But the force is ever more powerful, so in a sense there'll be more and more people who will be completely torqued around by some huge event which they cannot understand. A diagram I use a lot is a cross-section of a healthy civilization, in terms of the pace of change of different elements of civilization. Fast stuff starts and stops, and goes off in various directions. There's continuity in the slow stuff. With any healthy, dynamic, durable, adaptable system, shocks to the system get absorbed at the intermediate levels of governance and infrastructure, and then made integral to the whole system.
Libraries have a role which reaches across all the layers.
It's an interesting span, an interesting mission. The fast stuff gets all of the attention but the slow stuff has all the power. As you more than most people know, the peculiarity of the modern time is that computers, and the Internet, and increasingly biotech and nanotech, are very lively in the fast part and actually threaten slow stuff. There's continuity in the slow stuff and you want it there. The Soviet Union had a complete break of all continuity with the revolution in 1917, and they've paid horribly for it ever since.