getting an education on the internet is terrible.
Back in the 2000’s, the internet stood for freedom of movement, speech, information, and access.
Everything could be changed because everything on the internet was available. You wouldn’t have to go to school, or memorize multiplications tables, you would just simply learn things on the internet or go to it for answers.
It’s 2024, so how is the dream of internet intellectual freedom holding up? Uh. Well, about that.
We’re starting with e-books: a lot of libraries have online versions of these available for public use through online library apps, like Libby.
A year or so ago, I downloaded Libby and got to work linking my Oregon, Washington, and California library cards. Then, I learned (like everyone else did during the pandemic) how e-books actually work.
When libraries buy rights to a book, they buy ONE license. A license acts like a physical book: only one person at a time can check it out, and when they are digitally reading it, it is unavailable to everyone else who wants to read it. Libraries usually buy 3–10 copies of books, and then people are given a reading period of about a month to finish it.
It is, exactly, a digital version of a physical library. But, a digital library is accessible to way more people than a physical library.
A small number of people are actually going into a library to check out a book, compared to the overall number of people in a city. But a digital library is available to everyone who has an active library card. That can mean that 10x, or even 30x the amount of people can have access to digital copies of books compared to those who can visit.
That’s the point of a library: information for everyone within the constraints of the medium of which the knowledge is delivered. The constraints placed on libraries should be removed in a digital medium, which should allow it to fulfill its promise even MORE.
The dream of a digital library with unlimited content and access to incredible materials, is melded with the realities of copyright law and antiquated industries.
In larger areas, this means increasing unavailability of content. Tens or hundreds of people are waiting for access to 3 licenses. Everything you want to read is digital, but also not available to you.
The digital library is telling you a digital book will take 6 months to be available to read. But don’t worry, you’re on the hold list.
Libby is an amazing app and it is better than a library with no digital outlet. But, loving something is more reason to critique it.
The whole point of having a digital copy is for the benefits of it being digital, right? It can be shared among more people compared to a physical copy. It’s a medium of knowledge that reaches more people than its physical predecessor ever could.
Yet, we keep it constrained in the rules of a physical medium it does not exist in.
Outside of libraries, education on the internet itself is mostly pay to play. I love Medium, and I write a bunch of articles here. And, I barely ever read anything on the platform because a majority of what’s on my feed is Members Only.
Most content online now is just AI generated. A study recently came out from Amazon that says 57% of content on the internet is now AI generated, even though widespread LLMs have only been available to the public for the past 2–3 years.
All of the articles that are high quality, fact checked, and truly interesting are hidden behind paywalls.
All of the misinformation is free.
The dream of the internet being a place for free and expansive knowledge in pursuit of accessible education is dead. And the Internet Archive lawsuit proves that.
Going back to the digital library concept I mentioned with unlimited access to content: The Internet Archive tried to do that in the pandemic. They realized as we all did, that physical places were inaccessible and online was what we had to hold ourselves over.
They made millions of books available for free, with no holds. They truly built a library for the internet, and they got sued for it almost immediately. They appealed, and the appeal was rejected a couple of days ago.
The reason: copyright law, the fear of piracy, and negative emotions of authors finding their books free on the internet to anyone who wanted them.
I can’t say I don’t understand the arguments of the publishers. But, there’s no research showing that having freely available copies of something makes people buy less of it.
Nevertheless, publishers of content do not want freely distributed information. They want it under their terms and conditions, and those terms and conditions means paying $15 for a digital book, or waiting for a digital library slot (if the book is available to you).
It’s not surprising, but what the lawsuit and the legal precedent it creates shows is something more sinister: the dream that we had of the internet being flush with free, high quality content from vetted sources is dead. Legally speaking.
The Internet Archive is now one example in a long line of a dark history of the internet fighting for open access of educational materials: one shared by Aaron Swartz, Anna’s Archive, and Richard Stallman. A fight for freedom, transparency, knowledge, and liberation from a version of the internet that violates the very construct it’s built on.
Companies build their everything on the backbone of free labor made up of open source software that makes the internet possible. But, there’s no interest in repayment, or adjusting the rules of the world to adhere better to a new, digital paradigm.
The broken carnage of an internet where digital business models are being translated without adjustment from a physical world is everywhere. The entire media industry is crumbling like cards, streaming is incredibly unprofitable and doesn’t create any culturally relevant shows similar to cable, EPIC systems is killing patients with its’ terrible EHR systems, digital libraries act like physical ones, and the most profitable software is the kind that gives you content that you ingest like crack.
I have limited funds, and unlimited access on the internet to all of the ways I could spend it. We are entering into a model of the internet where you have a small amount of money that you’re willing to invest in content — and it usually happens monthly.
Do I want my $25/mo for the internet to go to Medium? HBO Max? Mr. Beat’s Patreon? An Atlantic Subscription? An actual ebook?
As is with unlimited options and limited funds, we’re creating lines and divisions of access to quality education (and content in general) online.
There are so many things that want our money, and everyone prioritizes to themselves what’s worth it. Education is an indirect benefit, and falls often to the wayside in budgeting. It doesn’t provide dopamine, comfort, clothing, or food.
Good education and content makes you upset, has you question yourself, and requires intense focus and attention to detail. Those all are unquantifiable things, and make educational content low on the totem pole of human needs, and therefore, budget line items.
Thus, oftentimes there’s small, marginal, or NO amounts of money going to educational content. It does not fill a direct desire in a world where everything else does. Which is why it’s so important that good quality educational content is accessible.
There is really, amazing, great content out there. It’s also incredibly hard to find. There is really terrible content out there that is incredibly easy to find.
I’m not saying I have a solution, because I know we live in a capitalist world. Businesses need revenue, people need to make money on what they share. But I’m also willing to say: this is not the vision of the internet that the people who built it wanted for us.
Aaron Swartz, one of the late co-founders of Reddit, helped create RSS and Markdown, two widely adopted pieces of web technology.
He also killed himself after the FBI was destroying his life for trying to upload academic papers for anyone to read online that he had access to through MIT.
Aaron Swartz, in fact, created a lot of the technical infrastructure that would go on to allow Reddit and the Internet Archive to reach commercial scale and success.
He literally helped build the internet, and he paid dearly for the vision he had of it.
The very internet that you’re reading this on is fundamentally built on sharing. Yes, you reading this are using someone’s free code. OSS, or Open Source Software, is software that’s freely available online, and that anyone can use or modify for free. Even for commercial purposes.
Behind your website, servers, and computer is hundreds or thousands of free packages, made by someone who will never get paid or recognized for their contribution.
Because in essence: the fact their work is used is payment. In naivety, that’s what I hoped libraries could be.
I often think of what would have happened if I did not have access to a large amount of high quality coding literature from Apple. I started learning to code in 2012 by following C++ and HTML tutorials, and learned Swift when it came out in 2014.
I remember hearing that they had made this free book about Swift that anyone with an Apple device could download and read. And I did, and then released my first iOS app in 2015.
As I’ve wanted more knowledge, I’ve increasingly hit stumbling blocks. Most books these days that cover what I want are not in libraries or in bookstores, who often have surface level books on how to use Photoshop as opposed to updated programming reference or internet culture books from this decade.
I increasingly struggle to afford the $40-$100 dollars for technical O’Reilly books, course subscriptions, or thousands for conference tickets. I rely a lot on the kindness of YouTube, Github repos that contain free guides, and by looking up “${searchTopic} .pdf” on Google.
When I lived in Oakland, I would often make the trip to the main branch of the SFPL because I knew I would very rarely get access to that depth of technology literature ever again in my life.
I’m incredibly thankful for the people who make, free, high quality content on YouTube and online who create work from unbiased perspectives and who work to cite their sources.
And I’m biased in this: I pirate a lot of books, academic courses and papers.
I learned in depth recently about 9/11 (I was born after it), and it was because of the internet and online book libraries that I got the information I did, as opposed to a slop of conspiracy theories.
Because I left high school early and was kicked out of homeschooling programs, I know that without that work available online- I would probably not have gathered an accurate knowledge of history.
Beyond my education, my career path of internet safety and building safe software for consumers, is a new and niche area of HCI. Most of the work in the field is done in corporate and academic circles, and therefore not accessible to me.
A lot of companies write engineering blogs about programming challenges, but don’t often openly talk about how they solved that human trafficking problem, or how they manage Child Sexual Abuse Material.
Does this mean I don’t want to buy books? Absolutely not. I have 100+ books I’m waiting to afford in my Amazon Saved For Later section. I also try to budget for me to get at least 1 book from my local bookstore a month, although it’s hard to find books relevant to my interests and they’re the price of my internet bill.
Although I pirate books, I have bought books that I have pirated, and I will buy books that come from authors who I really want to support.
It can be true that I want to support authors, and that we need to create different ways of accessing educational content that enable learning instead of snuffing it out with paywalls.
My entire career is built off of the goodwill of people who’ve made things available for free, because I could not have really gotten it any other way.
More than an economic conversation, this is an ethical conversation: would I rather go with potentially incorrect content online, or pirate from an expert who will present me with the facts and give me education I can’t otherwise afford and I didn’t get? You know my answer.
If we do not make good educational content accessible, people will just go to bad content that fulfills and deepens their inner worldview. Content that has no sources, that’s written by AI, or that fills all of their deepest stereotypes about the world.
I can understand why people ingest fake news and tons of conspiracy theories. These things are symptomatic of the fact the U.S education system struggles to instill media literacy, and that making interesting content that is educational and entertaining is very hard.
But it also shows me that people who are interested in conspiracy theories and misinformation are interested in learning. They’re just learning the wrong things by falling into their pre-convinced biases, or don’t have access to the right ones.
I think a lot about my dad, who’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.
I think often about the mental health field, which I used to advocate for and be in more actively. It’s no secret there’s a huge shortage of therapists and mental health professionals.
Like clockwork, there’s an insane amount of accessible misinformation about mental health on TikTok. Not because people don’t want to learn: because they really DO want to learn, and they’re just getting information from the wrong sources and spreading it forward because they can’t get it otherwise.
Obviously, making a completely free internet would not solve misinformation, the mental health crisis, or the education system. But, it cannot be understated the damage we may be doing by making misinformation accessible and free, while having vetted educational content available by jumping through hoops or paying money.
There’s truly a desire to learn that lines every stitch of the internet. There’s a desire to share built into its’ infrastructure. And yet, getting a factual education on the internet is so fucking hard.
As long as there is knowledge, there are barriers to it. A lot of those barriers may be there for good reason. But barriers with good reasons are still barriers.
The technical infrastructure of the internet was a foundation built on free labor for the purpose of being part of something greater, giving free information to facilitate it. Maybe what we’re seeing is not surprising, but it’s an indicator of something we already know. The internet is now, fully and unadulteratedly, commercial.
Pay for this site, this file, this article, this subscription, or get the fuck out.
