Being digital ...

Burning or banning books, a great idea is it not? Especially in the good ole USA where right-minded folks "know" what people should read, right? With this in mind, there's a way to snuff out this urge to censor one's access to information and it all begins with being digital and connected to the net.

Hardly a day goes by when we don't hear from a school or library somewhere in the United States that they've removed a book from circulation following complaints from parents or constituents. 

Last week, in a school district in Tennessee, it was the removal of MAUS, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, that retells the Holocaust story through the eyes of mice oppressed by fascist cats. 

This week, we learned of a Texas school district, Granbury (pop. 11,000), removing over 125 titles from library shelves. This comes amid the news of pushback by parents to proposals by Rep. Matt Krause, R-TX, and other lawmakers to pull hundreds of titles from libraries in Texas school districts due to content related to race and sexuality.

The varied politicized agendas in our not-so-United States seem to be driving us down a dark, dystopian path familiar to any reader of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; school districts -- fashioning themselves as modern-day Guy Montags -- are removing works of literature lest their children are exposed to whatever values they view as improper, obscene, or not politically acceptable. 

But's there's a way out.

Let's call it the Freedom Archive.

I envision a publicly accessible website and app made available for the four major computing platforms -- iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows. This entity would contain a running inventory of books and other written content that have been banned historically and currently -- including banned content by libraries worldwide. 

This Freedom Archive -- which could be formed as an independent 501(c)6 -- would have commentaries and news included about each banned work.

Electronic media cannot be censored, particularly when replicated across multiple cloud providers and cloud service provider platforms. And that is why it is clear and incumbent upon these providers to act now.

Exactly.