The New Enlightenment • The New Enlightenment Chapter 11. Our Moment Peter B. Kaufman Published on: Feb 23, 2021 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) The New Enlightenment • The New Enlightenment Chapter 11. Our Moment We have to convene more regular conversations, publish more systematic financial and legal analyses, produce more frequent programming, curate more substantial exhibitions, and teach more detailed courses—all about the ways in which we might restore control over the information economy we have been so busily victimized by until today. At MIT we have convened a working group on open (Open 2020, as we’ve called it), to advance the discussion points herein and the future of knowledge and open learning— inviting visionary stakeholders from throughout the university and experts and creative advocates from outside the institute, inviting in funders and underwriters and other strategic partners. The people we are inviting and assembling—from Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation; from the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, the Public Broadcasting Service, and National Public Radio; legal experts on rights, including free speech and copyright; historians of education and media; librarians, publishers, museum curators, technologists—are like a Constituent Assembly or a Continental Congress, but even more like a freely assembled Rebel Alliance, a nonprofit Sanhedrin of activists and teachers who together (with you) are leading us out of this mess as stakeholders in the future of the non-neoliberal web.1 Another new MIT-originated initiative is the Knowledge Futures Group, established in 2019 to address precisely these issues of public control over publishing and search.2 So much of what is fascinating on the web is produced by us, but somehow it is owned or being run—published, sold, licensed, rented out, agented—by others. We in this sector operate some of the best business schools in the world, so why do we not have our own McKinsey Group, one that could study the fish soup of a financial ecosystem that is scholarly publishing and university librarianship and information science and turn it back into its original aquarium? We have some of the best and most accomplished graduates out there, so why do we not have our own advertising agency, equipped to sell access and time on our digital platforms to a short client list of the companies whose interests could conceivably align with ours? Or our own lobbying group—based in Washington and state capitols, to campaign for better decisions about the issues that affect us and our world so deeply? Or our own legal and business advocacy group, which could—more effectively than the Association of American Universities or American Association of University Professors, the American Alliance of Museums, the Society of American Archivists or Association of Moving Image Archivists, America’s Public Television Stations, the advocacy workers we all hire, the agents and representatives we enlist, the labor unions and other collectives that have, 2 The New Enlightenment • The New Enlightenment Chapter 11. Our Moment basically, missed the forest for the trees—argue for our rights,3 and maybe one day pull off actions the equal of a Pullman Strike to bring more awareness to the systemic problems we face as a sector and thus as a nation?4 Who should be able to say, even a bit, that they own our knowledge? To have some kind of metaphorical purchase on it is fine. To have rights to control some of it, even exclusive rights, for a time—okay. But to own it? Outright? And ostensibly in perpetuity? No. Efforts are under way, especially now in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, to establish a so-called public sphere—or “public space”—for public-service and educational content. Visionaries at cultural and educational institutions and in journalism and related fields are now joining cutting-edge leaders in audiovisual production, so we may actually be getting somewhere. Indeed, the pandemic has brought forth collaborative projects of the sort that true public service broadcasting was founded for—projects involving television and radio, museums, universities, hospitals now, concert halls, and schools: the entire knowledge industry, and much of the culture sector. Here is the BBC: Our core role is to bring trusted news and information to audiences in the UK and around the world in a fast-moving situation, and counter confusion and misinformation. We will help people in the UK deal with the impact of the crisis on their own lives, by providing advice, education and support. We will keep people entertained, providing laughter, escapism, companionship, shared experiences and a sense of connection to the outside world. At a time when British culture is having to close its doors, the BBC [. .] can give British culture an audience that can’t be there in person. We propose to run an essential arts and culture service—Culture in Quarantine—that will keep the Arts alive in people’s homes [. .] This arts and culture service will include guides to shuttered exhibitions or permanent collections in museums and galleries; performances from world-class musicians and comedians; new plays created especially for broadcast featuring exceptional talent; the experience of book festivals with privileged access to 3 The New Enlightenment • The New Enlightenment Chapter 11. Our Moment authors and great ideas switched online; and quarantine diaries from creative visionaries. We will also be offering jewels from the archive, ensuring that brand new theatre and dance performances will join with modern classics to create a repertory theatre of broadcast.5 The great Czech writer and playwright and later president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, next to Nelson Mandela perhaps our only modern philosopher-king, spoke of the possibility that certain elements of our human experience “do not—without our really being aware of it—point somewhere further, beyond their apparent limits” and whether “right here, in our everyday lives” “certain challenges are not already encoded, quietly waiting for the moment when they will be read and grasped.” The real question, he maintained, “is whether the ‘brighter future’ is really always so distant”: What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?6 But—we need more. The forces that line up to shut down these kinds of experiments— often led by rightsholders seeking to monetize content before everything is available online—are strong: years ago, they put the kibosh on an early, majestic experiment at the BBC in 2005, and they have been busy before and since. Consortial efforts are required because the world’s strongest vested interests—whether Elsevier, Wiley, Disney, Sony, Warner, or any of a hundred others—are commercializing our knowledge, locking it away from us, exerting a powerful counterforce upon its natural, Newtonian trajectory into the Commons. That force lasts longer than the lifetime of single human advocates, and when these nefarious and financially powerful corporations expand and merge and acquire one another, they benefit by receiving not only the assets and revenue of the companies they buy but the accrued man-days of their institutional existences, their connections, their collective suppression strategies—the momentum behind which is considerable. When church and state working together (the church being the publisher, or JSTOR, of its day), neutralize or eliminate our greatest advocates and heroes, the only way we can combat their power is by aggressive and collective action. We have to launch a consortial effort to take back the public broadcasting efforts we seem to have abandoned, writ large, as a global society—a consortial effort to establish, produce, coprogram a new web network, perhaps called “public sphere broadcasting”?7 One devoted to the public weal—rather than to the bottom line. 4 The New Enlightenment • The New Enlightenment Chapter 11. Our Moment We might (this means: we should) therefore want to start (this means we should start right away) a new national, even international, commission of experts from science, media, technology, and the arts to explore the proper role for the university and sister knowledge institutions in our modern and broken information ecosystem. This would be an echo of the Carnegie Commission on educational broadcasting that MIT’s former president James Rhyne Killian called for and chaired in the 1960s. Though it was bold, and produced a report full of passion, effectively paving the way for our current system of public broadcasting, the Carnegie Commission operated in a world that could not have imagined our current epistemic crisis. On the other hand, its members could not have imagined the possibilities that the networked world presents to us today. Visionaries almost a decade ago called for the great global meta-university—a great global meta-archive of knowledge—as well. MIT’s former president Charles Vest spoke of “a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The meta-university will enable, not replace, residential campuses, especially in wealthier regions. It will bring cost efficiencies to institutions through the shared development of educational materials. It will be adaptive, not prescriptive. It will serve teachers and learners in both structured and informal contexts. It will speed the propagation of high-quality education and scholarship. It will build bridges across cultures and political boundaries. It will be particularly important to the developing world.”8 We have to start consciously collaborating with one another and producing—but immediately—for this new knowledge network. Signs of what is possible are evident everywhere. The Internet Archive, always a host and sponsor of such coproductions, is working with Wikipedia now, digitizing books so that links to sources in Wikipedia link all the way through to the books themselves—and render up images and text on the cited pages.