"The White Plague" & Mumford and the Slothrop Paper Company

[ish mailian]

from Mumford's _The City in History_

To believe, therefore, that human culture has reached a marvelous
final culmination in the modern metropolis one must avert one‘s eyes
from the grim details of the daily routine. And that is precisely what
the metropolitan denizen schools himself to do: he lives, not in the
real world, but in a shadow world projected around him at every moment
by means of paper and celluloid and adroitly manipulated lights: a
world in which he is insulated by glass, cellophane and film from the
mortifications of living. In short, a world of professional
illusionists and their credulous victims.

The swish and crackle of paper is the underlying sound of the
metropolis. What is visible and real in this world is only what has
been transferred to paper or has been even further etherialised on a
microfilm or a tape recorder. The essential daily gossip of the
metropolis is no longer that of people meeting face to face at a
cross-roads, at the dinner, table, in the marketplace: a few dozen
people writing in the newspapers, a dozen or so more broadcasting over
radio and television, provide the daily interpretation of movements
and happenings with slick professional adroitness. Thus. even the most
spontaneous human activities come under professional surveillance and
centralized control. The spread of manifolding devices of every sort
gives to the most ephemeral and mediocre products of the mind a
temporary durability they do not deserve: whole books are printed to
justify the loose evacuations of the tape recorder.

All the major activities of the metropolis are directly connected with
paper and its plastic substitutes; and printing and packaging are
among its principal industries. The activities pursued in the offices
of the metropolis are directly connected with paper: the tabulating
machines, the journals, the ledgers, the card-catalogues, the deeds,
the contracts, the mortgages, the briefs, the trial records: so, to,
plioo, the prospectuses, the advertisements, the magazines, the
newspapers. As early as the eighteenth century Mercier had observed
this metropolitan form of the White Plague. Modern methods of
manifolding have not lessened the disease: they have only exchanged
easygoing slipshod ways, which often sufficed, for a more exact
record, whose elaboration and cost are out of all proportion to the
value of what is recorded. What was a mere trickle in Mercier’s day
has now becoming a ravaging flood of paper.

As the day’s routine proceeds the pile of paper mounts higher: the
trashbaskets are filled and emptied and filled again. The ticker tape
exudes its quotation of stocks and its report of news; the students in
the schools and universities fill their notebooks, digest and disgorge
the contents of books, as the silkworm feeds on mulberry leaves and
manufactures its cocoon, unraveling themselves on examination day. In
the theatre, in literature, in music, in business, reputations are
made on paper. The scholar with his degrees and publications, the
actress with her newspaper clippings, and the financier with his
shares and his voting proxies, measure their power and importance by
the amount of paper they can command. No wonder the anarchists once
invented the grim phrase: ‘Incinerate the documents!’ That would ruin
this whole world quicker than universal flood or earthquake, if not as
fatally as a shower of hydrogen bombs. That life is an occasion for
living, and not a pretext for supplying items to newspapers,
interviews on television, or a Spectacle for crowds of otherwise
vacant bystanders these notions do not occur in the metropolitan mind.
For them the Show is the reality, and ‘ the show must go on!’ This
metropolitan world, then, is a world where tears and blood are less
real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great
masses of people, unable to achieve a more fullbodied and satisfying
means of living, take life vicariously, as leaders, spectators,
listeners, passive observers. Living thus, year in and year out, at
second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them, and no less
remote from the nature that is within, it is no wonder that they turn
more and more of the functions of life, even thought itself, to the
machines that their inventors have created. In this disordered
environment only machines retain some of the attributes of life, while
human beings are progressively reduced to a bundle of reflexes,
without self-starting impulses or autonomous goals: ‘behaviourist
man’.