44. Democratization of information.

Last summer, I met a woman who was hacking university students' and personnel's passwords to provide access to the world's largest electronic libraries for people who do not have such material readily available to them. I cannot say I am at ease with her methods, but at the same time, I can't categorically condemn her actions.

I've always been a curious cat. My mum still has stupid drawings of the continents I did when I was in kindergarten, and I remember avidly reading my illustrated books on geography, animals, and the human body. I loved coming up with theories ("Lungs are your soul!", "Dogs can sleep with adrenaline in their blood!") and I rejoiced the day my mother's alarm clock ran out of batteries and she let me break it into its smallest components because it was "broken."

I use Google and Wikipedia obsessively - to the point where I dread to think of the environmental disaster I am creating by keeping Google's huge search engines churning. Classics and related fields might have been a bit slow to join the merry bandwagon of free, open information online, but it's catching up fast.

And let me tell you, having professors e-mail me links to their entire body of publications instead of ferociously guarding their copyrights and sitting on unpublished data for years; running searches on entire museum collections complete with context information and descriptions; using specialized (and incredibly expensive if bought) dictionaries online is glorious. Glorious!

I believe having varied, open information available really does make the world a better place. It makes life easier, sure. (How did translators ever manage before Google? Furthermore, I organized correspondence from the 70s between scientists recently and boy, was keeping up-to-date on new research difficult.) More importantly, however, educated women have fewer and healthier children, are more conscious about protecting the environment, and, when empowered, sometimes keener and more capable of solving conflicts. While it's a rocky road filled with potential for complications, I believe in the theory of education -> fewer children, more food -> fewer wars -> happier people.

So no, I don't think it's right to hack people's computers. But I do thank every single author, publisher, blogger, twitterer, etc., who is making their view, their information and knowledge available to as many as possible.


This post was brought to you with the gracious help of roughly a dozen Google searches.