Art & Creativity Quote by Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker, a cyberpunk-adjacent mathematician who helped imagine our digital futures, sounds almost quaint here-and that is exactly the point. The line isn’t a Luddite tantrum; it’s a systems thinker calling a bluff. In the early Net-era glow, “the Internet will replace books” was a kind of secular prophecy. Rucker punctures it by treating “book” less as sacred content and more as a physical technology optimized over centuries: cheap, portable, rugged, battery-free.

The specific intent is pragmatic: match medium to use case. A book, in Rucker’s framing, is at its best when it behaves like a tool you can mistreat. “Bang around” is doing heavy work: it evokes backpacks, bus rides, coffee spills, marginalia. That casual violence is actually an argument for intimacy and ownership. Digital reading, especially in its earlier forms, was tethered to screens, power, fragile hardware, clunky interfaces, and a culture of access rather than possession. A paperback doesn’t ask permission, doesn’t crash, and doesn’t nag you with notifications.

The subtext is also about economics and control. “Inexpensive” isn’t just price; it’s independence from subscription gates, DRM, platform churn. Coming from a scientist steeped in information culture, it’s a reminder that progress isn’t a single track toward dematerialization. Sometimes the future is admitting that the older interface already solved the problem elegantly-and that the Net, for all its reach, can be a worse container for sustained attention than a dog-eared paperback.