Travel in Life

A name on the cover of a book is a very small thing to carry a book.

In 1988, Bantam Books published A Brief History of Time with Stephen Hawking as its sole author. That looked ordinary. It is worth noticing that it looked ordinary.

Hawking had lost his voice to a tracheotomy three years earlier. He wrote through a computer, and over the following decades the machinery between his intention and the finished sentence grew steadily more capable, learning to predict his words from a model of his own writing, until the system could double his typing rate while requiring about one-fifth as many character selections as before. A later book appeared after his death, assembled from his archive by other hands.

The name kept not changing.

The interface changed. The attribution did not.

A name can survive enormous changes in the machinery beneath it.

The name on the cover is not a production credit.

It is an interface.

A byline gives the reader something small enough to hold.

Publishers do not ordinarily print the complete causal history of a book across its front. Editors, translators, designers, copy editors, researchers, estates, software, typesetters, permissions departments, and production staff do not all crowd onto the cover. Most of them appear elsewhere, if they appear at all.

The cover compresses.

Hawking wrote.

Adler says.

The Kaiser started the war.

The grammar is efficient. A distributed field acquires an agent.

Sometimes that compression is almost innocent. It helps us think.

Sometimes it does other work.

During the First World War, Kaiser Wilhelm II became one of the human images through which Britain and its allies represented Germany and German militarism. A modern war is difficult to picture as a whole. It contains governments, alliances, generals, mobilization schedules, railways, factories, newspapers, soldiers, civilians, accumulated grievances, errors, and millions of individual decisions.

A man in a spiked helmet is easier.

The Kaiser was real. His power was real. His responsibility was not imaginary.

But the image carried far more than one man’s actions.

The compression moved from comprehension toward targeting. A whole causal field acquired a face that could be blamed, mocked, feared, and hated.

The same mechanism appears elsewhere.

Norman Thrower’s Maps and Civilization ends with an appendix listing isograms, lines connecting places where some value is, or is assumed to be, constant.

The list begins comfortably.

Pressure.

Temperature.

Rainfall.

Then it keeps going.

Isodopane: cost of travel time.

Isotim: the price for certain goods.

Isonoet: equal average degree of intelligence.

Somebody believed each of these could be drawn.

That last one is difficult to forget. Intelligence receives contours. A line can be made to pass through places where an average degree of it is assumed to remain constant, as though intelligence lay across the land the way barometric pressure does.

The line may be clean.

The field beneath it may not be.

That is what makes compression dangerous rather than merely crude. A representation can become elegant before the thing it represents has been established in the form the representation assumes.

Agency can work the same way.

When I read Alfred Adler, I say Adler argues, Adler believes, Adler moves from perception to memory, from imagination to dreams.

There really was an Alfred Adler. He died in 1937.

But the Adler I read now is already a distributed object: Adler, the original text, a translator, perhaps another translator in another edition, editors, publishers, typesetters, punctuation decisions, paragraph breaks, changes in vocabulary, nearly a century of transmission.

Then there is the reader.

I supply emphasis. I hear cadence. I remember a sentence from fifty pages earlier. I decide that one passage has resolved and another has not. I connect material the book may never explicitly connect.

And still I say:

Adler does this.

The name earns its keep.

It compresses the field.

The dead author makes the mechanism easier to see: the words continue to produce effects after their source is gone. Adler can no longer experience anything happening on the page. Yet the prose still arrives with pressure. It still moves. It still resolves. A reader can still feel instruction, reassurance, irritation, or recognition.

Readers have always accepted presence from sources whose present interior is unavailable. The dead. The translated. The anonymous. The fictional.

Usually this causes little trouble because the reader supplies a biography behind the words. Someone wrote them. Someone once had an experience while producing them. Even if that person has been dead for centuries, the name gives the language somewhere to come from.

The reader supplies more author than the page contains.

Artificial intelligence makes that old habit conspicuous because the familiar biography disappears.

Words still arrive.

They can return to something said earlier. They can adjust to the previous sentence. They can withhold an obvious conclusion. They can pick up a distinction the reader introduced and carry it somewhere else.

The reader begins assembling a figure from those behaviors.

It remembers this.

It noticed that.

It waited.

It came back.

The contour appears.

Something has happened in the reader. The effect does not become unreal because the source is difficult to name.

But the output does not certify an experiencing source.

The effect is real.

The attribution is the question.

Conversation makes the attribution more tempting because responsive language adds something a dead author cannot provide.

Interactive contingency.

Adler cannot change his next paragraph because I misunderstood the previous one. A conversational system can change what comes next because of what I just said. My contribution alters the return. The return alters my next contribution. Direction is not fixed before the exchange begins. It develops through the exchange.

That can feel like being met.

Part of that presence may come from hearing one’s own movement returned with variation. The reader moves. Something comes back that could not have arrived in precisely that form without the movement. The reader moves again.

The resulting figure is neither delivered whole nor merely projected.

It is assembled from the interaction.

Agency may therefore be another compression.

Organized behavior becomes a someone: a figure who remembers, notices, waits, responds, intends. That compression may be accurate, approximate, useful, or dangerous.

The important question is what the compression is for, what it preserves, and what it allows us to stop carrying.

Hawking sits toward one end of that continuum. His name compressed a complicated production history, but it remained anchored to an obvious intellectual source, and the cover could keep pointing toward him because attribution was tracking something other than the mechanics by which the text was physically produced.

The name survived because it was not trying to describe the machinery.

The Kaiser shows the other danger. A real person can become too successful a handle. A name can begin carrying a war, a nation, a system, a population, a moral cause. Compression toward comprehension can become compression toward blame.

Between them sit the ordinary cases: authors, leaders, institutions, movements, machines, names that help us hold causal fields too large to carry whole.

There is an imprint I use whose name contains an ampersand: EZorrillaMc&Co.

The ampersand does a small piece of work.

It gives the reader a name while refusing to pretend that the name is singular. Something has been gathered here, but the gathering is declared incomplete. The handle stays small enough to hold while admitting that more hands exist than the front can show.

A compression that declares itself one.

Books have always had another place for this.

Turn past the title page.

Look at the verso.

The translators, editions, publishers, rights holders, designers, dates, and production history have not necessarily been hidden.

Much of what the name on the cover discarded is still there.

Six-point type.

Copyright page.

Nobody reads it.

WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.

Intel — “New Intel-Created System Offers Professor Stephen Hawking Ability to Better Communicate with the World” (December 2014). Documents ACAT, SwiftKey integration, language prediction, and the finding that the system doubled his typing rate while requiring about one-fifth as many character selections as before.

WIRED — João Medeiros, “How Intel Gave Stephen Hawking a Voice” (January 2015). Detailed account of the communication system’s evolution, including Words Plus, Walter Woltosz, and the SwiftKey model trained on Hawking’s own writing.

Computer History Museum — “Bringing a New Voice to Genius: MITalk, the CallText 5010, and Stephen Hawking’s Wheelchair” (2019). Corroborates the 1985 date, Equalizer in 1986, and the speech synthesizer.

Penguin Random House / Bantam — A Brief History of Time. Lists Stephen Hawking as sole author and Bantam as the U.S. publisher.

Penguin Random House / Bantam — Brief Answers to the Big Questions. Lists Stephen Hawking as author and Bantam as the U.S. publisher; published October 16, 2018. The publisher’s note documents completion from his personal archive with the involvement of colleagues, family, and the Stephen Hawking Estate.

Norman J. W. Thrower — Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, third edition, University of Chicago Press. Appendix B, “Short List of Isograms,” is the source for isodopane, isotim, and isonoet as printed.

Alfred Adler — Understanding Human Nature (1927).

Imperial War Museums — First World War propaganda materials, for Kaiser Wilhelm II as a condensed image of Germany and German militarism.