Flaming Hydra’s new Kickstarter campaign rethinks e-book ownership and digital lending

Résumé détaillé

A new Kickstarter campaign aims to usher in the “return of the human internet.”

Here’s a big promise: A new Kickstarter campaign aims to usher in the “return of the human internet.”

To Flaming Hydra’s lead editor Maria Bustillos, these disparate projects are “basically all one thing,” tied together by the goal of “protecting freedom of information” and fulfilling the “promise of the early internet, where you’re making information available to as many people as possible, while still protecting the right of artists and authors to make a living.”

Bustillos told me that these issues have been highlighted on Flaming Hydra itself, for example when Tal Levin wrote about finding countless AI-generated clones of his book on Amazon. By “creating an ecosystem that is based in people working together, who are offering their stuff in a context that is controlled and doesn’t allow” others to create and sell AI-generated clones, Bustillos said Flaming Hydra is “part of the human project.”

“AI is not this unstoppable force,” she added. “If people just set up publishing pipelines and networks and organizations that are dedicated to the human internet, people who want to read stuff can go to them, and it’s actually completely isolated from mechanistic interference.”

The Phoenix Project fits into this vision by making the work of human writers more accessible to libraries.

Back in 2020, Bustillos wrote about the e-book systems dominating libraries and schools. In one example, instead of just buying a book, a school had to pay $27 per student per year for continued access to copies of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

This is symptomatic of a broader system that treats true ownership of e-books and other digital media as a thing of the past. Instead, we “license” these e-books from their publishers, and they can be altered or removed at any time.

“E-books are books,” Bustillos said. “They’re not some other thing. They are books, and people should be able to own them, and libraries should be able to own them, and media should be able to be owned.

In her view, ownership boils…

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