An almost legal form of confiscation, or expropriation. But the big German and Dutch publishing firms, who bring out scientific works in English, have already adapted to this situation. A two-hundred-page book now costs fifty dollars. They know full well that they will sell it only to libraries and research teams, and the rest will be xeroxes. They will sell only three thousand copies. But three thousand copies at fifty dollars comes out the same as fifty thousand copies at three dollars (except that production and distribution costs are lower).

Further, to protect themselves, they don’t pay the authors, claiming that these are scholarly publications destined for public-service organizations.
The example is only an example, and it applies exclusively to indispensable scientific works. But it serves to demonstrate that the capacity of the big systems for healing their wounds is considerable. And that, indeed, big systems and subversive groups are often twins, and one produces the other.

That is to say, if the attack on the presumed “heart” of the system (confident that a central Power exists) is bound to fail, likewise the peripheral attack on systems that have neither center nor periphery produces no revolution. At most it guarantees the mutual survival of the players of the game. The big publishing houses are ready to accept the spread of photocopying, as the multinationals can tolerate the phone calls made at their expense, and a good transportation system willingly accepts a fair number of counterfeit tickets—provided the counterfeiters are content with their immediate advantage. It is a more subtle form of “historic compromise,” except that it’s technological. It is the new form that the Social Contract is preparing to assume, to the extent that the Utopia of the revolution is transformed into a scheme of short-range, but permanent, harassment.

1978

The end