Review -- The Anarchist in the Library

Anarchy comes from the Greek, anarchos, meaning without headship or ruler. The American Heritage Online Dictionary defines it as

1. Absence of any form of political authority.
2. Political disorder and confusion.
3. Absence of any cohesive principle, such as a common standard or purpose.

In 2004, Siva Vaidhyanathan published his 256 page tome “The Anarchist in the Library: How the clash between freedom and control is hacking the real world and crashing the system.” This blog installment reviews Chapter Eight: The Perfect Library.

According to Vaidhyanathan, societies view libraries as dangerous, because they believe that “openness is a luxury that a secure society can no longer afford.” Therefore, power elites are working actively to destroy libraries as we know them and seeking to re-monopolize information: “…the world is still governed by a cadre of powerful men who monopolize power over and above the naked skeletons of dysfunctional democracy.”

One foreboding omen for Vaidhyanathan is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1988 (DMCA) which he believes was a vain attempt to control creative works such as songs by carefully structuring a global jukebox. As he goes on to explain, “To maintain the market value of information products, elites must find ways to create artificial scarcity and restrict flows of information. But information is also an essential public good.” “Building the global jukebox first required passing the DMCA and then enforcing it vigorously. The oligarchs fear that we may build an open jukebox by ourselves with our own material. Unfortunately for them, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

He chides the Patriot Act as “a blank check to a government institution – the Federal Bureau of Investigation – that is notorious for overstepping its bounds, being ineffective, incompetent, and racist.” In contrast, the library stands as “a temple devoted to the antielitist [sic] notion that knowledge should be cheap if not free…” He then goes on to describe the “perfect library.”

“The perfect library would be funded at first by various government entities, but governments would back away from that role and would not regulate its use in any way.” “…users would supply communally edited analysis that would rate and rank [the information.]” “The doors would be open at all hours, the lights always on.” “There would be no information monopolies.” If this sounds suspiciously like the internet, that is Vaidhyanathan’s point.

But this perfect library is not described merely in glowing terms. There is a dark side: “On the other hand, the perfect library would be a haven for those who wished … to harm other people [,] child pornographers…. [Supporting] industries… might wither or collapse because nobody would want to pay for cultural products or information. …no more Star Wars… no new Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

So which is it? According to Vaidhyanathan, neither. “Both visions of the perfect library – utopian and dystopian – are overstated.” “In 2004 there are more libraries than McDonald’s restaurants in the United States. Many millions are served.” So what is his fear?

His fear is that libraries are morphing into unfamiliar and more sinister creatures. He is worried that information will be traded in “a pay-per-view universe in which all terms of use and reuse are dictated by the information provider and licensed by the state.” “… there would be no difference between your neighborhood library and a Kinko’s or Barnes and Noble Superstore.” Vaidhyanathan claims that “To be democratically, artistically, and scientifically useful, information must be cheap, bountiful, and accessible.” Above all, a library should be a place “where those without money, power, access, university affiliations, or advanced degrees can get information for free.” For Vaidhyanathan, “The real culprit, however, is the steady commercialization of the cultural and communicative process.”

And what is the remedy? Here, Vaidhyanathan ends his chapter by proclaiming “We need a just, reasonable, republican model of information distribution. We should be able to enjoy and exploit the freedom of information anarchy with the ability to discern good from bad, useful from useless information. … we have bickered over the specifics…. We are a long way from [it.] I fear we may be too late.”

I’m not so sure how useful that prescription is, or is meant to be. Perhaps it is just a tease for the next chapter. For certain, the debate protecting intellectual property and public disclosure is a very old one, and as information professionals, I expect we shall become embroiled in it whether we like it or not. And as always, the devil is in the details.

Ultimately, this clash is informed by our worldview. For Vaidhyanathan, the problem is access to information. If society had unfettered access to information all would be well, or at least such would be necessary in the path to making all things well. He writes, “In Genesis, the serpent exploits universal human passions like curiosity and hubris, and consequently Adam and Eve are cast out of blissful ignorance into a world of horrible truths. God protects his information monopoly.”

For others, the problem is education. If only all had unfettered access to education we would transform our planet back into a garden of Eden.

For Theodore Kazinsky, the problem was technology. In what has infamously become known as the Unibomber Manifesto he wrote a surprisingly lucid text decrying technology as the core of inequity and injustice.

For theists like me, le coeur du problème est le problème du coeur (the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart) and le problème du coeur lies uncomfortably beyond our mortal means. I am at a loss to know how to argue convincingly for my own worldview. There is a Bible, there is the testimony of history, and there are the believers who founded hospitals and colleges, worked to fight slavery and poverty, and wrote glorious songs and sermons. What can I add? Maybe a hyperlink to a summary.

I am not completely sure why God left us in charge, but so it is. And all of us are compelled by duty, as human beings created in God's image, to decry oppression in all its quarters. A man should be able to reap the fruit of his labor and make the world a better place; and there lies the rub: balancing them is not always easy, but it is imperative.

Review and Discussion -- Memex at 60: Internet or iPod?

Richard H. Veith's Memex at 60: Internet or iPod? discusses a prescient 1945 article by MIT researcher Vannevar Bush entitled “As We May Think.” Originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, Bush coined the term Memex to describe a mechanized private library. Since Bush’s publication, many of the features of the Memex have now been realized in a technology that indexes a vast interconnection of documents we know today as the internet – but not so fast.

According to Bush, the Memex was a device that could “file items by association and run through trails of associations at the touch of a button.” Is this something different than the internet? Are we engaging in textual eisegesis – importing a 21^st century perspective into a 1940s document? In part, yes, according to Veith. Veith points out that Memex was for personal use and not a way of indexing publicly available documents. It was envisioned to use vacuum tubes and a telephone-exchange model which seems to me to have more in common with the address system used in a database. But Veith says it did not envision a database either, merely a mechanized library to supplement and to extend the user’s own memory.

Eisegesis in Textual Documents

This brings up a more generic problem, and here, I wish to digress to a discussion of eisegesis in general. This is a great problem in the analysis of any ancient text, but as the Veith article shows, even writing removed barely a generation from its readership is prone to this kind of misunderstanding. I shall make my point with two brief examples.

Thomas Will, an early diabetes researcher, noted that the urine of diabetics tastes “wonderfully sweet.” “Yuk!” is no doubt, the reader’s first reaction. But is the text really saying what we think it is saying?

In the 17^th century, when Will made his observation, researchers had a paucity of scientific devices. They were forced to use their five senses. As a matter of historical fact, Will’s observation is very fortunate in the history of diagnosis and treatment of diabetes.“Okay, fine,” the reader may think, “but why does Will describe the flavor as wonderful?” The answer may surprise you. In the 17^th century, “wonderful” was used in a more etymologically correct way, meaning “full of wonder or amazement.” Will is not describing something delicious. He is describing something unexpected, amazing, or baffling. If Will were alive today he would have likely said that the urine of diabetics is “unexpectedly sweet.”

In another example from the not-too-distant past, John Adams, the United States’ second president and a lifelong protestant, says his first Catholic Mass was both “wonderful and awful.” Well, which was it? Actually, as historian David McCullough noted on page 84 of his biography of Adams, the word “awful” meant “‘full of awe,’ or ‘that which strikes with awe, or fills with reverence.’” In other words, the Catholic Mass was amazing and awe-inspiring, to use modern textual equivalents.

History and context are the key tenets of hermeneutics – the science of textual interpretation. Can we really understand ancient works like Homer’s Iliad, the Bible, or Egyptian hieroglyphics? These works have the additional complication that the target and receptor languages are different (e.g., from ancient Greek to modern English). Notwithstanding, the same principles apply. So long as the text is translated with diligent consideration of history and context we shall not go awry.