digitization in Kelty, Bodo & Allen 2018


y reducing global asymmetries in the process.

4

This radicalization of access has changed how publications
travel across time and space. Digital archiving, cataloging and
sharing is transforming what we once considered as private
libraries. Amateur librarianship is becoming public shadow
librarianship. Hybrid use, as poetically unpacked in Balazs
Bodo's reflection on his own personal library, is now entangling
print and digital in novel ways. And, as he warns, the terrain
of antagonism is shifting. While for-profit publishers are
seemingly conceding to Guerrilla Open Access, they are
opening new territories: platforms centralizing data, metrics
and workflows, subsuming academic autonomy into new
processes of value extraction.
The 2010s brought us hope and then realization how little
digital networks could help revolutionary movements. The
redistribution toward the wealthy, assisted by digitization, has
eroded institutions of solidarity. The embrace of privilege—
marked by misogyny, racism and xenophobia—this has catalyzed
is nowhere more evident than in the climate denialism of the
Trump administration. Guerrilla archiving of US government
climate change datasets, as recounted by Laurie Allen,
indicates that more technological innovation simply won't do
away with the 'post-truth' and that our institutions might be in
need of revision, replacement and repair.
As the contributions to this pamphlet indicate, the terms
of struggle have shifted: not only do we have to continue
defending our shadow libraries, but we need to take back the
autonomy of knowledge production and rebuild institutional
grounds of solidarity.

Memory of the World
http://memoryoftheworld.org

5

Recursive
Publics and
Open Access

Christopher
Kelty

Ten years ago, I published a book calledTwo Bits: The Cultu


digitization in Constant 2016


now
what is excluded and how search results are ordered.

P.82

nascent demand for public access to
books to the fore.
From Bibliothécaire amateur - un
cours de pédagogie critique:
Puisqu'il était de plus en plus facile de
produire des livres en masse, les
bibliothèques privées payantes, au
service des catégories privilégiées de
la société, ont commencé à se
répandre. Ce phénomène a mis en
relief la question de la classe dans la
demande naissante pour un accès
public aux livres.

P.83

It is within and against this milieu that libraries such as
the Internet Archive, Wikileaks, Aaaaarg, UbuWeb,
Monoskop, Memory of the World, Nettime, TheNextLayer
and others gain their political agency. Their countertechniques for negotiating the publicness of publishing
include self-archiving, open access, book liberation,
leaking, whistleblowing, open source search algorithms
and so on.
Digitization and posting texts online are interventions in
the procedures that make search possible. Operating
online collections of texts is as much about organising
texts within libraries, as is placing them within books of
the web.

Originally written 15-16 June 2015 in Prague, Brno
and Vienna for a talk given at the Technopolitics seminar in Vienna on 16 June 2015.
Revised 29 December 2015 in Bergen.
Last
Revision:
1·08·2016

The
Indexalist
MATTHEW FULLER

I first spoke to the patient in the last week of that August. That evening the sun was tender in
drawing its shadows across the lines of his face. The eyes gazed softly into a close middle
distance, as if composing a line upon a translucent page hung in the middle of the air, the
hands tapping out a stanza or two of music on legs covered by the brown folds of a towelling
dressing gown. He had the air of someone who had seen something of grea


ter a legal challenge against their economic
hegemony in Europe was initiated.
2009
ERIC SCHMIDT VISITS IRAQ

A news report from the Wall Street Journal[13] as well as an AP report on Youtube[14] confirm
the new Google venture in the field of historical collections. The executive chairman of
Alphabet declared: “I can think of no better use of our time and our resources to make the
images and ideas from your civilization, from the very beginning of time, available to a billion
people worldwide.”
A detailed account and reflection of this visit, its background and agenda can be found in
Powered by Google: Widening Access and Tightening Corporate Control. (Schiller & Yeo
2014)
FRANCE REACTS AGAINST GOOGLE BOOKS

In relation to the Google Books dispute in Europe, Reuters reported in 2009 that France's
ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy “pledged hundreds of millions of euros toward a separate
digitization program, saying he would not permit France to be “stripped of our heritage to the
benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is.”[15]

Although the reactionary and nationalistic agenda of Sarkozy should not be celebrated, it is
important to note that the first open attack on Google’s cultural agenda came from the French
government. Four years later, the Google Cultural Institute establishes its headquarters in
Paris.
2010
EUROPEAN COMMISSION LAUNCHES AN ANTITRUST INVESTIGATION AGAINST
GOOGLE.

The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into
allegations that Google Inc. has abused a dominant position in online search, in
violation of European Union rules (Article 102 TFEU). The opening of formal
proceedings follows complaints by search service providers about unfavourable
treatment of their services in Google's unpaid and sponso

 

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