By Sheldon Greaves

An interesting item appeared recently that you may have missed while the Dictator-Wannabe-in-Chief was playing despot, torturing children, mocking international law, playing the media like a cheap harmonica, and generally embarrassing the United States in front of the rest of the world. While you weren’t watching, Microsoft pulled the plug on their E-Library, causing all its users’ content–including user notes–to vanish from their devices. Just like that. Gone.

Regular readers of this blog (both of you) already know that I have a thing for libraries and books; the real, dead-tree variety. The kind that you can still read by candlelight when the power goes off. There is nothing “archival” about an electronic archive. “Electronic library” is basically a bad joke.

Down the Memory Hole

Ten years is an eon in internet culture, so perhaps it’s easy to forget that we’ve been here before when, in 2009, Amazon removed all copies of a certain book from its users’ Kindle tablets. The book? George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I swear, I am not making this up. Not only the book, but readers’ notes vanished. A seventeen year-old student who was reading the book for a class and saw his study notes disappear sued Amazon, and won.

At issue, the story goes, was a copyright problem. The copy of Orwell’s classic was uploaded by a third party that did not have the rights to it… blah, blah, blah. Imagine if you purchased the book as a hard copy, and then someone came round to swipe it back?

But let’s get back to Microsoft, who apparently had no reason to nuke its customers’ libraries other than that they weren’t making enough money, or some other banal excuse. What made this technically feasible was DRM (digital rights management) software embedded into the eBooks and devices that allow Microsoft to control every aspect of an eBook, including its existence. It raises the question of whether we actually “own” something digital that we obtain over the Internet. But it also raises some nasty prospects. We’ve already seen how the Trump Administration has removed or rendered inaccessible important data and reports on climate change (which you and I paid for). If Amazon and Microsoft could remove books on legal grounds, how much of a jump is it to doing so on legalistic or ideological grounds? Books–actual physical dead-tree books are more important than ever.

Deleting vs. Altering

Everyone hears about cyber attacks in which data is stolen or destroyed. But another form of attack is altering data and hoping no one notices. There is a part in Orwell’s other classic, Animal Farm in which the sheep, who are only good for chanting, “Four feet good, two feet bad!” are taken away and re-trained to chant, “Four feet good, two feet better!” What if someone created a bot that would seek copies of important literary texts, and subtly alter them? Hard-core literati wouldn’t be fooled, but how many lobbyists to they control? Even if it fooled no one, it would make for one hell of a show of force. Maybe I’m paranoid, but then again, last year I didn’t think we’d be looking at concentration camps along our southern border. Silly me.

Zones of Intelligence

Social critic Morris Berman, who has been tracking the decline of American culture for some time now, once suggested that as the culture became more and more unraveled, particularly as larger corporate and government forces put more and more of our cultural heritage at risk, citizens may want to set up small, ad hoc pockets of learning. Quietly establish tiny treasuries that could conserve, protect, and pass on things that we are in danger of losing and forgetting. He called this “the monastic option”, creating semi-obscure “zones of intelligence.” I don’t think we’re there, yet, but sometimes it looks like we’re getting close.

Keep your books. Hold them close. Curate them. Share them. Talk about them with your friends. Set up Little Free Libraries. Join your local Friends of the Library, if your town has one. Support learning activities anywhere you can; your local library, coffee shop, church, or other civic organization. Start a salon, and get people handling, reading, and talking about books. Real books. The kind you can’t get rid of without a f*cking bonfire.

I’ll be revisiting this topic again soon. Stay tuned.