At first glance it seems that marketers at Harper’s may have thought the copy in this ad would attract 45-year-old-plus printophiles, and among them, those who would accept an antagonism to content (or, the incoherent, topical mess of the internet). Content, says the ad, is toxic.

The majority of the commentary on file-sharing and video downloading or piracy comes from very Western perspectives. The American government files suit against suburban youth, the French declare—against their own government—their support for an internet that is a laboratory of free culture. Pirate Bay, the focus of the most recent round of anti-anti-copyright litigation, is run out of Stockholm.

While in Turkmenistan, the verb ‘to google’ dropped out of my vocabulary. Another volunteer had brought a laptop, which, pre-loaded with WorldBook Encyclopedia, more or less became the regional resource for all knowledge. Rather than coining new verbiage for WorldBook searches, however, we instead developed a strange flapping of the hands to signal the strangeness of the act.