Once I had felt that the Clinton-Gore people might truly share my own egalitarian dreams. I’d thought that nonlobbyists like me stood a healthy chance. I had been writing about computers for close to a decade; earlier I had covered a poverty beat, and I knew how we could drive down the cost of small computers so that someday even Head Start kids could read electronic books on them. What better way to encourage democracy? The whole country, not just the elite, could grow up understanding abstract thought. Could the Constitution have been drafted by a mob of illiterate TV watchers? Rather than letting Big Brother choose books for us, we could establish a democratic system with many librarians in many cities empowered to make acquisitions. Never would bureaucrats be able to do the equivalent of tweaking old copies of the _London Times_ behind our backs. It would be too damn hard with so many librarians in so many locations, and with the same material reposing on millions and millions of tablet-style computers that individual Americans owned. My vision was one of electronic federalism, not of Big Brother policing our reading tastes. TeleRead wouldn’t undermine local schools and public libraries. Quite the contrary. TeleRead would buy affordable, sharp-screened machines for them, sending a signal to Silicon Valley and paving the way for similar computers to go on sale at the Kmart for $99.95 for anyone to buy. Just as important, unlike the Postal plan mentioned earlier in this chapter, my TeleRead plan would let schools and libraries use the hardware without Big Brotherish restrictions. They could store whatever they wanted on their own computers for local people to dial up. And to make the national library more useful at the local level, they could add special, Web-style links designed for the people they served—not just for whole communities, but perhaps even for individual readers. What’s more, TeleRead would respect diversity and freedom of expression in other ways. Publishers could gamble fees up front to bypass librarians and qualify for royalties, and if censored from the national library, they could post on the Net itself. I took it for granted that Washington would try to censor TeleRead. That was the reason I envisioned a whole network of many librarians, in many places, together with long-range funding. Besides, my plan reflected the old wisdom from hackers: When censorship arises, just route around it. Private companies could make some nice money off officially banned books. Imagine the promotional opportunities; “Nixed by Washington” could be the new “Banned in Boston.” What’s more, since TeleRead was public and involved many librarians, not just a tiny D.C. elite, any censorship would probably be much more conspicuous than in the world of corporate publishing.