The Fall of the Internet Archive

       There’s a war going on that nobody can see, a war between the people who make money and the people who spread knowledge of what is, was and will be. One front of this war is between the Internet Archives and Americas four largest publishers. I suspect you’ve read something about it, and if you do than you know that our world has decided, categorically, that knowledge is a thing only the privileged are allowed access to. The people who run the Archive are fighting, but with everything else going wrong, nobody thinks that a library is worth saving. There is not much chance of survival. To be clear, I want it to survive. As a Dreamer, I want a world where anyone’s voice can be heard, and that isn’t the world the publishers live in. They live in a world where you charge a penny for every word someone else speaks to you, where those who made it to the top hold sway and those who have yet to make it are cast out. Small authors, unpopular ideas, things that could influence someone in a major way, these things have no place in the world the publishers want for us. All they want is a world where we give them everything, including our souls, so that they can rule over us for eternity. 

      I don’t want the Archive to just be a lending platform, I want it to be a conservation platform where you can find records of every edition of every book. I think the Archive’s role in our future is the preservation of history so we know what happened. A good example of this is the recent Roald Dahl controversy. The one where publishers decided to try and censor his work to make it more palatable to a world that has largely rejected his ideas. I don’t agree with their decisions, but since I think that our world is forgetting about him anyway I find it hard to care. What I find heinous is that they decided to retroactively doctor up any e-books they’d already sold to people without their consent, effectively erasing any record of the change. I don’t care if you think a change is justified or not, it shouldn’t be forced on your consumer base especially when a lot of them were rightly skeptical of the idea of censorship in the first place. There was no reason for them to do this. I know for a fact that most people wouldn’t have minded buying the books with changes, especially if it let them continue reading the books of their childhood without feeling guilty. Humans aren’t sinless, and most of us don’t want to put in the effort it takes to be good people. But the companies wanted to erase all trace of the censorship. I can only assume that on some level they feel guilty about playing dictator. The Archive, had it existed, would have functioned as a place of record keeping, a reminder of the kind of world Roald Dahl lived in and a place where Dreamers and Non-Dreamers alike could go and read the original texts and make up their minds about which were better. 

      Our world needs the Archive, but it also needs to be a place where anyone can access any media whenever they want to. Our world needs to be a world that we, the people, make real. Until now the job of reality maintenance laid in the hands of the wealthy, they were the ones who had access to the records that made our world last longer than a mere instance. Innovation after innovation has made it possible for us, the common people, to tell our own stories and write our own history, for good and for evil. But the publishers, indeed our leaders in general, don’t want us to write our own history because our history usually paints them in a bad light. They’re not good at their jobs and no one knows that better than them. Worse than them, though, are those who know the importance of reality but refuse to do the work needed to keep it alive. I’m told there are more authors rooting for the Archive’s downfall than are fighting to keep it up. They don’t see themselves as mere Dreamers, but as Creators, people engineering new places for people to go. They don’t see the publishers clearly spelling their doom. We don’t need a world where books can be lent out, but we do need a world where books are protected from those who wish to do them harm. Including, it seems, most of the people who write them.