Siva Vaidhyanathan: The Anarchist in the Library

Book: Siva Vaidhyanathan: The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004, Basic Books). SV teaches in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University, and publishes a blog sivacracy.net. His core interest has to do with how copyright law, which in the U.S. has increasingly favored rights holders, works against the interests of the public, especially by restricting or inhibiting creativity. He understands, for instance, that much of what we think of as new and innovative is really based on prior work, often spun off on unanticipated tangents. The central part of this book (the easiest-to-read part) deals with the music industry: file sharing, Napster, DMCA, pay-for-access schemes, etc. (Not much on creative reuse or appropriation, which is rich subject but involves getting into the music rather than just skimming over the business and politics.)

But along the way toward a fairly benign and balanced account of the music industry wars, SV discovered a more general principle: a global struggle between oligarchy and anarchy. The dreary early part of the book attempts to ideologize and develop a critique of anarchy. (Oligarchy is self-evident; the rich need not explain, even if occasionally they try to rationalize.) The problem here is that the anarchy that SV describes doesn't attempt to instantiate a system of sociocultural organization, unlike, say, the writings of self-avowed anarchists from Kropotkin and Tolstoy to Goodman and Bookchin. Rather, SV's anarchy makes more sense as resistance to oligarchy. Mostly resistance, anyway, notwithstanding the occasional preëmptive strike. The key is that the anarchic movements here are furtive, the scattered work of individuals and subterranean conspiracies, whereas for Bookchin et al. anarchism was a matter of community building, accomplished by a moral reformation.

There are cases of the latter in SV's mix, in fact ones he would recognize: the science commons, open source, the creative commons license. But these are cases where the distinction between anarchy (without control) and chaos (without order) are easy to make. The core concept of at least one major strain of anarchist thought is that relations based on power are inherently damaging, both to those who wield power and to those who are victimized by it. Anarchists divide about what happens next: one approach is to grow a power-free civil society through coöperation and consenses; another is to try to extend individual freedom to the maximum extent possible. In the general sense, both approaches are tools, which like most tools work better for some tasks than for others. SV approaches this territory by introducing two terms -- cultural democracy and civic republicanism -- as a way of establishing a boundary between what he sees as positive anarchy (in culture) and negative anarchy (in civics). To quibble with that would mostly be a matter of quibbling.

While the ideologizing of anarchy isn't very helpful, oligarchy is brute fact and blind ambition. And in a world which prides itself on having one-and-only-one superpower, it's not unreasonable to think of the world in terms of oligarchy and its discontents. If anything, the very notion of superpower is oligarchy's way of celebrating itself. The strongest sections of the book are where SV turns on the empire. Consider this quote:

The Washington consensus was a form of market fundamentalism complicated by bad faith. Although its advocates claimed to champion "free trade" and "open markets," there was nothing free and nothing open about the Washington consensus. It was more Washingtonian than consensual, existing mainly among major institutions in Washington, D.C., and representing the vested interests of developed nations. While intending to empower market forces, it depended on coercion by institutions that resemble superstates with no direct democratic accountability. In practice, powerful multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank determine important policies of many nation-states. Clearly the multilateral institutions that enforced the Washington conesnsus serve the interests of a handful of rich, powerful states in North America and western Europe.

That's as clear a statement as you'll find anywhere, and the latter third of the book is full of such critiques. (Not that I think much of what SV calls "California Ideology" -- a combination of techno-optimism and shady business ethics that conjured up a lot of imaginary wealth in the late '90s, setting the stage for the subsequent orgy of antihype. Sifting through the reality under the bubble will take more work than is done here.) Interesting book. Glanced through his blog and there's a lot of interesting things there (many contributed by someone named Ann Bartow). The name I've avoided above is Siva Vaidhyanathan. Paperback coming out in May. Look for it.

posted 2005-01-25