Now that it has come, I can no longer be silent. I have been aware of the coronavirus for over two months. I have made multiple attempts to write an article over that period of time, but I have let the mundane concerns of my life consume me. The opportunity to share my unique speculation on COVID-19 has come and gone. Nevertheless, I feel it is important to speak now.
I got my supplies early. I wasn’t one of the people in the stores as of late buying up all the toilet paper. I imagine you have tried and perhaps succeeded in securing the supplies necessary for your survival, should their be a shortage of goods for a couple of weeks, but you, like me, are probably not adequately prepared for the total collapse of the financial markets. While I fear a deep recession, I think we will generally be all right, even if millions of people in the United States were to die. This event is absolutely guaranteed to not be an extinction-level event, rest assured. However, times like these do make one think: what would happen in the event of a nuclear war? How would my life change? How would the world change? How would I survive?
The concern ought not to be limited to survival. We ought not limit ourselves to the lives of animals—creatures that think, no, not even think, of nothing but the next meal. We must concern ourselves with more than surviving a cataclysm. We must be prepared to maintain the fruits of humanity. We must assemble a shield around the garden of human knowledge and achievement.
This is by no means a new idea, and it’s not some ancient one that I was the first to consider in a thousand years. There are many excellent archivists around the world who are trying to preserve knowledge for the coming generations. However, I see the effort as it currently stands as lacking.
Nothing is impossible. The uncrackable safe can be cracked. The unsinkable ship can be sunk. The impossible will be made possible, and the miraculous will be made mundane.
Since nothing is truly impossible, one is best served by thinking of the impossible as just very unlikely to be overcome under the current conditions but not truly impossible. For instance, a bank robber with absolutely no preparation can be missed by the guards as they do their sweep of the perimeter. The thief can randomly spin the combination lock and walk right in, taking all of the gold and leisurely making their way out, escaping detection without an attempt of avoiding it. Perhaps, a better example for the modern day would be breaking into a bitcoin wallet. Even with a long password with upper and lower case letters and a variety of numbers and symbols, a person can aimlessly guess the username and password. However, you are going to minimize the chances of a break-in with a password more complicated than password123. Furthermore, if you store your bitcoins in multiple wallets with different passwords, you are going to minimize losses in the event of one account becoming compromised.
It is my opinion that it is better to have one’s money hidden in multiple relatively weak safes at multiple undisclosed locations than it is to have all of one’s money in a single “unbreakable” safe at a known location. As this applies to the sum of human knowledge and achievements, I believe we ought to decentralize and disperse. I want people to download and store music, movies, and books on their computers. I want as many people as possible to be the judge of what gets remembered. If left in the hands of a single great, albeit fallible, person, as it often has been in the past, humanity could forever lose precious knowledge. In times past, there was an excuse for losing the one copy of Homer’s Margites. Before the invention of the printing press, books were not only priceless vessels of knowledge but also the mark of a huge investment of time by a highly learned individual. The survival of an ancient book is a greater testament to the author than are the pyramids to the Egyptian pharaohs.
Today, there is no excuse. The preservation of knowledge begins and ends with a single click of a button. We must not put off this task any longer because tomorrow we might not have the chance.
It is my goal in founding this library to disperse what I believe is worthy of remembrance and consideration. This will include my own writings. While I dare not yet say that my writing is worthy of remembrance, I believe it is worthy of consideration. It has grown increasingly difficult to make money off of the sale of one’s creation, and many creators have turned to accepting donations as a result. I believe this to be the future of content creation and am diving in head first at a pitch no other has done before. Should there be no water in the bottom of this pool, I may have to change my approach, perhaps following a more traditional path. Perhaps, I was too early. Nevertheless, I ask that you follow my work, should you, today, deem it worthy—no matter its packaging.
In accordance with what I have previously stated, I will be maintaining an offline component to the works that this website mentions. Some of these works are protected under copyright. I am not telling you to pirate these works, nor am I suggesting that I pirated them; maybe, wait until 2070, when the copyright expires, to download Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna, or you could buy the books I mention from Amazon—I’m not telling you what to do.
Let this place be a library for you to explore and enjoy, and let it be a starting point for your own collection of works you find worthy of preservation.
Sincerely,
Matthew Zerwic
* Please note, I have been paralyzed in the creation of this website for over a year by my pursuit of perfection. The layout of this website is far from perfect due to my lack of web design skills. Future improvements may be made.