Digital Biblioclasm & The Information Apartheid

There is currently an epoch defining struggle over who controls the future of information, Garry Glass discusses its contours and the implications for the prospects of the “civilisation”. Also at the bottom of this page are details of excellent sources for downloading quality pirated reading material.

Since the origins of recorded history humans have elaborated a kind of archival soul. Vast repositories of paper are marked by inks that have inscribed our experience. This record is the foundation upon which the concept of progress is built. This literature is housed in libraries, often with ornate architectures of cut stone and neoclassical motifs that are quintessentially evocative of the progress myth of civilisation.

The Alexandria library was the archetype of these centres of learning. It is reputed to have housed the most comprehensive collection in all antiquity for 600 years before its loss to accidental fire, neglect and finally conquest.   It will never be known what riches were lost at the annexation of Alexandria but they were deemed by the invaders as either heretical or at the very best superfluous to the teachings of the Koran.

The destruction of literature is considered by many an act of a barbarism. Biblioclasm, like iconoclasm, is a symbolic and material attack on a culture.  The photographs of the Third Reich’s book piers are etched into the subconscious of post-war psyche and remain a testament to what was almost lost altogether. When the works of an epoch perish it as though there is a resetting of history.

 

 

It might be asked should “we burn every copy of Mein Kampf?”  This author suggests not because it is in the interests of an intellectually liberated civilisation to preserve the artefacts of obsolescence of ideology in perpetuity.

Literature has many times sought to grapple with the end of literature itself, for examplebiblioclasm is the central theme of Fahrenheit 451.  In this near future sci-fi classic novel by Ray Bradbury, teams of book burners work to eradicate the past.

The survival of ideas is imperative for any epoch, none more so than our own precarious times.  Ultimately what is important is what fragments remain to be passed on.

The fragility of parchment to the rigours of flame or rot reveals the fallibility of the idea of unhindered progress.  Vellum scrolls can last 5,000 years at best yet time will inevitably lead to the eventual annihilation of this accumulated heritage.

Data will soon be stored indefinitely at the atomic level in crystalline structures suggesting we may finally have the technology for a more permanent archival legacy.  We have the ability to store information effectively indefinitely or to erase it entirely from existence in an instant.  What stays and what goes is of political and historical concern.

Gutenberg’s mechanical movable type printer was a technical innovation that would come to underpin successive waves of intellectual revolution in Europe since the 15th century.  The ability to reproduce information at increasingly minimal cost is considered by many as the very dawn of modernity.

With digital technology the cost of copying and distributing information is effectively zero.  Far from being the realisation of Gutenberg’s legacy, Ebooks and much scholarly work are enclosed by Digital Rights Management.  Publishers are now insisting it is not how much it costs to materialise a book rather the value of the “intellectual property” itself which is important.  The consequence is that centuries since the print revolution, books are still too expensive for most people to afford.

 

We have the means of sharing all of humanity’s most important works of literature, philosophy and science with everyone on earth.  This knowledge would be of far greater strategic value if it were utilised by humanity rather than for it to rot on shelves or on a database where access is prohibitively expensive.

Surely everyone should get access to know how to fix things.  That way we would be a lot less manipulable and less useful as consumers and slaves.  Intellectual and material progress is being hindered by privatisation and enclosure.  “Hacking” and “Piracy” are criminalised as though certain dances of electrons in transistors can alone constitute a violence to someone’s claims of property.

Preventing access to humanity’s collective archive and removal of literature from it is now a matter of politics and not of technical means.  The paywalls of cyberspace effectively represent a digital biblioclasm.  If one cannot afford to read a book or are unable to find it, the meaning contained within disintegrates like ash.  If at best only the privileged can access it because of DRM this may be thought of as part of a wider strategy of informational segregation or apartheid.  In other words the proliferation of ideas is to be managed in the interests of the ruling class, specifically the white global elite.

The internet was originally conceived as an information sharing platform so that global challenges could be more efficiently solved.  However far from liberating humanity it looks like the internet has become a sophisticated means of surveillance and social control.  We have a most powerful platform upon which to build a different kind of world and yet the dreams of its inception have given way to a new kind of barbarism.

 

 

We are in the midst of the greatest explosion of information in history and yet a lot of it is junk.  Misinformation is considered an X-factor in the world Economic Forums’ global risk analysis. Where access to quality information is inhibited we are more manipulable.  We watch news from around the world in real time and yet our attention is quickly diverted.  A population of information addicts are subject to a perpetual destabilisation of perception by armies of digital propagandists.

Misinformation is another weapon in the arsenal of the oligarchs alongside DRMs and mainstream news propaganda. The Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) is a unit of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) dedicated to internet misinformation. They “destroy, deny, degrade and disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.  The first casualty of war is Truth.

Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles and Activist Ghettos

A lot of online activism, whilst effective in many ways is also preaching to their ghetto.  It’s as though our antagonistic politics becomes reduced to the imperatives of effective user generated content.

A “movement” unable to conceive of itself inside the filter bubble that largely only returns content to those initiated in the milieu exacerbates political ghettoisation.  This proclivity is conveniently built into the global information infrastructure we rely upon.

Certain radical literatures are superfluous to the ideological underpinnings of corporate fascism, the rationale for the eventual eradication of such thought is clear.  Catalogue searches in libraries also have a bias against returning search results for left-wing material.  Borrower history information is not secure despite this being a core principle of librarianship.  Library funding cuts reduce procurement of new books. and the more “esoteric”, “radical” or “critical” material is naturally the first to suffer from this triage in the interests of social engineering.

Thousands of libraries are being closed down and sold off to real estate developers because of cuts to local funding from central government.  Central Libraries have been amalgamated with council public offices and children’s daycare.  Local libraries are increasingly kept open by skeleton staff and volunteers.

There is a dumbing down of literature, this is evident in the mundane titles seen nowadays in most high street bookshops, which is part of a wider policy which seeks to stifle intellectual debate.  University graduates are to subject to massive debt burdens, this is an effective attack on the emergence of radical tendencies on campus.  Despite causing some of the greatest unrest in years students had to return to study for exams in order to get that job to service that debt.

These policies are consistent with the aims of social engineers to create a more pliable, less critical population.  Creating the illusion of debate is essential to this soft power yet taboos abound in contemporary discourse.

Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984 was employed to rewrite the politically inappropriate past. Newspeak was a terrifying insight into the internalisation of a self limiting vocabulary in a dystopia that was uncomfortably prophetic.

It was observed by Foucault that history was usually interpreted in service to the present, he believed that we should examine the origins of ideas and take the best from all of history and use them to make a better world.

The Academy – The Original Old Boys Club

Far from being some benevolent remnant from the enlightenment, the university system remains tied to the maintenance of state and capital.  They may be credited with the production of a great deal of knowledge, but how much knowledge has been silenced or forgotten because of this system.  How many people work in jobs that are less than benevolent using their uni education.  Universities do offer the opportunity for a certain amount of social mobility but also reinforce the class system, the advantages one gains are offset by the huge debt burden.

Academic publishers such as Elsevier, JSTOR, Sciencedirect and Taylor Francis are extremely profitable with revenues in the billions and profit margins of around 30%.  These obscene profits come at the expense of the betterment of our world. Publishers are central to maintaining the institutions of the establishment by promoting the dominant discourses and the power of expert knowledge.  What universities will claim is the unbridled search for understanding is something more like a process to mobilise the power of that knowledge and to sanction and legitimise certain knowledges over others.

The academic publishing system defends intellectual property rights vigorously.  This is inherently political because it affects both the diminished proliferation of knowledge and more fundamentally the imperatives that guide research and in turn the direction of “civilisation” itself.

Academics must sign legal waivers to ensure that any new knowledge strictly belongs to the university and its corporate allies, that it remains in the house in order for those institutions to maintain a monopoly on the power it offers.

      Specialisation is a euphemism for the a privatisation of knowledge under the division of labour.  Our fragmented sciences are the function not simply of a reductionist method but of a system that encourages collaboration only on its own terms.  It is designed to keep knowledge for a certain class of people. The clue is in the blatantly elitist concept of “access privileges”.

The open access movement has emerged as an antidote to restricted content, challenging the monopoly of the established journals.  Authors who publish open access make their work freely available on the internet for users to read, download, copy, distribute etc.  Similarly The Creative Commons (CC) license seeks to empower authors to determine how their work is distributed and protects users from the risks of copyright infringement.

Whilst the open access movement and creative commons has gathered pace in the past decade there remains a great deal of important literature which remains behind paywalls unless one resorts to piracy.

The argument that piracy harms output by denying a funding stream to authors neglects the fact that they are often paid very little for their work and most of the money goes to the publishers.  The incentive structure for writers of quality content usually centres around the desire for impact rather than financial gain.  Big publishers offer exposure and a sense of the legitimacy of the work at the cost of fair compensation for its author.  Whilst the livelihoods issue is pertinent and some kind of direct compensation system could work there are certainly many authors who will criticise the publishers before any mention of the pirates in terms of harm to the dissemination of their work.

Whilst the concerns of academics are useful in the intellectual advancement of this “civilisation” it can be argued quite cynically that academics are institutionally beholden to the imperatives of publishing league tables.  This often leads to a gimmicky trivialisation of research as form exceeds content.

Scientific community and privatisation

Science is the shared understanding of a community with a common vocabulary.  Standing on the shoulders of giants is possible by virtue of the open sharing of ideas, methods and empirical data although this happens through the restriction institutional “access federations”.

The disparity of access to scientific literature in the global south is nothing less than an instrument of neocolonialism that may be thought of as an information apartheid.Further the chauvinism of western knowledge production under the rubric of an enlightened universal humanism is an inherently racist paradigm.

Remembering Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was charged with data theft for systematically downloading JSTOR articles from MIT computers to make them freely available online.  The pressure of the prosecution led this visionary web developer and freedom of information activist to hang himself in January 2013. Aarons inspiring life and work and its tragic end made many people realise the importance of the struggle for information freedom and the severe repression of those who resist.

 

Carrying on Swartz’s legacy the creator of Sci-hub Alexandra Elbakyan used the real login credentials from universities to access journals and has been able to download 48,000,000 papers en mass.  The work of Sci-hub has radically undermined the monopoly of established publishers and journals who had already been under pressure from academics in the open access movement.  Some claim it represents a threat to science itself, to others this is a breakthrough for the global scientific community.  Now anyone can access, not simply the privileged of the global north. Needless to say these and other initiatives are under attack from the big publishers.

Information is survival

We are deceived by a past that never actually existed and a future of promises to be broken, only a generalised movement for critical thought can smash this descent into barbarism.

Ecological collapse is arguably humanity’s greatest concern.  Whilst there is a burgeoning market in mundane green literature, the more rigorous material is much harder to come by.  Even the libraries of top universities complain that they cannot afford to maintain up to date material.

We have a situation where students of environmental science and politics are stuck reading books so old they still have date stamps on inside covers despite this being a relic of 20th century librarianship.  The global problems we face are escalating at a rate far faster than our society can deal with because its latest research is not readily available.

It could be way past the beginning for the end before we even have knowledge of it. Not because the knowledge doesn’t exist, but because it was not effectively distributed.  Crucially all the progress we have made across the multitude of human concerns is nothing if we don’t have an ecosystem we can inhabit.

In Mary Shelley’s classic “The Last Man” a plague slowly wipes out our species, while the dwindling survivors must look on and question the value of humanities intellectual accomplishments in the absence of any future humans.

Civilisation is as a veritable junk yard of ideas many of which we may happily discard.  The ideas which survive the impending economic/ecological collapse will go to inform the world that will come.  Theory is compelled to grapple with the possibility of its own demise. Just as we live in a world we know is untenable we are nonetheless able to bare witness to its transformation.  The enclosure of information is a serious indictment of the whole system of knowledge production and resistance to this is now essential to the future of life on this planet.

 

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How to Use Sci-hub

Use google scholar to find the academic articles you wish to read. Edit the URL for the paywall page of the article by adding “sci-hub.io” between the end of “.com” and “/”.  Put this new URL into a proxy browser like Proxysite.com and type in the security word that appears. You now have access to effectively all scientific papers in publication.
 

 

 

Piratebay

You can find a proxy site for The Pirate Bay athttps://proxybay.la/ and download torrents using a client such as bittorrent. This is a great source for ebooks with titles you might expect to find in most bookshops.

 

 

 

 

 

Aaaaarg.fail

Aaaaarg is an online pirate library of literature from the radical and critical milieu. The creators describe it as a scaffold architecture that extends outside of traditional academic institutions.  By uploading material onto this site one contributes to a community which is a veritable intellectual treasure trove. The creators are currently being sued for copyright violation.  Check out their facebook for up to date posts on the information battle https://www.facebook.com/aaaarg.org

Library Genesis

Based in Russia, this is the largest and longest running openly available collection of fiction and non-fiction material. Library Genesis is the Library of Congress of the digital world.  Proxies can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/themetalibrary/library-genesis