Friday, January 18, 2008

I'm sick and tired of Censorship Silos

Abunga is a book store that promises to 'empower decency' by allowing books to be banned (and subsequently burned?) through a voting system.

Currently over 65,000 books have been blocked on Abunga.com to guard you family. Help us create a safer site for you and your family by blocking titles you find that aren't family friendly.

Blocking a book alerts us that you may have found a book that we don't want to sell and allows us to remove these titles to guard your family and ours. Additionally, once you block a book it will also remove the title from your view and it won't show up in one of your searches again.


A laudable effort. My current ability to choose to not purchase particular titles has left me feeling less than optimally empowered - Abunga not only gives me control over what I read, but what others can read. Now that's a decent level of empowerment!

I do have a concern however. If I were to create an account at Abunga and start listing books that offend me in some way (with the hopes that others would agree), that's all well and good. But it would be effort I'd need to duplicate at any other similarly right-thinking book sellers - the burden would fall on myself to ensure that my family was equally protected from undesirable contamination at each.

Each separate book store would be a 'silo of censorship'.

Could we not bridge these silos? Could we not make it possible for me to specify my narrow mindedness centrally, and yet leverage it at all the various sites I feel I need be protected at (and not just book stores, there are lots of things that offend me or that I don't understand.)

The current chaos of censorship must end.

1 comment:

Pat Patterson said...

Hey - if we can get government involved, we could maybe help folks out who are regretting their mistaken purchases - you know, in a communal way...