The Anarchist in the Library
And a few other books
A while back I reviewed Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, a book that powerfully illustrates how property has consistently changed in meaning over time. This week I read
Siva Vaidhyanathan’s 2004 book
The Anarchist In The Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System
Taking on issues that reach from the changes in copyright laws over the years to the patenting of genes, from repressive regime’s attempts to restrict speech to the anarchistic nature of culture, this book covers a lot of ground. Obviously there is the discussion about online file sharing, but that’s only a small section of a much larger argument.
Vaidhyanathan’s assessment of the chilling effects of the USA PATRIOT Act is spot on, as he identifies the attack on libraries as an effort by media and entertainment companies to shift the free lending of materials into a pay-per-view structure:
“Harsh reactions to information anarchy in recent decades include technological access restrictions, electronic surveillance measures, coercive contracts, stiff legal penalties for distributing information without authorization. Strategies of propaganda, confusion, and distraction generate a pervasive chilling effect on the public. These reactions are overkill and reach far beyond the communications networks themselves to corrupt the inner workings of culture, science, education, commercial competition, and even democracy itself. Rather than the perfect library, the information system being imposed resembles a pay-per-view universe in which all terms of use and reuse are dictated by the information provider and licensed by the state…
Libraries are a threat to the content industries and their plans for a pay-per-view delivery system. Libraries are leaks in the information economy. As a state-funded institution that enables efficient distribution of texts and information to people who can’t afford to get it commercially, the library pokes holes in the commercial information system. Because a library can lend a book at no charge, the publisher only makes money once. It can’t charge per reading. The new technocratic information regime aims to correct for that market failure by regulating access.”
There are no easy answers in this book, instead there is a fierce indictment of the philosophy of techno-fundamentalism, which Vaidhyanathan describes as being a “blind faith in technology as a simple solution to complex social and cultural issues.” Unfortunately, this ideology doesn’t seem exactly restricted to either the oligarchs or the anarchists, but is a wide-spread glossing-over by both sides of the very real economic impact that simplistic attitudes towards global concerns have perpetuated. His descriptions of the centers of piracy in under-developed economies shows very clearly the larger issues at play, in particular, his description of the state of affairs in Nigeria:
“…The former British colony has become a leading petroleum exporter; it has also become a node in global smuggling operations. Massive numbers of Nigerians have emigrated to Europe, Asia, and North America. Satellite television and mobile telephones allow Nigerians to stay in contact with their friends and family members in Houston, London, and Los Angeles. Money and cultural products flow throughout these networks.
However, the signal is distorted. The quality of voice and image, music and video, is quite poor. Most videos are copies of copies of copies of copies of poor original versions. Machine breakdown is as important in Nigeria as the introduction of technology itself. Because the Nigerian mediascape constantly needs repair, the hacker, the tinkerer, is increasingly important. Those who repair equipment often master the skills of dubbing, editing, remixing, and distributing video from multiple sources. Everything is distorted. Everything is cheap. Everything is illicit. And everything is either breaking or being fixed. Piracy and hacking are the source of media experiences for much of Nigeria. There is no other distribution infrastructure. A more expensive form of content or mode of dissemination would not succeed in a (sic) environment in which everything breaks down, especially the electricity supply… piracy enables media flows outside the view of the state, which is often hostile to the content or producers. The pirate network is so diffuse and ingrained that there seemingly is no way to stop it…”
Touching on the issues not only of piracy but also the copyrighting of genes and the market pressures of attention, this book provides a touchstone in understanding how we got to where we’re at today. The United States began as a pirate nation.
“During the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, the Founding Fathers pursued a policy of counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring global patents, and stealing intellectual property wholesale. “Law enforcement of the intellectual property laws was a primary engine of the American economic miracle,” writes Doron S. Ben-Atar in Trade Secrets. “The United States employed pirated know-how to industrialize.” Americans were so well known as bootleggers, Europeans began referring to them with the Dutch word “Janke,” then slang for pirate, which is today pronounced “Yankee.”
~ Matt Mason,
The Pirate’s Dilemma, p. 36
But the United States is by no means the only pirate nation out there. Many nations grew out of anarchistic approaches to intellectual property, not to mention actual, high-seas piracy. There’s a really great passage in
Poker Without Cards by Ben Mack that
sums this up nicely:
“HOWARD CAMPBELL: Pirates created countries.
DR. WILLIAM FINK: How do you figure?
HOWARD CAMPBELL: You think Western civilization just sprung up simultaneously along different coasts?
DR. WILLIAM FINK:
People were trading via shipping routes. Businessmen.
HOWARD CAMPBELL:
Pirates. Pirates created foci of power. These powers expanded until they overlapped with other powers. Wars require immense resources. Boundaries emerged as means to focus resources on their ports of trade.
It is now four years since Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book The Anarchist in the Library was published and the political landscape has changed. While here in the United States we’re still embroiled in a two party machine and the
US Pirate Party is just beginning to take shape, in Europe the Pirate Party is already growing in influence.
The relevance of
the Pirate Party is, in essence, because they are revealing a power structure which has remained occulted for so long. Amusingly enough, they are against the entrenched empires
that the
earlier pirates built, if we are to believe Buckminster Fuller by way of Ben Mack. The new pirates use anarchistic principles to re-arrange the world in a democratic way.
And along the way, they’re becoming a new pirate nation, a virtual one.
Suggested Reading:
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Hey, thanks for the nice words!
Siva
Intriguing. I’ve just ordered The Anarchist in the Library based on this recommendation.
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