We live in the shiny, new world of digital information where more information is available to humanity than ever before. Some say information is the new oil.
These tropes are tired marketing for dataminers like Google and Facebook. Humanity arguably has less unfettered acceess to information than in earlier decades, notwithstanding increasing literacy globally. Information is the new oil. It is scarce, controlled, and valuable.
Digital information has more barriers to access than we like to think. Nor is it a stable medium, demonstrated by the Library of Congress' decisison to back up in formats other than digital.
To read a book a person needs 1) to be literate in the language of the text, 2) have access to the book, and 3) have some light (freely provided during the day).
Now consider reading that book as backed up digitally by the opticon. You need 1) literacy, 2) access to a complex and expensive hardware array (phone, computer etc), 3) access to sophisticated software that can translate the machine language stored in the memory into human words, 4) a power supply, and 5) access to the network or server where the digital book is stored, probably via a paid portal. Each of these steps requires extremely complicated social and technological applications, like education, manufacturing, resource extraction, utility provision and others. Each offering an opportunity for dominance by governments, individuals, or companies that are the arbitors of access. Each requires access to wealth. So people with scarce resources now need not only to provide education to their children, but must also participate in an economic system likely set up to exploit them and their time on this planet to pay for the phone, the power bill, the internet connection and any software needed.
So is digital information really more accessible? For some, but now with many gates, each susceptible to capture, corruption and/or failure.
Book burning is becoming trivially easy. Massive information loss is just as much a threat as it was in the days of the great fire in Alexandria.
