Primates-drawingKim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction writer, once gave an interview in which he called for human activities to be more primate-friendly. Enough with technology disrupting our routines!

So here’s a question. Do e-books or p-books better satisfy our needs and desires as primates?

Before I answer that question, let me share some of Robinson’s own words: “People try to do stupid technological replacements for natural primate actions, but it doesn’t quite give them the buzz that they hoped it would. Even though it looks quite magical, the sense of accomplishment is not there. So they do it again, hoping that the activity, like a drug, will somehow satisfy the urge that it’s supposedly meant to satisfy. But it doesn’t. So they do it more and more—and they fall down a rabbit hole, pursuing a destructive and high carbon-burn activity, when they could just go out for a walk, or plant a garden, or sit down at a table with a friend and drink some coffee and talk for an hour. All of these unboosted, straight-forward primate activities are actually intensely satisfying to the totality of the mind-body that we are.”

“Well,” Luddites would respond, “I don’t even understand why you’re asking that questions. Paper books are more natural. They don’t require the Internet.”

But wait! I myself would think of this mostly at the individual level, and I see e-books as the winners. You can walk or garden or enjoy countless other activities beloved to human primates and listen to e-books by way of text to speech. What’s more, e-books can just be there—on our cell phone, always with you. You don’t have to at a library or in your den. You can sit down at a park bench or on the grass and read. Of course, some would argue that cell phones themselves are primate hostile. Depends. If you know how to turn off WiFi or maybe social-media notifications—it’s just a matter of familiarizing yourself with the settings—you can kick back and relax while oblivious to the rest of the world. Judging from a Wall Street Journal piece, plenty of my fellow primates agree even if the ones in the above image may not be ready.

Speaking of primate friendly: Jeff Bezos really, really ought to check out the Robinson interview. Who knows, maybe it’ll even inspire him to ban laptops from Amazon’s restrooms. And if he can restore TTS to E Ink Kindles, for the benefit of walkers and gardeners among others, that would also be nice. “Primate-friendly,” Jeff—that’s the buzzword of the day.

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