Robin Hood Was Right. Shadow Libraries Are Too.

Ethical hacking, piracy, and rebellion against capitalism

Image created by the author from “Robin Hood” by Richard Croft. CC BY-SA 2.0.

If you’re new here, welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, and organizer with the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund.

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This post is a slight departure from the topics I typically cover here, but it’s a fun, controversial, and important one. I hope you enjoy.

The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. ... Those with access to these resources—students, librarians, scientists—you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not—indeed, morally, you cannot—keep this privilege for yourselves.

—  Aaron Swartz, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

When I went to college, most classes required textbooks costing nearly a hundred dollars each. That was money I didn’t have.

The high cost was driven by profit. Textbooks are published by academic corporations that add value by vetting scholars, editing material, and so on — but not nearly enough to justify the prices they charge. That makes their business model a form of legally sanctioned theft, operated against students in a captured market.

Thankfully, this paradigm was already beginning to falter. Rather than buying, I checked out textbooks at the library, rented them, or bought used. All of these amounted to a tax on working class people: going to the library took extra time, renting books was an overpriced hassle even when the books I needed were available, and used books were usually out-of-date editions.

What changes in chemistry from year to year? Nothing. But there’s no profit in reusing the same old textbooks for 20 years, which is why publishers would release a new edition of each textbook annually, rearranging and rewriting content to make it impossible to follow reading assignments using an older book. “Read chapter five,” for example, is meaningless if the material in chapter five in this year’s addition had been split into three separate places in the book.

The modern solution: shadow libraries

Students today don’t have to deal with the same problem due to the rise of “shadow libraries.” Shadow libraries are illegal, clandestine websites that aggregate and share millions of books, textbooks, scientific papers, and other forms of written material for free download to anyone around the world. The most popular are such as Z-Library, Library Genesis, Anna's Archive, and Sci-Hub.

They are “shadow” because running these sites, or downloading copyrighted material from them, is illegal. And the term “library” is appropriate since these services see themselves as conducting a non-monetized community service, just like public libraries.

(For more on expanding libraries beyond books as a form of political and ecological action, see this post from

TheLastFarm

. If you read this, TLF, I hope you come back and continue writing. You are missed here.)

How working class students access knowledge

Imagine you are a student in Havana, Manila, or Bucharest. You are studying medicine, environmental science, or education. Your local library – if one exists – doesn’t have access to prestigious, expensive western academic databases. There’s no market for used textbooks in your country. You are studying primarily in a foreign language, and the infrastructure to support your education doesn’t match that in the imperial core.

Further, your budget is completely consumed with tuition, rent, food, and other living expenses.

What are you supposed to do? The answer, according to corporate overlords, is basically “if you don’t have the money to pay, screw you.” Either that, or jump through hoops for every paper you want to access — filling out access forms, requesting waivers. Basically, you should beg.

And so, many turn to shadow libraries.

I have personally heard stories from dozens of people who have used shadow libraries to access essentially all of the required reading material for their education.

What about copyright?

I believe that artists, writers, and creative people should be compensated for their work.

I also know from personal experience that in publishing, the vast majority of profit does not go to authors. The situation is similar in the music business, where songwriters typically take home 10-20% of revenues after labels and distributors take their cut.

As a published author who has made an (admittedly small) amount of money from my writing, I support shadow libraries wholeheartedly. My books can be found on these shadow libraries, and I support readers of this blog getting them for free from those sources. If you can afford to buy a copy, please do. But if you can’t, I’d rather you go get it from your local library — shadow or otherwise.

I may be sabotaging my own economic gains, but some things are more important than money. The point of my writing is not to make money, it’s to spread ideas. These should not be restricted to those who can pay, and they should certainly not be used as a means of accumulating massive profits by middlemen corporations.

The same goes for other forms of art and creativity. In my view, these should not be commodified. Those who advocate for comprehensive copyright reform call for social funding for artists, musicians, and other creative people — the modern equivalent of a village or tribe making sure that the storytellers and ceremony-holders don’t go hungry, even if they are too busy to join in the hunt or the harvest.

Instead of this humane approach to sharing creative gifts with the world, we have the cutthroat world of industrial capitalism.

This is why piracy is not just a survival technique — it has a moral resonance.

The moral thief: Robin Hood and the romanticism of piracy

There is an allure to piracy. While folklore and popular culture paint pirates as bloodthirsty and rapacious (mostly), historians have documented that some pirates during the golden age of piracy (1650’s – 1730’s) used democratic means of self-organization that contrasted strikingly with the dominant hierarchical systems of the time. Rather than simply preying on the weak, some saw themselves as rebels carving out egalitarian spaces on the fringes of civilization, parasitizing a rotten system.

Have all pirates throughout history operated in this admirable spirit? Of course not. Some have been among the worst murderers in history (just like many presidents, emperors, and capitalists).

Similarly, digital piracy is a liminal space, a dark underworld where idealism coexists with crime and exploitation. Much pirated software, for example, contains malware meant to pilfer bank details and commandeer computers for botnets; many pirates have purely selfish interests, transposing the ideology of capitalism into a non-monetized space; and some piracy websites are full of objectionable ads.

Nonetheless, the profoundly anti-capitalist “moral thief” ethos of Robin Hood still pervades much of the culture of internet piracy. Sometimes this even comes out of the shadows into the public square. As unlikely as it may seem, there is a political party that has arisen from the world of piracy and ethical hacking: the Pirate Party of Sweden, founded in 2006, which has led to the founding of other pirate parties in more than sixty countries. These parties advocate for net neutrality, free software, anti-corruption, online civil rights, restriction on AI and surveillance technologies, end-to-end encryption, and, as I mentioned earlier, a combination of comprehensive reform of copyright laws with public funding for the arts and culture.

A rebellion against technocratic overlords

At its best, piracy is not just about open access to knowledge. It’s a deliberate rebellion against the panopticon and corporate power. It represents a refusal to cooperate in the algorithmically monetized digital nightmare that is the internet today; a rejection of what Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s wrote in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media:

“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.”

This is the world we live in today, in which social media, streaming movies and TV, video games, and porn provide an endless stream of cheap dopamine for the low price of your critical thinking, health, peace, bank balance, and soul, not to mention the ecological and social costs. It’s mass-produced, profit-driven brain chemistry alteration, a spiritually empty toxic mimic of real happiness where corporations vampirically feast on the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues generated by the boob tube, perfected and now into your pocket.

Piracy is a means of not only avoiding giving money to Hollywood and the tech corporations that are our new techno-feudal overlords, but also picking and choosing the content that one wants to consume, rather than accepting what the algorithm spits out.

Artificial intelligence was trained using shadow libraries

News broke over the last several years that major AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta’s Llama, and Anthropic’s Claude (and likely many, many others) were trained using data downloaded from shadow libraries — dozens of terabytes of books, papers, articles, and more.

Even piracy itself has been co-opted by capitalism.

This, along with scraping the web for training content, is nothing less what Professor Noam Chomsky calls “the largest property theft since European settlers arrived on Native American lands.” And it has been used to turn the accumulated knowledge of the human species into a weaponized technology for the benefit of corporations, militaries, and repressive governments — for these are where the greatest benefits of AI are accumulating.

“Let's stop calling it ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and call it what it is: ‘Plagiarism Software,’” Chomsky told the New York Times (a despicable rag if you ask me).

Make no mistake: AI is one of the great moral, environmental, and social disasters of our time. It is also the basis of several ongoing lawsuits whereby authors have sued AI corporations. The first of these lawsuits was recently settled, with Anthropic agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to some 500,000 authors (of whom I might be one of). It's unclear what the outcome of the rest of these lawsuits will be, but even though I generally oppose copyright as it exists today, I hope that they are in some way successful at slowing down the monster that is artificial intelligence.

This is unlikely. As I've written before, the courts will not lead the way when it comes to these issues. If we are to stop AI, it will largely occur by depriving it of what it needs to function: data centers, power grids, and international supply chains. I don’t think we’ll see the end of AI until industrial civilization falls.

I look forward to that day.

Some people might say that it is hypocritical for me to say that corporations should not have the right to access copyrighted material, when I argued earlier that people should. You’re right: I’m a dirty hypocrite! But this arguement assumes that morality is universal; that it does not shift given circumstances, but rather relies on simple rules that apply in every situation. I just don’t buy that, in most cases. This is why people study philosophy and debate ethics.

I support individual people, especially those who are poor, who want to pirate my books. If people can afford it and want to read my books, I hope that they buy them (preferably directly from me, not Amazon). And as for corporations, fuck them. If I could stop them from accessing my books, I would. But I can’t.

At least, not without taking down the techno-industrial system itself. I’ve been working on that for going on 20 years now but haven’t managed it yet. Let me know if you want to help.

Accessing shadow libraries

Visiting a shadow library is not illegal. However, downloading copyrighted content is.

When you connect to the internet, the sites you visit are visible to your Internet Service Provider (ISP), which means that they, and by extension, the government, can see everything you do online. When someone pirates a movie or music or books online, ISPs typically flag this traffic as illegal and deliver a warning notice to the account holder. This can be linked to a particular IP address, meaning a specific device.

Thousands of people have been targeted by organizations like the MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America) after illegally downloading movies, receiving threatening letters from MPAA attorneys demanding they pay thousands of dollars in restitution after illegally downloading movies.

Therefore, if a person wished to be safe while accessing these sites, they would be best to use a trustworthy and reputable “no-logs” VPN (Virtual Private Network) which obscures web traffic from the ISP by encrypting it and routing it through a different server. Avoid anything from major technology companies like Microsoft, Google, or Apple. You can find recommendations elsewhere for specific VPNs.

(One could also use Tor to access shadow libraries, which is an even more secure option. Note that downloading large files, such as movies, is discouraged by network operators to save bandwidth for more important traffic. Tor is often used to bypass government censorship, leak sensitive information to the press, or plan resistance movements.)

I’d also recommend using an ad blocker not only on these sites, but at all times. It's another way of reducing your digital footprint, increasing privacy and security, and saying a big fuck you to corporations that monitor and monetize our everyday lives).

Practicing disobedience

The final reason why piracy has a moral resonance in these times is because it does two important things. First, it trains a person in how to avoid internet surveillance as a technical matter. This is important in this panopticon we live in.

Second, it psychologically prepares us, through small, minor acts of lawbreaking, for more serious acts of political rebellion.

In these times, that is essential. We must learn to disobey.

This post, like everything you read here, was written without the use of any AI tools.