Thread by @dakami

twitter.com/i/moments/1132…

We need books.google.com actually working. If the "marketplace of ideas" is to work at all we can't be locking up everything *but* tech, and then wondering why *only* tech seems to vaguely function.

I adore Wikipedia, but it's not enough.

Let me be clear. I *absolutely* respect librarians. Not because they know how to maintain and locate physical sheets of paper, but because they are sherpas across vast tracts of not obviously connected human knowledge.

Books are not the most searchable resources things, particularly relative to digital search engines. Librarians were who you went to, to be productive anyway.

What, you think those skills don't matter in the digital era? We have *so much more* to archive, acquire, integrate.

I realized all this a while ago, when I tried to research a historical fact I saw mentioned on Wikipedia. All I could find, was that one paragraph from Wikipedia, over, and over, and over again.

Google built the new Library of Alexandria, with books.google.com. It hasn't been burned, but it's been locked up. At the end of the day, the resources do exist, but don't get to inform our debates.

So we're sounding pretty dumb.

We can find economics that work for books.google.com, and of course, for Sci-Hub. There are many capitalisms. Some of them deliver health care. Some of them deliver fake news.

Our civilization is based on the spread of ideas, and it also based on minimizing costs. Those can conflict, and are.

Well, there's a lot of cheap conceptual kit out there, and we're all paying the price. These debates are really stupid. Seriously. What the hell. Ouch.

Where there's openness -- which I'll say, tech has delivered, to itself, for itself, of itself, because *spreading quality knowledge of other fields was and is actively blocked* -- progress and innovation is real, measurable, probably impoverished.

We can allow better.

I think librarians can help us. We gave them something workable once. We can do that again. There's lots of capitalisms. There's lots of copyright systems. Some of them even work.

Not being a librarian (or a lawyer) I should defer to others on structure, but this could help.