How Silicon Valley, the dark net, and digital culture have affected
our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading,
and truth.
In October 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Ross William Ulbricht was arrested
at the Glen Park Public Branch Library in San Francisco, accused of
being the "Dread Pirate Roberts" and mastermind of a dark net drug
marketplace known as Silk Road. Ulbricht was an ardent libertarian who
believed Silk Road--described by the New York Times as "the largest,
most sophisticated criminal enterprise the internet has ever seen"--was
battling the forces of big government. He was convicted two years later
of money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic
narcotics and sentenced to life in prison.
Art historian Pamela Lee reads this event as a fairy tale of disruption
rather than an isolated episode in the history of the dark net, Silicon
Valley, and the relationship between public libraries and digital
culture. Lee argues that the notion of "disruptive" technology in
contemporary culture has radically affected our relationship to
knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. Against
the backdrop of her account of Ulbricht and his exploits, Lee provides
original readings of five women artists--Gretchen Bender, Cecile B.
Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms--who weigh
in, either explicitly or inadvertently, on the nature of contemporary
media and technology. Written as a work of experimental art criticism,
The Glen Park Library is both a homage to the Bay Area and an
excoriation of the ethos of Silicon Valley. As with all fairy tales, the
book's ultimate subjects are much greater, however, and Lee casts a
critical eye on collisions between privacy and publicity, knowledge and
information, and the past and future that are enabled by the
technocratic worldview.
