{"id":661,"date":"2004-09-19T11:40:45","date_gmt":"2004-09-19T16:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=661"},"modified":"2004-09-19T11:40:45","modified_gmt":"2004-09-19T16:40:45","slug":"anarchist-in-the-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=661","title":{"rendered":"Anarchist in the Library"},"content":{"rendered":"

I loved Siva Vaidhyanathan’s last book, Copyrights and Copywrongs<\/a>. It’s a superb excellent intellectual and cultural history and critique of copyright policy.
\nHis new book, Anarchist in the Library<\/a> isn’t up to his standards. “Anarchist” tries to draw a connection between the spread of peer to peer file-sharing, peer cultural creation, and political anarchy.
\nThe analogy is thin, though. Anarchism is a deliberate political philosophy that opposes central government. My guess is that most file-sharers aren’t making a political statement, they just want access to music.
\nThe bigger problem with defining file-sharing as anarchy is that it focuses on what’s absent — central control; rather than what is present — strong and shifting networks of cultural influence.
\nAfter a brief historical period dominated by mass media, we’re seeing a revival of folk culture, with new forms of peer cultural sharing and creation — file sharing, blogging, mashups. The trend has been growing since the advent of cheap photocopiers and cheap videocameras, and accelerating with cheap distribution and improved tools for sharing taste and collaborating.
\nThe portrayal of culture as anarchy is a Romantic notion, shaped by the ideal of the artists as lone rebels or dissident cliques. That concept itself is the result of the mass media dominance. Artists see themselves as an embattled minority, then their work gets co-opted into mass media<\/a> (Lennon’s Revolution selling sneakers).
\nWith the rise of mainstream folk culture, though, the interesting structural observation isn’t the lack of central control. It’s the emergence of networks of influence that are shaped by taste, by opinion, by identity, by personal connection, by mentorship.
\nVaidhyanathan laments the lack of community formed around Napster. But that was just immaturity. We’re just inventing tools<\/a> for groupforming around shared preferences and collaborative creation. Flickr has cool tools for building groups around sharing pictures. If Napster was allowed to live, if music-sharing were legal, we’d see faster growth of social software around music.
\n“Anarchist” segues from Napster to chapters showing science and libraries under attack by increasing corporate and political control. I found those chapters more interesting and informative, probably because I knew less about those topics than then internet copyright wars.
\nBut the anarchist argument still wasn’t all that persuasive. There’s a strong case to be made that a balance is shifting toward control. But the converse — that science and libraries are inherently anarchistic — just doesn’t hold up. David Weinberger recently published an interesting piece on cultural bias in the Dewey Decimal system<\/a>. Western science and technology has always had an alliance with military and industrial forces.
\nAlso, the book’s politics contain a bit of kneejerk Chomskyism. Lets get this straight — third world unlicensed DVD factories are good guys, fighting US intellectual property protectionism. Meanwhile, the Brazilian domestic aerospace industry are the good guys when they implement protectionism, fighting US free trade. IP production is bad when the US does it, and good when the 3rd world does it.
\nIn summary, Anarchist in the Library has some interesting ideas and information, but is a disappointing book overall. Beyond this book, Vaidyanathan thinks and writes well about interesting and important topics, and I look forward to reading more good books from him in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I loved Siva Vaidhyanathan’s last book, Copyrights and Copywrongs. It’s a superb excellent intellectual and cultural history and critique of copyright policy. His new book, Anarchist in the Library isn’t up to his standards. “Anarchist” tries to draw a connection between the spread of peer to peer file-sharing, peer cultural creation, and political anarchy. The … Continue reading “Anarchist in the Library”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-aF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}