Civic Health and Intellectual Freedom
The Hidden Premise Made Explicit
Infophilia, a Positive Psychology of Information | January 24, 2026 | Vol. 4 Issue 6 | Updated 01/24/26, 12:53 pm: Added "Notes On Western Republicanism" section
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Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2026). Civic health and intellectual freedom: The hidden premise made explicit. Infophilia: A Positive Psychology of Information, 4(6).
About the image: The rock bed creates the conditions for tidepools to form—just as civic health creates conditions for intellectual freedom.
The final essay in the intellectual freedom reimagined trilogy suggests that the question facing us is not what happens when freedom to read is under threat but when the freedom to know itself has collapsed. We, the people, are the bedrock—and builders of tidepools. What should be our intentions in this year of celebrations: the 150th anniversary of the American Library Association, 250th anniversary of our nation? Western republicanism still assumes infrastructure is neutral—built to protect individual rights, not contest collective capture of reality itself. This essay is what happens when we stop assuming.
In the spirit of intellectual freedom—and in recognition that individual foresight becomes collective power when institutions support it—this essay is open access. Share it, cite it, argue with it.
Civic Health and Intellectual Freedom
The Hidden Premise Made Explicit
This is civic health collapse: not when you have no choice, but when you stop recognizing that you do.
Just before the pandemic I left the sandbox of my life to enter another kind of cloister – an academic library with more than a century of tradition, excellence, and now, progressive social justice values. My job: streamline services and integrate information literacy into the graduate curriculum. I’d barely started when COVID happened.
The campus shut down. Robust remote and expanded access to the library became urgent. Yet, when I proposed shifting book budgets to ebooks and setting up digital workflows, some librarians resisted. They wanted to keep buying print books (other than standing and serial orders) from Amazon.
A quick study showed that local vendors could match Amazon’s pricing. Amazon orders required a separate workflow and workarounds. It didn’t matter. Amazon was the default. Changing vendors would require collective discussion, vendor evaluation, and staff training. Easier to just keep clicking the Amazon button.
This was 2020. The community we served was sheltering at home, couldn’t access physical books anyway, and desperately needed digital resources. But capitalist convenience won. Even when it made no economic or logistical sense.
At the same time, Amazon warehouse workers were trying to organize during that same pandemic. They faced a problem that previous generations of labor organizers never had: the company controlled their communication infrastructure. Amazon could monitor internal messaging, algorithmically identify “organizing risks,” and selectively enforce policies against coordination. Workers trying to build collective power had to use tools owned by the company they were trying to contest.
And libraries—were funding that same company. Not because we didn’t understand the problem but because Amazon was the default. The path of least resistance.
But Amazon isn’t our only complicity. As law professor Ashley Krenelka Chase pointed out in her Charleston Conference critique one of our biggest vendors, RELX (Reed Elsevier/LexisNexis) increased lobbying spending by $130,000 in a single quarter to fight the American Data Privacy and Protection Act. We read their journals, use SSRN for our faculty, and—perhaps most significantly—we and our patrons are part of their massive data brokerage business. What Sarah Lamdan calls “data cartels” in my previous essay (and the Libby app, Rakuten OverDrive, AI that some librarians are fighting). We’re not just buying books from platforms. We’re feeding patron data to corporations that lobby against privacy protections.
The pattern repeats across platforms, across space and time. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, journalists, activists, and researchers who’d built networks there for over a decade discovered they had no collective power to contest the new terms. He banned critics, throttled competitors, turned verification into pay-to-play. The platform that had enabled movements—Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo—became a billionaire’s vanity project.
I left Twitter in fall 2021, before the Musk acquisition. Not prophecy. Just pattern recognition. When a platform's incentives diverge from civic health, exit becomes necessary. By 2023, other librarians were asking the same question I'd wrestled with: "Where do we go when platforms become hostile to the work we do?" That question led to collective action. ALA developed post-Twitter guidance. Libraries shifted to Mastodon, BlueSky, owned infrastructure—coordinated migration rather than scattered retreat. Not perfect. Fragmentation still weakens reach. But it proved libraries could contest platform power through collective refusal, not lawsuits or regulation—just organized exit from systems designed to extract rather than support civic work.
By January 2026, the lesson had been tested again. During ICE raids in Minnesota, communities that had spent years building mutual aid networks on social media went silent. People stopped posting—not because they stopped caring, but because the platforms they’d used to coordinate were now surveillance infrastructure. They moved to Signal, organized in person, fragmented into smaller networks invisible to those who needed help. Meanwhile, Google’s search timeline for these raids omitted critical events entirely. The infrastructure designed for connection had become infrastructure for erasure.
That same month, when the U.S. administration renewed threats to acquire Greenland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned of "the passing of the old rules-based order" and called for "the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together"—before nations are "forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.”
Meanwhile, markets responded (again!): “Sell America.”
People could leave platforms individually. Nations could condemn threats diplomatically. But coordination, memory, organizing capacity—all stayed locked inside privately owned infrastructure or moved too slowly against algorithmic speed. Some communities tried Signal, Mastodon, BlueSky. Some nations tried multilateral forums. But fragmentation itself weakens collective power, and platform-mediated markets now move faster than democratic deliberation.
Amazon and Twitter. Labor and speech. Libraries and journalists. Different domains. Same civic health collapse: the tools we use to coordinate, deliberate, and contest power are owned by the powers we need to contest.
This is civic health collapse in its purest form: not when you have no choice, but when you stop recognizing that you do. When capitalist convenience becomes reason enough to fund your own obsolescence. And when the infrastructure for public goods is privatized, even public institutions become complicit in their own erosion.
The Hidden Premise
Civic health is the organizing condition that determines whether information, economic, financial, and intellectual health remain public concerns rather than private outcomes.
In the self-censorship essay, I argued that information health connects to intellectual freedom—that outsourcing consciousness construction to algorithmic feeds erodes our capacity to think independently from within.
In the platform capture essay, I added economic and financial health to that equation—that we cannot think freely when the infrastructure of knowledge is controlled by platforms optimized for extraction rather than enlightenment.
Now I name what anchors all of these: civic health.
Civic health is the organizing condition that determines whether information, economic, financial, and intellectual health remain public concerns rather than private outcomes. It is the capacity of a society to deliberate without being constantly polarized or monetized, to trust institutions enough to act collectively, to contest power without sliding into nihilism, to reproduce norms of reciprocity and shared fate.
Once civic health collapses, information becomes propaganda or noise. Economic health becomes GDP without distribution. Financial health becomes personal risk management. Intellectual freedom becomes a luxury good. You can still speak, but you can’t coordinate. You can still think, but only inside systems designed to fragment attention and extract value.
Platform power is uniquely corrosive. Byung-Chul Han calls this “psychopolitics”—power that doesn’t prohibit, it optimizes. Digital platforms turn us into “achievement subjects”: we exploit ourselves thinking we’re free, we swarm without deliberating, we coordinate without collective consciousness. Platforms condition what we think to search for, how we frame questions, which arguments seem valid before we even begin. The swarm moves fast. The assembly moves slowly. Platform capitalism has chosen the swarm.
Without civic health, freedom becomes procedural—you have the formal right to speak, but the material conditions make speech costly, dangerous, or irrelevant. And platforms quietly inherit sovereignty.
Classical Western republicanism doesn’t see this well. It worries about domination by the state but assumes markets and infrastructure are neutral backdrops. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” promised that individual self-interest would aggregate into collective good. But Smith never imagined infrastructure monopolies that could condition self-interest itself—platforms that don’t just respond to demand but manufacture it.
And republicanism certainly never imagined what Philip K. Dick explored: infrastructure that manufactures reality itself. Across his novels, Dick depicted worlds where memories can be implanted, where simulations feel more real than reality, where the question “what is true?” becomes unanswerable. Legal scholars cite Dick when debating whether freedom of thought protects our right to artificial realities.
But platform power doesn’t control minds through coercion. It manufactures the information environment where certain thoughts become inevitable. Google’s search timeline determines what happened. Facebook’s feed determines what matters. Amazon’s recommendations determine what exists. We’re already in the “Experience Machine.” We just call it “personalization.”
Freedom framed as non-interference misses domination that works through dependence and design—and through the quiet manufacture of what counts as real.
Two countries offer instructive contrasts—as experiments that reveal what intellectual freedom requires when infrastructure itself becomes contested ground.
India: Naming the Problem Without Building the Solution
India’s constitutional imagination named what Western republicanism has missed: freedom requires social and economic conditions, not just formal rights.
The Indian Constitution doesn’t just protect speech. It directs the state to secure “the right to an adequate means of livelihood,” to distribute material resources “to subserve the common good” (Directive Principles, Articles 39-41). It recognized that rights without material security are rhetorical.
And India had civic traditions that understood deliberation as collective practice. Panchayats and other assemblies (sabhas) operated on the principle that authority could be collective, procedural, and contested. Not democratic in the modern sense, often exclusionary, but built around deliberation as civic responsibility.
But there’s a catch: assemblies without universal material security become gatekeepers. Hierarchy hardens. Those who control access to material survival control who speaks, who gets heard, who can afford to dissent.
India named the problem in its Constitution but never built the institutional capacity to defend those conditions against concentrated private power. The Directive Principles remained aspirational. The result: formal rights to speech coexist with material conditions that make speech costly or irrelevant for most people.
And now, infrastructure privatization. When internet shutdowns can silence entire regions, when platform access becomes synonymous with participation, civic health depends on corporate goodwill. India has become one of the world’s leaders in internet shutdowns, with Kashmir experiencing prolonged blackouts since 2019, and platforms like Jio/Reliance tying civic participation to corporate infrastructure.
The global pattern intensifies: In January 2026, Iran implemented a nationwide internet shutdown after 12 days of anti-regime protests—activists report the government is planning a permanent break from the global internet. When states control the on/off switch and platforms control access terms, the constitutional promise of free speech requires infrastructure we can contest.
A deeper irony: India has become a soft power in compute—engineers, founders, architects of global platforms building the infrastructure that mediates global thought. Yet that technical leadership operates outside Indian civic traditions, often against intellectual freedom as a public good. The panchayat tradition—deliberation as collective responsibility, authority as contestable—has no obvious translation into systems designed to maximize engagement and monetize attention. But if Indian engineers can build global platforms, they can also build civic alternatives—if the panchayat tradition can be translated into code.
Scandinavia: Making Domination Expensive
Scandinavia took a different path. The Scandinavian countries have made domination expensive.
When education, healthcare, time, and income are secured collectively, cognition becomes harder to capture privately. Strong labor institutions mean workers can contest power without risking survival. Universal services mean civic participation isn’t gated by wealth. High-trust regulation means institutions are predictable enough to build on, accountable enough to contest.
Landing in Oslo airport after an international flight, I wanted to use the bathroom but lacking the kroner, I hesitated. A passing stranger noticed and just pressed some kroner into my hand. That’s how I entered Norwegian land—literally relieved—to learn profound lessons about universal provision and civic trust.
This might seem trivial, but it’s not. It shows a society where access costs are visible and immediately addressed through informal civic practice. Contrast that with platform capture: access costs are invisible (you’re the product), and civic practice has been replaced by terms of service agreements we can barely read.
E.F. Schumacher wrote Small Is Beautiful (1973) to critique industrial gigantism—what republicanism missed. His insight holds for platform capitalism: small isn’t just beautiful, it’s governable. You can contest a local institution. You can’t contest an algorithm optimized for a billion users.
Schumacher understood something essential about education and civic health: "The greatest resource is education," he wrote, but education as transmission of values, not just know-how. "Know-how is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence." When education becomes credential collection, when learning becomes optimization for market value, when knowledge becomes data extraction—civic health collapses. The Scandinavian model treats education as formation of civic subjects capable of collective deliberation, not human capital optimized for individual advancement.
But even Scandinavia isn’t immune. Platform capture is global. Yet Scandinavia's capacity to regulate, tax, and contest without collapsing shows what civic health makes possible—a model under pressure, but not yet defeated.
What Intellectual Freedom Means When Civic Health Anchors It
Intellectual freedom survives when material life is secure enough that cognition isn’t continuously auctioned. Assemblies only work when participants are not negotiating from precarity.
Without universal material security, assemblies become gatekeepers. Without civic accountability, platforms become sovereigns. Without institutions that can contest concentrated power, freedom becomes procedural performance.
Intellectual freedom in these times of platform power is the collective capacity to think without being continuously optimized for extraction—protected through:
Civic health: Institutions strong enough to contest concentrated power. Spaces where disagreement produces learning, not estrangement.
Material security: Universal provision that secures the conditions for cognition—when education, healthcare, time, and income are guaranteed collectively, attention can’t be fully captured privately.
Public infrastructure: Knowledge systems governed for collective flourishing, not privatized for profit.
Information health. Economic health. Financial health. Civic health. Intellectual freedom. All these collapse into each other once you notice where power actually sits.
The Civic Work of Libraries
intellectual freedom was never individual in the first place—it was always civic, always collective, always dependent on the unsexy work of building institutions that outlast us—libraries.
The self-censorship essay asked: Who are we being prevented from becoming?
The platform capture essay asked: What’s your place in this epic battle?
This essay asks: How can we build civic health strong enough to reclaim thinking as a public good?
We do that best when we remember that intellectual freedom was never individual in the first place—it was always civic, always collective, always dependent on the unsexy work of building institutions that outlast us—by looking at our libraries.
Libraries are one of the few remaining institutions where access isn’t auctioned, where knowledge is treated as a public good, where the infrastructure of thought remains—however tenuously—in civic hands. But librarians cannot defend intellectual freedom alone, and they cannot defend it if they become complicit in their own erosion by defaulting to capitalist convenience.
In late 2025 / early 2026, ALA restructured its Office for Intellectual Freedom, integrating it into the Public Policy & Advocacy Department. The restructuring reframed intellectual freedom work as requiring "closer alignment" across advocacy, policy, and member support, toward "coordination" and "responsiveness." Does this represent adaptive infrastructure, a shift from symbolic brand defense against book bans? That depends on what library workers choose to build next.
The restructuring offers library advocates and workers a chance to reimagine intellectual freedom as adaptive infrastructure contesting platform capture.
We cannot defend intellectual freedom while defaulting to capitalist convenience. We cannot build civic health while funding its erosion—whether that’s clicking the Amazon button, feeding patron data to RELX’s data cartels, or assuming platforms will remain neutral.
Intellectual freedom was never individual in the first place. It was always civic, always collective, always dependent on infrastructure we control rather than infrastructure that controls us.
The work of rebuilding that infrastructure—unsexy, difficult, institutional—is the work of our time.
But.
This is why we build libraries—to outlast the chaos.
Notes
On Western Republicanism: Space constraints prevented me from including all references, but one deserves acknowledgment for catalyzing this essay’s direction—through its limitations. Sean Irving’s “The West’s Forgotten Republican Heritage” (Aeon, 2024, August 8, https://aeon.co/essays/the-wests-forgotten-republican-heritage) revives economic republicanism, extending non-domination from politics to economics as essential for authentic freedom. Valuable, but the essay centers 19th-century Western thinkers (Hodgskin, Proudhon, George), noting only brief legacies in Singapore/Hong Kong land taxes, without engaging postcolonial republics like India, whose Directive Principles (1950) explicitly linked economic security as foundational to speech rights.
What catalyzed my thinking beyond Irving’s argument was Aeon‘s framing: “our unfinished republics.” That possessive—”our”—revealed how Western lineage dominates even progressive scholarship theorizing economic power. It sent me looking elsewhere.
India’s Directive Principles link resource distribution to rights and freedoms; Scandinavia’s post-1945 models operationalized economic-political interdependence through universal provision—decades before Irving’s 2024 Western economic republicanism—and they did so while centering collective welfare, not individual non-domination.
This explains why Western republicanism repeatedly “forgets” insights other traditions grasped earlier. That amnesia costs us when platforms capture infrastructure theory assumed neutral. The blindness is epistemic.
While ALA celebrates 150 years and the nation 250, the platforms that now mediate most information access are celebrating their own milestones: 2026 will see Apple’s 50th anniversary, Microsoft’s 56th, ARPANET’s 57th, Google’s 28th (parent company Alphabet’s 12th). On January 12, 2026, Alphabet hit a $4 trillion market cap, joining Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple amid AI-driven growth (Gemini, cloud services). The civic institutions we’re celebrating predate platforms by centuries. Will they outlast platforms?
The American Library Association (ALA) updated its Core Values in 2024 to include "Public Good" as one of five explicit values alongside Access, Equity, Intellectual Freedom and Privacy, and Sustainability, defining it as "working to improve society and protect the rights to education, literacy, and intellectual freedom," with libraries positioned as essential institutions in democratic societies.
ALA member communications (2026, January 21). https://www.ala.org/news/2026/01/american-library-association-strengthens-intellectual-freedom-work-through-integrated.
By libraries, I also include archives and museums.
Potter, C. (2024). What Should Libraries Do? A Banned Books Week conversation with writer, translator, and librarian Frieda Afary about how to use our civic spaces to combat disinformation with knowledgeable conversations. Substack. This conversation with Frieda who (like me) frames libraries beyond just access/resistance: as civic spaces for hosting evidence-based fact-checked discussions (reimagining IF when “thought infrastructure” is privatized; empathy-building via deep reading (infophilia for flourishing), promoting humanities, continuing ed post-COVID (economic health tied to IF and exit vendor extraction). Afary's Pathfinders exemplify a collective refusal to platform fiat, proving libraries can contest capture without courts—vital for my previous essay’s orbit-bound infrastructure warning. Complements Lisa Schiff's federal censorship with grassroots tools.
Schiff, L. (2025). Resisting Censorship and Defending the Integrity of Federally Supported Information. DTTP 53 (2). Documents to the People, ALA GoDORT 53 (2). https://journals.ala.org/index.php/dttp/article/view/8521/11838 - This strongly complements my arguments by documenting external governmental censorship (top-down suppression), which amplifies my focus on internal threats like self-censorship and platform capture. It’s an exceptional read of “Orwellian” censorship paired with my “Huxleyan” internals (algorithmic feeds warping diets, eroding agency).
Blitz, M. J. “The Right to an Artificial Reality? Freedom of Thought and the Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” examines whether First Amendment protections of freedom of thought extend to technologies that create artificial realities, false memories, or deepfake experiences. The last question is key for IR reimagined and his exact quote:
“Of course, freedom of thought entails a right to believe in falsehoods. When people swear that the earth is flat or firmly believe in the fantasies of 9/11 truthers or QAnon, the government cannot constitutionally coerce them to think otherwise. As the Supreme Court said in 1969, ‘[o]ur whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.’ But does it likewise rebel at the thought of giving the government power to limit how we shape our minds with Experience Machines, or other VR devices? Does it let the government restrict the technologies we might use to create and implant false memories to reinforce our false beliefs? Or, perhaps, recruit others to design ‘deepfake’ videos that vividly—and convincingly—show us and others a world we would like to believe in?” (Law Repository, University of Michigan). https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=mtlr
Boak, J. (2026, January 21). Stock market sends a message to Trump on Greenland. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/trump-greenland-denmark-stock-markets-davos-3ec896e5f68f21f8c8b067bc7c31d5fc
Chase, A. K. (2023, February). Legally speaking—Time to get loud about data brokers. Against the Grain, 34(6). https://www.charleston-hub.com/2023/02/legally-speaking-time-to-get-loud-about-data-brokers/
Constitution of India. Certain Principles of Policy to be Followed by the State. https://www.constitutionofindia.net/articles/article-39-certain-principles-of-policy-to-be-followed-by-the-state/
On Consciousness / Neuroscience
Frith, C. D. (2025). Sharing the world—A social aspect of consciousness. Open Mind, 9, 814–824. https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi.a.5. For a deeper exploration of how consciousness constructs reality, see my earlier essay “The Hallucinated Reality: Is the brain a prediction machine, a theater, or an integrated information generator?” There, I drew on neuroscientist Anil Seth’s concept of reality as a “controlled hallucination.” That piece examined how our brains construct perception through sensory input, past experiences, and predictions. My self-censorship and platform capture arguments extend that neuroscience using Frith’s recent work on consciousness: if consciousness is already a controlled hallucination, platforms that control our sensory inputs (search results, feeds, timelines) are literally manufacturing the raw material our brains use to construct reality. We don’t just consume platform content—we hallucinate a world shaped by algorithmic curation. (BL: feeds warp information diets, aligning with Frith's "shared models" vulnerable to curation)
Intellectual Freedom implication of Adaptive Infophilia
Adaptive infophilia—healthy info-seeking—counters threats by fostering "infophilic lifestyles" for collective intelligence, trust, and critical integration, protecting against groupthink and ensuring IF enables autonomous judgment.
Dissent and Diversity: Builds “infophilic lifestyles” for questioning consensus—akin to Frith’s “odd one out”—through information literacy that sustains collective capacity for critical judgment. Not “think for yourself” in isolation, but “think with others” who can contest your assumptions.
Platform Resistance: Advocates economic decoupling (e.g., paid subs, open access, open source, degoogling) to reclaim agency from data-harvesting feeds. Remember: open does not mean free. And open does not “public good” either!
Collective Resilience: Fosters group intelligence through shared verification, mitigating groupthink collapse i.e. preventing information cascades where collective belief detaches from verifiable reality.
Dick, P. K. (2019, December 14). If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others [Speech]. Festival International de la Science-Fiction, Metz, France, September 24, 1977. Intellectual Deep Web [Video]. YouTube. 41 minutes long.
“Experience Machine” is from Robert Noziek’s 1974 work Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society. Stanford University Press.
Han, B.-C. (2023). In the swarm: On the internet and relational thinking. MIT Press.
Hudson, D. L., Jr. (2009, updated 2025). Thurgood Marshall. In The First Amendment Encyclopedia. Middle Tennessee State University. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/thurgood-marshall/ (see Stanley v. Georgia (1969))
Kamdar, R. (2026, January 20). India’s largest company, Reliance, faces the biggest challenge at home from its retail slowdown and Russian oil sanctions. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/india-reliance-oil-russia-trump-tariff-sanctions-retail-slowdown.html
Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (2018, Crown) makes the case for libraries as civic infrastructure that builds social capital. My argument builds on his foundation but extends it to the digital infrastructure of thought itself, which has been captured by platforms in ways that physical library buildings cannot contest alone.
Schumacher, E. F. Small is beautiful: Economics as if people mattered. Harper & Row. First Perennial Library 1975 edition. Another point: Schumacher explicitly invokes Kafka’s The Castle and uses it as a metaphor for modern society’s futile quest for meaning amid dehumanizing systems.
Stan, M. (2025, June 26). Freedom to read – What does it mean? Joco Library Foundation. https://www.jocolibraryfoundation.org/2025/06/26/freedom-to-read-library-lets-loose/
World Economic Forum. (2026, January 20). Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada [Speech transcript]. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/
On “Sell America”
Fortune (Jan 12, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/sell-america-stocks-fed-independence/) is a strong early source for market reaction specifics (e.g., gold at $4,600, yield data, ING/Pesole quotes); CNBC and Barron though offer more contextual framing. Bloomberg (January 20, 2026) provides the most direct hit linking the Greenland/tariff threats to a "Sell America" revival, with overnight market chaos details. Newsweek and CNBC offer strong corroboration on the resurgence post-threats: Wigglesworth, R. (2026, January 20). Trump's Greenland, tariff threats revive 'Sell America' trade [Newsletter]. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-01-20/trump-greenland-threats-tariff-chaos-brings-back-sell-america
Winkelstein, C. (2019, January 4). To engage or not to engage? Social media in public libraries. Public Libraries Online. https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2019/01/to-engage-or-not-to-engage-social-media-in-public-libraries/
Coming Next
The intellectual freedom reimagined trilogy connects to several forthcoming essays examining how institutions navigate (or fail to navigate) platform capture and become co-opted into people capture (this is adaptive infophilia in broader systemic / institutional level settings):
The Impact of the By The People and Mass Persuasion Projects by the Library of Congress on the Future of Copyright, the Public Domain, and AI Training Data Governance - When public institutions inadvertently feed the platforms they should be contesting
Cassandra’s Library: Why Academic Institutions Ignore Their Own Researchers - The structural reasons libraries and universities can’t hear warnings from those who know the most
The FTC 6(b) Series: AI and Parasocial Intimacy with Children - What happens when platforms manufacture emotional reality for the most vulnerable
More about the image: The Crystal Cove tidepool imagery in this intellectual freedom reimagined trilogy uses an ocean metaphor to explain why libraries matter:
Bedrock = Libraries/public spaces (parks) creating stable community foundations.
Pools = Safe zones where people can share ideas without fear, building trust and understanding.
Ocean = Algorithm-driven chaos (social media, misinformation) flooding communities with noise, leading to isolation and self-censorship.
Libraries are civic anchors. When we lose these foundations (to privatization, digital churn, information overload, fatigue, overwhelm) society becomes a lawless ocean where no one can navigate together. The image shows why protecting intellectual freedom requires physical and digital infrastructure that holds space for shared humanity.
This picture is everything btw
I appreciate your helpful feedback. Thank you! I'm still learning to write more like a storyteller and less like an academic. And I find that using my own photos as metaphors helps both me and my readers engage better with the metaphysical themes in my writing.