A long quote and some bullshit from me

Libraries are under incredible pressure to conform to the pay-per-view model. Increasingly, academic journals are coming to libraries in electronic form rather than on paper. So imagine this: An electronic journal is streamed into a library. A library never has it on its shelf, never owns a paper copy, can’t archive it for posterity. Its patrons can access the material and maybe print it, maybe not. But if the subscription runs out, if the library loses funding and has to cancel the subscription, or if the company itself goes out of business, all the information is gone. The library has no trace of what it bought: no record, no archive. It’s lost entirely. This is not a good model for a library. It defeats the fundamental purpose of a library. You might as well be sitting at a computer terminal in a copy shop.

[…]

The emerging information pay-per-view regime could signal the death of the liberal Enlightenment project and thus the public library itself. Thinkers as politically diverse as Theodore Adorno, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Dinesh D’Souza, and Neil Postman have predicted the death of the Enlightenment, blaming a variety of causes, including the Enlightenment’s internal contradictions, the empty cleverness of postmodernism, and the social tremors caused by ethnic politics. The real culprit, however, is the steady commercialization of the cultural and communicative process.

There is a real value in a public library and its metaphorical counterpart, the information commons. Though not quantifiable, it is discernible and essential. Public libraries are functional expressions of Enlightenment principles. We are about to let commercial interests shut them down (this will be news to most people but not to librarians). The public library is where the public domain lives, the place where we gain access to the information commons. As our rights of fair use, first sale, and use of works in the public domain disappear, so do the raw materials of our culture and democracy. Most importantly, the public library is where those without money, power, access, university affiliation, or advanced degrees can get information for free. Thus trends toward a pay-per-view delivery system threaten both the public library and Enlightenment ideals. They signal the dawn of the age of proprietary information.

An open global information ecosystem is essential to a dynamic culture and the spread of stable democracy. Our information environment is under attack on technological, legal, and commercial fronts. Information, far from being a scarce resource, is more abundant than ever. For centuries, our species suffered because of maldistribution of information, not necessarily an overall shortage of a deficient quality of information. Facing an apparent oversupply of information, we attempt to employ technological tools to correct the maldistribution of information.

(The Anarchist in the Library, Siva Vaidhyanathan, 121, 124)

For me, that was the high point of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s fine short book on the freedom of information and the clash of oligarchy and anarchy in the realm of technology. Because he’s painting with such broad strokes in that passage, Vaidhyanathan, I think, just misses making a precise argument that he approaches throughout the book. By limiting the freedom of information (one example given is Justice Department injunctions from publishing the winning code from an Adobe-sponsored contest to hack their Ebook format) we are stifling the education of everyone, including (for the sake of my argument) the future generation of military and government intelligence. By blocking the lines of code that break the Ebook software, you are putting our future intelligence one step further from breaking a theoretical enemy code.