Carolyn Dever, writing in Public Books, about the ongoing cyberattack affecting the British Library:

Perhaps that’s the bitterest extreme of the irony: the sense in which the ransomware attack violates the very premise of libraries themselves. Libraries exist to connect learners with knowledge. Full stop. That’s what has been destroyed: not the stuff, but the connections, the fascia.

The library’s website and catalogue have been offline since Halloween, rendering its (decidedly analog) collections inaccessible. 

This is all eerily reminiscent of the recently-released Julia Roberts-Mahershala Ali-Ethan Hawke movie, Leave the World Behind. How to disable a society? Take down its information infrastructure.