Introducing "Project 451"

Join the memory rebellion.

Left, a burning book. Right, firemen in Kharkiv

From a recent article in The Scholarly Kitchen:

Clarivate, the provider behind a number of resources key to academic libraries… announced that it is shifting to a “subscription-based access strategy,” meaning that it will no longer allow academic libraries to purchase perpetual licenses to content… [This] came just a week before Amazon ended users’ ability to download their Kindle purchases to a computer.

While it feels to many consumers like buying an e-book means they have purchased a file that they can use as they please, in reality they have bought the right to access the book through approved methods.

Two weeks ago I complained about the failure/refusal of commercial news organizations to link to primary source materials. What I thought was an annoying niche problem is really a full-blown crisis. Not only are primary sources becoming difficult to locate, we’re being made into information renters, who will soon be able to purchase only temporary access to digital information, with publishers reserving rights to retrieve and edit even data you thought you owned.

This brings Ray Bradbury’s famous Fahrenheit 451 scenario to life. If keeping hold of original versions of history is discouraged or prohibited, memory becomes rebellion. The new mechanism is a delete button instead of a flamethrower. Otherwise, it’s the exact theme in Bradbury’s book.

If you check the format of our new “Timeline” pieces, you’ll see we made an effort to find hard copies of every key document. Videos are not links, but embeds. Like the documents and written transcripts, they’ll be there as long as I’m allowed to publish. It would be irresponsible of me to tell people to download these materials to personal hard drives. However, it’s just journalism to point out that we have no way of preventing people from doing this. Bradbury’s firemen couldn’t stop people from memorizing books, either.

The new features we’re introducing are designed with these problems in mind. Americans showed fortitude in the last year in beating back (or at least wounding) a global censorship effort. Its new challenge will be finding ways to remember and record history in defiance of a creepy Year Zero ethos that’s become an institutional constant.

There’s no easy solution. The Wayback Machine is technically foolproof, but like any digitization project, legally vulnerable. Almost everything on the Internet is copyrighted, as anyone who’s glanced at the bottom of a web page knows:

Those who want their copyrighted material taken down can do so. It doesn’t sound unfair at all, until we start getting into the thorny area of public-interest documents and multimedia. What about quotes, data, and images from the sources we need to access, to check against current propaganda?

At least for now, I’m calling the new smorgasbord of “Library” features “Project 451” (although one friend already told me the idea is “gay”). Still, it’s the same type of collective, rebellious memory effort that the book’s characters pursued. As I explained in the livestream, it can work without reader help, but it’ll work a lot better if commenters and outside contributors add the odd line or two.

Oh, and this stuff is all going to be free. No paywalls for what we see as a public service.

THE LINEUP:

Table of Contents: At the bottom of the Racket face page there will be a pinned article with a searchable, chronological list of topics and related articles.

Timelines: We now have enough staff to get a Timeline up with basic reference docs within a day or so of that story hitting the news. Most Timelines won’t be as ambitious as the Ukraine War doc that new managing editor Greg Collard, Kathleen McCook and I each incurred migraines assembling this week. We made that one big to show what such a broad subject history would start to look like if it could be added to over time through crowdsourcing. Most will be more like the EPA/Zeldin piece coming today: quick reference guides, with maps to the known reference docs.

Readers hopefully also notice that we’ve added a cool service, taking foreign videos and adding translated subtitles before uploading. Our hope is that readers pitch in with documents or quotes or video/audio to patch gaps in our chronologies. We’re hoping that end of it goes faster once the interactive portion kicks in just a little more. To wit:

The Group Op-Ed. Next to every Timeline, there will be a related op-ed piece (“Is Russia at War With Ukraine, or With the West?”). It may start with a few paragraphs by me or someone on our staff, offering a brief opinion, usually prompted by the process of compiling Timelines (one drifts to interesting frames of mind after reading 1,000+ pages of broken treaties and bogus news stories). We want readers to comment as usual, but an editor (Greg, usually) will pick out notable contributions. We’ll highlight anyone who makes a well-written, cogent case, or has something interesting or unique to add. With permission, we’ll add them to the body of the main op-ed. If enough entries come in, we’ll stitch them together and re-publish them as articles (“Racket Readers on Why Russia Invaded Ukraine”).

Sites like Wikipedia or search engines like Google emphasize “authority.” Their idea of editing is gatekeeping: figuring what credentials make a person deserving of being heard. I disagree with “authority” as a metric. A human editor should only care if something is interesting. Funny has value, a crazy-ass theory has value, personal recollections are important, and even cultural references help (with Slavic politics, the right clip from the right mob movie is worth ten Brookings papers). Instead of one Wiki-style entry that attempts an inoffensive compilation of acceptable views, these family argument-type editorials should read as snapshots of what people really thought during these news cycles. It’s also a place where we can finally include the excellent idea of printing deleted comments from papers like the New York Times and Washington Post.

Do Your Own Research: We’re running regular interviews with people who can help audiences find information on their own. Our first entry (“Do Your Own Research: European Public Records”) is in the strike zone of multiple stories, including the censorship dispute triggered by J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, the fate of NATO in the wake of Zelensky’s White House visit, and the seeming interest of figures like Sir Keir Starmer in building a new European security structure independent from the United States. Paul Holden took me on an excellent tour of key search tools, offering a multitude of useful tips. As with all of these features, we want to hear from you if you think another search tool should be included, at Library@Racket.news.

A while ago, Walter Kirn and I started reading old short stories on America This Week because we were pals who like geeking out over books. It was fun and we became fast friends doing it, but it also became clear over time that there was a hint of the forbidden in the exercise. What Matt Orfalea does with his videos carries the same stigma. We’re not meant to remember now, nor are we encouraged to analyze thinkers of the past, I’m guessing because the people sold to us as intellectuals in the present compare so poorly.

Either way, it feels right to be flies in the soup of those who want people to get out of the habit of remembering.

Let’s make lying hard, and remembering easier.