Posts Tagged ‘Open Society’
“Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception”*…
Indeed. And that’s especially true of the institutions that guard the archives that are our cultural heritage. The ongoing transition from physical media sales to digital licensing markets has unleashed a new wave of archival ephemerality, which endangers these memory institutions’ core operations and threatens to plunge society into a digital dark age.
The stakes are high. As Haruki Murakami observed: “Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime… If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”
Michael Menna (a Stanford Law Fellow who co-authored the “Our Future Memory” manifesto) and Lila Bailey (Senior Policy Counsel at one of the world’s most crucial repositories, The Internet Archive), call for four digital rights that would allow libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”) to uphold their shared public service mission of preserving history and providing access to information…
… We are living through a troubling paradox: Digital technologies have enabled the production and distribution of more information than ever, yet access to that information isincreasingly fragmented and fragile. These technologies should permit us to engage and learn from all the digital content at our fingertips. Instead, many of the basic rights we grew accustomed to in the physical world are now being overtaken by aggressive market tactics that do not reflect the public-interest values the law was meant to protect. If copyright, privacy, and other regulatory frameworks were designed to balance the interests of creators and users with the public’s need to access and contribute to the wealth of human knowledge, then our increasingly digital information economy has thrown that balance out of whack.
In this new media environment, publishers and other content providers have unprecedented power to control knowledge and culture with technical restrictions and exclusionary licensing terms. Governments also have an easier time censoring what people can see by scrubbing their websites and pressuring commercial platforms to do the same. These sudden changes will feel familiar to anyone who has logged onto a streaming service or social media app to find a movie or news story suddenly missing. But for libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”), it poses an existential risk to
their core public service mission of preserving culture and protecting history. When these organizations can no longer collect and provide access to digital materials, members of the public cannot place their trust in a stable record—which affects their ability to confidently participate in democratic discourse.
We write this paper from our perspective at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit research library that specializes in web archiving, digitization, and the preservation of media in all forms. We feel the harms from these shifts firsthand and hear many of the same complaints from our partner memory institutions around the world. That shared frustration with today’s digital landscape has given rise to an emerging consensus among libraries, archives, museums, and their allies, calling for better legal protections and practical options to continue their services and preserve cultural memory in today’s information age.
This two-part paper (1) presents the looming threat of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis, and (2) discusses the key role that libraries and other memory institutions can play in meeting that crisis.2 In the first part, we examine the underlying causes of vanishing culture and trace its ripple effects along several different facets of modern life: (a) educational resources, (b) journalistic integrity, (c) civic engagement, (d) religious study, and (e) environmental policy. In the second part, we reintroduce a framework of four rights that would ensure memory institutions’ ability to work together to collect, preserve, and provide access to digital materials. This framework rests on the simple proposition that memory institutions should be allowed to do the same things in the digital world that they’ve historically done in the physical world. It originated in the 2024 statement titled Four Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online3 before it became a global rallying cry for the Our Future Memory movement and its growing list of library, archive, and museum signatories. Together, these memory institutions are striving to combat the political causes and effects of vanishing culture by speaking with one voice to the importance of memory work in an age of digital ephemerality. That is why we call on all memory institutions, large and small, to sign onto the Statement and join the movement. Individuals and communities need memory institutions to educate themselves and freely participate in civic life, and every time a content provider lets critical information disappear online, it offers further proof that today’s digital markets alone do not constitute a viable alternative. If things do not change soon, we risk sleepwalking into a future where both memory institutions and the public they serve will become passive consumers, rather than active stewards of human knowledge…
Menna and Bailey explain the situation; unpack the four rights they propose: collection, preservation, access, and collaboration; then issue a call to action.
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory” (PDF here)
See also Vanishing Culture (full PDF here)
And consider joining me in supporting the Internet Archive.
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As we preserve and share, we might send open birthday greetings to a man who would surely have understood the importance of Menna’s and Bailey’s arguments: Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he was born on this date in 1902. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance”*…
In 1945, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper described “the paradox of tolerance“…
The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal…
Mark Manson offers a critique…
… Popper proposed the Paradox of Tolerance to explain why a German public full of otherwise good people allowed Hitler to come to power and commit so many atrocities. Since then, the Paradox of Tolerance has survived and has occasionally become a talking point in discussions about social justice. The idea is that it’s okay to be a piece of shit to someone because they, too, are a piece of shit.
But the problem is that, most of the time, it’s not crystal clear what defines “tolerance” and “intolerance.”… Like most thought experiments inspired by Hitler, it doesn’t really work when you don’t have someone who is so obviously evil to unite against. As a result, the definition of an intolerant person has become so muddied and loose to the point where it might as well mean, “someone who believes things that make me feel bad.”…
The problem with Popper’s reasoning is that it quickly devolves into a cascade of dickish, self-righteous behavior.
Let’s say Person B decides that Person A’s behavior is intolerant and a threat to society. Person B then decides that it is morally correct to be intolerant of Person A and treat her like crap.
But then, Person C strolls by and notices Person B being a totally intolerant assface to Person A. Person C then decides that it’s morally correct to be actively intolerant of Person B. But then Person D strolls by, and notices Person C being horribly intolerant towards Person B…
You can see where this is going. And if you ever doubt the realism of this scenario, I invite you to spend a few hours on Twitter some time.
The irony is that in order to practice tolerance, you must be willing to sit with things that upset you or make you uncomfortable.
Yet, if your adopted ethic is that no one should ever be upset or uncomfortable, then you make any sort of tolerance impossible…
– source
I imagine that Popper might respond first that, of course, Manson is right that the definition of intolerance is slippery and that most varieties of unshared disapproval are best tolerated– indeed, that’s the essence of an open society.
But I suspect that he’d further argue that it is possible, well shy of Hitlerian extremes, to identify the intent (beyond disapproving) to debar– to abridge the fundamental rights of others. Even then, of course, it’s tricky– especially in social/cultural periods in which xenophobia and othering are in the ascendant, when difference isn’t perceived to be simply difference or disagreement, but a threat.
Still (presuming again to channel Popper), if one values an open society, one must practice the art (which is to say that it’s not a science) of protecting against this extreme, imperious intolerance– lest it squelch all alternatives to itself. This was the challenge taken up by the Founding Fathers in crafting the U.S. Constitution. And as they observed (but we tend to forget) it’s an on-going challenge. They imagined that the Constitution would be continually revised, both to reflect “learning” (what worked and what didn’t– practical learning) and to reflect changing circumstances and culture (the social and cultural learning/development on which, as Humanists, they were counting).
It’s hard… but then, as my old man used to say, that’s why they call it a paradox…
* Karl Popper
With apologies, another “hiatus notice”: I’m headed into three days of very intense meetings, so (R)D will be off until Friday…
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As we deal with dichotomies, we might spare a cartographically-constructive thought for one of history’s most impactful scientific artists: Gerardus Mercator; he died on this date in 1594. The most renown cartographer of his time, he created a world map based on a new projection– the Mercator Projection— on which parallels and meridians are rendered as straight lines spaced so as to produce at any point an accurate ratio of latitude to longitude and sailing courses of constant bearing are represented as straight lines, an approach still employed in nautical charts used for navigation. He also introduced the term “atlas” for a collection of maps.
While he is most esteemed as the foremost geographer of his day, Mercator was also an accomplished engraver, calligrapher and maker of globes and scientific instruments. And he studied theology, philosophy, history, mathematics, and magnetism.
“Baseball is the only thing beside the paper clip that hasn’t changed”*…
The paper clip is something of a fetish object in design circles. Its spare, machined aesthetic and its inexpensive ubiquity landed it a spot in MoMA’s 2004 show Humble Masterpieces. This was a pedestal too high for design critic Michael Bierut, who responded with an essay called “To Hell with the Simple Paper Clip.” He argued that designers praise supposedly unauthored objects like the paper clip because they’re loath to choose between giving publicity to a competitor and egotistically touting their own designs. Bierut might be right about his colleagues’ motives, but he’s wrong about the paper clip: It’s not all that simple.
Most everyday objects—like the key, or the book, or the phone—evolve over time in incremental ways, and the 20th century in particular revolutionized, streamlined, or technologized the vast majority of the things you hold in your hand over the course of an average day. But if you could step into an office in 1895—walking past horse-drawn buses and rows of wooden telephone switchboard cabinets—you might find a perfectly recognizable, shiny silver paper clip sitting on a desk. What was then a brand-new technology is now, well over a century later, likely to be in the same place, ready to perform the same tasks. Why did the paper clip find its form so quickly, and why has it stuck with us for so long?…
It was invented in the 1890s; it hasn’t been improved upon since: “The perfection of the paper clip.”
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As we find fasteners fascinating, we might spare a thought for Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he died on this date in 1994. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“Have pity on them all, for it is we who are the real monsters”*…
The International Cryptozoology Museum is smaller than my apartment. It’s a big apartment, but it’s an even smaller museum.
The museum is located in a red-brick former industrial building in Portland, Maine. It shares a wall with Big J’s Chicken Shack, and so the International Cryptozoology Museum — the only museum in the world dedicated to the study and promotion of cryptozoology — smells wonderfully, overwhelmingly, of fried chicken…
Officially, cryptozoology is “the study of unknown, legendary, or extinct animals whose existence or survival to the present day is disputed or unsubstantiated.”
The International Cryptozoology Museum offers a slightly different definition. For the ICM, the discipline is “an exciting field that studies hidden and unconfirmed legendary animals, as a means to discover new species.”
The definition from the Oxford English Dictionary looks backwards. The animals are disputed and unsubstantiated. Their existence has not been proven. The ICM’s definition looks forward. The animals are hiding. Their discovery is imminent. There is something new to be found. The animals, or, more exactly, the cryptids — we’re talking Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Dover Demon, the Jersey Devil — they’re out there.
The International Cryptozoology Museum is a place of hope…
The search for surreptitious species at “Real Toads at the International Cryptozoology Museum.” Visit the museum here.
* Bernard Heuvelmans (the father of cryptozoology and founder of the International Society of Cryptozoology), On the Track of Unknown Animals
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As we adumbrate the unfamiliar, we might send carefully-constructed birthday greetings to Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he was born on this date in 1902. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“The ice caps are melting, Leonard. In the future, swimming won’t be optional”*…
* “Sheldon,” The Big Bang Theory
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As we turn up the air conditioner, we might spare a thought for Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he died on this date in 1994. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
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