’CULTURE IS ANARCHISTIC IF IT IS ALIVE AT ALL’
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library (Basic Books, 2004):
"The hacker ethic rests on openness, peer review, individual autonomy, and communal responsibility. Anarchism built the Internet. But the threat of anarchy has launched a decade-long effort to rule it and rein it in. The outcome of this battle is far from clear, but the battle itself has damaged the progressive potential of this powerful communicative network of networks."
"If books became streams of data rather than objects for sale, they could be metered, rendering libraries superfluous or relegating them to vendor status. There would be nothing ’public’ about them. ... A patron would enter a credit card or debit card to access databases of text, music, video, or facts. The computer would charge the card by the minute or the megabyte. ... The emerging pay-per-view regime could signal the death of the liberal Enlightenment project and thus the public library itself."
"Culture is anarchistic if it is alive at all. ... Anarchists believe that culture should flow with minimal impediments. Oligarchs, even if they are politically liberal, favor a top-down approach to culture with massive intervention from powerful institutions such as the state, corporations, universities, or museums. These institutions may be used to construct and preserve free flows of culture and information, but all too often they are harnessed to the oligarchic cause, making winners into bigger winners and thus rigging the cultural market."