David's World

January 23, 2005

Information Age Anarchism: Hacking the Real World.

I finished reading The Anarchist in the Library by Siva Vaidhyanathan the other day.

The book is about this new inter-connected society, struggling between freedom and control in its cultural and informational exchange. It's subtitle: "How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System".

"Information age" was a term coined quite a while ago, but Vaidhyanathan finally put the term into a political perspective for me. Files flow freely in peer-to-peer systems now, content has become hard to control. Movies are downloaded in foreign countries before their official, local premiere. When the music industry missed the MP3 revolution, music-lovers found their ways to copy and trade songs for free. Look at what's happened recently: If soldiers beat up civilians, photos will make their way around the 'net in no time.

Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian at NYU, avoids the quick answers. He doesn't give in to utopian dreams of a file-sharing anarchy: Information needs to be paid for, because somebody needs to produce it. But evenly clearly, Vaidhyanathan wonders whether information should be controlled centrally by multi-national companies.

The friction between exerting control over knowledge and other goods and successful cultural exchange of these is what characterizes the beginning of the information age. But haven't we seen that friction before? "The Anarchist in the Library" points to the globalization process that has been taking place over decades. Countries enter free-trade agreements, which regulate subsidies to establish a liberal world economy. At the same time these agreements fixate the current state of affairs, excluding new players in the game, whose second-world industries can't have the subsidies that the 1st world ones have enjoyed. World-wide copyright and patent enforcement legislation is striving to do the same now for the entertainment industry, thereby protecting established structures. Neither anti-globalization anarchists nor liberal writers have drawn this picture so convincingly as this book does.

Recommended reading for information society citizens.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library, Basic Books, 2004.

Thanks for the great review! I really appreciate you taking the time to take my book seriously. It's the best reward.

Stay in touch.

Siva