Implication behind “Information”
It’s your choice…
Firstly, I give you one example, if you spend your lifetime dealing with a world-unsolved problem and unraveled it. Do you feel like your work should be easily accessed to the public without even making some money? Or, addressing this issue in another way, I give you two options, 1) Provide open access to the public and be an altruistic person? Or 2) sell your achievement to a publication and make some money? Guided by my slightly narrowed world-view, I believe that a large number of people will choose the latter one. We are not judging whether this choice is good or bad right now, but that is just how the world is operating. With that being said, we cannot stop ourselves but creating a system in which a significant chunk of the world’s knowledge are accessible so few. In this system, worldwide scholarly heritage is only obtainable by those people that were either affiliated with an institution, or others that are willing to pay a significant amount of money to get in touch with those locked heredity. After all, do you believe that this should be how the knowledge world operated?
Aaron Swartz…
Certainly, there is one person who opposed such idea, and his name is Aaron Swartz, who is one of the best computer programmers and political organizers, and who deeply believed that the world’s scholarly materials should be publicly accessible. Later in his life, he wrote the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”, which is an article that mainly focus on unlocking the power of information and break the system described in the previous paragraph. Because, As Aaron Swartz wrote in his Manifesto shown in Internet Archive, “information is power, but like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” And Arron believe that limiting such power to certain people is unjust for the world, and it is unjust for the entire human being. However, during his fight with this unjust system, he was gradually reaching his own threshold for pressure and finally committed suicide in January 2013.
I think…
I do not believe that all those things done by Aaron are completely correct. However, I do believe that in the entire human history, there is a thing called “the old world have-not yet dead and the new world hasn’t yet come.” And Aaron is living in the rip of such status in the history, where he dedicated his entire life to the belief of “open access & Public Domain.” In fact, he is just an unsophisticated idealist, an idealist that ignores one simple but important fact, that he is devastating the interests of others. To be more specific, every time he initiated a movement, whatever the consequence is, there are some ten billion businesses being involved. However, he never seems to notice such important fact, which inevitably makes him a supercilious person who is trying to decide the final result in just one single shot. Because Aaron believes that what he is doing is definitely right, and it is what the world is eventually going to be. Hypothetically, if I was the person who can modify the manifesto, I would try my best to keep those businesses away from it. After all, I believe that Aaron’s purpose is to help the world change something that should be changed, not completely overthrowing the whole system and potentially ruined what other people have achieved.
Are we involved?
And yes, we all are getting involved in this system where information is being locked down, a system that our beloved Aaron Swartz, one of the open access movement predecessor, failed to unlock. In my opinion, the implication behind such system is a vicious cycle in which people need money to get access to information, and this information is going to function as a booster for people to make money. In other words, without access to information, you will discover a series of barriers in your endeavor to make money, and without money, you will not have proper access to information.
In conclusion…
As hopeless as it could possibly be, still, optimistically speaking, people are trying to fix this system. Although Aaron Swartz’s age is long gone, behind Aaron there will still be thousands of people who, like Aaron, would fight against the unjust and commit themselves into fixing the world. The existence of such seemingly unjust system also could potentially imply that we are currently living in the middle boundary between the new world and the old world, and finally one day, such vicious cycle will break because this is something that is stopping the entire human species from progressing rapidly, and things like that in the past has been kept in past tense.
