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

by Siva Vaidhyanathan

Book Overview

From Napster to Total Information Awareness to flash mobs, the debate over information technology in our lives has revolved around a single question: How closely do we want cyberspace to resemble the real world? Siva Vaidhyanathan enters this debate with a seminal insight: While we've been busy debating how to make cyberspace imitate the world, the world has been busy imitating cyberspace. More and more of our social, political, and religious activities...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465089852
• ISBN13: 9780465089857
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.8" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Infostructure in geopardy?

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.

Anarchy for thee, not for me.

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.

EXCELLENT! and very enjoyable....

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.

George's review

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.

Very important and very timely---yet very readable!

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.