books they want to read, and they have to ship in books from some other city just to check them out from the library, or to buy them at the bookstore. Books have a critical problem that they are dreadfully inefficient — there are always more books than there is space to keep books, and there are always more books than there is time to sort through all the excess information contained in the great ocean of books spread across multiple cities and multiple countries to find the much smaller body of crucial information any particular individual or group of people is actually looking for.

Here is the problem with books: it takes weeks, months, or years to solidly disprove an incorrect statement by finding the correct books, but it takes less than a day for somebody to spread misinformation to hundreds of thousands of people. Books cost money, but misinformation costs nothing. Books take time and effort to print and then to ship across an entire country area, but misinformation takes no physical effort to transport. If we want people to be properly informed, all the proper information needs to be instantly available at no charge <em>yesterday</em>.

the surest repository of knowledge is one that is tiny and absolutely vast in how much information it can transport. it could well be the case that a cheap, replaceable digital device with indefinite access to battery power is superior to a collection of books.

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core theme: everything should be maintainable by one person at a time, because when something fails, it's very likely there will be no more than one inexperienced individual to fix it

[[Category:Policy guides]]