Customer Reviews

The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System

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This book is so full of information and ideas that it seems almost impossible to do justice to them all. In discussing the parallels between vast and possibly ungovernable world of the internet, and the complexity of idea exchange in the real world, Dr. Vaidhyanathan broadens the discussion of Internet and file sharing policies. While I am personally interested in the future of the music industry, I found the book most compelling as it discusse the theories and rationales behind our systems of governing intellectual property. Dr. Vaidhyanathan's book covers not only the ideologies behind Napster, but also issues of copyright law, public libraries, online political dissent, hackers, the effect of Limp Bizkit in the music industry and more.

Ultimately, Dr. Vaidhyanathan is a humanist, and that propels both the idea behind his book and his accessible, fluent writing style. Instead of offering easy answers to convoluted problems The Anarchist in the Library delves deeper into the social theories that motivate our laws and attempts to govern information exchange--both in the real world and the virtual one. Should we be willing to sacrifice human connection in order to hook up every human to the internet? Do we want a strict copyright law that works as a censoring device? Isn't anarchy in music the norm, rather than a recent technological development?

You will close this book with questions, but that is a good thing. It will encourage you to learn and debate more about a variety of subjects that initially seemed to complicated to consider. This, along with Dr. Vaidhyanathan's first book, Copyrights and Copywrongs, is a must for anyone interested in communication, globilization and Internet studies in the 21st century.

Siva Vaidhyanathan has written another book that (again!) establishes him as one of the sharpest young media thinkers emerging on the cultural scene. An American Studies scholar by training, Vaidhyanathan has an interdiscipliniary background that is everywhere apparent in his approach to complex, sprawling issues such as copyright (as in his excellent first book, Copyrights and Copywrongs) and now in the perplexities of digitality, the subject of his new title, The Anarchist in the Library.

Issues of privacy, intellectual property, creative freedom... this book pokes the major sore spots throbbing underneath our blithely digital epoch, though it does so in unexpected ways.This not the same old "paint by numbers" approach to cultural studies in which a problem is identified, denounced, and remedied (in the abstract) by a few cursory nods toward the self-evident.

Rather, this book takes unexpected turns that never lose the reader's interest or passion. Perhaps this is because Vaidhyanathan is blessed (or cursed by those academics suspicious of such fluency) with an inviting prose style that adds considerable charm to even his most polemical passages---this fluency may be why he is finding such success as a public intellectual, appearing in the pages of Salon, NY Times, etc., as well as on television and the net (he is a well-known blogger at www.sivacracy, one of the few I read outside of Eric Alterman's).

Bottom line: I'm teaching an Honors course on Media Studies next year and I expect to use this book with my students---it seems ideally pitched for both serious students and general readers alike.

In "The Anarchist in the Library", Dr. Vaidhyanathan progressively and analytically demonstrates through historical and contemporary cultural examples how our "information age" is evolving. This is an essential read, because its scope is imperitive to all citizens. It is empowering, because it is thought provocative long after you put it down, and places primacy on you- the individual and your future. Lastly, it is very enjoyable, because the author accomplishes all this with a highly personable prose that somehow manages to incorporate technical facts and daily, highly relevant examples to reinforce his thesis.

Curling up with The Anarchist in the Library was a bit like sitting down with an old friend - literally, since I'll admit to knowing the author as a friend and colleague. So, perhaps I am not the most objective reviewer in this series of remarks, but I find much to admire in Siva Vaidhyanathan's latest work. In fact, Siva Vaidhyanathan has opened my mind to a thread in American culture that I had not given much attention to in my studies - the relevance of anarchy as a system of rapid, unmediated, decentralized form of communication. In my loose lifting from the text, Vaidhyanathan defines anarchy as nonhierarchical, radically democratic, "organization through disorganization." He posits the meaningful history of anarchy - from Diogenes, to the French Revolution, to Emma Goldman, to peer-to-peer networking - against the ongoing corporatization of information in the mass media and government.

The importance Vaidhyanathan places on anarchic communication in contemporary culture casts another perspective onto the current debates on peer-to-peer networks, Internet blogs, the music industry, and American cultural policy. Vaidhyanathan writes, "Digitization and networking make anarchy relevant in ways it has not been before. Global electronic networks make widespread anarchistic activity possible. What used to happen in a neighborhood barbershop or on a park bench now happens across a nation-state or beyond. Rumors can bubble up into action." Vaidhyanathan's desire to illuminate the importance of anarchy as a means of community involvement and springboard for social movements is a powerful and even "radical" idea. And yet, his point is also to reinstate that anarchy is an aspect of daily life - not radical, but a mainstay of human interactions. The challenge is when corporate and legislative restrictions threaten to shut down these lines of communication and stifle dissent.

I was surprised by how moving I found the book to be as a whole. Told in the first person, and with the lucid prose of a former reporter, Anarchist in the Library is ultimately a passionate and insightful book about cultural freedom and censorship.

While many academics do tend to "fog" their arguments I think this book by Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan of New York University is a fresh, provocative, and extremely readable discourse on the nature of freedom and control in a world awash with technology that is often over-hyped and under-analyzed. Prof. Vaidhyanathan is a fresh voice analyzing the extremely important issue of, in his words, the "availability and accessibility of the substance of expression and thus the possibility of public discussion and creativity" (185). As a veteran of the culture wars spawned by punk rock's initial social (and later in a watered-down form) commercial success, I have seen the reliance on empty sloganeering and naive calls for anarchy from punks who couldn't organize taking out the trash if they had all week. Prof. Vaidhyanathan rejects simplistic calls for decentralization and anarchy, and instead provides a rich and nuanced historical context for why we should return to what he calls "Civic Republicanism," a return to the idea of public trust and mutual dependency that many Americans have lost sight of in the rather simplistic way most debates have been framed in the battle over public control of information. One of the virtues of Prof. Vaidhyanathan's book is that he does not provide any easy answer or EFF manifestos, just a reliance on the basic responsibility of human beings to engage in meaningful dialogue about the Faustian bargains involved in new technologies. And in an age that promises unparalleled control and unparalleled, resistance, a call for a meaningful and participatory dialogue is a breath of fresh air.

I had a graduate school professor who used to talk about his fog index.

This professor of Communications Theory believed, as do I, that writers and teachers who understand their material, are capable of expressing themselves in simple, declarative sentences. Those did not understand their material, went his corollary, resorted to compound, complex sentences to mask their lack of understanding. This continuum, he termed "The Fog Index."

Unfortunately for me, this was probably the only lecture by this professor I understood that semester.

In this book Siva Vaidhyanathan posits there are dangers posed by the increasing speed and amount of information available. We resort, he says, to technological fixes to avoid discussions of the often complex and serious issues presented by this explosion.

This conflict manifests itself when someone invents a device, algorithm or law that moves the system of digital information towards freer distribution. The other side responds by pushing the distribution system back into their previous restraints.

The book outlines several examples:

* The battle to control public libraries, which are seen as breeding grounds for terrorism and pornography.
* Attempts to restrict the use and distribution of encryption technology to prevent it from falling into the hands of terrorists and criminals.
* Efforts by governments to regulate personal computers and networks to control illicit flows of material.
* Commercial and governmental efforts to regulate science and mathematics, including the human genome.

Unfortunately for me, and I believe, society, that is about all I understood. Vaidynanathan's arguments get lost in his fogged-in writing style. Hopefully, time will bring clarity to his writing. His message is critical to a society that treasurers its civil liberties.

This is a book is on, the most unexpected subjects: Information anarchy in utopia, Information anarchy in dystopia and Information utopia?

These insights are from an expert who visualizes the effects of hacking, cracking and whacking in the world in general. And how such a scenario creates chaos in libraries. See for instance, computer filters (p. 38), effect of total acces (121-122), and terrorism (118-120, 122).

Contextually, this books sounds as a sequel to the earlier title by the same author, i.e., "Copyrights and Copywrongs." In considering structurally as a sequel, I am not in anyways special. Because, The Chronicle of Higher Education, in 2004, said it precisely in the following article: "In the Copyright Wars, This Scholar Sides With the Anarchists." (see: http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i13/13a02901.htm)

Nevertheless, Anarchist in the Library adds value to the existing literature on safety, security, and emergency preparedness.

Interestingly, The Anarchist in the Library deals with clashes and the limits of freedom in a world that continues to converge - in electronic, media and digital domains.

The Anarchist in the Library is a good reading for policy makers to consider issues in public governance in a situation that is loaded with smart-internet, as well as, friendly-access environment.

If you've been reading Slashdot, EFF's newsletter, or similar news sources, you have already read most of the valuable ideas that are in this book.
If you know very little about the political issues raised by recent changes in technology, the first three quarters of this book might be as good a place as any to introduce yourself to the discussions that have been floating around the net.
The last quarter of the book deals with broader political issues where the author has no more expertise than a typical reporter, and is at least as superficial as what you'd find in a typical newspaper article. For instance, he says "The World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which exercise wide-ranging influence over the lives of billions of people in developing nations, clearly work for the interests of the developed nations." I say that they work for a much narrower set of interests, and are probably somewhat harmful to developed nations as a whole.

This is the best balanced treatment of copyrights and patents I have seen. Unsurprisingly, it is also not very original to people who have been following a lot of the discussion on-line. The author unfortunately brings a frequently annoying (and often stupid, see mention that Jar Jar Binks is "blatantly racist" on page 77 of the paperback for example) academic Leftism to the text. Includes a good treatment of peer to peer file sharing and an excellent discussion of culture as a "living artifact" (NOT the author's term). Also, since it is 4 years old, it misses out on some newer issues that the author would have addressed since they bear directly on his thesis, like the Sony rootkit fiasco a couple of years ago.

This is an excellent read for those seeking an idea of what the battle for the internet may be in the near future - freedom vs controlled. Rumors of governmental and business desires to control the internet are heard more and more. These rumors include a 'fairness' doctrine much like the proposed reintroduction of it for radio and TV.

Anarchy (or freedom) on the internet has created a tool of immense importance to a free society. The desires to control the internet as set forth in this book indicate desires to control the flow of information by certain business and government interests, and thus create another means to control the masses for economic or political exploitation.

The book provides an introductory discussion of what anarchy means and where is it derived.

The book also provides a glimpse of the struggle of certain businesses to control certain uses of the internet for their economic gain by pursuing in some cases those that download music or other copyrighted material. This is a continuation of the author's earlier work.

The book warns a controlled internet may lead to or sustain an increasingly police state type government where the masses are persecuted based on their on-line activity -- much like China is protrayed being in some news reports with help from some of the internet business heavy weights.

Steve Levy's "Crypto" would be an excellent additional reading since it covers the American government's (especially the NSA's input) actions regarding cryptography and the internet during the 1990s.