Book Banning vs NFT Books
Book Banning vs NFT Books
a battle for the century
Censorship is a hot topic in this day and age, right?
And if you’re reading this on a web3 platform like Zirkels, Mirror, or a Deso app, then I would wager it’s something you care about deeply.
It seems like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, (fill in the blank) has been censoring content from the beginning. And we’ve been ok with it until now.
What’s changed?
My opinion is that in the beginning, censorship was ensuring “safe” content. Let’s not show people literally getting murdered on YouTube. That’s disturbing.
But today the definition of “safety” has gotten blurrier and blurrier. All of a sudden, if it has any conservative undertones, it’s unsafe.
Why do I bring this up in an article about book banning?
I believe books and community are interrelated. And just as the technology of blockchain is solving this censorship issue with social media (thanks Deso), I think it can do the same for books!
Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty.
How is a Book Banned?
Ok, so to truly talk about this, we need a level playing field. We need to define a couple of things.
What does the term: “banned book” even mean? What is the process to banning a book?
Now, any of you school teachers out there might cringe when you see me share a Wikipedia page, but come on, it’s 2023, I think Wikipedia is pretty reliable at this point.
Here is a list of banned books within each country throughout the world (it might not show every country): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments
The reason I share this is that since I’m writing from the US, most of my perspectives will come from the US. But check out the list and see what books have been banned in your country.
If you read through, you’ll see a few interesting things:
Most banned books were temporary. In the US, there were only a few that were permanent bans. One was a copyright infringement case where someone illegally wrote and published a sequel to Catcher and the Rye. The other was a memoir from a retired US special ops who apparently put classified information into the book. The US government purchased and destroyed all 9,500 copies of that book! Though they missed the 60 advanced copies still in the public.
Book banning is not new. According to that list the earliest banned book was from the Roman empire in the 330s! It was a book of religious writings that contradicted another religious leader in the Catholic church. All his books were burned and then he was either exiled or killed (knowing Rome…probably killed).
There are a ton of different reasons behind the bans. The older you go back, the more books were banned for blaspheming a religion. But in more recent centuries, you see more books banned for inappropriate content like sexuality, violence against people groups, racisim, or a whole slew of things we’ll get into soon.
Ok, so truth be told, I don’t know how books are banned in every country.
Every government is a little different.
Therefore, for the rest of this article, I will focus on the US. But I think the sentiment of book banning is consistent across the world. The process might be slightly different in your country.
In the US, when a book is banned (for the most part), it is usually not a government-enforced country-wide banning. These banned book cases are typically local.
The kinder term thrown around is actually a “book challenge.” This is when a school “challenges” a book and requests to remove it from the school library or school curriculum.
So typically, that’s where the book banning stops. There have been a couple cases where a book challenge has made it to the supreme court. But typically it’s overturned or whatever due to the first amendment protection of free speech.
Which is actually pretty cool of the government.
So, to sum up: a book is banned on a localized level usually by a school board district trying to ban a certain book from a school library, school curriculum, or public library.
State of Banned Books Today
2022 hit a record high of challenged books across the US, and it’s thought that this will just continue to rise into 2023.
Between July 2021 and June 2022 (just 1 year) there were over 2,500 book challenges! And this challenged about 1,600 unique titles!
Most Commonly Banned Books and Why
What are these books and why are they being banned? Or as the banners would say, “challenged”?
As we said earlier, if you look throughout history, books have been banned for a number of reasons. If I were to sum it up, though, a book is banned because it goes against the status quo.
Who defines the status quo? In this case, typically the local government or a school board.
Here is a list of the most commonly banned books of recent years and why:
1984: pro-communist, sexualtiy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: racism
The Catcher in the Rye (number one most banned book from what I saw): offensive language and unsuitable for certain ages
The Color Purple: offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuitable for certain ages
The Great Gatsby: references to drugs, sexuality, and profanity
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: sexually explicit
Lord of the Flies: profanity, sexuality, racial slurs, and excessive violence
Of Mice and Men: offensive language, racism, and violence
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: racism, misogyny, and sexually explicit
To Kill a Mockingbird: offensive language and racism
If you’re like me, several of those books are books you read in school growing up. They were considered classics!
If you’re still like me, you’ll think that some of these reasons are vague and not really a main focus of the books at all.
And that’s just a small list of examples. I didn’t even include Animal Farm or Fahrenheit 451, which are commonly banned too.
Again, it goes back to this idea of “status quo.”
In the US, that status quo is defined by the local government or school board. For instance, Texas, in recent years has been cracking down on any books that discuss LGBTQ identities or sexuality.
Other schools and governments around the nation are banning books that have racist undertones in them.
Now when I mention LGBTQ and racist books as being banned, I’m sure I created a whole slew of emotions.
Some people are angry, and others might say, “yea, kids shouldn’t be exposed to this stuff yet.”
Wherever you fall on the spectrum, you have to admit that banning books is a complex issue. It deals with some very complicated topics.
Do you want my honest answer? It’s going to be a hot take.
I, personally, believe we shouldn’t force kids to read books from some “curriculum” that falls in line with a “status quo.”
I think kids should be allowed to read the stories they want, go on the adventures they want, learn what they want (when it comes to reading), and ultimately…just let kids be kids.
When did it become the norm to try and force kids to grow up as fast as possible? All it does is cause 18-year-olds to realize they never got to be a kid and start acting like one at 18! Then they stop growing altogether until they’re 30!
Ugh, I digress.
We’re not here to talk about that.
We are talking about book banning.
And the problem with book banning is this: if books are banned by a status quo, then you will be fine with it until the status quo goes against your ideals. A status quo is defined by someone in power, and it is not designed to make everyone happy.
And by the way, we’ve only been talking about government so far. Once you involve other big powers like Amazon, then you can see there is a major issue here. If you don’t know what I mean, look at this article.
https://zirkels.com/a/did-your-kindle-book-suddenly-disappear
So what is the solution?
What are NFT Books
NFT books are just what they sound like. Fully-owned digital books the way we should have done it the first time around. When we had the idea of digitizing books in the form of e-books, it’s almost like it wasn’t fully thought out.
We gave way too much power to the hands of Amazon and others. For some good reasons, I suppose. Like protecting the intellectual property of the authors.
But now they have all the cards. And if their status quo changes, they have full authority to force yours to change too.
However, with NFT books, your book is a digital collectible, stored fully on a public blockchain! So nobody can censor it, nobody can steal it, nobody can burn it. Except you, I guess.
What about intellectual property, though?
Well, awesome projects with Spatium Stories and Book.io are actually solving that problem too. The books being stored fully on-chain are encrypted, meaning the intellectual property is secure.
So…just like Deso protects your social content from censorship, NFT books will protect your literary content from censorship too!
How do NFT Books Solve the Problem?
I have a hard question: is there ever an appropriate time to ban a book?
Like, what if the book is bad…like, really really bad? And I don’t mean written poorly, I mean the content of the book could only be described as evil.
One might say, ‘sure’ in that case ban it! However, there are 2 major problems at play here:
The floodgates will open. For now, a lot of challenges are for public libraries and stuff. But if something like this happened, I think the idea of banning books would be deemed “ok.” And the banning of Kindle books would really take off. And all of a sudden, the only books on your Kindle are the ones that fit into Amazon’s agenda.
As the old adage goes: “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The same can be said for “bad books.” If you took 5 people and told them to walk through a library and pick out 5 books that they would ban based on content, I’d wager you’d end up with close to 25 unique book titles. Everyone has different morals and ideologies. What we would consider inappropriate for our kids, might not be the same as our neighbor.
So how do NFT books solve this issue?
Well, let me explain how Deso solves the issue. With Deso, if a particular node (or app) decides to censor certain content, is that content truly deleted? Is it gone forever? NO! Because any social content you post on any Deso app is pushed to the blockchain.
All a node (or app) can do is determine what data from the Deso blockchain they want to show. One day, I’m sure we’ll have nodes dedicated to different political parties, sports-based nodes, technical nodes, etc. And they’ll just censor all other content.
Another word for this could be content curation.
The cool thing about this is that it’s not banning content. Because the content is on the blockchain.
It gives the people the power, not to the government or a big tech company.
NFT books will be the same way!
Take Spatium Stories, for instance. We store all of our encrypted book files on Arweave, and then mint all our NFTs on the Deso blockchain (offering Polygon and Solana this year hopefully too).
This means that all those books are public. So if someone wanted to create a curated book marketplace of just Christian books or just business books, they could!
But I think that’s why NFT books solve the problem. They allow people to choose what they want to read. The decision is not made for them.
In Conclusion
Book banning, as I’ve learned, is actually a pretty hard problem to solve. I thought going into this it would be a clear-cut, “book banning is evil” sort of thing.
But it turns out, it’s a little more complicated than that. A lot of these “book challenges” bring up some complex questions and involve some pretty complicated topics. What kind of information should we expose to our kids?
I, personally, believe it shouldn’t be 100% up to the government or school board. It should be up to the parents and the children themselves.
From personal experience, if I was allowed to read anything I wanted in school, then I wouldn’t have hated reading and writing for 12 years of my life.
I believe that NFT books will allow people to have control again. Government, Amazon, or any other powers at be can’t ban NFT books or burn them! Only you can.
You have full control.
Remember: Not your keys, Not your book.
References:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/conservative-liberal-book-bans-differ-amid-rise-literary/story?id=96267846
https://libguides.butler.edu/c.php?g=34189&p=217684
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments#Roman_Empire