Nouveau intellectuals - a not-so-nice depiction

OK, I am coining a new term, “nouveau intellectuals.� Like the finger-down-the-throat nouveau riche, this bunch of vacuous, uncouth, brash and perpetually plagiarizing bunch love intellectual properties the way the nouveau riche love money.

Their use and reliance on the right to use other people’s creative abilities, other’s serious research they access and bandy about as if it were well within their comprehension, and, never least, the name or book title dropping they litter about to somehow pretend intellectual comprehension — all this is truly revolting. There is no other word for it.

I am at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair with 7,533 exhibitors (publishers mostly) and 522 agents participating. The local hotel watering holes are stuffed to breaking as deals are being made, friends do their annual meet and greet and waiters try and keep the lips of the hard-selling agents lubricated with $20 vodka tonics.

At the HessischerHof Hotel these professionals have an added worry: the ultimate nouveau intellectuals, striding through the wool-suited and cashmere-jacketed crowd in their slogan printed T-shirts, casual torn jeans, beard stubble mimicking aging rock stars, ultra-slim computers casually under arms, the ubiquitous iPhone needing both hands.

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The boys from Google are here. They have the most money, so why not? They take the largest meeting room. As you walk by the open door, their private bar is heavily laden, the buffet table (at 4 p.m.) loaded down with expensive treats, all meant to keep the real literati comfortable with these otherwise brash individuals as the boys from Google seek to tame and profit from the vast wealth of literature they could never, ever, really appreciate.

Like bankers on Wall Street who write down the full asset value of your house as theirs and treat you like an unwanted pest if their money flow becomes interrupted, the boys from Google are here to make over your favorite books, transforming thousands of authors’ words and life’s work into an asset value of Google.

Think I’m kidding? Here’s a Google “vision statement,� and they are in Frankfurt to wrap this baby up: “Google believes that an open Web benefits all users and publishers. However, ‘open’ need not mean free. We believe that content on the Internet can thrive supported by multiple business models.… While we believe that advertising will likely remain the main source of revenue for most news content, a paid model can serve as an important source of additional revenue.… When it comes to a paid content model, there are … challenges. First, the content must offer value to users. Only content creators can address this.�

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Spoken like true Wall Street nouveau riche wannabes. You make it, we’ll profit from it and we will never have any real understanding of the value of your intellectual creation or your life’s work which we’re misusing.

Welcome to the nouveau intellectuals, thinking they deserve to control something they neither value, respect nor worry about — beyond the bottom line. Hey, why not?

As one of those T-shirts said, “Tech Savvy, I Can Do It As I Want.� Intellectual arrogance heavily ladled on to a serious lack of learning and culture, the true definition of my new term: nouveau intellectuals.

Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.

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