I am one of the few people who does almost exactly what they were trained to do in school, write essays. For most people this was an indirect form of learning, but for me, I still do exactly what I've been doing since elementary school. This is not a good career, I'm unclear why everyone needs to be trained to be useless bloggers, but I was brought up that way.

What I learned in school was the five-paragraph essay and I was told to have at least three sources, and I still follow this basic structure to this day. Those days I would literally walk to the Upper Arlington Library, which shared a parking lot with my elementary school, and wander through the Dewey Decimal System. I'd use the encyclopedia for general knowledge and microfiche or bound journals as necessary. I produced a lot of forgettable work on yew trees, electricity, and Benedict Arnold, at least that's what I remember.

These days, however, I am very far from a good library in Colombo. Indeed, the concept of a library feels like something illegal if it was started today. Free books, for everybody? That sounds like piracy. And, indeed, I now use piracy for the same function as the old days. The Colombo library is not great for English, and I can't just walk there. So I browse over to Anna's Archive or (formerly) LibGen to accomplish the same thing. I do not consider this a crime in any way. Everyone has the right to a library.

Conceptually this bad somehow, but it's just what I was taught as a child. It's amazing how we reverse and perverse everything we teach our children—sharing, caring, copying, pasting—this is all effectively illegal as adults. I look at my young cousins and the value of getting them to read anything at all seems to outweigh any capital considerations. Most perversely, the wronging of books under copyright leads to many being lost entirely. Sharing and copying books preserves them, while copyrighting them endlessly reproduces what's profitable while disappearing all else. Copyright is the antithesis of all human preservation, which used to be getting as many people to memorize and/or copy your work as possible, so that it might be preserved during the inevitable capital destruction of ancient capitals.

What used to be common-sense practice (read and share books to preserve them) is now somehow piracy, because books are just another form of capital, with no particular value beyond gathering interest on someone's spreadsheet. God forbid someone should take an actual interest in books, and share them out of the joy of reading. The miserliness of commodified culture is justified as being for the authors, but authors are just peasants getting royalties, most of the money goes to the capitalized kings, ie the owner of the presses or, increasingly, just lawyers that press their made up intellectual property. There are an increasingly shrinking amount of publishers, constantly merging and dumping unprofitable works in their wake.

The scholarly journal system is even worse, scholars pay the journals to publish their research and then universities pay them to read it, forming a perfect circle of rent-seeking. These journals are heinously expensive, meaning global south universities do not have subscriptions, and God forbid you're in independent researcher or just curious, that's forbidden. Please read the 300-word hyperbolic summaries of studies you get in the news, in between a dozen pop-up ads for goji berries or whatever distortion they can capitalize on. It's a fraud dictated by fiat, this whole copyright thing.

I suppose if I was a scholar in a fancy university I wouldn't notice; they get subscriptions, they have libraries, they are part of the ‘right’ people and thus have copyright privileges. They're in on the whole academic money laundry thing. But I'm not, I'm just a dude, stubbornly doing what my elementary school teachers told me to do, to at least skim three books before writing about something. How am I supposed to do this, cast away as I am in Sri Lanka, effectively out at sea? Thank God for piracy.

So these days (today, for example, I need to check out the Theodosian Code, City of God by Augustine, and maybe the old Roman Empire by Gibbons) I go to Anna's Archive, which sets as its express purpose “1) Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity. [and] 2) Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world.”

I won't get into whether this is at the expense of authors, they provide a link to a book on that, if you read enough about copyright you can see that it's a fraud by capitalists to turn books into capital, with only a tangential connection to authors as alienated laborers. And yet many authors still defend their masters out of lack of imagination. This imagination is what we're taught in elementary school, though it's successively beaten out of us afterwards. Sharing is caring, they say, until it's criminal.

I don't care. I'll share. Where I live no one even gives enough of a shit to try and sell us stuff, we are beneath copyright capitalism. For years Adobe wouldn't even let you buy a subscription with a Sri Lankan address, and streaming services like Disney Plus or whatever Max are simply not available here. When I was younger, you could walk into the mall and buy pirate software, the copyright holders didn't care about us and we cared even less about them. That's the nature of copyright, it only prioritizes people and products that are profitable, and all else can just disappear. Without pirates to ferry goods back and forth, I dunno what we would even have access to. As it is, we luckily have access to everything, and more abundantly. Copyright is really about the restriction of information, not its expansion. It's about controlling the flow of information, not letting it flow. As that inveterate hypocrite Thomas Jefferson said,

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

The government he founded doesn't behave like this of course, such things (like freedom in general) were not practiced but preached, all just so much marketing atop rank oligarchy. But this is the nature of ideas, they do “spread like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density”, but this ideal is preserved by pirates, not property holders. They're only concerned about their property, and have made the extension of the library into digital space illegal. But certainly not impossible. Shout-out Anna's Archive, my pirate library.