Tag Archives: book talk

Book Talk: The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

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Join us for a virtual book talk with author Cory Doctorow about THE INTERNET CON, the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

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When the tech platforms promised a future of “connection,” they were lying. They said their “walled gardens” would keep us safe, but those were prison walls.

The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extraction. Twitter, Facebook and other Big Tech platforms hard to leave by design. They hold hostage the people we love, the communities that matter to us, the audiences and customers we rely on. The impossibility of staying connected to these people after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it’s a business strategy in service to commodifying your personal life and relationships.

We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. In The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission.

Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CORY DOCTOROW is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and conspiracy; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group.

Book Talk: The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow
Tuesday, October 31 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now for the virtual discussion!

Book Talk: Sparks by Ian Johnson

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Join author Ian Johnson and sociologist Li Jun for an IN-PERSON discussion about “Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future”

Click Here to Watch the Recording

Sparks tells the resonant story of writers, filmmakers, and artists who use history to challenge Communist Party rule.

6:00 PM — Doors Open
6:30 PM — Book Talk: Sparks by Ian Johnson
7:30 PM — Book Signing

Please note that this event will be held in person at the Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco.

Click Here to Watch the Recording

About Sparks
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (to be published by Oxford University Press on September 26, 2023) describes how some of China’s best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.

The past is a battleground in many countries, but in China it is crucial to political power. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism’s triumph. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and glorify its rule. Indeed, one of Xi Jinping’s signature policies is the control of history, which he equates with the party’s survival.

But in recent years, a network of independent writers, artists, and filmmakers have begun challenging this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China’s legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a regular pattern of disasters: from famines and purges of years past to ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present–powerful and inspiring accounts that have underpinned recent protests in China against Xi Jinping’s strongman rule.

Based on years of first-hand research in Xi Jinping’s China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity’s great struggles of memory against forgetting—a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.

Ian Johnson is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has lived more than twenty years in China as a student, journalist, and teacher. His work appears regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and other publications, and for five years he was on the editorial board of The Journal of Asian Studies. He has won numerous prizes for his coverage of China, including a Pulitzer Prize.

Li Jun (who writes under the penname Li Sipan) is a Ph.D. in political sociology, and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Before entering academia, she was an investigative reporter for the liberal newspaper group Southern Daily Press and a recognized feminist activist. In 2004, she founded the feminist communications NGO Women’s Awakening Network (新媒体女性), which has played a leading role in China’s anti-sexual harassment campaigns and in the process of legislating against domestic violence. Li’s research focuses on the intergenerational differences in the feminist movement as well as the relationship between the media and the feminist movement in China.

Book Talk: Sparks by Ian Johnson
October 19 @ 6pm PT
IN-PERSON @ 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
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Book Talk: Memory, Edited

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Join archivist Rick Prelinger and author Abby Smith Rumsey for an IN-PERSON discussion about “Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History.”

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An exploration of historical memory and networks of meaning in the context of today’s crises of extremism and polarization.

6:00 PM — Doors Open
6:30 PM — Book Talk: Memory, Edited
7:30 PM — Book Signing

Please note that this event will be held in person at the Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco.

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About Memory, Edited
As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about what has happened and what is happening become ever more relevant. In Memory, Edited, Abby Smith Rumsey examines collective memory, how it binds us, and how it can be used by bad actors to manipulate us. Bringing forward the voices of a rich cast of Eastern European artists from the past two hundred years—from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Gerhard Richter—Rumsey shows how their work and lives illustrate the devastation wrought by regimes dependent on entrenched lies to survive. This hijacking of the narrative polarizes communities even as it commandeers our future.

Through an interdisciplinary lens that includes the best thinking from history, the arts, cognitive science, psychology, and political philosophy, Rumsey lays bare our narratives, showing how they are constructed and how they have changed over time. Ever-aware of resisting the false promise of utopia, Rumsey argues that only by confronting the past and reckoning with the crimes that were committed can we ever hope to heal and gain self-knowledge. Memory, Edited is an indispensable text for anyone who cares about democracy, equality, and freedom in our current age of crisis.

Abby Smith Rumsey is an intellectual and cultural historian. She chairs the board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and is the author of When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future.

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator.

Book Talk: Memory, Edited
September 20 @ 6pm PT
IN-PERSON @ 300 Funston Avenue, SF
Register now!

Book Talk: Moving Theory Into Practice

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Join Internet Archive’s Chris Freeland for a discussion with Oya Y. Rieger about ‘Moving Theory Into Practice,’ the landmark digitization guide & workshop that sparked a revolution in digital libraries.
Thursday, August 24 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET

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As the digital library field emerged in the mid- to late-1990s, librarians faced numerous challenges in building the skills necessary to provide digital access to their collections. That changed in the summer of 2000, when Anne R. Kenney and Oya Y. Rieger (Cornell University Library) produced “Moving Theory Into Practice,” a groundbreaking week-long workshop & digitization guide that offered hands-on, immersive training in digitization and preservation.

The purpose of “Moving Theory Into Practice” was to skill-build librarians, archivists, curators, administrators, technologists, and other professionals who were either contemplating or already implementing digital imaging programs. Its objective was to equip participants with practical strategies that surpassed theoretical concepts, grounded in the latest standards, best practices and informed decision-making.

In our upcoming webinar, we are delighted to talk with Oya Y. Rieger, co-author of “Moving Theory Into Practice.” During the discussion, we will delve into the impacts of hosting these training sessions, shedding light on their significance within the digital library community and the broader library community at the time. We will also explore related training such as Rare Book School, and reflect on large-scale digitization projects like Making of America and state-based efforts to understand the context in which this workshop occurred. Additionally, we will touch upon the evolution of digitization training since the original workshop, providing insights into how the field has matured.

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About our speakers

Oya Y. Rieger is a senior strategist on Ithaka S+R’s Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums team. She spearheads projects that reexamine the nature of collections within the research library, help secure access to and preservation of the scholarly record, and explore the possibilities of open source software and open science.

Prior to joining Ithaka S+R, Oya worked at Cornell University for 25 years. For the past ten years she served as Associate University Librarian, leading strategic initiatives, building partnerships, and facilitating sustainable and user-centered projects. During her tenure at Cornell, her program areas included digital scholarship, collection development, digitization, preservation, user experience, scholarly publishing, learning technologies, research data management, digital humanities, and special collections. She spearheaded projects funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Studies (IMLS), the Henry Luce Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Simons Foundation, and Sloan Foundation to develop ejournal preservation strategies, conduct research on new media archiving, implement preservation programs in Asia, design digital curation curriculums, and create sustainability models for alternative publishing models to advance science communication.

Chris Freeland is the Director of Library Services at the Internet Archive, working in support of our mission to provide “Universal access to all knowledge.” Before joining the Internet Archive, Chris was an Associate University Librarian at Washington University in St. Louis, managing Washington University Libraries’ digital initiatives and related services. He holds an M.S. in Biological Sciences from Eastern Illinois University and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from University of Missouri-Columbia. His research explores the intersections of science and technology in a cultural heritage context, having published and presented on a variety of topics relating to the use of new media and emerging technologies in libraries and museums.

Book Talk: Moving Theory Into Practice
Thursday, August 24 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now for the virtual discussion!

Virtual Book Talk: The Apple II Age

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BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!

Last month, we hosted Laine Nooney and Finn Brunton for an in-person discussion at the Internet Archive. We had considerable interest from people who couldn’t make it to the discussion, so we’re pleased to host the conversation again, this time virtually, so that anyone can join in!

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Join us for an engrossing origin story of the personal computer—showing how the Apple II’s software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists’ plaything to essential home appliance. Author LAINE NOONEY will read a selection from their new book, then discuss the importance of the Apple II with historian FINN BRUNTON.

If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. It was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers—it’s about the rise of everyday users.

Recounting a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney offers a new understanding of how the hobbyists’ microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops to long-forgotten disk-cracking utilities, The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu—and why so much of it converged around the pioneering Apple II.

About our speakers:

Laine Nooney is assistant professor of media and information industries at New York University. Their research has been featured by outlets such as The Atlantic, Motherboard, and NPR. They live in New York City, where their hobbies include motorcycles, tugboats, and Texas hold ’em.

Finn Brunton (finnb.net) is a professor at UC Davis with appointments in Science and Technology Studies and Cinema and Digital Media. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency, and the co-author of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest.

Book Talk: The Apple II Age
July 13th @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now for the virtual discussion!

LECTURE: The Publisher Playbook, May 25

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Join Kyle K. Courtney & Juliya Ziskina of Library Futures for a review of how publisher interests have attempted to hinder the library mission.

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FROM THE ABSTRACT: Libraries have continuously evolved their ability to provide access to collections in innovative ways. Many of these advancements in access, however, were not achieved without overcoming serious resistance and obstruction from the rightsholder and publishing industry. The struggle to maintain the library’s access-based mission and serve the public interest began as early as the late 1800s and continues through today. We call these tactics the “publishers’ playbook.” Libraries and their readers have routinely engaged in lengthy battles to defend the ability for libraries to fulfill their mission and serve the public good. The following is a brief review of the times and methods that publishers and rightsholder interests have attempted to hinder the library mission. This pattern of conduct, as reflected in ongoing controlled digital lending litigation, is not unexpected and belies a historical playbook on the part of publishers and rightsholders to maximize their own profits and control over the public’s informational needs. Thankfully, as outlined in this paper, Congress and the courts have historically upheld libraries’ attempts to expand access to information for the public’s benefit.

Read the full article, “The Publisher Playbook: A Brief History of the Publishing Industry’s Obstruction of the Library Mission.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

KYLE K. COURTNEY is a lawyer and librarian dedicated to issues surrounding copyright, access, and preservation. He serves as Copyright Advisor and Program Manager at the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication. His “Copyright First Responders” initiative is in its seventh year, spreading from Harvard to libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and soon, internationally. He is the co-author of the White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books (with David Hansen). He serves as an Advisor to ALI, helping to draft the first Restatement of Copyright. He co-founded Fair Use Week, now an international celebration sponsored annually by over 100+ universities, libraries, and other institutions, and won a Knight Foundation Grant to test technology for crowdsourcing copyright and fair use decisions. He also currently maintains a dual appointment at Northeastern University: teaching “Cyberlaw: Privacy, Ethics, and Digital Rights” for the interdisciplinary Information Assurance and Cybersecurity program at the Khoury College of Computer Science and teaching both “Legal Research and Writing for LLM’s” and the “Advanced Legal Writing Workshop” at the Northeastern University School of Law. He holds a J.D. with distinction in Intellectual Property Law and an MSLIS. He is a published author and nationally recognized speaker on the topic of copyright, technology, libraries, and the law. His blog is at http://kylecourtney.com and he can be found on Twitter @KyleKCourtney.

JULIYA ZISKINA is an attorney, artist, photographer, and open access advocate based out of Brooklyn, New York. A forever curious jack-of-all-trades, she believes strongly in a vibrant, collaborative global commons. She completed her JD at the University of Washington in Seattle and served as a graduate student representative on the Faculty Council on University Libraries. As a law student, Juliya co-founded an initiative for an institutional open access policy at the University of Washington, which was successful as of June 2018. Previously, she advocated for the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) in Washington, DC with the Student Advocates for Graduate Education, representing over 150,000 graduate students. In 2015, she attended OpenCon in Brussels, Belgium, where she co-led a workshop on grassroots mobilization. Later that year, she presented on a panel at the American Libraries Association Annual Conference on advancing open access through library partnerships with students and early career researchers. A lifelong grassroots rabble-rouser, she started her career by co-founding an underground student newspaper at her high school that was acclaimed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Student Press Law Center. Juliya’s work has strengthened her belief in the importance of the free flow of information and the human side of the law.

LECTURE: THE PUBLISHER PLAYBOOK
Thursday, May 25 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Watch the session recording

Book Talk: The Apple II Age

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Join author Laine Nooney for an IN-PERSON reading from their new book, followed by a conversation with historian Finn Brunton.

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“The Apple II Age is a joy to read and an extraordinary achievement in computer history. A rigorous thinker and a bright and witty writer, Nooney offers a compelling account of the initial attempts to make computers inviting to the public. The Apple II Age, like the old microcomputer itself, is bound to intrigue both experts and newcomers to the subject.” ―JOANNE MCNEIL, author of ‘Lurking: How a Person Became a User’

Join us for an engrossing origin story for the personal computer—showing how the Apple II’s software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists’ plaything to essential home appliance.

6:00 PM — Reception
6:30 PM — Book Talk: The Apple II Age
7:30 PM — Book Signing 

Please note that this event will be held in person at the Internet Archive.

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If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. It was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers—it’s about the rise of everyday users.

Recounting a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney offers a new understanding of how the hobbyists’ microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops to long-forgotten disk-cracking utilities, The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu—and why so much of it converged around the pioneering Apple II.

Laine Nooney is assistant professor of media and information industries at New York University. Their research has been featured by outlets such as The Atlantic, Motherboard, and NPR. They live in New York City, where their hobbies include motorcycles, tugboats, and Texas hold ’em.

Book Talk: The Apple II Age
May 11 @ 6pm
IN-PERSON @ 300 Funston Ave., San Francisco
Register now for the free, in-person event

Book Talk: Against Progress

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Join journalist MARIA BUSTILLOS for a virtual book talk with author & professor of law JESSICA SILBEY for her latest book, AGAINST PROGRESS.

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When first written into the Constitution, intellectual property aimed to facilitate “progress of science and the useful arts” by granting rights to authors and inventors. Today, when rapid technological evolution accompanies growing wealth inequality and political and social divisiveness, the constitutional goal of “progress” may pertain to more basic, human values, redirecting IP’s emphasis to the commonweal instead of private interests.

Against Progress considers contemporary debates about intellectual property law as concerning the relationship between the constitutional mandate of progress and fundamental values, such as equality, privacy, and distributive justice, that are increasingly challenged in today’s internet age. Following a legal analysis of various intellectual property court cases, Jessica Silbey examines the experiences of everyday creators and innovators navigating ownership, sharing, and sustainability within the internet eco-system and current IP laws. Crucially, the book encourages refiguring the substance of “progress” and the function of intellectual property in terms that demonstrate the urgency of art and science to social justice today.

Purchase Against Progress from Stanford University Press.

JESSICA SILBEY is Professor of Law at the Boston University School of Law. She is the author of Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age (Stanford, 2022), The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property (Stanford, 2015), and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.

BOOK TALK: AGAINST PROGRESS
May 9 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Watch session recording

Book Talk: Digital Copyright

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Join Internet Archive’s founder BREWSTER KAHLE for a virtual book talk with author & professor of law JESSICA LITMAN.

In Digital Copyright (read now), law professor Jessica Litman questions whether copyright laws crafted by lawyers and their lobbyists really make sense for the vast majority of us. Should every interaction between ordinary consumers and copyright-protected works be restricted by law? Is it practical to enforce such laws, or expect consumers to obey them? What are the effects of such laws on the exchange of information in a free society?

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Read Digital Copyright now.

PROFESSOR JESSICA LITMAN, the John F. Nickoll Professor of Law, is the author of Digital Copyright and the co-author, with Jane Ginsburg and Mary Lou Kevlin, of the casebook Trademarks and Unfair Competition Law: Cases and Materials.

BREWSTER KAHLE, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, has been working to provide universal access to all knowledge for more than 25 years.

Book Talk: Digital Copyright
April 20, 2023 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now for the free, virtual discussion

Book Talk: Athena Unbound

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Join CHRIS BOURG in conversation with author PETER BALDWIN about the history & promise of the open access movement.

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“In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an admirably pragmatic yet principled approach to the perennial problem of encouraging both the production and distribution of knowledge.” – Paul Romer, Nobel Laureate and University Professor, NYU

Read or purchase Athena Unbound from MIT Press. (Pub date: March 28, 2023)

Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces fierce resistance. In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to providing a clear analysis of the debates, Baldwin focuses on thorny issues such as copyright and ways to pay for “free” knowledge. He also provides a roadmap that would make OA economically viable and, as a result, advance one of humanity’s age-old ambitions.

Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world.

Rich in detail and free of jargon, Athena Unbound is an essential primer on the state of the global open access movement.

About our speakers

PETER BALDWIN is Professor of History at UCLA, and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. His recent books are Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State across History (MIT Press); Fighting the First Wave: Why the Coronavirus Was Tackled So Differently across the Globe; and The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle. He serves on the boards of the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wikimedia Endowment, the Central European University, the Danish Institute of Advanced Studies, and as chair of the Board of the Center for Jewish History. His journalistic writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Newsweek, New Republic, Huffington Post, Der Spiegel, Berliner Zeitung, Publishers Weekly, American Interest, Chronicle of Higher Education, Prospect, American Interest, and Zocalo Public Square.

CHRIS BOURG is the Director of Libraries at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she also has oversight of the MIT Press. She is also the founding director of the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Prior to assuming her role at MIT, Chris worked for 12 years in the Stanford University Libraries. Before Stanford, she spent 10 years as an active-duty U.S. Army officer, including three years on the faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She received her BA from Duke University, her MA from the University of Maryland, and her MA and Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford.

Book Talk: Athena Unbound
March 28 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET