the first step in plunging democracy back into feudalism is the propriatization of knowledge.

there are a small number of semi good reasons, and a huge number of ones that are marginal at best.

the whole internet stated out to be precisely that alternative. before the dot coms came along and turned it into a shopping mall.

although before it went public, it was a closed defense research community that gave birth to it.

you know, all i can say is what i've been saying all along, this is what comes of making everything have to be about money.

far from creating a democratic world, it does the exact opposite, by keeping people uninformed.

which people are kept from noticing, by being 'infotained' instead.

keeping people obsessed with excitement keeps them from noticing or even realizing they're being kept in the dark.

in the 70s and even 80s, before we had the internet, no one ever stopped me from entering university engineering libraries, whether i was enrolled there or not.
of course i couldn't check anything out without being student there, but no one stopped me from looking things up and taking notes, xeroxing pages that interested me with the coin op copy machines and so on.

but that was an era when people wanted each other to be educated and informed.
i wish i had a better answer for you then to rant, but yes this is one of the things that burns me.
when i look something up on the net, i want that particular piece of data,
not to be informed that someone wants to sell me a book the might or might not contain it.

*smiles* I've been there. When I lived in Northfield Mn I was in close proximity to two nationally accredited colleges that both had extensive libraries that were open to the public, including entire levels of electronic moving shelves overflowing with the kind of information I wish I had now.