Category Archives: reflections

Reflection 4: Shadow Libraries

Russian samizdat (via)

Spinning off from what I touched on briefly in my Assignment X, I decided to dig deeper into the world and history of shadow libraries for my Wild Card post. Shadow libraries, as we discussed previously, are online troves of commercial books and scholarly texts made available digitally and for-free. Large sites like Library Genesis (LibGen), Z-Library and Anna’s Archive offer inconceivably large archives of literature, free to all, or at least free-to-all who are savvy enough to operate them (and also serve as lightning rods for a number of legal issues, as we will discuss later) while smaller, less visible, community-driven, thematically-specific libraries have emerged at a grassroots level, spread across Google Drives and the file sharing service Mega.nz, several of which popped up or prospered during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.

In “The Genesis of Library Genesis: The Birth of a Global Scholarly Shadow Library,” the scholar Balázs Bodó (2018) traces the origins of both LibGen and the modern online shadow library model to the its roots in Soviet-era ideology, where the combination of state censorship, commercial scarcity, lax intellectual property laws and still widespread cultivation of literacy among the people created a unique piracy-contingent book distribution model. One LibGen admin described the Soviet era “samizdat” model to Bodó (p. 33) as such:

“People hoarded books: complete works of Pushkin, Tolstoy or Chekhov. You could not buy such things. So you had the idea that it is very important to hoard books. High-quality literary fiction, high-quality science textbooks and monographs, even biographies of famous people (writers, scientists, composers, etc.) were difficult to buy. You could not, as far as I remember, just go to a bookstore and buy complete works of Chekhov. It was published once and sold out and that’s it. Dostoyevsky used to be prohibited in the USSR, so that was even rarer. Lots of writers were prohibited, like Nabokov. Eventually Dostoyevsky was printed, but in very small numbers. And also there were scientists who wanted scientific books and also could not get them. Mathematics books, physics—very few books were published every year, you can’t compare this with the market in the U.S. Russian translations of classical monographs in mathematics were difficult to find.

So, in the USSR, everyone who had a good education shared the idea that hoarding books
was very, very important, and did just that. If someone had free access to a Xerox machine, they were [x]eroxing everything in sight. A friend of mine had an entire room full of [x]eroxed books.

These informal and physical networks rolled over naturally into the digital era, with BBS platforms like Fidonet, which hosted early collections via groups like SU.SF & F.FANDOM (which focused on Soviet sci-fi and fantasy literature), and lib.ru, a personal collection of Russian language texts founded in 1994 that eventually grew so large that it had to be splintered into a number of thematically specific collections, including LibGen, which focuses on scientific texts and still stands today as one of the largest and most infamous shadow libraries.

(In the name of both authenticity and being broke, I downloaded a .pdf of the collection in which this Bodó article appears from LibGen.)

Today the advantages of these libraries are numerous. They offer a truly democratized access to literature that would’ve been unimaginable in past generations, making texts freely available across class and global borders, offering alternative distribution routes for otherwise banned or censored books, and keeping rare or out-of-print texts in perpetual circulation. Understandably, these libraries are not without their critics and detractors. Publishers and authors alike have brought about numerous lawsuits against shadow libraries, arguing that the model infringes copyright and hurts their bottom line. (Creamer, 2023) while the FBI has “seized” the commercial book database Z-Library on more than one occasion (Javaid, 2022) but somehow it manages to reemerge (it’s still active right now).

Probably the most damning recent critique of shadow libraries stems from how their databases have been for generating AI models. It is alleged that Meta employees knowingly harvested 82TB of data from LibGen in training their AI, with stated intention to sidestep licensing this material from publishers and the express blessing of CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Reisner, 2025). This is the center of a large copyright infringement lawsuit brought by publishers against Meta, with the company arguing that it is “fair use” to mine this content for new material. It is a worst case scenario for advocates of these libraries, as it contradicts their implicit mission of liberating knowledge by reducing these great works of literature and research to mere data to be chewed up by the machines that are aiming to supplant the production of this type of work:

“LibGen and other such pirated libraries make information more accessible, allowing people to read original work without paying for it. Yet generative-AI companies such as Meta have gone a step further: Their goal is to absorb the work into profitable technology products that compete with the originals (Reisner, 2025).”

Bajaj & Bhateja (2022) are optimistic about court cases being brought against LibGen and Sci-Hub in India, suggesting that “the litigation should serve as a launching point to initiate a conversation on developing new business models in the publishing industry, the way Napster did for the music industry or Netflix did television (p. 26).” Though many have argued that the emergence of large scale legal digital distribution platforms Spotify and Netflix have had numerous negative effects on their respective industries, resulting in a homogenization of content (Svetkey, 2025), the underpayment of creators (Hsu, 2024), and, in the case of streaming music, an avalanche of exploitative AI-generated slop content (Lopatto, 2024). (Another advantage of free and copyright-indifferent platforms like shadow libraries is that they little financial incentive for users to flood them with the sort of meaningless generated slop and drivel that has begun to subsume the rest of the internet.)

Personally, I’m of the opposite belief. Rather than seeing the shadow library model hollowed out and repurposed to more commercial ends, I’d love to see copyright law reformed in a way that would decriminalize it. I’d love to see public and academic libraries integrate these crucial resources in their stacks “because what is known must be shared,” as per the OLCL slogan. Ironically enough, the OLCL is currently legal battle against Anna’s Archive, alleging that the Z-Library alternative scraped and shared their Worldcat database (Moody, 2024).

References:

Bajaj, R. & Bhateja, A. (2022). Bringing shadow libraries out of legal shadows: An opportunity for the Delhi High Court. Indian Journal of Law and Technology, 18(2). https://repository.nls.ac.in/ijlt/vol18/iss2/4/

Bodó, B. (2018). The genesis of Library Genesis: The birth of a global scholarly shadow library. In J. Karaganis (Ed.), Shadow libraries: Access to knowledge in global higher education (pp. 25-51). MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11339.001.0001

Creamer, E. (2023, September 15). Four large US publishers sue ‘shadow library’ for alleged copyright infringement. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/15/four-large-us-publishers-sue-shadow-library-for-alleged-copyright-infringement

Hsu, Hua (2024, December 23). Is there any escape from the Spotify syndrome? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/mood-machine-liz-pelly-book-review

Javaid, M. (2022, November 17). The FBI closed the book on Z-Library, and readers and authors clashed. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/17/fbi-takeover-zlibrary-booktok-impacted/

Lopatto, E. (2024, November 14). Not even Spotify is safe from AI Slop. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/14/24294995/spotify-ai-fake-albums-scam-distributors-metadata

Meyers, N. (2013, January 11). Shadow libraries: The dilemma. Book Scouter. https://bookscouter.com/blog/shadow-libraries/

Moody. (2024, September 23). OCLC Says ‘what is known must be shared,’ but is suing Anna’s Archive for sharing knowledge. Tech Dirt. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/23/oclc-says-what-is-known-must-be-shared-but-is-suing-annas-archive-for-sharing-knowledge/

Naprys, E. (2024, July 25). Biggest-ever leak of digital pirates: 10 million exposed by Z-Library copycat. Cybernews. https://cybernews.com/security/zlibrary-copycat-exposes-millions-digital-pirates/

Reisner, A. (2025, March 20). The unbelievable scale of AI’s pirated-books problem. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/

Rumfitt, A. (2022, November 25). In defence of Z-Library and book piracy. Dazed. https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/57545/1/in-defence-of-piracy-and-z-library-shut-down-alison-rumfitt-writer-author

Svetkey, B. (2025, March 4). How streaming is making us all cinema-illiterate. The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/streaming-impact-classic-fillms-algorithm-1236146209/

Reflection 3: The Neoliberal Library

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Dmitri Moor – Capitalism Devours Everything (1920)

Resident doomer-luddite-hater-leftist checking in here once again. Though I was initially intrigued by some of the concepts being implemented at Colorado’s Anythink libraries – the nature library (Anythink Libraries, n.d.-a) in particular sounds fascinating and I am actually not mad at the idea (Anythink, n.d.-b) that libraries don’t necessarily need to be quiet spaces, at least not uniformly so – the more I read about the organization, the more I was turned off by just how business-y their whole business seemed.

The documents on their site are littered with MBA language like “branding” and “product placement” and “entrepreneurial spirit.” Patrons are “customers,” books are “products, and shelving is “merchandising.” They even proudly tout a decision to dump the eternally reliable Dewey system in favor of an organization system that more closely resembles a bookstore (Anythink, 2013). It all gave me the sinking, suffocating feeling that I was reading about a start-up, not a library. And, in fact, poking around a further lead me to “The Economics of Anythink,” a press release posing as an American Libraries article in which the company’s communication manager flat-out says “Anythink has approached its transformation like a start-up company (Ledden, 2012).” The article goes on to mostly celebrate the number of local subcontractors employed on the project and the myriad of other ways that the new libraries benefitted those oft-mythologized heroes of late capitalism The Small Business Owners (Waterhouse, 2017).

This all reminded of a book I read a few years ago, Oli Mould’s Against Creativity. In it, Mould writes about how modern neoliberal logic (“the idea that the markets must be as efficient as possible, and they must extend into every realm of life [Brehm, 2018]”) hijacks creative labor in the service of capital and how this then accelerates privatization, financialization, gentrification, and probably many equally bad -ations that I am forgetting now. Mould considers the role of the library in these systems:

“Libraries and other public institutions have traditionally been repositories of collective and civic knowledge, and archives of local cultures and histories. But they have become drawn into the creativity rhetoric by virtue of their subject matter. They have been forced to compete in the new global landscape of creative industrial activity because they are traditional places of knowledge rather than because they are designed to be competitive and commercial. This in turn brings with it the myriad of problems and inequalities that this version of creativity fuels: massive regional disparities, with investment focused on larger metropolitan regions at the expense of their hinterlands; the removal of services and activities that cater for the underprivileged and marginal; the destruction of public assets with deep local histories; and, inevitably, the privatization of social services.

Austerity has been implemented, forcing these institutions to be more ‘creative’. It has recast public cultural institutions as panaceas of this new austere world. Libraries can diversify to be social service centres; museums can hold evening classes; leisure centres can host school PE lessons. But it has primed them for appropriation because their ability to act as engines of non-capitalist knowledge and social practices has been eroded and, in some cases, completely destroyed, only for them to be resurrected as another agent of capitalist, competitive and entrepreneurial versions of creativity (Mould, 2018, p. 161).”

Reading more about the encroachment of neoliberal values upon modern libraries lead me to the work of John Buschman, who has written extensively on the topic, lamenting a system that encourages “mindlessly imitating management practices and fads, accountability/social capital/return-on-investment analyses of the institution, outsourcing of core functions such as collections and management, and silly and faddish investments in technology (such as gaming) that erode core functions. I argue that we’re changing what a library is and what it is for without much real thought or discussion. (Buschman, 2017, p. 55)”

That might be a bit too harsh (or maybe I just like gaming more than Buschman seems to!) but his concerns about the erosion of the modern library’s core functions had me wondering: Do these Anythink branches still work as old fashioned 1.0 libraries? A number of Yelp reviews suggest they do not: “This library is so small, not a very good selection of books (Lori M., 2021)”; “This library is a JOKE! A boutique library at best and do not think for a minute that you will find what you’re looking for if it has not won at least three awards and on the bestsellers list, and even then, it’s a stretch (Lisa K., 2016)”; “The selection at this library is pretty poor. The card catalog was not overly user friendly, and I could not for the life of me find the reference section and finally gave up trying. (Steve R., 2011)”

It breaks my heart to think that the success of a library system is now primarily measured primarily by its ability to “innovate” or, worse still, how well it stimulates the local economy, rather than its core function as a source of knowledge-qua-knowledge. Maybe this is a naively idealistic position to take though. I do understand that doing cool library things costs money and learning how to navigate the systems that provide the money for these cool library things is a big part of becoming a library professional but still I feel a need to announce my frustration with this reality.

References:

Anythink Libraries. (n.d.-a). Anythink announces Nature Library in partnership with City of Thornton. https://www.anythinklibraries.org/news-item/anythink-nature-library?fbclid=IwAR2DgO-k8nU6kNUODo7vTlRXKiEiYSoSeQMC8Aq0QnoLMZoT3d-QKpbSl5M

Anythink Libraries. (n.d.-b). Anythink Brochure. https://www.anythinklibraries.org/sites/default/files/imce_uploads/Anythink%20Brochure.pdf

Anythink Libraries. (2013). Visual merchandising guidelines. https://www.anythinklibraries.org/sites/default/files/imce_uploads/anythink_merchandising_guidelines_final_100113.pdf

Brehm, W. (2018, September 24). Interview with Oli Mould. [Audio Podcast] FreshEd. https://freshedpodcast.com/olimould/

Buschman, J. (2017, January). The library in the life of the public: Implications of a neoliberal age. The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 87(1), 55-70. https://doi.org/10.1086/689314

Ledden, S. (2012, May 1). The economics of Anythink. American Libraries. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2012/05/01/the-economics-of-anythink

Lisa K. (2016, Feb 15). [Review of Anythink Wright Farms]. Yelp. https://www.yelp.com/biz/anythink-wright-farms-thornton?hrid=xPZGM7W8LI0lj2Tjgq2E-A

Lori M. (2021, April 8). [Review of Anythink Huron Street]. Yelp https://www.yelp.com/biz/anythink-huron-street-thornton?hrid=Oc7JXNzD7RirwVN_xEGO6g

Mould, O. (2018). Against Creativity. Verso.

Steve R. (2011, February 7). [Review of Anythink Commerce City]. Yelp. https://www.yelp.com/biz/anythink-commerce-city-commerce-city?hrid=ehLy116A1wFChY_F-HtUyw

Waterhouse, B. C. (2017, November 8). The small business myth. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/what-does-small-business-really-contribute-to-economic-growth

Reflection 1: Reimagining the Social Internet Through the Public Library

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Still from The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Of all the texts we read at in the Hyperlinked Communities module, boyd’s (2016) “What World Are We Building?” resonated most with me. As someone who has grew up as a member of — and later helped to build — a number of rich and socially rewarding internet communities throughout the ’90s and ’00s, the shifts she describes are depressingly familiar. Over the past decade or so I’ve watched many of the online spaces that previously felt more like home than any of my physical homes did get bulldozed and replaced by hideous walled-garden panopticons. Social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram that seemed fun at first but mostly served to accelerate capitalism (Ranger, 2020), extract data, exploit minors, (FTC, 2024), enable grifting (Mishan, 2019), foster hatred (Bond, 2021), confuse our perception of time (Posner, 2018), further marginalize marginalized communities (boyd, 2011), spread misinformation, cultivate tribalism, and empower fascists (Cook, 2017).

Ranger (2020) calls for “a socialist digital deceleration” via a move towards “independent/ethical/decentralized alternative digital products” and I’m inclined to agree. It’s time to divest from big tech as much as possible and refocus our collective energies towards building new networks for entertainment and information distribution, ones that are smaller but still more inclusive, that actively strive to bridge the widening gap between physical and digital communities and between old media and new.

Fortunately, public libraries are uniquely positioned to spearhead such efforts! In many communities they stand as the most prevalent (if not the only) non-commercial in-real-life third space available to the general public and already have infrastructure and built-in audiences. Library makerspaces like Memphis Library’s Cloud 901 Lab (Memphis Library, n.d.) stand as strong examples of technological curiosity being applied to purely creative, closed-circuit and communal ends while the many digital services and events that libraries offered during the COVID-19 pandemic (Syn, et al., 2023) proved that the patron base is savvy enough to adapt to online environments. Maybe librarians could consider further merging these two approaches into something more concrete and socially-focused?

Personally, I’ve mostly moved away from posting on platforms like Twitter and Instagram and towards having smaller, more anonymous, less permanent chats on Discord servers, running conversations that are technically open-to-the-public (via word-of-mouth invites, mostly) but not publicly-indexed as such. Discord is a VC-funded company and will likely be ruined eventually for that reason but I do think it is a good model for quieter, less extractive forms of online socialization. It is quite easy to imagine an open-source/decentralized/not-for-profit version, perhaps one that is specifically designed with libraries and library patrons in mind. We already think of physical libraries as sources of quietude in an otherwise loud world, maybe one day their online outposts could offer similar relief from the blaring noise of the social internet.

References:

Bond, K. (2021, April 30). Why do we ‘hate-follow’ people on social media? The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-psychology-behind-why-we-hatefollow-people-on-social-media-b1837751.html

boyd, d. (2016, January 25). What world are we building? Medium. https://medium.com/datasociety-points/what-world-are-we-building-9978495dd9ad

boyd, d. (2011). White flight in networked publics? How race and class shaped American teen engagement with MySpace and Facebook. In Nakamura, L. & Chow-White, P. A. (Eds.) Race After the Internet (pp. 203-222) Routledge. https://www.danah.org/papers/2011/WhiteFlight.pdf

Cook, R. F. (2017). From triumph of the will to twitter: Modern media and the evolution of tribalism. Colloquia Germanica, 50(3/4), 315–326. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26852199

Federal Trade Commission (2024, September 19). FTC staff report finds large social media and video streaming companies have engaged in vast surveillance of users with lax privacy controls and inadequate safeguards for kids and teens. [Press Release]. Federal Trade Commission. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-staff-report-finds-large-social-media-video-streaming-companies-have-engaged-vast-surveillance

Goldstein, M. & Bensimon, O. (2025, February 24). Crypto firm pleads guilty to operating illegally in U.S. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/business/okx-crypto-exchange-guilty-plea.html

Kaplan, M. (2020, September 21). How libraries are writing a new chapter during the pandemic. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/libraries-respond-to-coronavirus-with-book-bikes-and-virtual-festivals

Memphis Library. (n.d.). Cloud901 Teen Learning Lab. Memphis Library. https://www.memphislibrary.org/cloud901/

Mishan, L. (2019, September 12). The distinctly American ethos of the grifter. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/t-magazine/the-distinctly-american-ethos-of-the-grifter.html

Posner, L. (2018, January 25). Social media may be messing with your perception of time. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2018/01/25/social-media-may-be-messing-with-your-perception-of-time_partner/

Ranger, J. (2020). Slow down! Digital deceleration towards A socialist social media. TripleC, 18(1), 254–267. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v18i1.1127

Syn, S. Y., Sinn, D., & Kim, S. (2023). Innovative public library services during the COVID-19 pandemic: Application and revision of social innovation typology. Library & Information Science Research, 45(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2023.101248

Thompson, P. (2024, March 28). Palmer Luckey says Anduril is working on AI weapons that ‘give us the ability to swiftly win any war’. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/palmer-luckey-anduril-defense-startup-ai-weapons-war-2024-3