[Daniel Akst] Casualties of the digital age of information

It’s hard to resist contrasting the liquidation of the Borders bookstore chain, which commenced this week, with the latest outburst of worry over the fate of the U.S. Postal Service.

Both Borders and the Postal Service are basically broke, and both are victims of a technological revolution that increasingly delivers information digitally. So Borders went bankrupt and has launched a going-out-of-business sale. It will have some bargains, but I won’t be stopping in, since I read almost everything nowadays on-screen.

Eventually, you will too.

But while the Postal Service is also in bad shape, as an arm of the government it must soldier on, trudging toward an anticipated loss of $8 billion this year on top of a similar loss last year. Of course if the Postal Service could act more like a business ― by closing money-losing offices, ending Saturday delivery and changing the way it pays for employee and retiree benefits ― it would probably be in the black. Although Congress expects it to break even, Congress also blocks the sensible measures that would enable it to do so.

Yet this isn’t the story of creative destruction (private sector) versus hopeless ineptitude (public sector) that it may at first seem.

Borders, all of 40 years old, is just a business. The Postal Service, on the other hand, was the Internet before we had an Internet. Its death throes of necessity will be longer and more difficult, because the U.S. mail has more to do with who we are and what we want to be.

Its history is nothing short of illustrious. Rooted in the Puritan belief in universal literacy, which was seen as necessary so that all could read the Bible, America from its earliest days was primed to be a networked society dependent on information and its transmission.

No less than Ben Franklin used his organizational genius to modernize the primitive Colonial mail system, and when the new nation was born, the Post Office Act of 1792 decreed that newspapers would be carried at rock-bottom prices ― a massive subsidy for information from what amounted to a federal tax on commercial correspondence. By 1838 newspapers accounted for just 15 percent of postal revenue ― but 95 percent of weight.

By this time, in contrast to the plodding bureaucracy of today, the American postal system was the world’s largest and certainly among its greatest. Merchants would send as much as $10,000 in cash through the mail without fear of loss, and the U.S. mail knit the budding nation together by fostering a vast network of stagecoach routes that were succeeded by railroads, which in turn fostered the spread of telegraph lines. With the rise of each breakthrough technology, government played a major role and universal service was a bedrock principle. Always, there was what one historian called a distinctively American “faith in the emancipatory potential of communications.”

The Internet is only the most recent example. It arose from a Defense Department initiative to connect far-flung campus computers and evolved into a transformative technology that threatens to overturn many of the ones that came before ― including traditional books and mail service.

Mail delivery will probably be with us long after printed books have evolved into novelties, gift items and art objects ― if only because someone will have to deliver all the things that we purchase online. Of course, a Postal Service that maintains an outpost at every crossroads and hamlet, delivering unwanted coupons for margarine and laxatives six days a week at unsustainable cost, will have to change.

Just don’t expect the adjustment to be as easy as liquidating Borders.

By Daniel Akst, Newsday

Daniel Akst, a columnist for Newsday, is the author of “We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess” from Penguin Press. ― Ed.

(McClatchy-Tribune Information Services)