FTC 6(b) orders, Venezuela’s Information Networks, and More
How Decentralized Systems Defend Democracy
Infophilia, A Positive Psychology of Information | February 14, 2025 - Vol. 4, Issue 10
✨Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly serial exploring how our love of information and connections can help us all thrive, individually and collectively. Avant-garde research.
Biophilia | Civic Infophilia | Intellectual Freedom | Technophilia | Toolbox | Wellbeing
What’s new?
We begin a new series exploring FTC 6(b) orders as tools for fostering healthy infophilia—enhancing evidence-based policy for individuals, libraries, and information practice in different fields.
A quick look at Venezuela’s citizen‑led information networks, Bezos’s 10,000‑year clock, and an Anthropic safety expert’s warning “world is in peril,” and acting on values.
The FTC 6(b) orders that are reshaping AI‑chatbot regulation.
📌Access & Attribution: This serial offers free previews always and occasional open access essays to keep scholarship accessible. Students and those facing financial barriers can request complimentary access. If you find value here, please cite the original work and consider supporting the public scholarship through subscription. Proper attribution sustains this work and models healthy information engagement.
📚 Book Club Announcement
Date: Feb. 18 Wed. 12 noon Pacific Time
Book: The Privatization of Everything by Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian (The New Press, 2021).
Chapter 2 complements this issue’s themes of decentralization and integrity.
Free for all readers.
Contact me for the Zoom invite.
Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2026). FTC 6(b) orders, Venezuela’s information networks, and more: How decentralized systems defend democracy. Infophilia, a positive psychology of information 4 (10).
Signal & Noise
I still feel a physical pain in my gut, yet my spirit lifts whenever I recall our attempts to build dLIST/DL-Harvest. It was an open source open access (OA) cross-disciplinary repository with federated metadata harvesting and searching. Our goal was to unify the fragmented literature of information sciences – including library science, archival science, museum informatics, information retrieval, information literacy, knowledge organization, systems, and more. Our field does so much for access and preservation to other disciplines, what about our own literature, we asked. But the web was still in its infancy, and few in the library field understood our long term vision, OA values, or why improving a legal tool—copyright transfer agreements—was so vital to our scholarly communication and publishing. When I felt I’d given everything I could, I left the profession I loved and for which I’d trained. Now, I enjoy the freedom of independent scholarship, especially research and writing, a flow beyond compare.
Venezuela’s citizens have shown us that when state and private information channels collapse, the very tools we’ve long ignored—decentralized networks, encrypted messaging, and community‑driven truth‑sharing—become the foundation of democratic resilience. Open knowledge turns into a weapon against authoritarianism. It’s why citizens everywhere will benefit from acting on their values and ditching apps and platforms that weaponize our data. Venezuelan citizens’ digital security tactics demonstrate how open knowledge tools counter state and bad-actor data weaponization.
We’re living in a nepantla—the liminal space Anzaldúa described—where old certainties dissolve and new possibilities emerge. Venezuela’s story shows how communities practice information love—a term we adapt from Greenshields and Polkinghorne—to rebuild agency against algorithmic control. This mirrors the FTC 6(b) approach, which treats platforms as systemic entities requiring transparency to safeguard user well-being.
In this sense, this piece is meant to be read like a Valentine’s Day love letter.
🥰 Happy Valentine’s Day weekend!
The Information Networks Connecting Venezuelans in Uncertain Times
Lissbeth Boon details how Venezuelans—facing years of government-imposed censorship, disinformation, and repression under Chavismo, have developed a resilient citizen-driven information network to survive authoritarian control. Despite systematic internet shutdowns, blocked platforms (like WhatsApp and X), and the imprisonment of journalists, ordinary citizens used hidden folders, VPNs, satellite internet (e.g. Starlink), and peer-to-peer messaging to create a decentralized system that shared real-time information during the US military operation on January 3, 2026. Crucially, this network bypassed state-controlled media (like VTV broadcasting unrelated content) and enabled independent journalists to broadcast minute-by-minute coverage when official channels were silenced.
Key Lesson: Authoritarian regimes weaponize information control to fracture truth. Citizens who proactively build resilient, decentralized digital networks—prioritizing privacy, cross-platform sharing, and community vigilance—become essential guardians of democratic discourse. Venezuela demonstrates that democracy requires active citizen stewardship of information, not passive reliance on state-controlled channels, as regimes increasingly deploy digital repression to suffocate dissent.
What Does This Have to Do with Open-Access Disciplinary Archives?
The 10,000-Year Clock - Long Now
Are we being good ancestors? - Jonas Salk
We often say “time is money” and we’ve discussed self-censorship and how we can betray our future selves. Yet most of us rarely monetize time to the extent some capitalists do and few question our information ecosystems with a long term perspective—often resignedly giving up privacy for “capitalist convenience.” Jeff Bezos is a stark contrast.
Bezos is funding a 10,000-year clock inside a mountain, inspired by Jonas Salk’s question: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’ But is he following his own advice and being a good ancestor? The evidence suggests he isn’t. While Bezos’s 10,000-Year Clock symbolizes long term thinking, his Amazon, AWS, and Blue Origin record—marked by labor exploitation, union-busting, tax avoidance, and short-term profit maximization—shows capital consistently trumping worker welfare and sustainability.
His business model exemplifies how platform design prioritizes engagement over user welfare—a tension librarians must navigate when teaching critical evaluation. Does Bezos embody the “time is money” capitalist archetype? Is he relentlessly optimizing Amazon and AWS for short-term extraction (labor quotas, union resistance, market dominance) while his 10,000-Year Clock gestures at long-term thinking without reforming the empire’s extractive core?
“The World is in Peril” - AI Safety
A recent essay of The New Yorker on Substack asks: What is Claude? Anthropic doesn’t know, either. Gideon Lewis-Krause writes about going inside the company and what he found. It’s a compelling, beautifully written, and human story. However, while the article celebrates Anthropic’s research into interpretable AI, we cannot forget how the company’s practices including stolen books, flawed AI systems, and a $1.5 billion lawsuit settlement, contradict Anthropic’s integrity narrative. These realities clash with their constitutional AI safety branding, highlighting the extractive practices common in the industry. Lewis-Krause’s writing reveals a critical gap: tech journalism often focuses on innovation while ignoring the human and legal costs of AI development.
In this context, the departure of Anthropic’s AI safety research lead Mrinank Sharma around the same time as the New Yorker Claude article is noteworthy. Here’s what he wrote:
It is clear to me that the time has come to move on. I continuously find myself reckoning with our situation.
The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.
We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.
Moreover, throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions.
I’ve seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society too.
Mrinank Sharma (emphasis mine)
Some time before Sharma’s announcement, Zoë Hitzig, an OpenAI researcher also left that company over its decision to introduce ads into ChatGPT.
Sharma is hoping to “become invisible.” Forget institutional realities. Write poetry.