Who gets to control information, technology and culture in the digital age? That, in a phrase, is the simple and profound question raised in Siva Vaidhyanathan’s impressive new book, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is hacking the Real World and Crashing the System.
The Anarchist in the Library follows the author’s 2001 work, Copyrights and Copywrongs, and establishes Vaidhyanathan as a leading voice in the increasingly tumultuous intellectual property wars alongside Lawrence Lessig.
Vaidhyanathan’s generally accessible, down-to-earth prose distills for readers the somewhat arcane topics of globalization, digitalization, and “information anarchy,” showing how current trends threaten “the widely accepted freedoms to browse, use, reuse, alter, play with, distribute, share, and discuss information.” Creativity, he says, depends upon some degree of anarchy or lack of control. Rather than attack the subject through the familiar lens of constitutional law, he takes the reader on a wide-ranging ride through the world of political theory.
Vaidhyanathan helps expand the debate from the narrow range of discourse in the establishment media — about piracy and copyright holders’ property rights — and moves the conversation into interesting new directions. Can peer-to-peer technologies replace the recording industry as a marketplace solution for discovering and distributing new musical talent? If P2P is so bad for business, why are downloaders the music industry’s best customers?
The author raises significant points about the diminution of the public’s fair use rights in the digital age. For instance the autonomy that comes with VHS tapes is replaced by the militarized locks of the DVD. Digital television’s broadcast flag, adopted by the FCC last fall, will make it much more difficult for users to “take bits and pieces of shows and films and splice them into parodies, pastiches or completely new creations,” but it will do nothing to thwart tech-savvy pirates. And he points out that the creation of derivative novels, songs, movies, and plays that borrow characters and themes from earlier cultural works is strictly limited to narrow exceptions under copyright law, such as parody and scholarly use.
In a chapter titled, “The Peer-to-Peer Revolution and the Future of Music,” he writes forthrightly: “I personally spend hundreds of dollars per year on compact discs and legitimate, commercial digital downloads. I should be the record industry’s dream customer. Instead I’m a thief: I download thousands of songs per year from Gnutella, a noncommercial peer-to-peer file-sharing system built by volunteers who love music as much as I do.”
He aptly points to ancient habits that predate the rise of the commercial music industry. “We share music in a circle. Music doesn’t work the same way for us if it’s piped to us, processed for us, and stored at a clean distance. We want to groove it, mess with it, remake it. We want to make it ours and use what flows around us to build new music.”
At times, Vaidhyanathan occasionally veers into thematic tangents, such as the assassination of President William McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, the 1994-95 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, the rise of the Falun Gong in China, and the cynicism embodied in the teachings of Diogenes of Sinope. But this sweeping scope and global reach is what distinguishes the author’s work. As he writes in the final chapter:
“This book was supposed to be about entertainment — the battle over control of digital music, text, and video. … But as I researched this new project, the world shifted beneath my feet. Borders melted. Buildings collapsed. Thousands of my neighbors died, crushed by metal and concrete. … My concerns moved to the regulation and control of all sorts of information, much of it cultural, much of it political.”
He comes to this sweeping conclusion: “Culture works best when there is minimal authority and guidance. We must declare a desire for global cultural democracy.” It is a call that’s much needed and well articulated.
Review by JD Lasica
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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