Found in The Georgia Straight, a semi-funky news paper in my town, Vancouver.
Reminds me about my preoccupation …
The Anarchist in the Library
It’s rare that books about technology go much beyond describing the past, even though they usually purport to tell the future. Common subjects are the design of a computer or the evolution of a company, the origins of the Net or of research into virtual reality. Simple documentary stuff. It’s a much riskier proposition to attempt to write with a bigger-picture view; you need a bold theory and the means to support your argument.
American academic and media theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan has that dramatic thesis: current technologies such as peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing and systems that sidestep copyright are just the latest incarnation of the age-old ideological battle between anarchy and oligarchy, resistance against authority versus attempts to establish autocratic control. In his new book, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, $40), Vaidhyanathan analyzes the ways in which the individual power granted by information technology has led to confrontations with the ruling elite.
The author presents it all in terms of previous social struggles, and not solely those prompted by technological inventions. It sounds like an overreaching and grandiose way to discuss Napster and chat rooms–here comparing them to the role of gossip in turbulent 18th-century Paris–until you read the book. It contains an argument that is well-written, clear, and full of examples (from legal cases over software that defeats copyright protections to movie fans producing their own versions of films like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace), and Vaidhyanathan builds his case very seductively. To him, battles over issues like P2P networking involve “values beyond commerce and crime, including free speech, privacy, and intellectual freedom”.
It’s clear that Vaidhyanathan’s viewpoint is slanted toward supporting the rights of the individual over the corporations (his previous book is Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity), but he acknowledges that total anarchy is unacceptable too.
Whenever the wishes of the people are different than the systems they live under, the systems inevitably will be forced to undergo drastic change, and his stated goal is to prompt some intelligent debate in order to forestall a complete societal disruption. He believes there are ways to get through these changes without collapsing into a lawless state or enduring repressive attempts to legislate widespread behaviour out of existence.
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