/lit/ - Literature

What's the libgen mirror for britfriends?

Books are now free, effectively. Whether it be the Duino Elegies or A Color Guide to the Petrography of Carbonate Rocks: Grains, Textures, Porosity, Diagenesis, most texts you need to construct a curriculum can be found online. You can't download a lab, sure, but you can find out a great deal. Of the humanities, you can get practically everything. There's never been a better time to be an autodidact.

And what we find out is that the numbers who take up the opportunity are scarcely higher than they ever were. On /lit/ and /tv/, you will find people bitterly angry that you like 'elitist' books, movies, anything. Just *mentioning* such experiences can draw ire. But - these opportunities are free. They aren't restricted any longer. You can torrent a Straub-Huillet film for nothing, or you can pay £20 to go to the cinema and see some focus-grouped, aesthetically standardised exercise in mob psychology. You are spending money on a disposable experience. I am getting a life-changing experience for the price of some tiny fraction of my electric and broadband bills. I'm making more from less - how am I the elitist?

It's time we called time on the idea that what impedes most people's self-education is lack of 'access'. What impedes most people's self-education is their own indolence. That this could be the case was clear as soon as public libraries existed, but the arguments were always logistically plausible - you couldn't *prove* that others' lives didn't render it impossible, after all. You couldn't tell people what difficulties they should or shouldn't be having, or how they ought to live. But now all the excuses are invalid.

>>6550139

Good first sentence.