tactics in Mars & Medak 2019
Mars & Medak
System of a Takedown
2019
System of a Takedown: Control and De-commodification in the Circuits of Academic Publishing
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Since 2012 the Public Library/Memory of the World1 project has
been developing and publicly supporting scenarios for massive
disobedience against the current regulation of production and
circulation of knowledge and culture in the digital realm. While
the significance of that year may not be immediately apparent to
everyone, across the peripheries of an unevenly developed world
of higher education and research it produced a resonating void.
The takedown of the book-sharing site Library.nu in early 2012
gave rise to an anxiety that the equalizing effect that its piracy
had created—the fact that access to the most recent and relevant
scholarship was no longer a privilege of rich academic institutions
in a few countries of the world (or, for that matter, the exclusive
preserve of academia to begin with)—would simply disappear into
thin air. While alternatives within these peripheries quickly filled
the gap, it was only through an unlikely set of circumstances that
they were able to do so, let alone continue to exist in light of the
legal persecution they now also face.
48
The starting point for the Public Library/Memory of the World
project was a simple consideration: the public library is the institutional form that societies have devised in order to make knowledge
and culture accessible to all their members regardless of social or
economic status. There’s a political consensus that this principle of
access is fundamental to the purpose of a modern society. Yet, as
digital networks have radically expanded the access to literature
and scientific research, public libraries were largely denied the
ability to extend to digital “objects” the kind of de-commodified
access they provide in the world of print. For instance, libraries
frequently don’t have the right to purchase e-books for lending and
preservation. If they do, they are limited by how many times—
twenty-six in the case of one publisher—and under what conditions
they can lend them before not only the license but the “object”
itself is revoked. In the case of academic journals, it is even worse:
as they move to predominantly digital models of distribution,
libraries can provide access to and “preserve” them only for as
long as they pay extortionate prices for ongoing subscriptions. By
building tools for organizing and sharing electronic libraries, creating digitization workflows, and making books available online, the
Public Library/Memory of the World project is aimed at helping to
fill the space that remains denied to real-world public libraries. It is
obviously not alone in this effort. There are many other platforms,
some more public, some more secretive, working to help people
share books. And the practice of sharing is massive.
—https://www.memoryoftheworld.org
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
New media remediate old media. Media pay homage to their
(mediatic) predecessors, which themselves pay homage to their
own (mediatic) predecessors. Computer graphics remediate film,
which remediates photography, which remediates painting, and so
on (McLuhan 1965, 8; Bolter and Grusin 1999). Attempts to understand new media technologies always settle on a set of metaphors
(of the old and familiar), in order to approximate what is similar,
and yet at the same time name the new. Every such metaphor has
its semiotic distance, decay, or inverse-square law that draws the
limit how far the metaphor can go in its explanation of the phenomenon to which it is applied. The intellectual work in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction thus received an unfortunate metaphor:
intellectual property. A metaphor modeled on the scarce and
exclusive character of property over land. As the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction became more and more the Age of Discrete and
Digital Reproduction, another metaphor emerged, one that reveals
the quandary left after decades of decay resulting from the increasing distanciation of intellectual property from the intellectual work
it seeks to regulate, and that metaphor is: schizophrenia.
Technologies compete with each other—the discrete and the
digital thus competes with the mechanical—and the aftermath of
these clashes can be dramatic. People lose their jobs, companies
go bankrupt, disciplines lose their departments, and computer
users lose their old files. More often than not, clashes between
competing technologies create antagonisms between different
social groups. Their voices are (sometimes) heard, and society tries
to balance their interests.
If the institutional remedies cannot resolve the social antagonism,
the law is called on to mediate. Yet in the present, the legal system
only reproduces the schizoid impasse where the metaphor of property over land is applied to works of intellect that have in practical
terms become universally accessible in the digital world. Court
cases do not result in a restoration of balance but rather in the
confirmation of entrenched interests. It is, however, not necessary
that courts act in such a one-sided manner. As Cornelia Vismann
(2011) reminds us in her analysis of the ancient roots of legal mediation, the juridical process has two facets: first, a theatrical aspect
that has common roots with the Greek dramatic theatre and its
social function as a translator of a matter of conflict into a case for
weighted juridical debate; second, an agonistic aspect not unlike a
sporting competition where a winner has to be decided, one that
49
50
leads to judgment and sanction. In the matter of copyright versus
access, however, the fact that courts cannot look past the metaphor of intellectual property, which reduces any understanding of
our contemporary technosocial condition to an analogy with the
scarcity-based language of property over land, has meant that they
have failed to adjudicate a matter of conflict between the equalizing effects of universal access to knowledge and the guarantees of
rightful remuneration for intellectual labor into a meaningful social
resolution. Rather they have primarily reasserted the agonistic
aspect by supporting exclusively the commercial interests of large
copyright industries that structure and deepen that conflict at the
societal level.
This is not surprising. As many other elements of contemporary
law, the legal norms of copyright were articulated and codified
through the centuries-long development of the capitalist state
and world-system. The legal system is, as Nicos Poulantzas (2008,
25–26) suggests, genetically structured by capitalist development.
And yet at the same time it is semi-autonomous; the development
of its norms and institutional aspects is largely endogenous and
partly responsive to the specific needs of other social subsystems.
Still, if the law and the courts are the codified and lived rationality
of a social formation, then the choice of intellectual property as a
metaphor in capitalist society comes as no surprise, as its principal
objective is to institute a formal political-economic framework for
the commodification of intellectual labor that produces knowledge
and culture. There can be no balance, only subsumption and
accumulation. Capitalism and schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia abounds wherever the discrete and the digital
breaking barriers to access meets capitalism. One can only wonder
how the conflicting interests of different divisions get disputed
and negotiated in successful corporate giants like Sony Group
where Sony Pictures Entertainment,2 Sony Music Entertainment3
and Sony Computer Entertainment coexist under the same roof
with the Sony Electronics division, which invented the Walkman
back in 1979 and went on to manufacture devices and gadgets like
home (and professional) audio and video players/recorders (VHS,
Betamax, TV, HiFi, cassette, CD/DVD, mp3, mobile phones, etc.),
storage devices, personal computers, and game consoles. In the
famous 1984 Betamax case (“Sony Corp. of America v. Universal
City Studios, Inc.,” Wikipedia 2015), Universal Studios and the Walt
Disney Company sued Sony for aiding copyright infringement with
their Betamax video recorders. Sony won. The court decision in
favor of fair use rather than copyright infringement laid the legal
ground for home recording technology as the foundation of future
analog, and subsequently digital, content sharing.
Five years later, Sony bought its first major Hollywood studio:
Columbia Pictures. In 2004 Sony Music Entertainment merged with
Bertelsmann Music Group to create Sony BMG. However, things
changed as Sony became the content producer and we entered the
age of the discrete and the digital. Another five years later, in 2009,
Sony BMG sued Joel Tenenbaum for downloading and then sharing
thirty-one songs. The jury awarded US$675,000 to the music
companies (US$22,000 per song). This is known as “the second
file-sharing case.” “The first file-sharing case” was 2007’s Capitol Records, Inc. v. Thomas-Rasset, which concerned the downloading of
twenty-four songs. In the second file-sharing case, the jury awarded
music companies US$1,920,000 in statutory damages (US$80,000
per song). The defendant, Jammie Thomas, was a Native American
mother of four from Brainerd, Minnesota, who worked at the time
as a natural resources coordinator for the Mille Lacs Band of the
Native American Ojibwe people. The conflict between access and
copyright took a clear social relief.
Encouraged by the court decisions in the years that followed, the
movie and music industries have started to publicly claim staggering numbers in annual losses: US$58 billion and 370,000 lost jobs
in the United States alone. The purported losses in sales were,
however, at least seven times bigger than the actual losses and,
if the jobs figures had been true, after only one year there would
have been no one left working in the content industry (Reid 2012).
Capitalism and schizophrenia.
51
52
If there is a reason to make an exception from the landed logic of
property being imposed onto the world of the intellect, a reason
to which few would object, it would be for access for educational
purposes. Universities in particular give an institutional form to
the premise that equal access to knowledge is a prerequisite for
building a society where all people are equal.
In this noble endeavor to make universal access to knowledge
central to social development, some universities stand out more
than the others. Consider, for example, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT). The Free Culture and Open Access movements
have never hidden their origins, inspiration, and model in the
success of the Free Software Movement, which was founded in
1984 by Richard Stallman while he was working at the MIT Artificial
Intelligence lab. It was at the MIT Museum that the “Hall of Hacks”
was set up to proudly display the roots of hacking culture. Hacking
culture at MIT takes many shapes and forms. MIT hackers famously
put a fire truck (2006) and a campus police car (1994) onto the
roof of the Great Dome of the campus’s Building 10; they landed
(and then exploded) a weather balloon onto the pitch of Harvard
Stadium during a Harvard–Yale football game; turned the quote
that “getting an education from MIT is like taking a drink from a Fire
Hose” into a literal fire hydrant serving as a drinking fountain in
front of the largest lecture hall on campus; and many, many other
“hacks” (Peterson 2011).
The World Wide Web Consortium was founded at MIT in 1993.
Presently its mission states as its goal “to enable human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge,”
on the principles of “Web for All” and the corresponding, more
technologically focused “Web on Everything.” Similarly, MIT began
its OpenCourseWare project in 2002 in order “to publish all of
[MIT’s] course materials online and make them widely available to
everyone” (n.d.). The One Laptop Per Child project was created in
2005 in order to help children “learn, share, create, and collaborate” (2010). Recently the MIT Media Lab (2017) has even started its
own Disobedience Award, which “will go to a living person or group
engaged in what we believe is extraordinary disobedience for
the benefit of society . . . seeking both expected and unexpected
nominees.” When it comes to the governance of access to MIT’s
own resources, it is well known that anyone who is registered and
connected to the “open campus” wireless network, either by being
physically present or via VPN, can search JSTOR, Google Scholar,
and other databases in order to access otherwise paywalled journals from major publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell,
Springer, Taylor and Francis, or Sage.
The MIT Press has also published numerous books that we love
and without which we would have never developed the Public
Library/Memory of the World project to the stage where it is now.
For instance, only after reading Markus Krajewski’s Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929 (2011) and learning how
conceptually close librarians came to the universal Turing machine
with the invention of the index card catalog did we center the
Public Library/Memory of the World around the idea of the catalog.
Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation (2005) taught us how end
users could become empowered to innovate and accordingly we
have built our public library as a distributed network of amateur
librarians acting as peers sharing their catalogs and books. Sven
Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (2008) showed us the
exciting hybrid meta-space between psychoanalysis, media theory,
and conceptual art one could encounter by visiting the world of
catalogs and archives. Understanding capitalism and schizophrenia would have been hard without Semiotext(e)’s translations of
Deleuze and Guattari, and remaining on the utopian path would
have been impossible if not for our reading of Cybernetic Revolutionaries (Medina 2011), Imagine No Possessions (Kiaer 2005), or Art
Power (Groys 2008).
Our Road into Schizophrenia, Commodity
Paradox, Political Strategy
Our vision for the Public Library/Memory of the World resonated
with many people. After the project initially gained a large number
53
54
of users, and was presented in numerous prominent artistic
venues such as Museum Reina Sofía, Transmediale, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Calvert22, 98weeks, and many more, it was no
small honor when Eric Kluitenberg and David Garcia invited us to
write about the project for an anthology on tactical media that was
to be published by the MIT Press. Tactical media is exactly where
we would situate ourselves on the map. Building on Michel de
Certeau’s concept of tactics as agency of the weak operating in the
terrain of strategic power, the tactical media (Tactical Media Files
2017) emerged in the political and technological conjuncture of the
1990s. Falling into the “art-into-life” lineage of historic avant-gardes,
Situationism, DIY culture, techno-hippiedom, and media piracy, it
constituted a heterogeneous field of practices and a manifestly
international movement that combined experimental media and
political activism into interventions that contested the post–Cold
War world of global capitalism and preemptive warfare on a hybrid
terrain of media, institutions, and mass movements. Practices of
tactical media ranged from ephemeral media pranks, hoaxes, and
hacktivism to reappropriations of media apparatuses, institutional
settings, and political venues. We see our work as following in
that lineage of recuperation of the means of communication from
their capture by personal and impersonal structures of political or
economic power.
Yet the contract for our contribution that the MIT Press sent us in
early 2015 was an instant reminder of the current state of affairs
in academic publishing: in return for our contribution and transfer
of our copyrights, we would receive no compensation: no right to
wage and no right to further distribute our work.
Only weeks later our work would land us fully into schizophrenia:
the Public Library/Memory of the World received two takedown
notices from the MIT Press for books that could be found in its
back then relatively small yet easily discoverable online collection
located at https://library.memoryoftheworld.org, including a notice
for one of the books that had served as an inspiration to us: Art
Power. First, no wage and, now, no access. A true paradox of the
present-day system of knowledge production: products of our
labor are commodities, yet the labor-power producing them is
denied the same status. While the project’s vision resonates with
many, including the MIT Press, it has to be shut down. Capitalism
and schizophrenia.4
Or, maybe, not. Maybe we don’t have to go down that impasse.
Starting from the two structural circumstances imposed on us by
the MIT Press—the denial of wage and the denial of access—we
can begin to analyze why copyright infringement is not merely, as
the industry and the courts would have it, a matter of illegality. But
rather a matter of legitimate action.
Over the past three decades a deep transformation, induced by
the factors of technological change and economic restructuring,
has been unfolding at different scales, changing the way works
of culture and knowledge are produced and distributed across
an unevenly developed world. As new technologies are adopted,
generalized, and adapted to the realities of the accumulation
process—a process we could see unfolding with the commodification of the internet over the past fifteen years—the core and
the periphery adopt different strategies of opposition to the
inequalities and exclusions these technologies start to reproduce.
The core, with its emancipatory and countercultural narratives,
pursues strategies that develop legal, economic, or technological
alternatives. However, these strategies frequently fail to secure
broader transformative effects as the competitive forces of the
market appropriate, marginalize, or make obsolete the alternatives
they advocate. Such seems to have been the destiny of much of the
free software, open access, and free culture alternatives that have
developed over this period.
In contrast, the periphery, in order to advance, relies on strategies
of “stealing” that bypass socioeconomic barriers by refusing to
submit to the harmonized regulation that sets the frame for global
economic exchange. The piracy of intellectual property or industrial
secrets thus creates a shadow system of exchange resisting the
55
56
asymmetries of development in the world economy. However, its
illegality serves as a pretext for the governments and companies of
the core to devise and impose further controls over the technosocial systems that facilitate these exchanges.
Both strategies develop specific politics—a politics of reform, on
the one hand, and a politics of obfuscation and resistance, on the
other—yet both are defensive politics that affirm the limitations
of what remains inside and what remains outside of the politically
legitimate.
The copyright industry giants of the past and the IT industry giants
of the present are thus currently sorting it out to whose greater
benefit will this new round of commodification work out. For those
who find themselves outside of the the camps of these two factions
of capital, there’s a window of opportunity, however, to reconceive
the mode of production of literature and science that has been
with us since the beginning of the print trade and the dawn of capitalism. It’s a matter of change, at the tail end of which ultimately
lies a dilemma: whether we’re going to live in a more equal or a
more unjust, a more commonised or a more commodified world.
Authorship, Law, and Legitimacy
Before we can talk of such structural transformation, the normative
question we expect to be asked is whether something that is considered a matter of law and juridical decision can be made a matter
of politics and political process. Let’s see.
Copyright has a fundamentally economic function—to unambiguously establish individualized property in the products of creative
labor. A clear indication of this economic function is the substantive requirement of originality that the work is expected to have
in order to be copyrightable. Legal interpretations set a very low
standard on what counts as original, as their function is no more
than to demarcate one creative contribution from another. Once
a legal title is unambiguously assigned, there is a person holding
property with whose consent the contracting, commodification,
and marketing of the work can proceed.5 In that respect copyright
is not that different from the requirement of formal freedom that
is granted to a laborer to contract out their own labor-power as a
commodity to capital, giving capital authorization to extract maximum productivity and appropriate the products of the laborer’s
labor.6 Copyright might be just a more efficient mechanism of
exploitation as it unfolds through selling of produced commodities
and not labor power. Art market obscures and mediates the
capital-labor relation
When we talk today of illegal copying, we primarily mean an
infringement of the legal rights of authors and publishers. There’s an
immediate assumption that the infringing practice of illegal copying
and distribution falls under the domain of juridical sanction, that it is
a matter of law. Yet if we look to the history of copyright, the illegality
of copying was a political matter long before it became a legal one.
Publisher’s rights, author’s rights, and mechanisms of reputation—
the three elements that are fundamental to the present-day
copyright system—all have their historic roots in the context of
absolutism and early capitalism in seventeenth-and eighteenth-
century Europe. Before publishers and authors were given a
temporary monopoly over the exploitation of their publications
instituted in the form of copyright, they were operating in a system
where they were forced to obtain a privilege to print books from
royal censors. The first printing privileges granted to publishers, in
early seventeenth-century Great Britain,7 came with the responsibility of publishers to control what was being published and
disseminated in a growing body of printed matter that started to
reach the public in the aftermath of the invention of print and the
rise of the reading culture. The illegality in these early days of print
referred either to printing books without the permission of the
censor or printing books that were already published by another
printer in the territory where the censor held authority. The transition from the privilege tied to the publisher to the privilege tied to
the natural person of the author would unfold only later.
57
58
In the United Kingdom this transition occurred as the guild of
printers, Stationers’ Company, failed to secure the extension of its
printing monopoly and thus, in order to continue with its business,
decided to advocate the introduction of copyright for the authors
instead. This resulted in the passing of the Copyright Act of 1709,
also known as the Statute of Anne (Rose 2010). The censoring
authority and enterprising publishers now proceeded in lockstep to
isolate the author as the central figure in the regulation of literary
and scientific production. Not only did the author receive exclusive
rights to the work, the author was also made—as Foucault has
famously analyzed (Foucault 1980, 124)—the identifiable subject of
scrutiny, censorship, and political sanction by the absolutist state.
Although the Romantic author slowly took the center stage in
copyright regulations, economic compensation for the work would
long remain no more than honorary. Until well into the eighteenth
century, literary writing and creativity in general were regarded as
resulting from divine inspiration and not the individual genius of
the author. Writing was a work of honor and distinction, not something requiring an honest day’s pay.8 Money earned in the growing
printing industry mostly stayed in the pockets of publishers, while
the author received literally an honorarium, a flat sum that served
as a “token of esteem” (Woodmansee 1996, 42). It is only once
authors began to voice demands for securing their material and
political independence from patronage and authority that they also
started to make claims for rightful remuneration.
Thus, before it was made a matter of law, copyright was a matter of
politics and economy.
Copyright, Labor, and Economic Domination
The full-blown affirmation of the Romantic author-function marks
the historic moment where a compromise is established between
the right of publishers to the economic exploitation of works and
the right of authors to rightful compensation for those works. Economically, this redistribution from publishers to authors was made
possible by the expanding market for printed books in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while politically this was catalyzed
by the growing desire for the autonomy of scientific and literary
production from the system of feudal patronage and censorship
in gradually liberalizing and modernizing capitalist societies. The
newfound autonomy of production was substantially coupled to
production specifically for the market. However, this irenic balance
could not last for very long. Once the production of culture and
science was subsumed under the exigencies of the generalized
market, it had to follow the laws of commodification and competition from which no form of commodity production can escape.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, copyright expanded to
a number of other forms of creativity, transcending its primarily
literary and scientific ambit and becoming part of the broader
set of intellectual property rights that are fundamental to the
functioning and positioning of capitalist enterprise. The corporatization of the production of culture and knowledge thus brought
about a decisive break from the Romantic model that singularized
authorship in the person of the author. The production of cultural
commodities nowadays involves a number of creative inputs from
both credited (but mostly unwaged) and uncredited (but mostly
waged) contributors. The “moral rights of the author,” a substantive
link between the work and the person of the author, are markedly
out of step with these realities, yet they still perform an important
function in the moral economy of reputation, which then serves as
the legitimation of copyright enforcement and monopoly. Moral
rights allow easy attribution; incentivize authors to subsidize
publishers by self-financing their own work in the hope of topping
the sales charts, rankings, or indexes; and help markets develop
along winner-takes-all principles.
The level of concentration in industries primarily concerned with
various forms of intellectual property rights is staggering. The film
industry is a US$88 billion industry dominated by six major studios
(PwC 2015c). The recorded music industry is an almost US$20
billion industry dominated by only three major labels (PwC 2015b).
59
60
The publishing industry is a US$120 billion industry where the
leading ten companies earn in revenues more than the next forty
largest publishing groups (PwC 2015a; Wischenbart 2014).
The Oligopoly and Academic Publishing
Academic publishing in particular draws the state of play into stark
relief. It’s a US$10 billion industry dominated by five publishers and
financed up to 75 percent from library subscriptions. It’s notorious
for achieving extreme year-on-year profit margins—in the case of
Reed Elsevier regularly over 30 percent, with Taylor and Francis,
Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and Sage barely lagging behind (Larivière,
Haustein, and Mongeon 2015). Given that the work of contributing
authors is not paid but rather financed by their institutions (provided, that is, that they are employed at an institution) and that
these publications nowadays come mostly in the form of electronic
articles licensed under subscription for temporary use to libraries
and no longer sold as printed copies, the public interest could be
served at a much lower cost by leaving commercial closed-access
publishers out of the equation entirely.
But that cannot be done, of course. The chief reason for this is that
the system of academic reputation and ranking based on publish-
or-perish principles is historically entangled with the business of
academic publishers. Anyone who doesn’t want to put their academic career at risk is advised to steer away from being perceived
as reneging on that not-so-tacit deal. While this is patently clear
to many in academia, opting for the alternative of open access
means not playing by the rules, and not playing by the rules can
have real-life consequences, particularly for younger academics.
Early career scholars have to publish in prestigious journals if they
want to advance in the highly competitive and exclusive system of
academia (Kendzior 2012).
Copyright in academic publishing has thus become simply a mechanism of the direct transfer of economic power from producers to
publishers, giving publishers an instrument for maintaining their
stranglehold on the output of academia. But publishers also have
control over metrics and citation indexes, pandering to the authors
with better tools for maximizing their impact and self-promotion.
Reputation and copyright are extortive instruments that publishers
can wield against authors and the public to prevent an alternative
from emerging.9
The state of the academic publishing business signals how the
“copyright industries” in general might continue to control the
field as their distribution model now transitions to streaming or
licensed-access models. In the age of cloud computing, autonomous infrastructures run by communities of enthusiasts are
becoming increasingly a thing of the past. “Copyright industries,”
supported by the complicit legal system, now can pressure proxies
for these infrastructures, such as providers of server colocation,
virtual hosting, and domain-name network services, to enforce
injunctions for them without ever getting involved in direct, costly
infringement litigation. Efficient shutdowns of precarious shadow
systems allow for a corporate market consolidation wherein the
majority of streaming infrastructures end up under the control of a
few corporations.
Illegal Yet Justified, Collective Civil
Disobedience, Politicizing the Legal
However, when companies do resort to litigation or get involved in
criminal proceedings, they can rest assured that the prosecution
and judicial system will uphold their interests over the right of
public to access culture and knowledge, even when the irrationality
of the copyright system lies in plain sight, as it does in the case of
academic publishing. Let’s look at two examples:
On January 6, 2011, Aaron Swartz, a prominent programmer
and hacktivist, was arrested by the MIT campus police and U.S.
Secret Service on charges of having downloaded a large number
of academic articles from the JSTOR repository. While JSTOR, with
whom Swartz reached a settlement and to whom he returned the
61
62
files, and, later, MIT, would eventually drop the charges, the federal
prosecution decided nonetheless to indict Swartz on thirteen
criminal counts, potentially leading to fifty years in prison and a
US$1 million fine. Under growing pressure by the prosecution
Swartz committed suicide on January 11, 2013.
Given his draconian treatment at the hands of the prosecution
and the absence of institutions of science and culture that would
stand up and justify his act on political grounds, much of Swartz’s
defense focused on trying to exculpate his acts, to make them less
infringing or less illegal than the charges brought against him had
claimed, a rational course of action in irrational circumstances.
However, this was unfortunately becoming an uphill battle as the
prosecution’s attention was accidentally drawn to a statement
written by Swartz in 2008 wherein he laid bare the dysfunctionality
of the academic publishing system. In his Guerrilla Open Access
Manifesto, he wrote: “The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly
being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. . . . Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their
colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at
Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite
universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global
South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.” After a no-nonsense
diagnosis followed an even more clear call to action: “We need
to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing
networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access” (Swartz 2008).
Where a system has failed to change unjust laws, Swartz felt, the
responsibility was on those who had access to make injustice a
thing of the past.
Whether Swartz’s intent actually was to release the JSTOR repository remains subject to speculation. The prosecution has never
proven that it was. In the context of the legal process, his call to
action was simply taken as a matter of law and not for what it
was—a matter of politics. Yet, while his political action was pre-
empted, others have continued pursuing his vision by committing
small acts of illegality on a massive scale. In June 2015 Elsevier won
an injunction against Library Genesis, the largest illegal repository
of electronic books, journals, and articles on the Web, and its
subsidiary platform for accessing academic journals, Sci-hub. A
voluntary and noncommercial project of anonymous scientists
mostly from Eastern Europe, Sci-hub provides as of end of 2015
access to more than 41 million academic articles either stored
in its database or retrieved through bypassing the paywalls of
academic publishers. The only person explicitly named in Elsevier’s
lawsuit was Sci-hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who minced no
words: “When I was working on my research project, I found out
that all research papers I needed for work were paywalled. I was
a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university was not
subscribed to anything” (Ernesto 2015). Being a computer scientist,
she found the tools and services on the internet that allowed her to
bypass the paywalls. At first, she would make articles available on
internet forums where people would file requests for the articles
they needed, but eventually she automated the process, making
access available to everyone on the open web. “Thanks to Elsevier’s
lawsuit, I got past the point of no return. At this time I either have
to prove we have the full right to do this or risk being executed like
other ‘pirates’ . . . If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or
force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important
idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge. . . .
Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their
income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal. Also the idea
that knowledge can be a private property of some commercial
company sounds absolutely weird to me” (Ernesto 2015).
If the issue of infringement is to become political, a critical mass
of infringing activity has to be achieved, access technologically
organized, and civil disobedience collectively manifested. Only in
this way do the illegal acts stand a chance of being transformed
into the legitimate acts.
63
64
Where Law Was, there Politics Shall Be
And thus we have made a full round back to where we started. The
parallel development of liberalism, copyright, and capitalism has
resulted in a system demanding that the contemporary subject
act in accordance with two opposing tendencies: “more capitalist
than capitalist and more proletarian than proletariat” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1983, 34). Schizophrenia is, as Deleuze and Guattari
argue, a condition that simultaneously embodies two disjunctive
positions. Desire and blockage, flow and territory. Capitalism is
the constant decoding of social blockages and territorializations
aimed at liberating the production of desires and flows further
and further, only to oppose them at its extreme limit. It decodes
the old socius by means of private property and commodity
production, privatization and abstraction, the flow of wealth and
flows of workers (140). It allows contemporary subjects—including
corporate entities such as the MIT Press or Sony—to embrace their
contradictions and push them to their limits. But capturing them in
the orbit of the self-expanding production of value, it stops them
at going beyond its own limit. It is this orbit that the law sanctions
in the present, recoding schizoid subjects into the inevitability of
capitalism. The result is the persistence of a capitalist reality antithetical to common interest—commercial closed-access academic
publishing—and the persistence of a hyperproletariat—an intellectual labor force that is too subsumed to organize and resist the
reality that thrives parasitically on its social function. It’s a schizoid
impasse sustained by a failed metaphor.
The revolutionary events of the Paris Commune of 1871, its mere
“existence” as Marx has called it,10 a brief moment of “communal
luxury” set in practice as Kristin Ross (2015) describes it, demanded
that, in spite of any circumstances and reservations, one takes a
side. And such is our present moment of truth.
Digital networks have expanded the potential for access and
created an opening for us to transform the production of knowledge and culture in the contemporary world. And yet they have
likewise facilitated the capacity of intellectual property industries
to optimize, to cut out the cost of printing and physical distribution.
Digitization is increasingly helping them to control access, expand
copyright, impose technological protection measures, consolidate
the means of distribution, and capture the academic valorization
process.
As the potential opening for universalizing access to culture and
knowledge created by digital networks is now closing, attempts at
private legal reform such as Creative Commons licenses have had
only a very limited effect. Attempts at institutional reform such as
Open Access publishing are struggling to go beyond a niche. Piracy
has mounted a truly disruptive opposition, but given the legal
repression it has met with, it can become an agent of change only if
it is embraced as a kind of mass civil disobedience. Where law was,
there politics shall be.
Many will object to our demand to replace the law with politicization. Transitioning from politics to law was a social achievement
as the despotism of political will was suppressed by legal norms
guaranteeing rights and liberties for authors; this much is true. But
in the face of the draconian, failed juridical rationality sustaining
the schizoid impasse imposed by economic despotism, these developments hold little justification. Thus we return once more to the
words of Aaron Swartz to whom we remain indebted for political
inspiration and resolve: “There is no justice in following unjust laws.
It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil
disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
culture. . . . 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).
Notes
1
We initially named our project Public Library because we have developed it
as a technosocial project from a minimal definition that defines public library
as constituted by three elements: free access to books for every member of
a society, a library catalog, and a librarian (Mars, Zarroug and Medak, 2015).
However, this definition covers all public libraries and shadow libraries
complementing the work of public libraries in providing digital access. We have
thus decided to rename our project as Memory of the World, after our project’s
65
initial domain name. This is a phrase coined by Henri La Fontaine, whose men-
66
tion we found in Markus Krajewski’s Paper Machines (2011). It turned out that
UNESCO runs a project under the same name with the objective to preserve
valuable archives for the whole of humanity. We have appropriated that objective. Given that this change has happened since we drafted the initial version
of this text in 2015, we’ll call our project in this text with a double name Public
Library/Memory of the World.
2
Sony Pictures Entertainment became the owner of two (MGM, Columbia Pictures) out of eight Golden Age major movie studios (“Major Film Studio,” Wikipedia 2015).
3
In 2012 Sony Music Entertainment is one of the Big Three majors (“Record
Label,” Wikipedia 2015).
4
Since this anecdote was recounted by Marcell in his opening keynote in the
Terms of Media II conference at Brown University, we have received another
batch of takedown notices from the MIT Press. It seemed as no small irony,
because at the time the Terms of Media conference reader was rumored to be
distributed by the MIT Press.
5
“In law, authorship is a point of origination of a property right which, thereafter, like other property rights, will circulate in the market, ending up in the
control of the person who can exploit it most profitably. Since copyright serves
paradoxically to vest authors with property only to enable them to divest that
property, the author is a notion which needs only to be sustainable for an
instant” (Bently 1994).
6
For more on the formal freedom of the laborer to sell his labor-power, see
chapter 6 of Marx’s Capital (1867).
7
For a more detailed account of the history of printing privilege in Great Britain,
but also the emergence of peer review out of the self-censoring performed by
the Royal Academy and Académie de sciences in return for the printing privilege, see Biagioli 2002.
8
The transition of authorship from honorific to professional is traced in Woodmansee 1996.
9
Not all publishers are necessarily predatory. For instance, scholar-led open-
access publishers, such as those working under the banner of Radical Open
Access (http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org) have been experimenting with
alternatives to the dominant publishing models, workflows, and metrics, radicalizing the work of conventional open access, which has by now increasingly
become recuperated by big for-profit publishers, who see in open access an
opportunity to assume the control over the economy of data in academia.
Some established academic publishers, too, have been open to experiments
that go beyond mere open access and are trying to redesign how academic
writing is produced, made accessible, and valorized. This essay has the good
fortune of appearing as a joint publication of two such publishers: Meson Press
and University of Minnesota Press.
10
“The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence”
(Marx 1871).
References
Bently, Lionel. 1994. “Copyright and the Death of the Author in Literature and Law.”
The Modern Law Review 57, no. 6: 973–86. Accessed January 2, 2018. doi:10.1111/
j.1468–2230.1994.tb01989.x.
Biagioli, Mario. 2002. “From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review.” Emergences:
Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures 12, no. 1: 11–45.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ernesto. 2015. “Sci-Hub Tears Down Academia’s ‘Illegal’ Copyright Paywalls.” TorrentFreak, June 27. Accessed October 18, 2015. https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-tears
-down-academias-illegal-copyright-paywalls-150627/.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. “What Is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, 113–38. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press.
Groys, Boris. 2008. Art Power. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kendzior, Sarah. 2012. “Academic Paywalls Mean Publish and Perish.” Al Jazeera
English, October 2. Accessed October 18, 2015. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/
opinion/2012/10/20121017558785551.html.
Kiaer, Christina. 2005. Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Krajewski, Markus. 2011. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon. 2015. “The Oligopoly of
Academic Publishers in the Digital Era.” PLoS ONE 10, no. 6. Accessed January 2,
2018. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.
Mars, Marcell, Marar Zarroug, and Tomislav Medak. 2015. “Public Library (essay).” in
Public Library, ed. Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak. Zagreb: Multimedia Institute
& What, how & for Whom/WHW.
Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital, Vol. 1. Available at: Marxists.org. Accessed April 9, 2017.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm.
Marx, Karl. 1871. “The Civil War in France.” Available at: Marxists.org. Accessed April 9,
2017. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1965. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Medina, Eden. 2011. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s
Chile. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press.
MIT Media Lab. 2017. “MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award.” Accessed 10 April 2017,
https://media.mit.edu/disobedience/.
MIT OpenCourseWare. n.d. “About OCW | MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online
Course Materials.” Accessed October 28, 2015. http://ocw.mit.edu/about/.
One Laptop per Child. 2010. “One Laptop per Child (OLPC): Vision.” Accessed October
28, 2015. http://laptop.org/en/vision/.
67
68
Peterson, T. F., ed. 2011. Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Poulantzas, Nicos. 2008. The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law, and the State. London:
Verso.
PwC. 2015a. “Book Publishing.” Accessed October 18, 2015. http://www.pwc.com/gx
/en/industries/entertainment-media/outlook/segment-insights/book-publishing
.html.
PwC. 2015b. “Filmed Entertainment.” Accessed October 18, 2015. http://www.pwc.com
/gx/en/industries/entertainment-media/outlook/segment-insights/filmed-enter
tainment.html.
PwC. 2015c. “Music: Growth Rates of Recorded and Live Music.” Accessed October 18,
2015. http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/global-entertainment-media-outlook/assets/
2015/music-key-insights-1-growth-rates-of-recorded-and-live-music.pdf.
Reid, Rob. 2012. “The Numbers behind the Copyright Math.” TED Blog, March 20.
Accessed October 28, 2015, http://blog.ted.com/the-numbers-behind-the
-copyright-math/.
Rose, Mark. 2010. “The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright.” In Privilege
and Property, Essays on the History of Copyright, ed. Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer, and Lionel Bently, 67–88. Open Book Publishers.
Ross, Kristin. 2015. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune.
London: Verso.
Spieker, Sven. 2008. The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Swartz, Aaron. 2008. “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” Internet Archive. Accessed
October 18, 2015. https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/
Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt.
Tactical Media Files. 2017. “The Concept of Tactical Media.” Accessed May 4, 2017.
http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/articles/44999.
Vismann, Cornelia. 2011. Medien der Rechtsprechung. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag.
von Hippel, Eric. 2005. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 2015a. “Major Film Studio.” Accessed January 2,
2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Major_film_studio&oldid
=686867076.
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 2015b. “Record Label.” Accessed January 2, 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Record_label&oldid=685380090.
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 2015c. “Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City
Studios, Inc.” Accessed January 2, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.&oldid=677390161.
Wischenbart, Rüdiger. 2015. “The Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry 2014.”
Wischenbart. Accessed October 18, 2015. http://www.wischenbart.com/upload/
Global-Ranking-of-the-Publishing-Industry_2014_Analysis.pdf.
Woodmansee, Martha. 1996. The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of
Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press.
World Wide Web Consortium. n.d.“W3C Mission.” Accessed October 28, 2015. http://
www.w3.org/Consortium/mission.
tactics in Mars & Medak 2019
Mars & Medak
Against Innovation
2019
Against Innovation: Compromised institutional agency and acts of custodianship
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
abstract
In this essay we reflect on the historic crisis of the university and the public library as two
modern institutions tasked with providing universal access to knowledge and education.
This crisis, precipitated by pushes to marketization, technological innovation and
financialization in universities and libraries, has prompted the emergence of shadow
libraries as collective disobedient practices of maintenance and custodianship. In their
illegal acts of reversing property into commons, commodification into care, we detect a
radical gesture comparable to that of the historical avant-garde. To better understand how
the university and the public library ended up in this crisis, we re-trace their development
starting with the capitalist modernization around the turn of the 20th century, a period of
accelerated technological innovation that also birthed historical avant-garde. Drawing on
Perry Anderson’s ‘Modernity and Revolution’, we interpret that uniquely creative period
as a period of ambivalence toward an ‘unpredictable political future’ that was open to
diverging routes of social development. We situate the later re-emergence of avant-garde
practices in the 1960s as an attempt to subvert the separations that a mature capitalism
imposes on social reality. In the present, we claim, the radicality equivalent to the avantgarde is to divest from the disruptive dynamic of innovation and focus on the repair,
maintenance and care of the broken social world left in techno-capitalism’s wake.
Comparably, the university and the public library should be able to claim the radical
those gesture of slowdown and custodianship too, against the imperative of innovation
imposed on them by policymakers and managers.
Custodians.online, the first letter
On 30 November, 2015 a number of us shadow librarians who advocate, build
and maintain ‘shadow libraries’, i.e. online infrastructures allowing users to
digitise, share and debate digital texts and collections, published a letter
article | 345
ephemera: theory & politics in organization
(Custodians.online, 2015) in support of two of the largest user-created
repositories of pirated textbooks and articles on the Internet – Library Genesis
and Science Hub. Library Genesis and Science Hub’s web domain names were
taken down after a New York court issued an injunction following a copyright
infringement suit filed by the largest commercial academic publisher in the
world – Reed Elsevier. It is a familiar trajectory that a shared digital resource,
once it grows in relevance and size, gets taken down after a court decision.
Shadow libraries are no exception.
The world of higher education and science is structured by uneven development.
The world’s top-ranked universities are concentrated in a dozen rich countries
(Times Higher Education, 2017), commanding most of the global investment
into higher education and research. The oligopoly of commercial academic
publishers is headquartered in no more than half of those. The excessive rise of
subscription fees has made it prohibitively expensive even for the richest
university libraries of the Global North to provide access to all the journals they
would need to (Sample, 2012), drawing protest from academics all over the world
against the outrageously high price tag that Reed Elsevier puts on their work
(‘The Cost of Knowledge’, 2012). Against this concentration of economic might
and exclusivity to access, stands the fact that the rest of the world has little access
to the top-ranked research universities (Baty, 2017; Henning, 2017) and that the
poor universities are left with no option but to tacitly encourage their students to
use shadow libraries (Liang, 2012). The editorial director of global rankings at the
Times Higher Education Phil Baty minces no words when he bluntly states ‘that
money talks in global higher education seems … to be self-evident’ (Baty, 2017).
Uneven economic development reinforces global uneven development in higher
education and science – and vice versa. It is in the face of this combined
economic and educational unevenness, that Library Genesis and Science Hub,
two repositories for a decommodified access to otherwise paywalled resources,
attain a particular import for students, academics and researchers worldwide.
And it is in the face of combined economic and educational unevenness, that
Library Genesis and Science Hub continue to brave the court decisions,
continuously changing their domain names, securing ways of access beyond the
World Wide Web and ensuring robust redundancy of the materials in their
repositories.
The Custodians.online letter highlights two circumstances in this antagonism
that cut to the core of the contradictions of reproduction within academia in the
present. The first is the contrast between the extraction of extreme profits from
academia through inflated subscription prices and the increasingly precarious
conditions of studying, teaching and researching:
346 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
Consider Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher, whose 37% profit margin stands
in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level
wages for adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest 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. (Custodians.online, 2015: n.p.)
The enormous profits accruing to an oligopoly of academic publishers are a
result of a business model premised on harvesting and enclosing the scholarly
writing, peer reviewing and editing is done mostly for free by academics who are
often-times struggling to make their ends meet in the higher education
environment (Larivière et al., 2015).
The second circumstance is that shadow libraries invert the property relation of
copyright that allows publishers to exclude all those students, teachers and
researchers who don’t have institutional access to scholarly writing and yet need
that access for their education and research, their work and their livelihood in
conditions of heightened precarity:
This is the other side of 37% profit margins: our knowledge commons grows in
the fault lines of a broken system. We are all custodians of knowledge, custodians
of the same infrastructures that we depend on for producing knowledge,
custodians of our fertile but fragile commons. To be a custodian is, de facto, to
download, to share, to read, to write, to review, to edit, to digitize, to archive, to
maintain libraries, to make them accessible. It is to be of use to, not to make
property of, our knowledge commons.) (Custodians.online, 2015)
Shadow libraries thus perform an inversion that replaces the ability of ownership
to exclude, with the practice of custodianship (notion implying both the labor of
preservation of cultural artifacts and the most menial and invisible labor of daily
maintenance and cleaning of physical structures) that makes one useful to a
resource held in common and the infrastructures that sustain it.
These two circumstances – antagonism between value extraction and precarity
and antagonism between exclusive property and collective custodianship – signal
a deeper-running crisis of two institutions of higher education and research that
are caught in a joint predicament: the university and the library. This crisis is a
reflection of the impossible challenges placed on them by the capitalist
development, with its global division of labor and its looming threat of massive
technological unemployment, and the response of national policymakers to those
challenges: Are they able to create a labor force that will be able to position itself
in the global labor market with ever fewer jobs to go around? Can they do it with
less money? Can they shift the cost, risk and responsibility for social challenges
to individual students and patrons, who are now facing the prospect of their
investment in education never working out? Under these circumstances, the
article | 347
imperative is that these institutions have to re-invent themselves, that they have
to innovate in order to keep up with the disruptive course and accelerated the
pace of change.
Custodianship and repair
In what follows we will argue against submitting to this imperative of innovation.
Starting from the conditions from which shadow libraries emerge, as laid out in
the first Custodians.online letter, we claim that the historical trajectory of the
university and the library demands that they now embrace a position of
disobedience. They need to go back to their universalizing mission of providing
access to knowledge and education unconditionally to all members of society.
That universalism is a powerful political gesture. An infinite demand (Critchley,
2007) whereby they seek to abolish exclusions and affirm the legacy of the radical
equality they have built as part of the history of emancipatory struggles and
advances since the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. At the core of this legacy is a
promise that the capacity of members of society to collectively contest and claim
rights so as to become free, equal and solidaric is underwritten by a capacity to
have informed opinion, attain knowledge and produce a pedagogy of their own.
The library and the university stand in a historical trajectory of revolutions, a
series of historical discontinuities. The French Revolution seized the holdings of
the aristocracy and the Church, and brought a deluge of books to the Blibliotèque
Nationale and the municipal libraries across France (Harris, 1999). The Chartism
might have failed in its political campaign in 1848, but was successful in setting
up the reading rooms and emancipating the working class education from moral
inculcation imposed on them by the ruling classes (Johnson, 2014). The tension
between continuity and discontinuity that comes with disruptive changes was
written into their history long before the present imperative of innovation. And
yet, if these institutions are social infrastructures that have ever since sustained
the production of knowledge and pedagogy by re-producing the organizational
and material conditions of their production, they warn us against taking that
imperative of innovation at face value.
The entrepreneurial language of innovation is the vernacular of global technocapitalism in the present. Radical disruption is celebrated for its ability to depose
old monopolies and birth new ones, to create new markets and its first movers to
replace old ones (Bower and Christensen, 1996). It is a formalization reducing
the complexity of the world to the capital’s dynamic of creative destruction
(Schumpeter, 2013), a variant of an old and still hegemonic productivism that
understands social development as primarily a function of radical advances in
348 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
technological productivity (Mumford, 1967). According to this view, what counts
is that spurts of technological innovation are driven by cycles of financial capital
facing slumping profits in production (Perez, 2011).
However, once the effect of gains from new technologies starts to slump, once
the technologist’s dream of improving the world hits the hard place of venture
capital monetization and capitalist competition, once the fog of hyped-up
technological boom clears, that which is supposedly left behind comes the fore.
There’s then the sunken fixed capital that is no longer productive enough.
There’s then technical infrastructures and social institutions that were there
before the innovation and still remain there once its effect tapers off, removed
from view in the productivist mindset, and yet invisibly sustaining that activity of
innovation and any other activity in the social world we inhabit (Hughes, 1993).
What remains then is the maintenance of stagnant infrastructures, the work of
repair to broken structures and of care for resources that we collectively depend
on.
As a number of scholars who have turned their attention to the matters of repair,
maintenance and care suggest, it is the sedimented material infrastructures of
the everyday and their breakdown that in fact condition and drive much of the
innovation process (Graham and Thrift, 2007; Jackson, 2014). As the renowned
historian of technology Thomas Hughes suggested (Hughes, 1993),
technological changes largely address the critical problems of existing
technologies. Earlier still, in the 1980s, David Noble convincingly argued that the
development of forces of production is a function of the class conflict (Noble,
2011). This turns the temporal logic of innovation on its head. Not the creative
destruction of a techno-optimist kind, but the malfunctioning of technological
infrastructures and the antagonisms of social structures are the elementary
pattern of learning and change in our increasingly technological world. As
Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift argued (2007), once the smooth running
production, consumption and communication patterns in the contemporary
capitalist technosphere start to collapse, the collective coping strategies have to
rise to the challenge. Industrial disasters, breakdowns of infrastructures and
natural catastrophes have taught us that much.
In an age where a global division of labor is producing a growing precarity for
ever larger segments of the world’s working population and the planetary
systems are about to tip into non-linear changes, a truly radical gesture is that
which takes as its focus the repair of the effects of productivism. Approaching the
library and the university through the optic of social infrastructure allows us to
glimpse a radicality that their supposed inertia, complexity and stability make
article | 349
possible. This slowdown enables the processes of learning and the construction
of collective responses to the double crisis of growth and the environment.
In a social world in which precarity is differently experienced between different
groups, these institutions can accommodate that heterogeneity and diminish
their insecurities, helping the society effectively support structural change. They
are a commons in the non-substantive sense that Lauren Berlant (2016)
proposes, a ‘transitional form’ that doesn’t elide social antagonisms and that lets
different social positions loosely converge, in order to become ‘a powerful vehicle
for troubling troubled times’ (Berlant, 2016: 394-395).
The trajectory of radical gestures, discontinuities by re-invention, and creative
destruction of the old have been historically a hallmark of the avant-gardes. In
what follows, we will revisit the history of the avant-gardes, claiming that,
throughout their periodic iterations, the avant-gardes returned and mutated
always in response to the dominant processes and crises of the capitalist
development of their time. While primarily an artistic and intellectual
phenomenon, the avant-gardes emerged from both an adversarial and a coconstitutive relation to the institutions of higher education and knowledge
production. By revisiting three epochal moments along the trajectory of the
avant-gardes – 1917, 1967 and 2017 – we now wish to establish how the
structural context for radical disruption and radical transformation were
historically changing, bringing us to the present conjuncture where the library
and the university can reclaim the legacy of the avant-gardes by seemingly doing
its exact opposite: refusing innovation.
1917 – Industrial modernization,
revolutionary subjectivity
accelerated
temporality
and
In his text on ‘Modernity and Revolution’ Perry Anderson (1984) provides an
unexpected, yet the cogent explanation of the immense explosion of artistic
creativity in the short span of time between the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century that is commonly periodized as modernism (or avant-garde,
which he uses sparsely yet interchangeably). Rather than collapsing these wildly
diverging movements and geographic variations of artistic practices into a
monolithic formation, he defines modernism as a broad field of singular
responses resulting from the larger socio-political conjuncture of industrial
modernity. The very different and sometimes antithetical currents of symbolism,
constructivism, futurism, expressionism or suprematism that emerge in
modernism’s fold were defined by three coordinates: 1) an opposition to the
academicism in the art of the ancien régime, which modernist art tendencies both
350 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
draw from and position themselves against, 2) a transformative use of
technologies and means of communication that were still in their promising
infancy and not fully integrated into the exigencies of capitalist accumulation and
3) a fundamental ambivalence vis-à-vis the future social formation – capitalism or
socialism, state or soviet – that the process of modernization would eventually
lead to. As Anderson summarizes:
European modernism in the first years of this century thus flowered in the space
between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a
still unpredictable political future. Or, put another way, it arose at the intersection
between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy,
and a semi-emergent, or -insurgent, labour movement. (Anderson, 1984: 150)
Thus these different modernisms emerged operating within the coordinates of
their historical present, – committed to a substantive subversion of tradition or to
an acceleration of social development. In his influential theory of the avant-garde,
Peter Bürger (1984) roots its development in the critique of autonomy the art
seemingly achieved with the rise of capitalist modernity between the eighteenth
and late nineteenth century. The emergence of bourgeois society allowed artists
to attain autonomy in a triple sense: art was no longer bounded to the
representational hierarchies of the feudal system; it was now produced
individually and by individual fiat of the artist; and it was produced for individual
appreciation, universally, by all members of society. Starting from the ideal of
aesthetic autonomy enshrined in the works of Kant and Schiller, art eventually
severed its links from the boundedness of social reality and made this freedom
into its subject matter. As the markets for literary and fine artworks were
emerging, artists were gaining material independence from feudal patronage, the
institutions of bourgeois art were being established, and ‘[a]estheticism had made
the distance from the praxis of life the content of works’ (Bürger, 1984: 49)
While capitalism was becoming the dominant reality, the freedom of art was
working to suppress the incursion of that reality in art. It was that distance,
between art and life, that historical avant-gardes would undertake to eliminate
when they took aim at bourgeois art. With the ‘pathos of historical
progressiveness on their side’ (Bürger, 1984: 50), the early avant-gardes were
thus out to relate and transform art and life in one go.
Early industrial capitalism unleashed an enormous social transformation
through the formalization and rationalization of processes, the coordination and
homogenization of everyday life, and the introduction of permanent innovation.
Thus emerged modern bureaucracy, mass society and technological revolutions.
Progress became the telos of social development. Productive forces and global
expansion of capitalist relations made the humanity and the world into a new
article | 351
horizon of both charitable and profitable endeavors, emancipatory and imperial.
The world became a project (Krajewski, 2014).
The avant-gardes around the turn of the 20th century integrated and critically
inflected these transformations. In the spirit of the October Revolution, its
revolutionary subjectivity approached social reality as eminently transformable.
And yet, a recurrent concern of artists was with the practical challenges and
innovations of accelerated modernization: how to control, coordinate and socially
integrate the immense expansionary forces of early industrialization. This was an
invitation to insert one’s own radical visions into life and create new forms of
standardization and rationality that would bring society out of its pre-industrial
backwardness. Central to the avant-garde was abolishing the old and creating the
new, while overcoming the separation of art and social practice. Unleashing
imaginary and constructive forces in a reality that has become rational, collective
and universal: that was its utopian promise; that was its radical innovation. Yet,
paradoxically, it is only once there is the new that the previously existing social
world can be formalized and totalized as the old and the traditional. As Boris
Groys (2014) insisted, the new can be only established once it stands in a relation
to the archive and the museum. This tendency was probably nowhere more in
evidence than, as Sven Spieker documents in his book ‘The big archive – Art
from bureaucracy’ (2008), in the obsession of Soviet constructivists and
suprematists with the archival ordering of the flood of information that the
emergent bureaucratic administration and industrial management were creating
on an unprecedented scale.
The libraries and the universities followed a similar path. As the world became a
project, the aggregation and organization of all knowledge about the world
became a new frontier. The pioneers of library science, Paul Otlet and Melvil
Dewey, consummating the work of centuries of librarianship, assembled index
card catalogs of everything and devised classificatory systems that were powerful
formalizations of the increasingly complex world. These index card catalogs were
a ‘precursor of computing: universal paper machine’, (Krajewski, 2011), predating the ‘universal Turing machine’ and its hardware implementations by
Konrad Zuse and John von Neumann by almost half a century. Knowledge thus
became universal and universalizable: while libraries were transforming into
universal information infrastructures, they were also transforming into places of
popular reading culture and popular pedagogy. Libraries thus were gaining
centrality in the dissemination of knowledge and culture, as the reading culture
was becoming a massive and general phenomenon. Moreover, during the second
part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century, the working
class would struggle to transform not only libraries, but also universities, into
public institutions providing free access to culture and really useful knowledge
352 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
necessary for the self-development and self-organization of the masses (Johnson,
2014).
While universities across the modernizing Europe, US and USSR would see their
opening to the masses only in the coming decades later, they shyly started to
welcome the working class and women. And yet, universities and schools were
intense places of experimentation and advancement. The Moscow design school
VKhUTEMAS, for instance, carried over the constructivists concerns into the
practicalities of the everyday, constructing socialist objects for a new collective
life, novyi byt, in the spirit of ‘Imagine no possessions’ (2005), as Christina Kiaer
has punned in the title of her book. But more importantly, the activities of
universities were driven by the promise that there are no limits to scientific
discovery and that a Leibnitzian dream of universal formalization of language
can be achieved through advances in mathematics and logic.
1967 – Mature capitalism, spectacle, resistant subjectivity
In this periodization, the central contention is that the radical gesture of
destruction of the old and creation of the new that was characteristic of the avantgarde has mutated as the historic coordinates of its emergence have mutated too.
Over the last century the avant-garde has divested from the radical gestures and
has assumed a relation to the transformation of social reality that is much more
complicated than its erstwhile cohort in disruptive change – technological
innovation – continues to offer. If technological modernization and the avantgarde were traveling companions at the turn of the twentieth century, after the
WWII they gradually parted their ways. While the avant-garde rather critically
inflects what capitalist modernity is doing at a particular moment of its
development, technological innovation remained in the same productivist pattern
of disruption and expansion. That technological innovation would remain
beholden to the cyclical nature of capitalist accumulation is, however, no mere
ideological blind-spot. Machinery and technology, as Karl Marx insists in The
Grundrisse, is after all ‘the most adequate form of capital’ (1857) and thus vital to
its dynamic. Hence it comes as no surprise that the trajectory of the avant-garde
is not only a continued substantive subversion of the ever new separations that
capitalist system produces in the social reality, but also a growing critical distance
to technology’s operation within its development.
Thus we skip forward half a century. The year is 1967. Industrial development is
at its apex. The despotism of mass production and its attendant consumerist
culture rules over the social landscape. After the WWII, the working class has
achieved great advances in welfare. The ‘control crisis’ (Beniger, 1989), resulting
article | 353
from an enormous expansion of production, distribution and communication in
the 19th century, and necessitating the emergence of the capacity for
coordination of complex processes in the form of modern bureaucracy and
information technology, persists. As the post-WWII golden period of gains in
productivity, prosperity and growth draws to a close, automation and
computerization start to make their way from the war room to the shop floor.
Growing labor power at home and decolonization abroad make the leading
capitalist economies increasingly struggle to keep profits rates at levels of the
previous two decades. Socialist economies struggle to overcome the initial
disadvantages of belated modernization and instill the discipline over labor in
order to compete in the dual world-system. It is still a couple of years before the
first oil crisis will break out and the neo-liberal retrenchment begin.
The revolutionary subjectivity of 1917 is now replaced by resistant militancy.
Facing the monotony of continuous-flow production and the prospect of bullshit
jobs in service industries that start to expand through the surplus of labor time
created by technological advances (Graeber, 2013), the workers perfect the
ingenuity in shirking the intensity and dullness of work. The consumerist culture
instills boredom (Vaneigem, 2012), the social division of labor produces
gendered exploitation at home (James, 2012), the paternalistic welfare provision
results in loss of autonomy (Oliver, 1990).
Sensibility is shaped by mass media whose form and content are structured by
the necessity of creating aggregate demand for the ever greater mass of
commodities and thus the commodity spectacle comes to mediate social
relations. In 1967 Guy Debord’s ‘The society of the spectacle’ is published. The
book analyses the totalizing capture of Western capitalist society by commodity
fetishism, which appears as objectively given. Commodities and their mediatized
simulacra become the unifying medium of social integration that obscures
separations within the society. So, as the crisis of 1970s approaches, the avantgarde makes its return. It operates now within the coordinates of the mature
capitalist conjuncture. Thus re-semantization, détournement and manipulation
become the representational equivalent of simulating busyness at work, playing
the game of hide-and-seek with the capitalist spectacle and turning the spectacle
onto itself. While the capitalist development avails itself of media and computers
to transform the reality into the simulated and the virtual, the avant-garde’s
subversive twist becomes to take the simulated and the virtual as reality and reappropriate them for playful transformations. Critical distance is no longer
possible under the centripetal impact of images (Foster, 1996), there’s no
revolutionary outside from which to assail the system, just one to escape from.
354 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
Thus, the exodus and autonomy from the dominant trajectory of social
development rather than the revolutionary transformation of the social totality
become the prevailing mode of emancipatory agency. Autonomy through forms
of communitarian experimentation attempts to overcome the separation of life
and work, home and workplace, reproduction and production and their
concealment in the spectacle by means of micro-political experiments.
The university – in the meanwhile transformed into an institution of mass
education, accessible to all social strata – suddenly catapults itself center-stage,
placing the entire post-WWII political edifice with its authoritarian, repressive
and neo-imperial structure into question, as students make radical demands of
solidarity and liberation. The waves of radical political movements in which
students play a central role spread across the world: the US, Czechoslovakia,
France, Western Germany, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, and so on. The institution
becomes a site from which and against which mass civil rights, anti-imperial,
anti-nuclear, environmental, feminist and various other new left movements
emerge.
It is in the context of exodus and autonomy that new formalizations and
paradigms of organizing knowledge emerge. Distributed, yet connected. Built
from bottom up, yet powerful enough to map, reduce and abstract all prior
formalizations. Take, for instance, Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu that introduced
to the world the notion of hypertext and hyperlinking. Pre-dating the World Wide
Web by a good 25 years, Xanadu implemented the idea that a body of written
texts can be understood as a network of two-way references. With the advent of
computer networks, whose early adopters were academic communities, that
formalization materialized in real infrastructure, paving the way for a new
instantiation of the idea that the entire world of knowledge can be aggregated,
linked and made accessible to the entire world. As Fred Turner documents in
‘From counterculture to cyberculture’ (2010), the links between autonomyseeking dropouts and early cyberculture in the US were intimate.
Countercultural ideals of personal liberation at a distance from the society
converged with the developments of personal computers and computer networks
to pave the way for early Internet communities and Silicon Valley
entrepreneurialism.
No less characteristic of the period were new formalizations and paradigms of
technologically-mediated subjectivity. The tension between the virtual and the
real, autonomy and simulation of autonomy, was not only present in the avantgarde’s playful takes on mass media. By the end of the 1950s, the development of
computer hardware reached a stage where it was running fast enough to cheat
human perception in the same way moving images on film and television did. In
article | 355
the computer world, that illusion was time-sharing. Before the illusion could
work, the concept of an individual computer user had to be introduced (Hu,
2015). The mainframe computer systems such as IBM 360/370 were fast enough
to run a software-simulated (‘virtual’) clone of the system for every user (Pugh et
al., 1991). This allowed users to access the mainframe not sequentially one after
the other, but at the same time – sharing the process-cycles among themselves.
Every user was made to feel as if they were running their own separate (‘real’)
computer. The computer experience thus became personal and subjectivities
individuated. This interplay of simulation and reality became common in the late
1960s. Fifty years later this interplay would become essential for the massive
deployment of cloud computing, where all computer users leave traces of their
activity in the cloud, but only few can tell what is virtual (i.e. simulated) and what
is real (i.e. ‘bare machine’).
The libraries followed the same double trajectory of universities. In the 1960s,
the library field started to call into question the merit of objectivity and neutrality
that librarianship embraced in the 1920s with its induction into the status of
science. In the context of social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, librarians
started to question ‘The Myth of Library Neutrality’ (Branum, 2008). With the
transition to a knowledge economy and transformation of the information into a
commodity, librarians could no longer ignore that the neutrality had the effect of
perpetuating the implicit structural exclusions of class, gender and race and that
they were the gatekeepers of epistemic and material privilege (Jansen, 1989;
Iverson 1999). The egalitarian politics written into the de-commodification and
enabling the social mission of public libraries started to trump neutrality. Thus
libraries came to acknowledge their commitment to the marginalized, their
pedagogies and their struggles.
At the same time, library science expanded and became enmeshed with
information science. The capacity to aggregate, organize and classify huge bodies
of information, to view it as an interlinked network of references indexed in a
card catalog, sat well with the developments in the computer world. In return, the
expansion of access to knowledge that the new computer networks promised fell
in line with the promise of public libraries.
2017 – Crisis in the present, financialization, compromised subjectivity
We arrive in the present. The effects of neo-liberal restructuring, the global
division of labor and supply-chain economy are petering out. Global capitalism
struggles to maintain growth, while at the same time failing to slow down
accelerating consumption of energy and matter. It thus arrives at a double crisis
356 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
– a crisis of growth and a crisis of planetary boundaries. Against the profit
squeeze of 1970s, fixes were applied in the form of the relocation of production,
the breaking-up of organized labor and the integration of free markets across the
world. Yet those fixes have not stopped the long downturn of the capitalist system
that pinnacled in the crisis of 2008 (Brenner, 2006). Currently capital prefers to
sit on US$ 13.4 trillion of negative yielding bonds rather than risk investing into
production (Wigglesworth and Platt, 2016). Financialization is driving the efforts
to quickly boost and capture value where long-term investment makes little
sense. The finance capital privileges the short-term value maximization through
economic rents over long-term investment into growth. Its logic dominates all
aspects of the economy and the everyday (Brown, 2015). When it is betting on
long-term changes in production, capital is rather picky and chooses to bet on
technologies that are the harbingers of future automation. Those technologies
might be the death knell of the social expectation of full employment, creating a
reserve army of labor that will be pushed to various forms of casualized work,
work on demand and workfare. The brave new world of the gig-economy awaits.
The accelerated transformation of the labor market has made adaptation through
education and re-skilling difficult. Stable employment is mostly available in
sectors where highly specialized technological skills are required. Yet those
sectors need far less workers than the mass-manufacture required. Re-skilling is
only made more difficult by the fact that austerity policies are reducing the
universal provision of social support needed to allow workers to adapt to these
changes: workfare, the housing crisis, cuts in education and arts have converged
to make it so. The growing precarity of employment is doing away with the
separation between working time and free time. The temporal decomposition is
accompanied by the decomposition of workplace and living space. Fewer and
fewer jobs have a defined time and place in which they are performed (Huws,
2016) and while these processes are general, the conditions of precarity diverge
greatly from profession to profession, from individual to individual.
At the same time, we are living through record global warming, the seventh great
extinction and the destabilization of Earth’s biophysical systems. Globally, we’re
overshooting Earth’s regenerative capacities by a factor of 1.6 (Latouche, 2009),
some countries such as the US and the Gulf by a factor of 5 (Global Footprint
Network, 2013). And the environmental inequalities within countries are greater
than those between the countries (Piketty and Chancel, 2015). Unless by some
wonder almost non-existent negative emissions technologies do materialize
(Anderson and Peters, 2016), we are on a path of global destabilization of socioenvironmental metabolisms that no rate of technological change can realistically
mitigate (Loftus et al., 2015). Betting on settling on Mars is equally plausible.
article | 357
So, if the avant-garde has at the beginning of the 20th century responded to the
mutations of early modernization, in the 1960s to the integrated spectacle of the
mature capitalism, where is the avant-garde in the present?
Before we try to address the question, we need to return to our two public
institutions of mass education and research – the university and the library.
Where is their equalizing capacity in a historical conjuncture marked by the
rising levels of inequality? In the accelerating ‘race against the machine’
(Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2012), with the advances in big data, AI and
robotization threatening to obliterate almost half of the jobs in advanced
economies (Frey and Osborne, 2013; McKinsey Global Institute, 2018), the
university is no longer able to fulfill the promise that it can provide both the
breadth and the specialization that are required to stave off the effect of a
runaway technological unemployment. It is no surprise that it can’t, because this
is ultimately a political question of changing the present direction of
technological and social development, and not a question of institutional
adaptation.
Yet while the university’s performance becomes increasingly scrutinized on the
basis of what its work is contributing to the stalling economy and challenges of
the labor market, on the inside it continues to be entrenched in defending
hierarchies. The uncertainty created by assessment-tied funding puts academics
on the defensive and wary of experimentation and resistance. Imperatives of
obsessive administrative reporting, performance metrics and short-term
competition for grant-based funding have, in Stefan Collini’s words, led to a ‘a
cumulative reduction in the autonomy, status and influence of academics’, where
‘[s]ystemic underfunding plus competition and punitive performancemanagement is seen as lean efficiency and proper accountability’ (Collini, 2017:
ch.2). Assessment-tied activities produce a false semblance of academic progress
by creating impact indicators that are frequently incidental to the research, while
at the same time demanding enormous amount of wasted effort that goes into
unsuccessful application proposals (Collini, 2017). Rankings based on
comparative performance metrics then allow university managers in the
monetized higher education systems such as UK to pitch to prospective students
how best to invest the debt they will incur in the future, in order to pay for the
growing tuition fees and cost of study, making the prospect of higher education
altogether less plausible for the majority in the long run (Bailey and Freedman,
2011).
Given that universities are not able to easily provide evidence that they are
contributing to the stalling economy, they are asked by the funders to innovate
instead. To paraphrase Marx, ‘innovate innovate that is their Moses and the
358 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
prophets’. Innovation, a popular catch-all word with the government and
institutional administrators, gleaned from the entrepreneurial language of
techno-capitalism, to denote interventions, measures and adaptations in the
functioning of all kind of processes that promise to bring disruptive, almost
punitive radical changes to the failures to respond to the disruptive challenges
unleashed by that very same techno-capitalism.
For instance, higher education policy makers such as former UK universities
minister David Willets, advocate that the universities themselves should use their
competitive advantage, embrace the entrepreneurial opportunity in the global
academic marketplace and transform themselves into startups. Universities have
to become the ‘equivalent of higher education Google or Amazon’ (Gill, 2015). As
Gary Hall reports in his ‘Uberfication of the university’ (2016), a survey UK vicechancellors has detected a number of areas where universities under their
command should become more disruptively innovative:
Among them are “uses of student data analytics for personalized services” (the
number one innovation priority for 90 percent of vice-chancellors); “uses of
technology to transform learning experiences” (massive open online courses
[MOOCs]; mobile virtual learning environments [VLEs]; “anytime-anywhere
learning” (leading to the demise of lectures and timetables); and “student-driven
flexible study modes” (“multiple entry points” into programs, bringing about an
end to the traditional academic year). (Hall, 2016: n.p.)
Universities in the UK are thus pushed to constantly create trendy programs,
‘publish or perish’, perform and assess, hire and fire, find new sources of
funders, find students, find interest of parents, vie for public attention, produce
evidence of immediate impact. All we can expect from such attempts to
transform universities into Googles and Amazons, is that we will end up with an
oligopoly of a few prestige brands franchised all around the world – if the
strategy proves ‘successful’, or – if not – just with a world in which universities
go on faking disruptive innovations while waiting for some miracle to happen
and redeem them in the eyes of neoliberal policy makers.
These are all short-term strategies modeled on the quick extraction of value that
Wendy Brown calls the ‘financialization of everything’ (Brown, 2015: 70).
However, the best in the game of such quick rent-seeking are, as always, those
universities that carry the most prestige, have the most assets and need to be
least afraid for their future, whereas the rest are simply struggling in the prospect
of reduced funding.
Those universities in ‘peripheral’ countries, which rarely show up anywhere near
the top of the global rankings, are in a particularly disadvantaged situation. As
Danijela Dolenec has calculated:
article | 359
[T]he whole region [of Western Balkans] invests approximately EUR 495 million in
research and development per year, which is equivalent of one (second-largest) US
university. Current levels of investment cannot have a meaningful impact on the
current model of economic development ... (Dolenec, 2016: 34)
So, these universities don’t have much capacity to capture value in the global
marketplace. In fact, their work in educating masses matters less to their
economies, as these economies are largely based on selling cheap low-skilled
labor. So, their public funders leave them in their underfunded torpor to
improvise their way through education and research processes. It is these
institutions that depend the most on the Library Genesis and Science Hubs of
this world. If we look at the download data of Library Genesis, as has Balasz Bodó
(2015), we can discern a clear pattern that the users in the rich economies use
these shadow libraries to find publications that are not available in the digital
form or are pay-walled, while the users in the developing economies use them to
find publications they don’t have access to in print to start with.
As for libraries, in the shift to the digital they were denied the right to provide
access that has now radically expanded (Sullivan, 2012), so they are losing their
central position in the dissemination and access to knowledge. The decades of
retrenchment in social security, unemployment support, social housing, arts and
education have made libraries, with their resources open to broad communities,
into a stand-in for failing welfare institutions (Mattern, 2014). But with the onset
of 2008 crisis, libraries have been subjected to brutal cuts, affecting their ability
to stay open, service their communities and in particular the marginalized
groups and children (Kean, 2017). Just as universities, libraries have thus seen
their capacity to address structural exclusions of marginalized groups and
provide support to those affected by precarity compromised.
Libraries thus find themselves struggling to provide legitimation for the support
they receive. So they re-invent and re-brand themselves as ‘third places’ of
socialization for the elderly and the youth (Engel-Johnson, 2017), spaces where
the unemployed can find assistance with their job applications and the socially
marginalized a public location with no economic pressures. All these functions,
however, are not something that public libraries didn’t do before, along with
what was their primary function – providing universal access to all written
knowledge, in which they are however nowadays – in the digital economy –
severely limited.
All that innovation that universities and libraries are undertaking seems to be
little innovation at all. It is rather a game of hide and seek, behind which these
institutions are struggling to maintain their substantive mission and operation.
So, what are we to make of this position of compromised institutional agency? In
360 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
a situation where progressive social agency no longer seems to be within the
remit of these institutions? The fact is that with the growing crisis of precarity
and social reproduction, where fewer and fewer have time from casualized work
to study, convenience to do so at home and financial prospects to incur a debt by
enrolling in a university, these institutions should, could and sometimes do
provide sustaining social arrangements and resources – not only to academics,
students and patrons, but also to a general public – that can reduce economic
imperatives and diminish insecurities. While doing this they also create
institutional preconditions that, unlike business-cycle driven institutions, can
support the structural repair that the present double crisis demands.
If the historical avant-garde was birthing of the new, nowadays repeating its
radicalism would seem to imply cutting through the fog of innovation. Its
radicalism would be to inhabit the non-new. The non-new that persists and in the
background sustains the broken social and technological world that the technocapitalist innovation wants to disrupt and transcend. Bullshit jobs and simulating
busyness at work are correlative of the fact that free time and the abundance of
social wealth created by growing productivity have paradoxically resulted in
underemployment and inequality. We’re at a juncture: accelerated crisis of
capitalism, accelerated climate change, accelerated erosion of political systems
are trajectories that leave little space for repair. The full surrender of
technological development into the hands of the market forces leaves even less.
The avant-garde radicalism nowadays is standing with the social institutions that
permit, speaking with Lauren Berlant, the ‘loose convergence’ of social
heterogeneity needed to construct ‘transitional form[s]’ (2016: 394). Unlike the
solutionism of techno-communities (Morozov, 2013) that tend to reduce
uncertainty of situations and conflict of values, social institutions permit
negotiating conflict and complexity in the situations of crisis that Gary Ravetz
calls postnormal – situations ‘where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes
high and decisions urgent’ (Ravetz, 2003: 75). On that view, libraries and
universities as social infrastructures, provide a chance for retardation and
slowdown, and a capacity for collective disobedience. Against the radicalizing
exclusions of property and labor market, they can lower insecurities and
disobediently demand universal access to knowledge and education, a mass
intellectuality and autonomous critical pedagogy that increasingly seems a thing
of the past. Against the imposition to translate quality into metrics and capture
short-term values through assessment, they can resist the game of simulation.
While the playful simulation of reality was a thing in 1967, in 2017 it is no
longer. Libraries and universities can stop faking ‘innovativity’, ‘efficiency’ and
‘utility’.
article | 361
Custodians.online, the second letter
On 30 November, 2016 a second missive was published by Custodians.online
(2016). On the twentieth anniversary of UbuWeb, ‘the single-most important
archive of avant-garde and outsider art’ on the Internet, the drafters of the letter
followed up on their initial call to acts of care for the infrastructure of our shared
knowledge commons that the first letter ended with. The second letter was a gift
card to Ubu, announcing that it had received two mirrors, i.e. exact copies of the
Ubu website accessible from servers in two different locations – one in Iceland,
supported by a cultural activist community, and another one in Switzerland,
supported by a major art school – whose maintenance should ensure that Ubu
remains accessible even if its primary server is taken down.
McKenzie Wark in their text on UbuWeb poignantly observes that shadow
libraries are:
tactics for intervening in three kinds of practices, those of the art-world, of
publishing and of scholarship. They respond to the current institutional, technical
and political-economic constraints of all three. As it says in the Communist
Manifesto, the forces for social change are those that ask the property question.
While détournement was a sufficient answer to that question in the era of the
culture industries, they try to formulate, in their modest way, a suitable tactic for
answering the property question in the era of the vulture industries. (Wark, 2015:
116)
As we claimed, the avant-garde radicalism can be recuperated for the present
through the gestures of disobedience, deceleration and demands for
inclusiveness. Ubu already hints toward such recuperation on three coordinates:
1) practiced opposition to the regime of intellectual property, 2) transformative
use of old technologies, and 3) a promise of universal access to knowledge and
education, helping to foster mass intellectuality and critical pedagogy.
The first Custodians.online letter was drafted to voice the need for a collective
disobedience. Standing up openly in public for the illegal acts of piracy, which
are, however, made legitimate by the fact that students, academics and
researchers across the world massively contribute and resort to pirate repositories
of scholarly texts, holds the potential to overturn the noxious pattern of court
cases that have consistently lead to such resources being shut down.
However, the acts of disobedience need not be made explicit in the language of
radicalism. For a public institution, disobedience can also be doing what should
not be done: long-term commitment to maintenance – for instance, of a mirror –
while dealing institutionally with all the conflicts and challenges that doing this
publicly entails.
362 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
The second Custodians.online letter was drafted to suggest that opportunity:
In a world of money-crazed start-ups and surveillance capitalism, copyright
madness and abuse, Ubu represents an island of culture. It shows what a single
person, with dedication and focus, can achieve. There are lessons to be drawn
from this:
1) Keep it simple and avoid constant technology updates. Ubu is plain
HTML, written in a text-editor.
2) Even a website should function offline. One should be able to take the
hard disk and run. Avoid the cloud – computers of people you don’t
know and who don’t care about you.
3) Don’t ask for permission. You would have to wait forever, turning
yourself into an accountant and a lawyer.
4) Don’t promise anything. Do it the way you like it.
5) You don’t need search engines. Rely on word-of-mouth and direct
linking to slowly build your public. You don’t need complicated
protocols, digital currencies or other proxies. You need people who
care.
6) Everything is temporary, even after 20 years. Servers crash, disks die,
life changes and shit happens. Care and redundancy is the only path to
longevity. Care and redundancy is the reason why we decided to run
mirrors. We care and we want this resource to exist… should shit
happen, this multiplicity of locations and institutions might come in
handy. We will see. Find your Ubu. It’s time to mirror each other in
solidarity. (Custodians.online, 2016)
references
Anderson, K. and G. Peters (2016) ‘The trouble with negative emissions’, Science,
354 (6309): 182– 183.
Anderson, P. (1984) ‘Modernity and revolution’, New Left Review, (144): 96– 113.
Bailey, M. and D. Freedman (2011) The assault on universities: A manifesto for
resistance. London: Pluto Press.
Baty, P. (2017) ‘These maps could change how we understand the role of the
world’s top universities’, Times Higher Education online, May 27. [https://www
article | 363
.timeshighereducation.com/blog/these-maps-could-change-how-we-understa
nd-role-worlds-top-universities]
Beniger, J. (1989) The control revolution: Technological and economic origins of the
information society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Berlant, L. (2016) ‘The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34 (3): 393– 419.
Bodó, B. (2015) ‘Libraries in the post-scarcity era’, in H. Porsdam (ed.)
Copyrighting creativity: Creative values, cultural heritage institutions and systems
of intellectual property. London: Routledge.
Bower, J.L. and C.M. Christensen. (1996) ‘Disruptive technologies: Catching the
wave’, The Journal of Product Innovation Management, 1(13): 75– 76.
Branum, C. (2008) ‘The myth of library neutrality’. [https://candisebranum.word
press.com 2014/05/15/the-myth-of-library-neutrality/]
Brenner, R. (2006) The economics of global turbulence: The advanced capitalist
economies from long boom to long downturn, 1945-2005. London: Verso.
Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Brynjolfsson, E. and A. McAfee (2012) Race against the machine: How the digital
revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly
transforming employment and the economy. Lexington: Digital Frontier Press.
Bürger, P. (1984) Theory of the avant-garde. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Collini, S. (2017) Speaking of universities. London: Verso.
Critchley, S. (2007) Infinitely demanding: Ethics of commitment, politics of
resistance. London: Verso.
Custodians.online (2015) ‘In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub’. [http:/
/custodians.online]
Custodians.online
.online/ubu]
(2016)
‘Happy
birthday,
Ubu.com’.
[http://custodians
Dolenec, D. (2016) ‘The implausible knowledge triangle of the Western Balkans’,
in S. Gupta, J. Habjan and H. Tutek (eds.) Academic labour, unemployment and
global higher education: Neoliberal policies of funding and management. New
York: Springer.
364 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
Engel-Johnson, E. (2017) ‘Reimagining the library as an anti-café’, Discover
Society. [http://discoversociety.org/2017/04/05/reimagining-the-library-as-ananti-cafe/]
Foster, H. (1996) The return of the real: The avant-garde at the end of the century.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Frey, C.B. and M. Osborne, (2013) The future of employment: How susceptible are
jobs
to
computerisation?
Oxford:
Oxford
Martin
School.
[http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/view/1314]
Gill, J. (2015) ‘Losing Our Place in the Vanguard?’ Times Higher Education, 18
.
June. [https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/losing-our-place-van
guard]
Global Footprint Network (2013) Ecological wealth of nations. [http://www.
footprintnetwork.org/ecological_footprint_nations/]
Graeber, D. (2013) ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’, STRIKE! Magazine.
[https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/]
Graham, S. and N. Thrift, (2007) ‘Out of order: Understanding repair and
maintenance’, Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3): 1– 25.
Groys, B. (2014) On the new. London:Verso.
Hall, G. (2016) The uberfication of the university. Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press.
Harris, M.H. (1999) History of libraries of the western world. London: Scarecrow
Press.
Henning, B. (2017) ‘Unequal elite: World university rankings 2016/17’, Views of
the World. [http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/?p=5423]
Hu, T.-H. (2015) A prehistory of the cloud. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hughes, T.P. (1993) Networks of power: Electrification in Western society, 1880-1930.
Baltimore: JHU Press.
Huws, U. (2016) ‘Logged labour: A new paradigm of work organisation?’, Work
Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, 10(1): 7– 26.
Iverson, S. (1999) ‘Librarianship and resistance’, Progressive Librarian, 15, 14-19.
Jackson, S.J. (2014) ‘Rethinking repair’, in T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski and K.A.
Foot (eds.), Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and
society. Cambridge: MIT Press.
James, S. (2012) ‘A woman’s place’, in S. James, Sex, race and class, the perspective
of winning: A selection of writings 1952-2011. Oakland: PM Press.
article | 365
Jansen, S.C. (1989) ‘Gender and the information society: A socially structured
silence’. Journal of Communication, 39(3): 196– 215.
Johnson, R. (2014) ‘Really useful knowledge’, in A. Gray, J. Campbell, M.
Erickson, S. Hanson and H. Wood (eds.) CCCS selected working papers: Volume
1. London: Routledge.
Kean, D. (2017) ‘Library cuts harm young people’s mental health services, warns
lobby’. The Guardian, 13 January. [http://www.theguardian.com/books
/2017/jan/13/library-cuts-harm-young-peoples-mental-health-services-warnslobby]
Kiaer, C. (2005) Imagine no possessions: The socialist objects of Russian
Constructivism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Krajewski, M. (2014) World projects: Global information before World War I.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Krajewski, M. (2011) Paper machines: About cards & catalogs, 1548-1929.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Larivière, V., S. Haustein and P. Mongeon (2015) ‘The oligopoly of academic
publishers in the digital era’. PLoS ONE 10(6). [http://dx.doi.org/
10.1371/journal.pone.0127502]
Latouche, S. (2009) Farewell to growth. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Liang, L. (2012) ‘Shadow Libraries’. e-flux (37). [http://www.e-flux.com/journal
/37/61228/shadow-libraries/]
Loftus, P.J., A.M. Cohen, J.C.S. Long and J.D. Jenkins (2015) ‘A critical review of
global decarbonization scenarios: What do they tell us about feasibility?’ Wiley
Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 6(1): 93– 112.
Marx, K. (1973 [1857]) The grundrisse. London: Penguin Books in association with
New Left Review. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/gru
ndrisse/ch13.htm]
Mattern, S. (2014) ‘Library as infrastructure’, Places Journal. [https://placesjo
urnal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/]
McKinsey Global Institute (2018) Harnessing automation for a future that works.
[https://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/digital-disruption/harnessing-au
tomation-for-a-future-that-works]
Morozov, E. (2013) To save everything, click here: The folly of technological
solutionism. New York: PublicAffairs.
Mumford, L. (1967) The myth of the machine: Technics and human development.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
366 | article
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
Against innovation
Noble, D.F. (2011) Forces of production. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Oliver, M. (1990) The politics of disablement. London: Macmillan Education.
Perez, C. (2011) ‘Finance and technical change: A long-term view’, African
Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, 3(1): 10-35.
Piketty, T. and L. Chancel (2015) Carbon and inequality: From Kyoto to Paris –
Trends in the global inequality of carbon emissions (1998-2013) and prospects for
an equitable adaptation fund. Paris: Paris School of Economics.
[http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ChancelPiketty2015.pdf]
Pugh, E.W., L.R. Johnson and J.H. Palmer (1991) IBM’s 360 and early 370 systems.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ravetz, J. (2003) ‘Models as metaphor’, in B. Kasemir, J. Jaeger, C.C. Jaeger and
M.T. Gardner (eds.) Public participation in sustainability science: A handbook,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sample, I. (2012) ‘Harvard university says it can’t afford journal publishers’
prices’, The Guardian, 24 April. [https://www.theguardian.com/science
/2012/apr/24/harvard-univer sity-journal-publishers-prices]
Schumpeter, J.A. (2013 [1942]) Capitalism, socialism and democracy. London:
Routledge.
Spieker, S. (2008) The big archive: Art from bureaucracy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Sullivan, M (2012) ‘An open letter to America’s publishers from ALA President
Maureen Sullivan’, American Library Association, 28 September.
[http://www.ala.org/news/2012/09/open-letter-america%E2%80%99s-publ
ishers-ala-president-maureen-sullivan].
‘The Cost of Knowledge’ (2012). [http://thecostofknowledge.com/]
Times
Higher
Education
(2017)
‘World
university
rankings’.
[https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2018/
world-ranking]
Turner, F. (2010) From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole
Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Vaneigem, R. (2012) The revolution of everyday life. Oakland: PM Press.
Wark, M. (2015) ‘Metadata punk’, in T. Medak and M. Mars (eds.) Public library.
Zagreb: What, How; for Whom/WHW & Multimedia Institute.
article | 367
Wigglesworth, R. and E. Platt (2016) ‘Value of negative-yielding bonds hits
$13.4tn’, Financial Times, 12 August. [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/973b606060ce-11e6-ae3f-77baadeb1c93.html]
the authors
Marcell Mars is a research associate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry
University (UK). Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb.
His research ‘Ruling Class Studies’, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011),
examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by
corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. He is a doctoral student at
Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, writing a thesis on ‘Foreshadowed
Libraries’. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public
Library, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.
Email: ki.be@rkom.uni.st
Tomislav Medak is a doctoral student at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry
University. Medak is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia
Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, as well as an amateur librarian for the Memory of the
World/Public Library project. His research focuses on technologies, capitalist
development, and postcapitalist transition, particularly on economies of intellectual
property and unevenness of technoscience. He authored two short volumes: ‘The Hard
Matter of Abstraction—A Guidebook to Domination by Abstraction’ and ‘Shit Tech for A
Shitty World’. Together with Marcell Mars he co-edited ‘Public Library’ and ‘Guerrilla
Open Access’.
Email: tom@mi2.hr
Display 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 ALL characters around the word.