Does Information Really Want to be Free
Summary
Kimberly Christen, who built the Mukurtu archive with Warumungu collaborators in Central Australia, takes apart the slogan ‘information wants to be free’. Open-access advocates, she argues, share “a cultural blindness”: for many Indigenous communities the public domain is “just another colonial mash-up”. Information “neither wants to be free nor wants to be open; human beings must decide”.
Rationale
It bears on this site: parts of our glossary come from living traditions, and openness isn’t the same as circulating knowledge on its holders’ terms.
✳ This source was first suggested by AI. We read it and decided to include it. The entry was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing. See Rights.