What happens when we corporatize knowledge? I picture a dystopia where all the fat cats at the top hold all of the wealth of knowledge discovered by scientists and researchers, while all of the folks at the bottom scramble and claw to find information about the world they live in. Oh wait, we’re already living this! Capitalism has created an environment where it is okay to harbor ideas in order to gain a profit, and eventually the gap between the informed and misinformed is going to grow so exponentially wide that it will be impossible to fill. The information being sold by publishing companies (of which most of the researchers themselves could not even afford) is crucial to understanding many important aspects of our world (like climate change for instance) that have major effects on the way we approach social and political issues. I feel like the only way to abolish this prejudiced distribution of knowledge is to round up every researcher and author and have them sue the “Big 5” publishing companies for the rights to their own works. At least government funded research is made public now, but we still have a long way to go before equal access can be achieved- so for now it can only be through hacking, illegal downloading and unlawful distributing to create a dark web of info that people can rightfully obtain knowledge.