Little Free Libraries As "Dead Drops" for the Free Flow of Information

I found this innovative Little Free Library at a local school. While many schools have discontinued their Little Free Libraries due to the polarizing times we live in, this one in Happy Valley, Oregon is going strong.

I’m a fan of Little Free Libraries for their DIY creativity, reuse/recycling of materials and as bastions of democracy. I've built a few and am  always looking for new ideas. Whenever I find one, I take a photo and then look inside. Sometimes I will drop a book, other times I might take one. I rarely take one since I often find the materials skew heavily into popular fiction and self help books. This is something that could change. 

 In an age when our devices and our media are increasingly watching, recording and making money off our activity, they offer a place to find information that is “off grid” in a way. In an age when public institutions like schools and libraries are under attack and are scrutinized for everything, Little Free Libraries are truly free and that is what I love about them.

Libraries were once the keepers, controllers and preservers of information and knowledge, but now are increasingly relegated to being customers of publishing/tech companies and subject to their whims and prices. The world of information that was once curated by public institutions is now locked behind paywalls and proprietary labyrinths. The move from paper to digital has coincided with a loss of independence.and privacy as companies track us from purchases to how long we linger on certain words. Surveillance Capitalism as Shoshana Zuboff calls it, follows us everywhere but the offline printed page.

Little Free Libraries remind me a little of the so-called “dead drops” of spy fact and fiction where information or other items would be shared clandestinely at secret locations known only to the parties doing the exchange. I can drop a book in a Little Free Library and someone I have never met will pick it up and take it home. How cool. 

In our age when authoritarians and tech bros, who are sometimes the same people, may be allied to watch us in invasive ways, I wonder how Little Free Libraries could be the “dead drops” for the free flow of information in a future where to be offline is to be truly free.