In 1970, Abbie Hoffman created a great disturbance in the force when he published his revolutionary manual, Steal This Book!
Yesterday, Kevin Kelly may have created a 21st century version with his NY Times Magazine cover article, Scan This Book! (sub. req'd).
In the article, the always thought provoking Kelly describes the coming day when all knowledge will be digitized, linked and universally accessible. Not since the great library at Alexandria, Kelly says, has the dream of "housing" all human knowledge in one place been possible.
The threat to this vision, of course, is the expansion of copyright protection. Better minds than mine have addressed this issue, and Kelly's certainly falls in that category. I particularly like the description of the pragmatic forces at work in this space that closes the piece:
The reign of the copy is no match for the bias of technology. All new works will be born digital, and they will flow into the universal library as you might add more words to a long story. The great continent of orphan works, the 25 million older books born analog and caught between the law and users, will be scanned. Whether this vast mountain of dark books is scanned by Google, the Library of Congress, the Chinese or by readers themselves, it will be scanned well before its legal status is resolved simply because technology makes it so easy to do and so valuable when done. In the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen will prevail. On this screen, now visible to one billion people on earth, the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge.
Those inexorable forces, anchored by the overwhelming utility of digitized, linked, accessible information, are at the core of the Syndicate Conference that I'll be attending starting tomorrow. So, read the Kelly piece and check back here over the next few days as I try to capture the excitement of creative energy on the edge of the latest revolution in human knowledge.
As Abbie would have said, "Power To The People!"
Tags: Kevin Kelly
Comments