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.
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