The Ever-Receding Promise of Paperlessness

Will Richardson of "weblogg-ed" urges that we get off paper. (Hat-tip to Coturnix) I once thought of writing a science fiction story about a paperless society, in which it would be very clear that it was the result of the one cause we know can cause such a society: scarcity of paper. The reason why the ever-promised Paperless Society never comes about is that, while much technology we've developed can be used as substitutes for paper, all of it simultaneously facilitates the use of paper. They provide an endless source of things that can be easily and cheaply put onto paper; in their first infancy they began to drive a new kind of paper economy, in which (just as I can have, if I want, my own two-ton transportation device with gasoline engine) I, an ordinary Joe of limited means, can have my own little printing press. (Hence the popularity among academics.) It was naive of us to think that the source of a new kind of paper economy would suddenly reverse itself and eliminate paper from the scene. What computers really gave us is an encouragement to use paper, in a massive and promiscuous way. To be sure, they also gave us the bare ability not to use paper; but if the bare ability to do something were all it took to have it done, there would be a great many more people getting places without driving ridiculously inefficient SUVs. What will push through a paperless society will be something making it impossible, or at least extraordinarily difficult, to use paper; our technology doesn't do this and, what is more, part of its generally accepted value is precisely that it doesn't. And precisely because it doesn't, it powers not the reduction of paper use but an explosion of it. Computers don't substitute for paper; they give a reason to use hundreds of billions of pages more of it, contributing to the fact that our paper use has more than tripled in the past three decades. And there is, in fact, nothing to suggest that this will stop at any point in the near future, as long as paper is accessible.