Traces and Difficulty

A critical position.

Digital piracy of literatures— both intellectual and commercial— is structured to defend the author's financial income from the published work. While the potential financial income is the frontier to defend against digital piracy, it must be also acknowledge the separation between commercial purposes and intellectual purposes. In this, it generated such attention that the masses, or public audience, are mainly aware of 'canonized' or mainstream figures (or bodies of works)— for instance, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sylvia Plath, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, George Orwell, and other figures/thinkers/writers. However, it must be, meta-theoretically, noticed who allowed such names to enter mainstream or be propagated through public spheres. In consideration, the names Paul Lazarsfeld, Hadley Cantril, Edward Bernays, Ann Fessler, Robert Silvey, and other individuals, are relatively obscured, if not entirely unknown. Whose names and ideas are being hide? Why are they hidden or unknown? Why are they structurally hidden? What ideas are hidden? The main concern is gravitated towards the decline of intellectualization and the inaccessible intellectual works. On sociological consideration, intellectual works serves its public purpose for the advancement of thinking, not limited for individuals with financial capability to access such works. Suppose a working-class individual who desire to be 'successful', and searching inside the nearby local bookstore, and only happens to discover the mainstream 'motivational works' (that are considerably unhelpful) and bought the work without duly knowing the intellectual mechanism of the prose and style of the book is designed to persuade and convinced them, both in aesthetics and rhetorics. Instead of being exposed to works concerning economics, finance, politics, and/or mathematics, the working-class individual is, unfortunately, then exposed to motivating works. Fruitfully, this reveals a hidden mechanisms that aims to weaponize hidden intellectual works towards the benign, unaware, and vulnerable individuals.