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.  

On job requirements

   Recently I've been on the hunt for a paying job, because even great thinkers have bills to pay. The biggest hurdle I've encountered is that each job, no matter how much it pays, requires at least two to three years experience. That's part of the reason why I'm working so hard on the blog, so that in a couple of years I'll have something to put on my resume.
    The second biggest hurdle is that many of these jobs require a bachelors degree. Mostly they're jobs paying in the sixty to one hundred thousand a year range, but I've seen a few that only pay about forty thousand. I get why they do this, a lot of people think they can write but actually can't, so they need some way of vetting the pool of applicants. I like to think I'm a good writer, but my skills mostly lie in the "give me an example and I can emulate it while giving it my own voice" category (seriously, I built a resume that way). I love to create stuff, but putting it into words that really say what I want to say is tricky.
   I do wish companies wouldn't just use college as a way of vetting applicants. I'm told that people who went to college are more driven than people who didn't go to college, but in practice I find that to be grossly untrue. Most of the people who go to college aren't going to improve themselves, they're going because society expects people to want to study past high school, and if you don't want to than you're punished for it. Conversely, if someone forgoes college, they generally have a plan for what they want to do instead, and the ambition to stick it out.
   There's also nothing stopping a determined person from looking at classes, finding the text books they use, and learning the material by themselves. These days there are tons of resources for every subject out their if your willing to look for it. It's more difficult, but you also learn more because you aren't just a passive student listening to a professor, but an active participant in whatever field you want to research.
   Society puts a lot of importance on education, but very little emphasis on learning. We don't encourage people to do anything that might allow them to figure out what they really want to do, we just push them down the road that will get them the most money, which is often the road that requires expensive education. But going thousands of dollars in debt won't help the vast majority of people on a college campus, because most of what they want to learn doesn't require a professor. They could learn it just as easily from the library, or from free online courses. College is supposed to be a gate, opening to lead you to great opportunities. Instead, it's become a wall, blocking the less fortunate from getting ahead in the world.
    I realize that college is a good way of vetting people applying for a high paying position, and I don't fault the companies who decide this is the best way to get qualified applicants. But there are many better ways of doing this. Maybe for a writing job, you could have them write from a prompt. Maybe a marketing job could have them do a sales presentation. There's not a whole lot you can do if the job is for a lab, I understand that, but I don't think a college degree is really worth it for me at this point.
    College does have it's benefits, but I don't think everyone, or even most people, should be required to go. There are a lot of jobs that won't repay back a student loan or need college level skills that still require a degree, but it doesn't have to be the case. Ultimately, I think we need to have a discussion of if college, community, private, or public, is worth it for all but the most intense of majors, and if it is, how do we make it as accessible to people as possible. We also have to talk about those who can't handle college, like I wasn't able to. Should they be allowed to suffer?

New year, new me (maybe)

   I don't post a lot because I worry about how I'll react if people criticize me. One of the things you hear a lot is people say is that hearing people criticize you is incredibly hard on your ego. I don't know if that holds true for me, since for one thing I avoid any situation in which I might face criticism, and for another I find that my harshest critic is usually myself. But I've been thinking lately that the thing I'd love more than anything in the world is to share, well, myself with the world. Things I don't tell anyone because I'm worried they'll think that I'm crazy, even if I talk to myself all the time without feeling any shame.
   My favorite thing to do in the world is to think. My "real" life is almost non-existent, but my "imaginary" life is grand and full of fun. I don't have a great imagination, but I love imagining things, and I truly don't understand why most people don't. Most of what people call "normal" life mystifies me, but the idea of not spending the majority of your time analyzing or questioning why things are the way they are, or just imagining that your in a fantasy world where all of your problems can be solved with magic, baffles me.
   When I think, I like to create a world where I can be someone important and special. I'd like to think that's what most people want. The world I've created for myself is a place whey I don't have to depend on anyone, and no one is depending on me. It's a world where I can just sit by myself and think about what the "real" world must by like for everyone who chooses to live in it.
    It may seem like a terrible thing, but I don't want to live in the "real" world. I don't blame anyone who wants to live in it, because it really is a beautiful and wonderful place, where even the people who are the most aware of how it works will never have full control. But I can't understand it and I've never felt comfortable when I'm there. One of the things I fully believe is that the world takes all kinds of people. Leaders, followers, people who know everything, people who will never know anything, people who ask all the questions and people who just follow orders. I don't believe in one way of living, or doing things, outside of a few general rules. I don't even like enforcing morals, since there's always a case where enforcing that moral is a terrible idea.
   But regardless of what kind of person you are, you still have to be a kind of person if you wish to exist in another person's world. People can't see another person for who they are, doing that would require they assume their thoughts instead of simply guessing what their general emotions are. For that reason, no matter where you live in, you will be shoved into a mold once you grow old enough to be accepted into general society.
   That's not what I want for myself. It's never what I wanted for myself. I don't want to just be "autistic" or "anxious" or a "nerd". I want to be someone who can be anything, depending on what the situation calls for. I want to be a voice for those who would otherwise not have them. I want to find the others like me that are out there, children raised by mothers who never had a relationship with another person, people from families where everyone has mental health issues, people whose last name may die when they do.
   If I could change the world that the human race has created to be one where anyone can be whoever they want to be, regardless of what they were born as, I would be blessed. In the absence of that, I aim to do more than merely survive. I want to live, and give my decedents enough so that their failures are brought about by their own choices and not the circumstances they were born into. I may not be special, but I at least want to be different.