My latest Guardian column, “Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good” asks that we collectively kill the expression “Information wants to be free,” in favor of better, more comprehensive slogans such as “People want to be free.”
It’s time for IWTBF to die because it’s become the easiest, laziest straw man for Hollywood’s authoritarian bullies to throw up as a justification for the monotonic increase of surveillance, control, and censorship in our networks and tools. I can imagine them saying: “These people only want network freedom because they believe that ‘information wants to be free’. They pretend to be concerned about freedom, but the only ‘free’ they care about is ‘free of charge.'”
But this is just wrong. “Information wants to be free” has the same relationship to the digital rights movement that “kill whitey” has to the racial equality movement: a thoughtless caricature that replaces a nuanced, principled stand with a cartoon character. Calling IWTBF the ideological basis of the movement is like characterising bra burning as the primary preoccupation of feminists (in reality, the number of bras burned by feminists in the history of the struggle for gender equality appears to be zero, or as close to it as makes no difference).
So what do digital rights activists want, if not “free information?”
Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good
Vancouver’s Sophia books got a special thank you in FOR THE WIN. Today, Sophia’s Chris Eng wrote:
Hey Cory,
As a fan of your work, I was excited (okay, really excited) when I saw that For the Win had gone live on your website last week. I will definitely buy a hard copy, but since I was between paycheques (and because I’ve discovered I genuinely enjoy reading books on my phone) I was thrilled to be able to start reading it immediately.
I’ve been reading it when I can over the last several days and just now–midnight, Pacific time–got to the point where you thanked Sophia Books. As a staff member, I can’t thank you enough for the acknowledgement. The personalized scene dedications to all the various bookstores in the ebook version is a fantastic touch which I enjoy immensely anyway, but to have our store singled out is a thrill and an honour that I know will resonate in all the staff.
So, it’s with a heavy heart that I have to break some bad news to you–Sophia Books will be closing its doors at the end of the month. We’ve done our best and done what we could, but in the end it wasn’t flagging book sales or changing mediums or any of the other problems that people cite when they talk about the ailing book industry that brought us down: our building got sold, our lease came up for renewal and we got slapped with an increase that no one could afford. We looked into moving, but it just wasn’t feasible–rents have spiked across the board. And the worst part is that this is becoming endemic. Since January, the city has lost Duthie’s, one of the longest running independent bookstores (and once a thriving chain), Once Upon a Huckleberry Bush (a children’s bookstore) and Elfsar (a well-respected and loved comic shop), all, so far as I have been led to believe, for more or less the same reason. This is the new face of Vancouver–an artistic and literary city that no longer has any independent booksellers (of new books) in its core. A metropolis where you have to go far out of your way to be able to browse through new releases. By way of example, White Dwarf, a science-fiction and fantasy bookstore, is the better part of an hour out of downtown. I don’t think they’re doing that well either, though their location and relative real estate rates might be a saving grace at this point.
I’m not sure what the future holds for Vancouver. I have a great love of ebooks as well as dead tree media (I am a bookseller, after all), and I’m sure there’s room for both of them to coexist in the years to come, but Vancouver as a city (with grossly disproportionate commercial rents) seems to have consciously or unconsciously made up its mind about the role of booksellers in its boundaries. And it’s a decision that rather depresses me. Sophia Books will continue its role as a wholesaler to schools and libraries, but from an office space, and there will no longer be a storefront where someone can browse through and randomly find a book of Pablo Neruda’s poetry with English and Spanish on facing pages, no longer discover vocabulary books of Nepali or Inuktitut. Yes, there are still several used bookstores and a few resilient sellers of new books in the Metro Vancouver area, but their presence isn’t something we can take for granted anymore. And even if it wasn’t horribly bad sales that did the latest raft of bookstores in, maybe that’s the lesson that can be taken away from all this: that bookstores are a privilege, not a right, and we should treasure what we have while we have it, because things can be snatched away so very, very quickly.
Yours Sincerely,
Chris Eng
P.S. Please feel free to reprint some or all of this if you think it’s relevant. P.P.S. ‘For the Win’ is great. I don’t want to get fanboyish at the end of what’s turned into quite a downbeat missive, but I will say that it’s entertaining, educational and extremely important and I’ll attempt to force a copy of it into the hands of anyone I know in their teens and several I can think of who aren’t. Thank you for writing it.
Josh Bancroft recorded my Q&A and reading at the Powell’s Books in Beaverton, Oregon and put up a podcast. Thanks, Josh!
The Dunesteef podcast has completed its two part full-cast audio adaptation of my story A Place So Foreign. They did a stupendous job (again). Honestly, this is one of the best audio adaptations I’ve heard of my work. Here’s part one.
I’ve just hit San Francisco on my book tour for For the Win, and I’m doing three stops in the Bay Area:
Tonight (Monday), I’m at Borderlands Books in the Mission, reading and taking questions at 7PM
Tuesday, I’m at Books Inc in Palo Alto, as part of the Not Your Mother’s BookClub event, starting at 7PM.
Wednesday, I wrap up with a fantastic EFF benefit at the 111 Minna Gallery at 730PM.
After this, I head on Austin, where the EFF-Austin folks are planning an event in conjunction with BookPeople on Thursday, then I’m in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, then New York and Brooklyn, and finally finishing in my home town, Toronto, on June 4.
I’ve just hit San Francisco on my book tour for For the Win, and I’m doing three stops in the Bay Area:
Tonight (Monday), I’m at Borderlands Books in the Mission, reading and taking questions at 7PM
Tuesday, I’m at Books Inc in Palo Alto, as part of the Not Your Mother’s BookClub event, starting at 7PM.
Wednesday, I wrap up with a fantastic EFF benefit at the 111 Minna Gallery at 730PM.
After this, I head on Austin, where the EFF-Austin folks are planning an event in conjunction with BookPeople on Thursday, then I’m in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, then New York and Brooklyn, and finally finishing in my home town, Toronto, on June 4.
Jeff Clark sez, “I’ve created a graphic from the text of ‘Makers’ that shows the distribution of the various proper nouns in your work. It seems to do a pretty good job of communicating the ebb and flow of the various characters throughout the book.”
This works amazingly well — I’ve never seen an automated text analysis that was so revealing of the emotional and plot elements of a book!
Hey, Portlanders! I’m on my way today to the Powell’s location in Beaverton at 2PM for the latest stop in my For the Win tour.
After that, I’m off to the Bay Area, where I’ll kick off with a signing at Borderlands Books in the Mission on Monday at 7PM. Then it’s a stop in Palo Alto at Books Inc for the Not Your Mother’s Book Club event on Tuesday at 7PM.
It culminates with a kick-ass EFF fundraiser at the 111 Minna Gallery on Wednesday at 7:30PM.
After that, the tour goes on, with stops in Austin on May 20, Raleigh on the 22nd, Chapel Hill on the 23d, New York on the 26th, Brooklyn on the 27th, New York again on the 28th, and Toronto on June 4. Hope to see you!
