AI, Cryptography, and 'The End of Books'
Dear Reader,
In the late nineteenth century, French bibliophile Octave Uzanne heralded The End of Books. His thesis was simple: listening is easier than reading so phonographs would eventually dominate books. On the one hand, here you are reading this. On the other, I listened to The End of Books while I unloaded the dishwasher. I would like to explore Uzanne’s anxiety, a clever cryptographic technique, and how they relate to looming threats to the integrity of our expressions.
Consider a time when railways, electricity, and telegraphs were creating global connections on a seemingly-fantastical scale. Gargantuan international markets reared their heads, imperial expansion steamrolled the Earth and its peoples, and rapid modernisation deepened global inequalities. Consider then the baffled reactions of Scientific American staff when Thomas Edison presented his 1877 phonograph—those trumpet-looking things which later became gramophones and then record players.
Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night.
—Library of Congress
Uzanne argued that continuous progress in emerging technologies would make phonographic devices smaller and smaller until they could fit in our pockets or sit beside us at the dining table. Furthermore, the engineering would become so precise that phonographs could faithfully record and emit lifelike sound. Edison proposed that soon you could keep a ‘Family Record’ of sayings and remarks throughout generations, record your teacher and listen to their explanations at a later date, or catch up on public lectures, interviews, or announcements in your own time.
Because reading is a taxing process and we tend to choose the path of least resistance, demand would push us towards a market where authors are expert narrators. Oration—not writing—would be prized, and laborious books would fall from favour.
I can’t say whether I would have sided with the Bibliophile or echoed the ‘astonished "oh’s!" ironical "ah’s!" [or] doubtful “eh! eh’s!”’—Scribner’s Magazine, 1894—but today I think that Uzanne’s literary-doomsaying was justified and surprisingly prescient.
Perhaps unlike Uzanne, I need some time to be convinced of the literal ‘End of Books’. So far, it has turned out that we enjoy multimodal media; I recommend The Public Domain Review’s excellent essay.
Nevertheless, I’m fascinated by the anxiety and ideas which underpinned his prediction. In a world where authors are ‘narrators’, journalists are ‘announcers’, and watch-like devices of not more than five square inches produce perfect recordings while you enjoy landscape views or other activities, I feel a distinctly Orwellian anxiety about what might be lost. Or what might be endangered.
The author will become his own publisher. To avoid imitations and counterfeits he will be obliged, first of all, to go to the Patent-Office, there to deposit his voice, and register its lowest and highest notes, giving all the counter-hearings necessary for the recognition of any imitation of his deposit.
—The End of Books
There are two elements I would like to put aside for the moment. Firstly, the notion of ‘depositing’ your voice feels horrible—at least to me. It seems to say ‘roll up! Roll up! Today is DNA, tomorrow is fingerprints, and retina scans are every other Tuesday!’ Secondly, Uzanne proposes that the narrator would own the patent, hold the voice-containing-cylinders, and sell the recordings themself. Who owns, safeguards, and has access to the voice data are important questions that I would be remiss to ignore.
There is one element I would like to focus on: the integrity that these voice deposits aim to ensure.
We may define integrity variously. In moral terms, we might say that integrity relates to how honest and consistent we are with respect to our principles. When describing a concept or argument, we might say that integrity relates to its wholeness or completion. We might comment on the structural or internal integrity of a building.
In the field of information security, integrity is a primary concern. It’s one of the triumvirate powers of the cool-sounding ‘CIA triad’ of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Likewise, it features in the—less cool-sounding—CIANA+PS mnemonic. Most frequently, the following definition from the USA National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is used:
Guarding against improper information modification or destruction, and includes ensuring information non-repudiation and authenticity.
—NIST Computer Security Resource Center
Integrity is important in information security because safeguarding your credit card details, address, or medical history from being tampered with is key to safeguarding you from financial fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Ensuring the integrity of your data or cyber activities also means that you can’t deny that they’re yours, or that a digital contract you signed is an authentic and binding artefact.
Particularly when confronted with jargon and acronyms, concepts such as integrity can feel lofty. However, I think the NIST definition belies deeply human elements.
It seems to me that once concocted, we tend to care about the integrity of our expressions. There is a kind of unfairness in the paint-splattered artist watching as their composition is cropped to fit a smaller frame, or the jet-lagged journalist explaining that the AI summary was incorrect, or the so-called friend who steals your joke but retells it poorly. There is a kind of unfairness in the prospect of our expressions being altered or presented in an incomplete form.
In its simplest everyday form, the integrity of information security is often the business of ensuring that individual data packets, network endpoints, and other basic components are what they are meant to be. That is to say that when you send an email or upload a presentation, each link in the chain of communication between your computer and the destination can use hash functions to look at the proverbial wax seal on the envelope of data and confirm that it hasn’t been tampered with. If the sender has published a digital certificate—much like a cryptographic patent—then each computer can confirm that the message is intact and that its seal matches the emblem of its sender. Not only can we guarantee the integrity of the data but also that it was sent from the right place.
On a grander scale, the proliferation of these data-checking functions has allowed us to develop a new common cryptographic good: Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Although you may not be familiar with it by name, this ingenious layer below the surface allows your web browser to trust that the websites it loads aren’t fakes—or alert you if they might be. When you request a connection, the computers involved can evaluate wax seals and compare their emblems against a public registry to verify their claims. It happens so quickly that you don’t even notice.
In a future where phonographic technology might run rampant and dissolve trust, Uzanne imagined authors depositing their voices to register public patents so that listeners might verify the integrity and authenticity of their expressions. Today, an often-unknown infrastructure of public cryptographic certificates aims to secure the same principles every day.
Clearly, there may be an important difference between the systematisation of human voices and the mathematical assuredness of our silent cyberspace. Particularly so, when considering the two points I set aside: the discomfort of voice deposits and the questions of who owns, safeguards, and has access to the data. I’m not sure where that leaves our modern communications.
Regardless, I find it interesting that what first appears as a Nineteen Eighty-Four hedging against The End of Books actually underpins our digital lives. Beneath every new login, post, and DM is a silent mathematical battle for the integrity of human expression.
Will ChatGPT and DeepSeek drive a new era of business for the patent office? Food for thought.
If you would prefer, an AI-generated voice can read you this essay in the Substack app.
Thank you for your attention.
Kind regards,
Kai Tebay