Back to Index

1 {print $var}' temp.txt); awk
-vmaxx=$max -F' ' '{printf "%-7.7f %s\n", $1=0.5+($1/(maxx*2)), $2}' > freq.$i.txt; done && rm temp.txt

* 2\. Process the files freq.1-5.txt and produce tfidf.1-5.txt containing a list of words (out of 500 most frequent in respective lists), ordered by weight (specificity for each text):

> for j in {1..5}; do rm freq.$j.txt.temp; lines=$(wc -l freq.$j.txt) && for i
in {1..500}; do word=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=2 -F" " 'NR

line {print
$field}' freq.$j.txt); tf=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=1 -F" " 'NR

line {print
$field}' freq.$j.txt); count=$(egrep -lw $word freq.?.txt | wc -l); idf=$(echo
"1+l(5/$count)" | bc -l); tfidf=$(echo $tf*$idf | bc); echo $word $tfidf >>
freq.$j.txt.temp; done; sort -k 2nr < freq.$j.txt.temp > tfidf.$j.txt; done

* 3\. Process the files tfidf.1-5.txt and their source text, text.txt, and produce occ.txt with concordance of top 3 words from each of them:

> rm occ.txt && for j in {1..5}; do echo "$j" >> occ.txt; ptx -f -w 150
text.txt.$j > occ.$j.txt; for i in {1..3}; do word=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=1
-F" " 'NR

line {print $field}' tfidf.$j.txt); egrep -i
"[alpha:](/index.php?title=Alpha:&action=edit&redlink=1 "Alpha: \(page does
not exist\)") $word" occ.$j.txt >> occ.txt; done; done

Dušan Barok

_Written 23 October - 1 November 2014 in Bratislava and Stuttgart._

Mars & Medak
Knowledge Commons and Activist Pedagogies
2017


KNOWLEDGE COMMONS AND ACTIVIST PEDAGOGIES: FROM IDEALIST POSITIONS TO COLLECTIVE ACTIONS
Conversation with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak (co-authored with Ana Kuzmanic)

Marcell Mars is an activist, independent scholar, and artist. His work has been
instrumental in development of civil society in Croatia and beyond. Marcell is one
of the founders of the Multimedia Institute – mi2 (1999) (Multimedia Institute,
2016a) and Net.culture club MaMa in Zagreb (2000) (Net.culture club MaMa,
2016a). He is a member of Creative Commons Team Croatia (Creative Commons,
2016). He initiated GNU GPL publishing label EGOBOO.bits (2000) (Monoskop,
2016a), meetings of technical enthusiasts Skill sharing (Net.culture club MaMa,
2016b) and various events and gatherings in the fields of hackerism, digital
cultures, and new media art. Marcell regularly talks and runs workshops about
hacking, free software philosophy, digital cultures, social software, semantic web
etc. In 2011–2012 Marcell conducted research on Ruling Class Studies at Jan Van
Eyck in Maastricht, and in 2013 he held fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude
in Stuttgart. Currently, he is PhD researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Lab at
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.
Tomislav Medak is a cultural worker and theorist interested in political
philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He is an advocate of free software and
free culture, and the Project Lead of the Creative Commons Croatia (Creative
Commons, 2016). He works as coordinator of theory and publishing activities at
the Multimedia Institute/MaMa (Zagreb, Croatia) (Net.culture club MaMa, 2016a).
Tomislav is an active contributor to the Croatian Right to the City movement
(Pravo na grad, 2016). He interpreted to numerous books into Croatian language,
including Multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2009) and A Hacker Manifesto (Wark,
2006c). He is an author and performer with the internationally acclaimed Zagrebbased performance collective BADco (BADco, 2016). Tomislav writes and talks
about politics of technological development, and politics and aesthetics.
Tomislav and Marcell have been working together for almost two decades.
Their recent collaborations include a number of activities around the Public Library
project, including HAIP festival (Ljubljana, 2012), exhibitions in
Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart, 2014) and Galerija Nova (Zagreb,
2015), as well as coordinated digitization projects Written-off (2015), Digital
Archive of Praxis and the Korčula Summer School (2016), and Catalogue of
Liberated Books (2013) (in Monoskop, 2016b).
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Ana Kuzmanic is an artist based in Zagreb and Associate Professor at the
Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Geodesy at the University in Split
(Croatia), lecturing in drawing, design and architectural presentation. She is a
member of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists. Since 2007 she held more
than a dozen individual exhibitions and took part in numerous collective
exhibitions in Croatia, the UK, Italy, Egypt, the Netherlands, the USA, Lithuania
and Slovenia. In 2011 she co-founded the international artist collective Eastern
Surf, which has “organised, produced and participated in a number of projects
including exhibitions, performance, video, sculpture, publications and web based
work” (Eastern Surf, 2017). Ana's artwork critically deconstructs dominant social
readings of reality. It tests traditional roles of artists and viewers, giving the
observer an active part in creation of artwork, thus creating spaces of dialogue and
alternative learning experiences as platforms for emancipation and social
transformation. Grounded within a postdisciplinary conceptual framework, her
artistic practice is produced via research and expression in diverse media located at
the boundaries between reality and virtuality.
ABOUT THE CONVERSATION

I have known Marcell Mars since student days, yet our professional paths have
crossed only sporadically. In 2013 I asked Marcell’s input about potential
interlocutors for this book, and he connected me to McKenzie Wark. In late 2015,
when we started working on our own conversation, Marcell involved Tomislav
Medak. Marcell’s and Tomislav’s recent works are closely related to arts, so I
requested Ana Kuzmanic’s input in these matters. Since the beginning of the
conversation, Marcell, Tomislav, Ana, and I occasionally discussed its generalities
in person. Yet, the presented conversation took place in a shared online document
between November 2015 and December 2016.
NET.CULTURE AT THE DAWN OF THE CIVIL SOCIETY

Petar Jandrić & Ana Kuzmanic (PJ & AK): In 1999, you established the
Multimedia Institute – mi2 (Multimedia Institute, 2016a); in 2000, you established
the Net.culture club MaMa (both in Zagreb, Croatia). The Net.culture club MaMa
has the following goals:
To promote innovative cultural practices and broadly understood social
activism. As a cultural center, it promotes wide range of new artistic and
cultural practices related in the first place to the development of
communication technologies, as well as new tendencies in arts and theory:
from new media art, film and music to philosophy and social theory,
publishing and cultural policy issues.
As a community center, MaMa is a Zagreb’s alternative ‘living room’ and
a venue free of charge for various initiatives and associations, whether they
are promoting minority identities (ecological, LBGTQ, ethnic, feminist and

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others) or critically questioning established social norms. (Net.culture club
MaMa, 2016a)
Please describe the main challenges and opportunities from the dawn of Croatian
civil society. Why did you decide to establish the Multimedia Institute – mi2 and
the Net.culture club MaMa? How did you go about it?
Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (MM & TM): The formative context for
our work had been marked by the process of dissolution of Yugoslavia, ensuing
civil wars, and the rise of authoritarian nationalisms in the early 1990s. Amidst the
general turmoil and internecine bloodshed, three factors would come to define
what we consider today as civil society in the Croatian context. First, the newly
created Croatian state – in its pursuit of ethnic, religious and social homogeneity –
was premised on the radical exclusion of minorities. Second, the newly created
state dismantled the broad institutional basis of social and cultural diversity that
existed under socialism. Third, the newly created state pursued its own nationalist
project within the framework of capitalist democracy. In consequence, politically
undesirable minorities and dissenting oppositional groups were pushed to the
fringes of society, and yet, in keeping with the democratic system, had to be
allowed to legally operate outside of the state, its loyal institutions and its
nationalist consensus – as civil society. Under the circumstances of inter-ethnic
conflict, which put many people in direct or indirect danger, anti-war and human
rights activist groups such as the Anti-War Campaign provided an umbrella under
which political, student and cultural activists of all hues and colours could find a
common context. It is also within this context that the high modernism of cultural
production from the Yugoslav period, driven out from public institutions, had
found its recourse and its continuity.
Our loose collective, which would later come together around the Multimedia
Institute and MaMa, had been decisively shaped by two circumstances. The first
was participation of the Anti-War Campaign, its BBS network ZaMir (Monoskop,
2016c) and in particular its journal Arkzin, in the early European network culture.
Second, the Open Society Institute, which had financed much of the alternative and
oppositional activities during the 1990s, had started to wind down its operations
towards end of the millennium. As the Open Society Institute started to spin off its
diverse activities into separate organizations, giving rise to the Croatian Law
Center, the Center for Contemporary Art and the Center for Drama Art, activities
related to Internet development ended up with the Multimedia Institute. The first
factor shaped us as activists and early adopters of critical digital culture, and the
second factor provided us with an organizational platform to start working
together. In 1998 Marcell was the first person invited to work with the Multimedia
Institute. He invited Vedran Gulin and Teodor Celakoski, who in turn invited other
people, and the group organically grew to its present form.
Prior to our coming together around the Multimedia Institute, we have been
working on various projects such as setting up the cyber-culture platform Labinary
in the space run by the artist initiative Labin Art Express in the former miner town
of Labin located in the north-western region of Istria. As we started working
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together, however, we began to broaden these activities and explore various
opportunities for political and cultural activism offered by digital networks. One of
the early projects was ‘Radioactive’ – an initiative bringing together a broad group
of activists, which was supposed to result in a hybrid Internet/FM radio. The radio
never arrived into being, yet the project fostered many follow-up activities around
new media and activism in the spirit of ‘don’t hate the media, become the media.’
In these early days, our activities had been strongly oriented towards technological
literacy and education; also, we had a strong interest in political theory and
philosophy. Yet, the most important activity at that time was opening the
Net.culture club MaMa in Zagreb in 2000 (Net.culture club MaMa, 2016a).
PJ & AK: What inspired you to found the Net.culture club MaMa?
MM & TM: We were not keen on continuing the line of work that the
Multimedia Institute was doing under the Open Society Institute, which included,
amongst other activities, setting up the first non-state owned Internet service
provider ZamirNet. The growing availability of Internet access and computer
hardware had made the task of helping political, cultural and media activists get
online less urgent. Instead, we thought that it would be much more important to
open a space where those activists could work together. At the brink of the
millennium, institutional exclusion and access to physical resources (including
space) needed for organizing, working together and presenting that work was a
pressing problem. MaMa was one of the only three independent cultural spaces in
Zagreb – capital city of Croatia, with almost one million inhabitants! The Open
Society Institute provided us with a grant to adapt a former downtown leather-shop
in the state of disrepair and equip it with latest technology ranging from servers to
DJ decks. These resources were made available to all members of the general
public free of charge. Immediately, many artists, media people, technologists, and
political activists started initiating own programs in MaMa. Our activities ranged
from establishing art servers aimed at supporting artistic and cultural projects on
the Internet (Monoskop, 2016d) to technology-related educational activities,
cultural programs, and publishing. By 2000, nationalism had slowly been losing its
stranglehold on our society, and issues pertaining to capitalist globalisation had
arrived into prominence. At MaMa, the period was marked by alter-globalization,
Indymedia, web development, East European net.art and critical media theory.
The confluence of these interests and activities resulted in many important
developments. For instance, soon after the opening of MaMa in 2000, a group of
young music producers and enthusiasts kicked off a daily music program with live
acts, DJ sessions and meetings to share tips and tricks about producing electronic
music. In parallel, we had been increasingly drawn to free software and its
underlying ethos and logic. Yugoslav legacy of social ownership over means of
production and worker self-management made us think how collectivized forms of
cultural production, without exclusions of private property, could be expanded
beyond the world of free software. We thus talked some of our musician friends
into opening the free culture label EGOBOO.bits and publishing their music,
together with films, videos and literary texts of other artists, under the GNU
General Public License. The EGOBOO.bits project had soon become uniquely
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successful: producers such as Zvuk broda, Blashko, Plazmatick, Aesqe, No Name
No Fame, and Ghetto Booties were storming the charts, the label gradually grew to
fifty producers and formations, and we had the artists give regular workshops in
DJ-ing, sound editing, VJ-ing, video editing and collaborative writing at schools
and our summer camp Otokultivator. It inspired us to start working on alternatives
to the copyright regime and on issues of access to knowledge and culture.
PJ & AK: The civil society is the collective conscious, which provides leverage
against national and corporate agendas and serves as a powerful social corrective.
Thus, at the outbreak of the US invasion to Iraq, Net.culture club MaMa rejected a
$100 000 USAID grant because the invasion was:
a) a precedent based on the rationale of pre-emptive war, b) being waged in
disregard of legitimate processes of the international community, and c)
guided by corporate interests to control natural resources (Multimedia
Institute, 2003 in Razsa, 2015: 82).
Yet, only a few weeks later, MaMa accepted a $100 000 grant from the German
state – and this provoked a wide public debate (Razsa, 2015; Kršić, 2003; Stubbs,
2012).
Now that the heat of the moment has gone down, what is your view to this
debate? More generally, how do you decide whose money to accept and whose
money to reject? How do you decide where to publish, where to exhibit, whom to
work with? What is the relationship between idealism and pragmatism in your
work?
MM & TM: Our decision seems justified yet insignificant in the face of the
aftermath of that historical moment. The unilateral decision of US and its allies to
invade Iraq in March 2003 encapsulated both the defeat of global protest
movements that had contested the neoliberal globalisation since the early 1990s
and the epochal carnage that the War on Terror, in its never-ending iterations, is
still reaping today. Nowadays, the weaponized and privatized security regime
follows the networks of supply chains that cut across the logic of borders and have
become vital both for the global circuits of production and distribution (see Cowen,
2014). For the US, our global policeman, the introduction of unmanned weaponry
and all sorts of asymmetric war technologies has reduced the human cost of war
down to zero. By deploying drones and killer robots, it did away with the
fundamental reality check of own human casualties and made endless war
politically plausible. The low cost of war has resulted in the growing side-lining of
international institutions responsible for peaceful resolution of international
conflicts such as the UN.
Our 2003 decision carried hard consequences for the organization. In a capitalist
society, one can ensure wages either by relying on the market, or on the state, or on
private funding. The USAID grant was our first larger grant after the initial spinoff money from the Open Society Institute, and it meant that we could employ
some people from our community over the period of next two years. Yet at the
same time, the USAID had become directly involved in Iraq, aiding the US forces
and various private contractors such as Halliburton in the dispossession and
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plunder of the Iraqi economy. Therefore, it was unconscionable to continue
receiving money from them. In light of its moral and existential weight, the
decision to return the money thus had to be made by the general assembly of our
association.
People who were left without wages were part and parcel of the community that
we had built between 2000 and 2003, primarily through Otokultivator Summer
Camps and Summer Source Camp (Tactical Tech Collective, 2016). The other
grant we would receive later that year, from the Federal Cultural Foundation of the
German government, was split amongst a number of cultural organizations and
paid for activities that eventually paved the way for Right to the City (Pravo na
grad, 2016). However, we still could not pay the people who decided to return
USAID money, so they had to find other jobs. Money never comes without
conditionalities, and passing judgements while disregarding specific economic,
historic and organizational context can easily lead to apolitical moralizing.
We do have certain principles that we would not want to compromise – we do
not work with corporations, we are egalitarian in terms of income, our activities are
free for the public. In political activities, however, idealist positions make sense
only for as long as they are effective. Therefore, our idealism is through and
through pragmatic. It is in the similar manner that we invoke the ideal of the
library. We are well aware that reality is more complex than our ideals. However,
the collective sense of purpose inspired by an ideal can carry over into useful
collective action. This is the core of our interest …
PJ & AK: There has been a lot of water under the bridge since the 2000s. From
a ruined post-war country, Croatia has become an integral part of the European
Union – with all associated advantages and problems. What are the main today’s
challenges in maintaining the Multimedia Institute and its various projects? What
are your future plans?
MM & TM: From the early days, Multimedia Institute/MaMa took a twofold
approach. It has always supported people working in and around the organization
in their heterogeneous interests including but not limited to digital technology and
information freedoms, political theory and philosophy, contemporary digital art,
music and cinema. Simultaneously, it has been strongly focused to social and
institutional transformation.
The moment zero of Croatian independence in 1991, which was marked by war,
ethnic cleansing and forceful imposition of contrived mono-national identity, saw
the progressive and modernist culture embracing the political alternative of antiwar movement. It is within these conditions, which entailed exclusion from access
to public resources, that the Croatian civil society had developed throughout the
1990s. To address this denial of access to financial and spatial resources to civil
society, since 2000 we have been organizing collective actions with a number of
cultural actors across the country to create alternative routes for access to resources
– mutual support networks, shared venues, public funding, alternative forms of
funding. All the while, that organizational work has been implicitly situated in an
understanding of commons that draws on two sources – the social contract of the
free software community, and the legacy of social ownership under socialism.
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KNOWLEDGE COMMONS AND ACTIVIST PEDAGOGIES

Later on, this line of work has been developed towards intersectional struggles
around spatial justice and against privatisation of public services that coalesced
around the Right to the City movement (2007 till present) (Pravo na grad, 2016)
and the 2015 Campaign against the monetization of the national highway network.
In early 2016, with the arrival of the short-lived Croatian government formed by
a coalition of inane technocracy and rabid right wing radicals, many institutional
achievements of the last fifteen years seemed likely to be dismantled in a matter of
months. At the time of writing this text, the collapse of broader social and
institutional context is (again) an imminent threat. In a way, our current situation
echoes the atmosphere of Yugoslav civil wars in 1990s. Yet, the Croatian turn to
the right is structurally parallel to recent turn to the right that takes place in most
parts of Europe and the world at large. In the aftermath of the global neoliberal
race to the bottom and the War on Terror, the disenfranchised working class vents
its fears over immigration and insists on the return of nationalist values in various
forms suggested by irresponsible political establishments. If they are not spared the
humiliating sense of being outclassed and disenfranchised by the neoliberal race to
the bottom, why should they be sympathetic to those arriving from the
impoverished (semi)-periphery or to victims of turmoil unleashed by the endless
War on Terror? If globalisation is reducing their life prospects to nothing, why
should they not see the solution to their own plight in the return of the regime of
statist nationalism?
At the Multimedia Institute/MaMa we intend to continue our work against this
collapse of context through intersectionalist organizing and activism. We will
continue to do cultural programs, publish books, and organise the Human Rights
Film Festival. In order to articulate, formulate and document years of practical
experience, we aim to strengthen our focus on research and writing about cultural
policy, technological development, and political activism. Memory of the
World/Public Library project will continue to develop alternative infrastructures
for access, and develop new and existing networks of solidarity and public
advocacy for knowledge commons.
LOCAL HISTORIES AND GLOBAL REALITIES

PJ & AK: Your interests and activities are predominantly centred around
information and communication technologies. Yet, a big part of your social
engagement takes place in Eastern Europe, which is not exactly on the forefront of
technological innovation. Can you describe the dynamics of working from the
periphery around issues developed in global centres of power (such as the Silicon
Valley)?
MM & TM: Computers in their present form had been developed primarily in
the Post-World War II United States. Their development started from the military
need to develop mathematics and physics behind the nuclear weapons and counterair defense, but soon it was combined with efforts to address accounting, logistics
and administration problems in diverse fields such as commercial air traffic,
governmental services, banks and finances. Finally, this interplay of the military
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and the economy was joined by enthusiasts, hobbyists, and amateurs, giving the
development of (mainframe, micro and personal) computer its final historical
blueprint. This story is written in canonical computing history books such as The
Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of
Technical Expertise. There, Nathan Ensmenger (2010: 14) writes: “the term
computer boys came to refer more generally not simply to actual computer
specialists but rather to the whole host of smart, ambitious, and technologically
inclined experts that emerged in the immediate postwar period.”
Very few canonical computing history books cover other histories. But when
that happens, we learn a lot. Be that Slava Gerovitch’s From Newspeak to
Cyberspeak (2002), which recounts the history of Soviet cybernetics, or Eden
Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011), which revisits the history of socialist
cybernetic project in Chile during Allende’s government, or the recent book by
Benjamin Peters How Not to Network a Nation (2016), which describes the history
of Soviet development of Internet infrastructure. Many (other) histories are yet to
be heard and written down. And when these histories get written down, diverse
things come into view: geopolitics, class, gender, race, and many more.
With their witty play and experiments with the medium, the early days of the
Internet were highly exciting. Big corporate websites were not much different from
amateur websites and even spoofs. A (different-than-usual) proximity of positions
of power enabled by the Internet allowed many (media-art) interventions, (rebirth
of) manifestos, establishment of (pseudo)-institutions … In these early times of
Internet’s history and geography, (the Internet subculture of) Eastern Europe
played a very important part. Inspired by Alexei Shulgin, Lev Manovich wrote ‘On
Totalitarian Interactivity’ (1996) where he famously addressed important
differences between understanding of the Internet in the West and the East. For the
West, claims Manovich, interactivity was a perfect vehicle for the ideas of
democracy and equality. For the East, however, interactivity was merely another
form of (media) manipulation. Twenty years later, it seems that Eastern Europe
was well prepared for what the Internet would become today.
PJ & AK: The dominant (historical) narrative of information and
communication technologies is predominantly based in the United States.
However, Silicon Valley is not the only game in town … What are the main
differences between approaches to digital technologies in the US and in Europe?
MM & TM: In the ninties, the lively European scene, which equally included
the East Europe, was the centre of critical reflection on the Internet and its
spontaneous ‘Californian ideology’ (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996). Critical culture
in Europe and its Eastern ‘countries in transition’ had a very specific institutional
landscape. In Western Europe, art, media, culture and ‘post-academic’ research in
humanities was by and large publicly funded. In Eastern Europe, development of
the civil society had been funded by various international foundations such as the
Open Society Institute aka the Soros Foundation. Critical new media and critical
art scene played an important role in that landscape. A wide range of initiatives,
medialabs, mailing lists, festivals and projects like Next5minutes (Amsterdam/
Rotterdam), Nettime & Syndicate (mailing lists), Backspace & Irational.org
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KNOWLEDGE COMMONS AND ACTIVIST PEDAGOGIES

(London), Ljudmila (Ljubljana), Rixc (Riga), C3 (Budapest) and others constituted
a loose network of researchers, theorists, artists, activists and other cultural
workers.
This network was far from exclusively European. It was very well connected to
projects and initiatives from the United States such as Critical Art Ensemble,
Rhizome, and Thing.net, to projects in India such as Sarai, and to struggles of
Zapatistas in Chiapas. A significant feature of this loose network was its mutually
beneficial relationship with relevant European art festivals and institutions such as
Documenta (Kassel), Transmediale/HKW (Berlin) or Ars Electronica (Linz). As a
rule of thumb, critical new media and art could only be considered in a conceptual
setup of hybrid institutions, conferences, forums, festivals, (curated) exhibitions
and performances – and all of that at once! The Multimedia Institute was an active
part of that history, so it is hardly a surprise that the Public Library project took a
similar path of development and contextualization.
However, European hacker communities were rarely hanging out with critical
digital culture crowds. This is not the place to extensively present the historic
trajectory of different hacker communities, but risking a gross simplification here
is a very short genealogy. The earliest European hacker association was the
German Chaos Computer Club (CCC) founded in 1981. Already in the early
1980s, CCC started to publicly reveal (security) weaknesses of corporate and
governmental computer systems. However, their focus on digital rights, privacy,
cyberpunk/cypherpunk, encryption, and security issues prevailed over other forms
of political activism. The CCC were very successful in raising issues, shaping
public discussions, and influencing a wide range of public actors from digital rights
advocacy to political parties (such as Greens and Pirate Party). However, unlike the
Italian and Spanish hackers, CCC did not merge paths with other social and/or
political movements. Italian and Spanish hackers, for instance, were much more
integral to autonomist/anarchist, political and social movements, and they have
kept this tradition until the present day.
PJ & AK: Can you expand this analysis to Eastern Europe, and ex-Yugoslavia
in particular? What were the distinct features of (the development of) hacker
culture in these areas?
MM & TM: Continuing to risk a gross simplification in the genealogy, Eastern
European hacker communities formed rather late – probably because of the
turbulent economic and political changes that Eastern Europe went through after
1989.
In MaMa, we used to run the programme g33koskop (2006–2012) with a goal to
“explore the scope of (term) geek” (Multimedia Institute, 2016b). An important
part of the program was to collect stories from enthusiasts, hobbyists, or ‘geeks’
who used to be involved in do-it-yourself communities during early days of
(personal) computing in Yugoslavia. From these makers of first 8-bit computers,
editors of do-it-yourself magazines and other early day enthusiasts, we could learn
that technical and youth culture was strongly institutionally supported (e.g. with
nation-wide clubs called People’s Technics). However, the socialist regime did not
adequately recognize the importance and the horizon of social changes coming
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from (mere) education and (widely distributed) use of personal computers. Instead,
it insisted on an impossible mission of own industrial computer production in order
to preserve autonomy on the global information technology market. What a
horrible mistake … To be fair, many other countries during this period felt able to
achieve own, autonomous production of computers – so the mistake has reflected
the spirit of the times and the conditions of uneven economic and scientific
development.
Looking back on the early days of computing in former Yugoslavia, many geeks
now see themselves as social visionaries and the avant-garde. During the 1990s
across the Eastern Europe, unfortunately, they failed to articulate a significant
political agenda other than fighting the monopoly of telecom companies. In their
daily lives, most of these people enjoyed opportunities and privileges of working in
a rapidly growing information technology market. Across the former Yugoslavia,
enthusiasts had started local Linux User Groups: HULK in Croatia, LUGOS in
Slovenia, LUGY in Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Macedonia. In the spirit
of their own times, many of these groups focused on attempts to convince the
business that free and open source software (at the time GNU/Linux, Apache,
Exim …) was a viable IT solution.
PJ & AK: Please describe further developments in the struggle between
proponents of proprietary software and the Free Software Movement.
MM & TM: That was the time before Internet giants such as Google, Amazon,
eBay or Facebook built their empires on top of Free/Libre/Open Source Software.
GNU General Public Licence, with its famous slogan “free as in free speech, not
free as in free beer” (Stallman, 2002), was strong enough to challenge the property
regime of the world of software production. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley
experimented with various approaches against the challenge of free software such
as ‘tivoizations’ (systems that incorporate copyleft-based software but impose
hardware restrictions to software modification), ‘walled gardens’ (systems where
carriers or service providers control applications, content and media, while
preventing them from interacting with the wider Internet ecosystem), ‘software-asa-service’ (systems where software is hosted centrally and licensed through
subscription). In order to support these strategies of enclosure and turn them into
profit, Silicon Valley developed investment strategies of venture capital or
leveraged buyouts by private equity to close the proprietary void left after the
success of commons-based peer production projects, where a large number of
people develop software collaboratively over the Internet without the exclusion by
property (Benkler, 2006).
There was a period when it seemed that cultural workers, artists and hackers
would follow the successful model of the Free Software Movement and build a
universal commons-based platform for peer produced, shared and distributed
culture, art, science and knowledge – that was the time of the Creative Commons
movement. But that vision never materialized. It did not help, either, that start-ups
with no business models whatsoever (e.g. De.lic.io.us (bookmarks), Flickr
(photos), Youtube (videos), Google Reader (RSS aggregator), Blogspot, and
others) were happy to give their services for free, let contributors use Creative
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Commons licences (mostly on the side of licenses limiting commercial use and
adaptations), let news curators share and aggregate relevant content, and let Time
magazine claim that “You” (meaning “All of us”) are The Person of the Year
(Time Magazine, 2006).
PJ & AK: Please describe the interplay between the Free Software Movement
and the radically capitalist Silicon Valley start-up culture, and place it into the
larger context of political economy of software development. What are its
consequences for the hacker movement?
MM & TM: Before the 2008 economic crash, in the course of only few years,
most of those start-ups and services had been sold out to few business people who
were able to monetize their platforms, users and usees (mostly via advertisement)
or crowd them out (mostly via exponential growth of Facebook and its ‘magic’
network effect). In the end, almost all affected start-ups and services got shut down
(especially those bought by Yahoo). Nevertheless, the ‘golden’ corporate start-up
period brought about a huge enthusiasm and the belief that entrepreneurial spirit,
fostered either by an individual genius or by collective (a.k.a. crowd) endeavour,
could save the world. During that period, unsurprisingly, the idea of hacker
labs/spaces exploded.
Fabulous (self)replicating rapid prototypes, 3D printers, do-it-yourself, the
Internet of Things started to resonate with (young) makers all around the world.
Unfortunately, GNU GPL (v.3 at the time) ceased to be a priority. The
infrastructure of free software had become taken for granted, and enthusiastic
dancing on the shoulders of giants became the most popular exercise. Rebranding
existing Unix services (finger > twitter, irc > slack, talk > im), and/or designing the
‘last mile’ of user experience (often as trivial as adding round corners to the
buttons), would often be a good enough reason to enclose the project, do the
slideshow pitch, create a new start-up backed up by an angel investor, and hope to
win in the game of network effect(s).
Typically, software stack running these projects would be (almost) completely
GNU GPL (server + client), but parts made on OSX (endorsed for being ‘true’
Unix under the hood) would stay enclosed. In this way, projects would shift from
the world of commons to the world of business. In order to pay respect to the open
source community, and to keep own reputation of ‘the good citizen,’ many
software components would get its source code published on GitHub – which is a
prime example of that game of enclosure in its own right. Such developments
transformed the hacker movement from a genuine political challenge to the
property regime into a science fiction fantasy that sharing knowledge while
keeping hackers’ meritocracy regime intact could fix all world’s problems – if only
we, the hackers, are left alone to play, optimize, innovate and make that amazing
technology!
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

PJ & AK: This brings about the old debate between technological determinism
and social determinism, which never seems to go out of fashion. What is your take,
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as active hackers and social activists, on this debate? What is the role of
(information) technologies in social development?
MM & TM: Any discussion of information technologies and social
development requires the following parenthesis: notions used for discussing
technological development are shaped by the context of parallel US hegemony
over capitalist world-system and its commanding role in the development of
information technologies. Today’s critiques of the Internet are far from celebration
of its liberatory, democratizing potential. Instead, they often reflect frustration over
its instrumental role in the expansion of social control. Yet, the binary of freedom
and control (Chun, 2008), characteristic for ideological frameworks pertaining to
liberal capitalist democracies, is increasingly at pains to explain what has become
evident with the creeping commercialization and concentration of market power in
digital networks. Information technologies are no different from other generalpurpose technologies on which they depend – such as mass manufacture, logistics,
or energy systems.
Information technologies shape capitalism – in return, capitalism shapes
information technologies. Technological innovation is driven by interests of
investors to profit from new commodity markets, and by their capacity to optimize
and increase productivity of other sectors of economy. The public has some
influence over development of information technologies. In fact, publicly funded
research and development has created and helped commercialize most of the
fundamental building blocks of our present digital infrastructures ranging from
microprocessors, touch-screens all the way to packet switching networks
(Mazzucato, 2013). However, public influence on commercially matured
information technologies has become limited, driven by imperatives of
accumulation and regulatory hegemony of the US.
When considering the structural interplay between technological development
and larger social systems, we cannot accept the position of technological
determinism – particularly not in the form of Promethean figures of enterpreneurs,
innovators and engineers who can solve the problems of the world. Technologies
are shaped socially, yet the position of outright social determinism is inacceptable
either. The reproduction of social relations depends on contingencies of
technological innovation, just as the transformation of social relations depends on
contingencies of actions by individuals, groups and institutions. Given the
asymmetries that exist between the capitalist core and the capitalist periphery, from
which we hail, strategies for using technologies as agents of social change differ
significantly.
PJ & AK: Based on your activist experience, what is the relationship between
information technologies and democracy?
MM & TM: This relation is typically discussed within the framework of
communicative action (Habermas, 1984 [1981], 1987 [1981]) which describes how
the power to speak to the public has become radically democratized, how digital
communication has coalesced into a global public sphere, and how digital
communication has catalysed the power of collective mobilization. Information
technologies have done all that – but the framework of communicative action
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describes only a part of the picture. Firstly, as Jodi Dean warns us in her critique of
communicative capitalism (Dean, 2005; see also Dean, 2009), the self-referential
intensity of communication frequently ends up as a substitute for the hard (and
rarely rewarding) work of political organization. Secondly, and more importantly,
Internet technologies have created the ‘winner takes all’ markets and benefited
more highly skilled workforce, thus helping to create extreme forms of economic
inequality (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2011). Thus, in any list of world’s richest
people, one can find an inordinate number of entrepreneurs from information
technology sector. This feeds deeply into neoliberal transformation of capitalist
societies, with growing (working and unemployed) populations left out of social
welfare which need to be actively appeased or policed. This is the structural
problem behind liberal democracies, electoral successes of the radical right, and
global “Trumpism” (Blyth, 2015). Intrinsic to contemporary capitalism,
information technologies reinforce its contradictions and pave its unfortunate trail
of destruction.
PJ & AK: Access to digital technologies and digital materials is dialectically
intertwined with human learning. For instance, Stallman’s definition of free
software directly addresses this issue in two freedoms: “Freedom 1: The freedom
to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish,” and
“Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements
(and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community
benefits” (Stallman, 2002: 43). Please situate the relationship between access and
learning in the contemporary context.
MM & TM: The relationships between digital technologies and education are
marked by the same contradictions and processes of enclosure that have befallen
the free software. Therefore, Eastern European scepticism towards free software is
equally applicable to education. The flip side of interactivity is audience
manipulation; the flip side of access and availability is (economic) domination.
Eroded by raising tuitions, expanding student debt, and poverty-level wages for
adjunct faculty, higher education is getting more and more exclusive. However,
occasional spread of enthusiasm through ideas such as MOOCs does not bring
about more emancipation and equality. While they preach loudly about unlimited
access for students at the periphery, neoliberal universities (backed up by venture
capital) are actually hoping to increase their recruitment business (models).
MOOCs predominantly serve members of privileged classes who already have
access to prestige universities, and who are “self-motivated, self-directed, and
independent individuals who would push to succeed anywhere” (Konnikova,
2014). It is a bit worrying that such rise of inequality results from attempts to
provide materials freely to everyone with Internet access!
The question of access to digital books for public libraries is different. Libraries
cannot afford digital books from world’s largest publishers (Digitalbookworld,
2012), and the small amount of already acquired e-books must destroyed after only
twenty six lendings (Greenfield, 2012). Thus, the issue of access is effectively left
to competition between Amazon, Google, Apple and other companies. The state of
affairs in scientific publishing is not any better. As we wrote in the collective open
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letter ‘In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub’ (Custodians.online, 2015),
five for-profit publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis
and Sage) own more than half of all existing databases of academic material, which
are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the richest university
of the Global North, has complained that it cannot afford them any longer. Robert
Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library, says: “We faculty do the research,
write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all
of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labor at outrageous prices.”
For all the work supported by public money benefiting scholarly publishers,
particularly the peer review that grounds their legitimacy, prices of journal articles
prohibit access to science to many academics – and all non-academics – across the
world, and render it a token of privilege (Custodians.online, 2015).
PJ & AK: Please describe the existing strategies for struggle against these
developments. What are their main strengths and weaknesses?
MM & TM: Contemporary problems in the field of production, access,
maintenance and distribution of knowledge regulated by globally harmonized
intellectual property regime have brought about tremendous economic, social,
political and institutional crisis and deadlock(s). Therefore, we need to revisit and
rethink our politics, strategies and tactics. We could perhaps find inspiration in the
world of free software production, where it seems that common effort, courage and
charming obstinacy are able to build alternative tools and infrastructures. Yet, this
model might be insufficient for the whole scope of crisis facing knowledge
production and dissemination. The aforementioned corporate appropriations of free
software such as ‘tivoizations,’ ‘walled gardens,’ ‘software-as-a-service’ etc. bring
about the problem of longevity of commons-based peer-production.
Furthermore, the sense of entitlement for building alternatives to dominant
modes of oppression can only arrive at the close proximity to capitalist centres of
power. The periphery (of capitalism), in contrast, relies on strategies of ‘stealing’
and bypassing socio-economic barriers by refusing to submit to the harmonized
regulation that sets the frame for global economic exchange. If we honestly look
back and try to compare the achievements of digital piracy vs. the achievements of
reformist Creative Commons, it is obvious that the struggle for access to
knowledge is still alive mostly because of piracy.
PJ & AK: This brings us to the struggle against (knowledge as) private
property. What are the main problems in this struggle? How do you go about them?
MM & TM: Many projects addressing the crisis of access to knowledge are
originated in Eastern Europe. Examples include Library Genesis, Science Hub,
Monoskop and Memory of the World. Balázs Bodó’s research (2016) on the ethos
of Library Genesis and Science Hub resonates with our beliefs, shared through all
abovementioned projects, that the concept of private property should not be taken
for granted. Private property can and should be permanently questioned,
challenged and negotiated. This is especially the case in the face of artificial
scarcity (such as lack of access to knowledge caused by intellectual property in
context of digital networks) or selfish speculations over scarce basic human

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resources (such as problems related to housing, water or waterfront development)
(Mars, Medak, & Sekulić, 2016).
The struggle to challenge the property regime used to be at the forefront of the
Free Software Movement. In the spectacular chain of recent events, where the
revelations of sweeping control and surveillance of electronic communications
brought about new heroes (Manning, Assange, Snowden), the hacker is again
reduced to the heroic cypherpunk outlaw. This firmly lies within the old Cold War
paradigm of us (the good guys) vs. them (the bad guys). However, only rare and
talented people are able to master cryptography, follow exact security protocols,
practice counter-control, and create a leak of information. Unsurprisingly, these
people are usually white, male, well-educated, native speakers of English.
Therefore, the narrative of us vs. them is not necessarily the most empowering, and
we feel that it requires a complementary strategy that challenges the property
regime as a whole. As our letter at Custodians.online says:
We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the
very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective
civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names
behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us.
The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced
across the Internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs,
humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our
voices. Share your writing – digitize a book – upload your files. Don’t let our
knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries – care for the metadata – care
for the backup. (Custodians.online, 2015)
FROM CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE TO PUBLIC LIBRARY

PJ & AK: Started in 2012, The Public Library project (Memory of the World,
2016a) is an important part of struggle against commodification of knowledge.
What is the project about; how did it arrive into being?
MM & TM: The Public Library project develops and affirms scenarios for
massive disobedience against current regulation of production and circulation of
knowledge and culture in the digital realm. Started in 2012, it created a lot of
resonance across the peripheries of an unevenly developed world of study and
learning. Earlier that year, takedown of the book-sharing site Library.nu produced
the anxiety that the equalizing effects brought about by piracy would be rolled
back. With the takedown, the fact that access to most recent and most relevant
knowledge was (finally) no longer a privilege of the rich academic institutions in a
few countries of the Global West, and/or the exclusive preserve of the academia to
boot – has simply disappeared into thin air. Certainly, various alternatives from
deep semi-periphery have quickly filled the gap. However, it is almost a miracle
that they still continue to exist in spite of prosecution they are facing on everyday
basis.

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Our starting point for the Public Library project is simple: public library is the
institutional form devised by societies in order to make knowledge and culture
accessible to all its members regardless their social or economic status. There is a
political consensus across the board that this principle of access is fundamental to
the purpose of a modern society. Only educated and informed citizens are able to
claim their rights and fully participate in the polity for common good. Yet, as
digital networks have radically expanded availability of literature and science,
provision of de-commodified access to digital objects has been by and large denied
to public libraries. For instance, libraries frequently do not have the right to
purchase e-books for lending and preservations. If they do, they are limited in
regards to how many times and under what conditions they can lend digital objects
before the license and the object itself is revoked (Greenfield, 2012). The case of
academic journals is even worse. As journals become increasingly digital, libraries
can provide access and ‘preserve’ them only for as long as they pay extortionate
subscriptions. The Public Library project fills in the space that remains denied to
real-world public libraries by building tools for organizing and sharing electronic
libraries, creating digitization workflows and making books available online.
Obviously, we are not alone in this effort. There are many other platforms, public
and hidden, that help people to share books. And the practice of sharing is massive.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) is a part of
a wider global movement based, amongst other influences, on the seminal work of
Aaron Swartz. This movement consists of various projects including but not
limited to Library Genesis, Aaaaarg.org, UbuWeb, and others. Please situate The
Public Library project in the wider context of this movement. What are its distinct
features? What are its main contributions to the movement at large?
MM & TM: The Public Library project is informed by two historic moments in
the development of institution of public library The first defining moment
happened during the French Revolution – the seizure of library collections from
aristocracy and clergy, and their transfer to the Bibliothèque Nationale and
municipal libraries of the post-revolutionary Republic. The second defining
moment happened in England through working class struggles to make knowledge
accessible to the working class. After the revolution of 1848, that struggle resulted
in tax-supported public libraries. This was an important part of the larger attempt
by the Chartist movement to provide workers with “really useful knowledge”
aimed at raising class consciousness through explaining functioning of capitalist
domination and exploring ways of building workers’ own autonomous culture
(Johnson, 1988). These defining revolutionary moments have instituted two
principles underpinning the functioning of public libraries: a) general access to
knowledge is fundamental to full participation in the society, and b)
commodification of knowledge in the form of book trade needs to be limited by
public de-commodified non-monetary forms of access through public institutions.
In spite of enormous expansion of potentials for providing access to knowledge
to all regardless of their social status or geographic location brought about by the
digital technologies, public libraries have been radically limited in pursuing their
mission. This results in side-lining of public libraries in enormous expansion of
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commodification of knowledge in the digital realm, and brings huge profits to
academic publishers. In response to these limitations, a number of projects have
sprung up in order to maintain public interest by illegal means.
PJ & AK: Can you provide a short genealogy of these projects?
MM & TM: Founded in 1996, Ubu was one of the first online repositories.
Then, in 2001, Textz.com started distributing texts in critical theory. After
Textz.com got shot down in early 2004, it took another year for Aaaaarg to emerge
and Monoskop followed soon thereafter. In the latter part of the 2000s, Gigapedia
started a different trajectory of providing access to comprehensive repositories.
Gigapedia was a game changer, because it provided access to thousands and
thousands of scholarly titles and made access to that large corpus no longer limited
to those working or studying in the rich institutions of the Global North. In 2012
publishing industry shut down Gigapedia (at the time, it was known as Library.nu).
Fortunately, the resulting vacuum did not last for long, as Library.nu repository got
merged into the holdings of Library Genesis. Building on the legacy of Soviet
scholars who devised the ways of shadow production and distribution of
knowledge in the form of samizdat and early digital distribution of texts in the
post-Soviet period (Balázs, 2014), Library Genesis has built a robust infrastructure
with the mission to provide access to the largest online library in existence while
keeping a low profile. At this moment Library Genesis provides access to books,
and its sister project Science Hub provides access to academic journals. Both
projects are under threat of closure by the largest academic publisher Reed
Elsevier. Together with the Public Library project, they articulate a position of civil
disobedience.
PJ & AK: Please elaborate the position of civil disobedience. How does it
work; when is it justified?
MM & TM: Legitimating discourses usually claim that shadow libraries fall
into the category of non-commercial fair use. These arguments are definitely valid,
yet they do not build a particularly strong ground for defending knowledge
commons. Once they arrive under attack, therefore, shadow libraries are typically
shut down. In our call for collective disobedience, therefore, we want to make a
larger claim. Access to knowledge as a universal condition could not exist if we –
academics and non-academics across the unevenly developed world – did not
create own ways of commoning knowledge that we partake in producing and
learning. By introducing the figure of the custodian, we are turning the notion of
property upside down. Paraphrasing the Little Prince, to own something is to be
useful to that which you own (Saint-Exupéry, 1945). Custodians are the political
subjectivity of that disobedient work of care.
Practices of sharing, downloading, and uploading, are massive. So, if we want to
prevent our knowledge commons from being taken away over and over again, we
need to publicly and collectively stand behind our disobedient behaviour. We
should not fall into the trap of the debate about legality or illegality of our
practices. Instead, we should acknowledge that our practices, which have been
deemed illegal, are politically legitimate in the face of uneven opportunities
between the Global North and the Global South, in the face of commercialization
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of education and student debt in the Global North … This is the meaning of civil
disobedience – to take responsibility for breaking unjust laws.
PJ & AK: We understand your lack of interest for debating legality –
nevertheless, legal services are very interested in your work … For instance,
Marcell has recently been involved in a law suit related to Aaaaarg. Please describe
the relationship between morality and legality in your (public) engagement. When,
and under which circumstances, can one’s moral actions justify breaking the law?
MM & TM: Marcell has been recently drawn into a lawsuit that was filed
against Aaaaarg for copyright infringement. Marcell, the founder of Aaaaarg Sean
Dockray, and a number of institutions ranging from universities to continentalscale intergovernmental organizations, are being sued by a small publisher from
Quebec whose translation of André Bazin’s What is Cinema? (1967) was twice
scanned and uploaded to Aaaaarg by an unknown user. The book was removed
each time the plaintiff issued a takedown notice, resulting in minimal damages, but
these people are nonetheless being sued for 500.000 Canadian dollars. Should
Aaaaarg not be able to defend its existence on the principle of fair use, a valuable
common resource will yet again be lost and its founder will pay a high price. In this
lawsuit, ironically, there is little economic interest. But many smaller publishers
find themselves squeezed between the privatization of education which leaves
students and adjuncts with little money for books and the rapid concentration of
academic publishing. For instance, Taylor and Francis has acquired a smaller
humanities publisher Ashgate and shut it down in a matter of months (Save
Ashgate Publishing petition, 2015).
The system of academic publishing is patently broken. It syphons off public
funding of science and education into huge private profits, while denying living
wages and access to knowledge to its producers. This business model is legal, but
deeply illegitimate. Many scientists and even governments agree with this
conclusion – yet, situation cannot be easily changed because of entrenched power
passed down from the old models of publishing and their imbrication with
allocation of academic prestige. Therefore, the continuous existence of this model
commands civil disobedience.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) operates
in various public domains including art galleries. Why did you decide to develop
The Public Library project in the context of arts? How do you conceive the
relationship between arts and activism?
MM & TM: We tend to easily conflate the political with the aesthetic.
Moreover, when an artwork expressedly claims political character, this seems to
grant it recognition and appraisal. Yet, socially reflective character of an artwork
and its consciously critical position toward the social reality might not be outright
political. Political action remains a separate form of agency, which is different than
that of socially reflexive, situated and critical art. It operates along a different logic
of engagement. It requires collective mobilization and social transformation.
Having said that, socially reflexive, situated and critical art cannot remain detached
from the present conjuncture and cannot exist outside the political space. Within
the world of arts, alternatives to existing social sensibilities and realities can be
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articulated and tested without paying a lot of attention to consistency and
plausibility. Whereas activism generally leaves less room for unrestricted
articulation, because it needs to produce real and plausible effects.
With the generous support of the curatorial collective What, How and for Whom
(WHW) (2016), the Public Library project was surprisingly welcomed by the art
world, and this provided us with a stage to build the project, sharpen its arguments
and ascertain legitimacy of its political demands. The project was exhibited, with
WHW and other curators, in some of the foremost art venues such as Reina Sofía
in Madrid, Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, 98 Weeks in Beirut,
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana, and Calvert 22 in London.
It is great to have a stage where we can articulate social issues and pursue avenues
of action that other social institutions might find risky to support. Yet, while the
space of art provides a safe haven from the adversarial world of political reality, we
think that the addressed issues need to be politicized and that other institutions,
primarily institutions of education, need to stand behind the demand for universal
access. For instance, teaching and research at the University in Zagreb critically
depends on the capacity of its faculty and students to access books and journals
from sources that are deemed illegal – in our opinion, therefore, the University
needs to take a public stand for these forms of access. In the world of
commercialized education and infringement liability, expecting the University to
publicly support us seems highly improbable. However, it is not impossible! This
was recently demonstrated by the Zürich Academy of Arts, which now hosts a
mirror of Ubu – a crucial resource for its students and faculty alike
(Custodians.online, 2016).
PJ & AK: In the current climate of economic austerity, the question of
resources has become increasingly important. For instance, Web 2.0. has narrowed
available spaces for traditional investigative journalism, and platforms such as
Airbnb and Uber have narrowed spaces for traditional labor. Following the same
line of argument, placing activism into art galleries clearly narrows available
spaces for artists. How do you go about this problem? What, if anything, should be
done with the activist takeover of traditional forms of art? Why?
MM & TM: Art can no longer stand outside of the political space, and it can no
longer be safely stowed away into a niche of supposed autonomy within bourgeois
public sphere detached from commodity production and the state. However, art
academies in Croatia and many other places throughout the world still churn out
artists on the premise that art is apolitical. In this view artists can specialize in a
medium and create in isolation of their studios – if their artwork is recognized as
masterful, it will be bought on the marketplace. This is patently a lie! Art in Croatia
depends on bonds of solidarity and public support.
Frequently it is the art that seeks political forms of engagement rather than vice
versa. A lot of headspace for developing a different social imaginary can be gained
from that venturing aspect of contemporary art. Having said that, art does not need
to be political in order to be relevant and strong.

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THE DOUBLE LIFE OF HACKER CULTURE

PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) is essentially
pedagogical. When everyone is a librarian, and all books are free, living in the
world transforms into living with the world – so The Public Library project is also
essentially anti-capitalist. This brings us to the intersections between critical
pedagogy of Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, and others – and the
hacker culture of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Steven Lévy, and others. In
spite of various similarities, however, critical pedagogy and hacker culture disagree
on some important points.
With its deep roots in Marxism, critical theory always insists on class analysis.
Yet, imbued in the Californian ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996), the hacker
culture is predominantly individualist. How do you go about the tension between
individualism and collectivism in The Public Library project? How do you balance
these forces in your overall work?
MM & TM: Hacker culture has always lived a double life. Personal computers
and the Internet have set up a perfect projection screen for a mind-set which
understands autonomy as a pursuit for personal self-realisation. Such mind-set sees
technology as a frontier of limitless and unconditional freedom, and easily melds
with entrepreneurial culture of the Silicon Valley. Therefore, it is hardly a surprise
that individualism has become the hegemonic narrative of hacker culture.
However, not all hacker culture is individualist and libertarian. Since the 1990s, the
hacker culture is heavily divided between radical individualism and radical
mutualism. Fred Turner (2006), Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (1996) have
famously shown that radical individualism was built on freewheeling counterculture of the American hippie movement, while radical mutualism was built on
collective leftist traditions of anarchism and Marxism. This is evident in the Free
Software Movement, which has placed ethics and politics before economy and
technology. In her superb ethnographic work, Biella Coleman (2013) has shown
that projects such as GNU/Linux distribution Debian have espoused radically
collective subjectivities. In that regard, these projects stand closer to mutualist,
anarchist and communist traditions where collective autonomy is the foundation of
individual freedom.
Our work stands in that lineage. Therefore, we invoke two collective figures –
amateur librarian and custodian. These figures highlight the labor of communizing
knowledge and maintaining infrastructures of access, refuse to leave the commons
to the authority of professions, and create openings where technologies and
infrastructures can be re-claimed for radically collective and redistributive
endeavours. In that context, we are critical of recent attempts to narrow hacker
culture down to issues of surveillance, privacy and cryptography. While these
issues are clearly important, they (again) reframe the hacker community through
the individualist dichotomy of freedom and privacy, and, more broadly, through
the hegemonic discourse of the post-historical age of liberal capitalism. In this
way, the essential building blocks of the hacker culture – relations of production,
relations of property, and issues of redistribution – are being drowned out, and
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collective and massive endeavour of commonizing is being eclipsed by the
capacity of the few crypto-savvy tricksters to avoid government control.
Obviously, we strongly disagree with the individualist, privative and 1337 (elite)
thrust of these developments.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) arrives
very close to visions of deschooling offered by authors such as Ivan Illich (1971),
Everett Reimer (1971), Paul Goodman (1973), and John Holt (1967). Recent
research indicates that digital technologies offer some fresh opportunities for the
project of deschooling (Hart, 2001; Jandrić, 2014, 2015b), and projects such as
Monoskop (Monoskop, 2016) and The Public Library project (Memory of the
World, 2016a) provide important stepping-stones for emancipation of the
oppressed. Yet, such forms of knowledge and education are hardly – if at all –
recognised by the mainstream. How do you go about this problem? Should these
projects try and align with the mainstream, or act as subversions of the mainstream,
or both? Why?
MM & TM: We are currently developing a more fine-tuned approach to
educational aspects of amateur librarianship. The forms of custodianship over
knowledge commons that underpin the practices behind Monoskop, Public Library,
Aaaaarg, Ubu, Library Genesis, and Science Hub are part and parcel of our
contemporary world – whether you are a non-academic with no access to scholarly
libraries, or student/faculty outside of the few well-endowed academic institutions
in the Global North. As much as commercialization and privatization of education
are becoming mainstream across the world, so are the strategies of reproducing
one’s knowledge and academic research that depend on the de-commodified access
of shadow libraries.
Academic research papers are narrower in scope than textbooks, and Monoskop
is thematically more specific than Library Genesis. However, all these practices
exhibit ways in which our epistemologies and pedagogies are built around
institutional structures that reproduce inequality and differentiated access based on
race, gender, class and geography. By building own knowledge infrastructures, we
build different bodies of knowledge and different forms of relating to our realities –
in words of Walter Mignolo, we create new forms of epistemic disobedience
(2009). Through Public Library, we have digitized and made available several
collections that represent epistemologically different corpuses of knowledge. A
good example of that is the digital collection of books selected by Black Panther
Herman Wallace as his dream library for political education (Memory of the
World, 2016b).
PJ & AK: Your work breaks traditional distinctions between professionals and
amateurs – when everyone becomes a librarian, the concepts of ‘professional
librarian’ and ‘amateur librarian’ become obsolete. Arguably, this tension is an
inherent feature of the digital world – similar trends can be found in various
occupations such as journalism and arts. What are the main consequences of the
new (power) dynamics between professionals and amateurs?
MM & TM: There are many tensions between amateurs and professionals.
There is the general tension, which you refer to as “the inherent feature of the
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digital world,” but there are also more historically specific tensions. We, amateur
librarians, are mostly interested in seizing various opportunities to politicize and
renegotiate the positions of control and empowerment in the tensions that are
already there. We found that storytelling is a particularly useful, efficient and
engaging way of politicization. The naïve and oft overused claim – particularly
during the Californian nineties – of the revolutionary potential of emerging digital
networks turned out to be a good candidate for replacement by a story dating back
two centuries earlier – the story of emergence of public libraries in the early days
of the French bourgeois revolution in the 19th century.
The seizure of book collections from the Church and the aristocracy in the
course of revolutions casts an interesting light on the tensions between the
professionals and the amateurs. Namely, the seizure of book collections didn’t lead
to an Enlightenment in the understanding of the world – a change in the paradigm
how we humans learn, write and teach each other about the world. Steam engine,
steam-powered rotary press, railroads, electricity and other revolutionary
technological innovations were not seen as results of scientific inquiry. Instead,
they were by and large understood as developments in disciplines such as
mechanics, engineering and practical crafts, which did not challenge religion as the
foundational knowledge about the world.
Consequently, public prayers continued to act as “hoped for solutions to cattle
plagues in 1865, a cholera epidemic in 1866, and a case of typhoid suffered by the
young Prince (Edward) of Wales in 1871” (Gieryn, 1983). Scientists of the time
had to demarcate science from both the religion and the mechanics to provide a
rationale for its supriority as opposed to the domains of spiritual and technical
discovery. Depending on whom they talked to, asserts Thomas F. Gieryn, scientists
would choose to discribe the science as either theoretical or empirical, pure or
applied, often in contradictory ways, but with a clear goal to legitimate to
authorities both the scientific endavor and its claim to resources. Boundary-work of
demarcation had the following characteristics:
(a) when the goal is expansion of authority or expertise into domains claimed
by other professions or occupations, boundary-work heightens the contrast
between rivals in ways flattering to the ideologists’ side;
(b) when the goal is monopolization of professional authority and resources,
boundary-work excludes rivals from within by defining them as outsiders
with labels such as ‘pseudo,’ ‘deviant,’ or ‘amateur’;
(c) when the goal is protection of autonomy over professional activities,
boundary-work exempts members from responsibility for consequences of
their work by putting the blame on scapegoats from outside. (Gieryn, 1983:
791–192)
Once institutionally established, modern science and its academic system have
become the exclusive instances where emerging disciplines had now to seek
recognition and acceptance. The new disciplines (and their respective professions),
in order to become acknowledged by the scientific community as legitimate, had to
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repeat the same boundary-work as the science in general once had to go through
before.
The moral of this story is that the best way for a new scientific discipline to
claim its territory was to articulate the specificity and importance of its insights in a
domain no other discipline claimed. It could achieve that by theorizing,
formalizing, and writing own vocabulary, methods and curricula, and finally by
asking the society to see its own benefit in acknowledging the discipline, its
practitioners and its practices as a separate profession – giving it the green light to
create its own departments and eventually join the productive forces of the world.
This is how democratization of knowledge led to the professionalization of science.
Another frequent reference in our storytelling is the history of
professionalization of computing and its consequences for the fields and disciplines
where the work of computer programmers plays an important role (Ensmenger,
2010: 14; Krajewski, 2011). Markus Krajewski in his great book Paper Machines
(2011), looking back on the history of index card catalog (an analysis that is
formative for our understanding of the significance of library catalog as an
epistemic tool), introduced a thought-provoking idea of the logical equivalence of
the developed index card catalog and the Turing machine, thus making the library a
vanguard of the computing. Granting that equivalence, we however think that the
professionalization of computing much better explains the challenges of today’s
librarianship and tensions between the amateur and professional librarians.
The world recognized the importance and potential of computer technology
much before computer science won its own autonomy in the academia. Computer
science first had to struggle and go through its own historical phase of boundarywork. In 1965 the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) had decided to
pool together various attempts to define the terms and foundations of computer
science analysis. Still, the field wasn’t given its definition before Donald Knuth
and his colleagues established the algorithm as as the principle unit of analysis in
computer science in the first volume of Knuth’s canonical The Art of Computer
Programming (2011) [1968]. Only once the algorithm was posited as the main unit
of study of computer science, which also served as the basis for ACM’s
‘Curriculum ‘68’ (Atchison et al., 1968), the path was properly paved for the future
departments of computer science in the university.
PJ & AK: What are the main consequences of these stories for computer
science education?
MM & TM: Not everyone was happy with the algorithm’s central position in
computer science. Furthermore, since the early days, computer industry has been
complaining that the university does not provide students with practical
knowledge. Back in 1968, for instance, IBM researcher Hal Sackman said:
new departments of computer science in the universities are too busy
teaching simon-pure courses in their struggle for academic recognition to pay
serious time and attention to the applied work necessary to educate
programmers and systems analysts for the real world. (in Ensmenger, 2010:
133)
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Computer world remains a weird hybrid where knowledge is produced in both
academic and non-academic settings, through academic curricula – but also
through fairs, informal gatherings, homebrew computer clubs, hacker communities
and the like. Without the enthusiasm and the experiments with ways how
knowledge can be transferred and circulated between peers, we would have
probably never arrived to the Personal Computer Revolution in the beginning of
1980s. Without the amount of personal computers already in use, we would have
probably never experienced the Internet revolution in the beginning of 1990s. It is
through such historical development that computer science became the academic
centre of the larger computer universe which spread its tentacles into almost all
other known disciplines and professions.
PJ & AK: These stories describe the process of professionalization. How do
you go about its mirror image – the process of amateurisation?
MM & TM: Systematization, vocabulary, manuals, tutorials, curricula – all the
processes necessary for achieving academic autonomy and importance in the world
– prime a discipline for automatization of its various skills and workflows into
software tools. That happened to photography (Photoshop, 1990; Instagram, 2010),
architecture (AutoCAD, 1982), journalism (Blogger, 1999; WordPress, 2003),
graphic design (Adobe Illustrator, 1986; Pagemaker, 1987; Photoshop, 1988;
Freehand, 1988), music production (Steinberg Cubase, 1989), and various other
disciplines (Memory of the World, 2016b).
Usually, after such software tool gets developed and introduced into the
discipline, begins the period during which a number of amateurs start to ‘join’ that
profession. An army of enthusiasts with a specific skill, many self-trained and with
understanding of a wide range of software tools, join. This phenomenon often
marks a crisis as amateurs coming from different professional backgrounds start to
compete with certified and educated professionals in that field. Still, the future
development of the same software tools remains under control by software
engineers, who become experts in established workflows, and who promise further
optimizations in the field. This crisis of old professions becomes even more
pronounced if the old business models – and their corporate monopolies – are
challenged by the transition to digital network economy and possibly face the
algorithmic replacement of their workforce and assets.
For professions under these challenging conditions, today it is often too late for
boundary-work described in our earlier answer. Instead of maintaining authority
and expertise by labelling upcoming enthusiasts as ‘pseudo,’ ‘deviant,’ or
‘amateur,’ therefore, contemporary disciplines need to revisit own roots, values,
vision and benefits for society and then (re-)articulate the corpus of knowledge that
the discipline should maintain for the future.
PJ & AK: How does this relate to the dichotomy between amateur and
professional librarians?
MM & TM: We regard the e-book management software Calibre (2016),
written by Kovid Goyal, as a software tool which has benefited from the
knowledge produced, passed on and accumulated by librarians for centuries.
Calibre has made the task of creating and maintaining the catalog easy.
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Our vision is to make sharing, aggregating and accessing catalogs easy and
playful. We like the idea that every rendered catalog is stored on a local hard disk,
that an amateur librarian can choose when to share, and that when she decides to
share, the catalog gets aggregated into a library together with the collections of
other fellow amateur librarians (at https://library.memoryoftheworld.org). For the
purpose of sharing we wrote the Calibre plugin named let’s share books and set up
the related server infrastructure – both of which are easily replicable and
deployable into distributed clones.
Together with Voja Antonić, the legendary inventor of the first eight-bit
computer in Yugoslavia, we also designed and developed a series of book scanners
and used them to digitize hundreds of books focused to Yugoslav humanities such
as the Digital Archive of Praxis and the Korčula Summer School (2016), Catalogue
of Liberated Books (2013), books thrown away from Croatian public libraries
during ideological cleansing of the 1990s Written-off (2015), and the collection of
books selected by the Black Panther Herman Wallace as his dream library for
political education (Memory of the World, 2016b).
In our view, amateur librarians are complementary to professional librarians,
and there is so much to learn and share between each other. Amateur librarians care
about books which are not (yet) digitally curated with curiosity, passion and love;
they dare to disobey in pursuit for the emancipatory vision of the world which is
now under threat. If we, amateur librarians, ever succeed in our pursuits – that
should secure the existing jobs of professional librarians and open up many new
and exciting positions. When knowledge is easily accessed, (re)produced and
shared, there will be so much to follow up upon.
TOWARDS AN ACTIVIST PUBLIC PEDAGOGY

PJ & AK: You organize talks and workshops, publish books, and maintain a major
regional hub for people interested in digital cultures. In Croatia, your names are
almost synonymous with social studies of the digital – worldwide, you are
recognized as regional leaders in the field. Such engagement has a prominent
pedagogical component – arguably, the majority of your work can be interpreted as
public pedagogy. What are the main theoretical underpinnings of your public
pedagogy? How does it work in practice?
MM & TM: Our organization is a cluster of heterogeneous communities and
fields of interest. Therefore, our approaches to public pedagogy hugely vary. In
principle, we subscribe to the idea that all intelligences are equal and that all
epistemology is socially structured. In practice, this means that our activities are
syncretic and inclusive. They run in parallel without falling under the same
umbrella, and they bring together people of varying levels of skill – who bring in
various types of knowledge, and who arrive from various social backgrounds.
Working with hackers, we favour hands-on approach. For a number of years
Marcell has organized weekly Skill Sharing program (Net.culture club MaMa,
2016b) that has started from very basic skills. The bar was incrementally raised to
today’s level of the highly specialized meritocratic community of 1337 hackers. As
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the required skill level got too demanding, some original members left the group –
yet, the community continues to accommodate geeks and freaks. At the other end,
we maintain a theoretically inflected program of talks, lectures and publications.
Here we invite a mix of upcoming theorists and thinkers and some of the most
prominent intellectuals of today such as Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Saskia
Sassen and Robert McChesney. This program creates a larger intellectual context,
and also provides space for our collaborators in various activities.
Our political activism, however, takes an altogether different approach. More
often than not, our campaigns are based on inclusive planning and direct decision
making processes with broad activist groups and the public. However, such
inclusiveness is usually made possible by a campaigning process that allows
articulation of certain ideas in public and popular mobilization. For instance, before
the Right to the City campaign against privatisation of the pedestrian zone in
Zagreb’s Varšavska Street coalesced together (Pravo na grad, 2016), we tactically
used media for more than a year to clarify underlying issues of urban development
and mobilize broad public support. At its peak, this campaign involved no less than
200 activists involved in the direct decision-making process and thousands of
citizens in the streets. Its prerequisite was hard day-to-day work by a small group
of people organized by the important member of our collective Teodor Celakoski.
PJ & AK: Your public pedagogy provides great opportunity for personal
development – for instance, talks organized by the Multimedia Institute have been
instrumental in shaping our educational trajectories. Yet, you often tackle complex
problems and theories, which are often described using complex concepts and
language. Consequently, your public pedagogy is inevitably restricted to those who
already possess considerable educational background. How do you balance the
popular and the elitist aspects of your public pedagogy? Do you intend to try and
reach wider audiences? If so, how would you go about that?
MM & TM: Our cultural work equally consists of more demanding and more
popular activities, which mostly work together in synergy. Our popular Human
Rights Film Festival (2016) reaches thousands of people; yet, its highly selective
programme echoes our (more) theoretical concerns. Our political campaigns are
intended at scalability, too. Demanding and popular activities do not contradict
each other. However, they do require very different approaches and depend on
different contexts and situations. In our experience, a wide public response to a
social cause cannot be simply produced by shaping messages or promoting causes
in ways that are considered popular. The response of the public primarily depends
on a broadly shared understanding, no matter its complexity, that a certain course
of action has an actual capacity to transform a specific situation. Recognizing that
moment, and acting tactfully upon it, is fundamental to building a broad political
process.
This can be illustrated by the aforementioned Custodians.online letter (2015)
that we recently co-authored with a number of our fellow library activists against
the injunction that allows Elsevier to shut down two most important repositories
providing access to scholarly writing: Science Hub and Library Genesis. The letter
is clearly a product of our specific collective work and dynamic. Yet, it clearly
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articulates various aspects of discontent around this impasse in access to
knowledge, so it resonates with a huge number of people around the world and
gives them a clear indication that there are many who disobey the global
distribution of knowledge imposed by the likes of Elsevier.
PJ & AK: Your work is probably best described by John Holloway’s phrase
“in, against, and beyond the state” (Holloway, 2002, 2016). What are the main
challenges of working under such conditions? How do you go about them?
MM & TM: We could situate the Public Library project within the structure of
tactical agency, where one famously moves into the territory of institutional power
of others. While contesting the regulatory power of intellectual property over
access to knowledge, we thus resort to appropriation of universalist missions of
different social institutions – public libraries, UNESCO, museums. Operating in an
economic system premised on unequal distribution of means, they cannot but fail
to deliver on their universalist promise. Thus, while public libraries have a mission
to provide access to knowledge to all members of the society, they are severely
limited in what they can do to accomplish that mission in the digital realm. By
claiming the mission of universal access to knowledge for shadow libraries,
collectively built shared infrastructures redress the current state of affairs outside of
the territory of institutions. Insofar, these acts of commoning can indeed be
regarded as positioned beyond the state (Holloway, 2002, 2016).
Yet, while shadow libraries can complement public libraries, they cannot
replace public libraries. And this shifts the perspective from ‘beyond’ to ‘in and
against’: we all inhabit social institutions which reflect uneven development in and
between societies. Therefore, we cannot simply operate within binaries: powerful
vs. powerless, institutional vs. tactical. Our space of agency is much more complex
and blurry. Institutions and their employees resist imposed limitations, and
understand that their spaces of agency reach beyond institutional limitations.
Accordingly, the Public Library project enjoys strong and unequivocal complicity
of art institutions, schools and libraries for its causes and activities. While
collectively building practices that abolish the present state of affairs and reclaim
the dream of universal access to knowledge, we rearticulate the vision of a
radically equal society equipped with institutions that can do justice to that
“infinite demand” (Critchley, 2013). We are collectively pursuing this collective
dream – in words of our friend and our continuing inspiration Aaron Swartz: “With
enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”
(Swartz, 2008).


 
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