Dekker & Barok
Copying as a Way to Start Something New A Conversation with Dusan Barok about Monoskop
2017
COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
A Conversation with Dusan Barok about Monoskop
Annet Dekker
Dusan Barok is an artist, writer, and cultural activist involved
in critical practice in the fields of software, art, and theory. After founding and organizing the online culture portal
Koridor in Slovakia from 1999–2002, in 2003 he co-founded
the BURUNDI media lab where he organized the Translab
evening series. A year later, the first ideas about building an
online platform for texts and media started to emerge and
Monoskop became a reality. More than a decade later, Barok
is well-known as the main editor of Monoskop. In 2016, he
began a PhD research project at the University of Amsterdam. His project, titled Database for the Documentation of
Contemporary Art, investigates art databases as discursive
platforms that provide context for artworks. In an extended
email exchange, we discuss the possibilities and restraints
of an online ‘archive’.
ANNET DEKKER
You started Monoskop in 2004, already some time ago. What
does the name mean?
DUSAN BAROK
‘Monoskop’ is the Slovak equivalent of the English ‘monoscope’, which means an electric tube used in analogue TV
broadcasting to produce images of test cards, station logotypes, error messages but also for calibrating cameras. Monoscopes were automatized television announcers designed to
speak to both live and machine audiences about the status
of a channel, broadcasting purely phatic messages.
AD
Can you explain why you wanted to do the project and how it
developed to what it is now? In other words, what were your
main aims and have they changed? If so, in which direction
and what caused these changes?
DB
I began Monoskop as one of the strands of the BURUNDI
media lab in Bratislava. Originally, it was designed as a wiki
website for documenting media art and culture in the eastern part of Europe, whose backbone consisted of city entries
composed of links to separate pages about various events,
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initiatives, and individuals. In the early days it was modelled
on Wikipedia (which had been running for two years when
Monoskop started) and contained biographies and descriptions of events from a kind of neutral point of view. Over
the years, the geographic and thematic boundaries have
gradually expanded to embrace the arts and humanities in
their widest sense, focusing primarily on lesser-known
1
phenomena.1 Perhaps the biggest change is the ongoing
See for example
shift from mapping people, events, and places towards
https://monoskop.org/
Features. Accessed
synthesizing discourses.
28 May 2016.
A turning point occurred during my studies at the
Piet Zwart Institute, in the Networked Media programme
from 2010–2012, which combined art, design, software,
and theory with support in the philosophy of open source
and prototyping. While there, I was researching aspects of
the networked condition and how it transforms knowledge,
sociality and economics: I wrote research papers on leaking
as a technique of knowledge production, a critique of the
social graph, and on the libertarian values embedded in the
design of digital currencies. I was ready for more practice.
When Aymeric Mansoux, one of the tutors, encouraged me
to develop my then side-project Monoskop into a graduation
work, the timing was good.
The website got its own domain, a redesign, and most
crucially, the Monoskop wiki was restructured from its
2
focus on media art and culture towards the much wider
https://monoskop.org/
embrace
of the arts and humanities. It turned to a media
Symposium. Accessed
28 May 2016.
library of sorts. The graduation work also consisted of
a symposium about personal collecting and media ar3
chiving,2 which saw its loose follow-ups on media aeshttps://monoskop.org/
thetics (in Bergen)3 and on knowledge classification and
The_Extensions_of_
Many. Accessed
archives (in Mons)4 last year.
28 May 2016.
AD
https://monoskop.org/
Ideographies_of_
Knowledge. Accessed
28 May 2016.
Did you have a background in library studies, or have
you taken their ideas/methods of systemization and categorization (meta data)? If not, what are your methods
and how did you develop them?
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COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
4
been an interesting process, clearly showing the influence
of a changing back-end system. Are you interested in the
idea of sharing and circulating texts as a new way not just
of accessing and distributing but perhaps also of production—and publishing? I’m thinking how Aaaaarg started as
a way to share and exchange ideas about a text. In what
way do you think Monoskop plays (or could play) with these
kinds of mechanisms? Do you think it brings out a new
potential in publishing?
DB
Besides the standard literature in information science (I
have a degree in information technologies), I read some
works of documentation scientists Paul Otlet and Suzanne
Briet, historians such as W. Boyd Rayward and Ronald E.
Day, as well as translated writings of Michel Pêcheux and
other French discourse analysts of the 1960s and 1970s.
This interest was triggered in late 2014 by the confluence
of Femke’s Mondotheque project and an invitation to be an
artist-in-residence in Mons in Belgium at the Mundaneum,
home to Paul Otlet’s recently restored archive.
This led me to identify three tropes of organizing and
navigating written records, which has guided my thinking
about libraries and research ever since: class, reference,
and index. Classification entails tree-like structuring, such
as faceting the meanings of words and expressions, and
developing classification systems for libraries. Referencing
stands for citations, hyperlinking and bibliographies. Indexing ranges from the listing of occurrences of selected terms
to an ‘absolute’ index of all terms, enabling full-text search.
With this in mind, I have done a number of experiments.
There is an index of selected persons and terms from
5
across the Monoskop wiki and Log.5 There is a growing
https://monoskop.org/
list of wiki entries with bibliographies and institutional
Index. Accessed
28 May 2016.
infrastructures of fields and theories in the humanities.6
There is a lexicon aggregating entries from some ten
6
dictionaries of the humanities into a single page with
https://monoskop.org/
hyperlinks to each full entry (unpublished). There is an
Humanities. Accessed
28 May 2016.
alternative interface to the Monoskop Log, in which entries are navigated solely through a tag cloud acting as
a multidimensional filter (unpublished). There is a reader
containing some fifty books whose mutual references are
turned into hyperlinks, and whose main interface consists
of terms specific to each text, generated through tf-idf algorithm (unpublished). And so on.
DB
The publishing market frames the publication as a singular
body of work, autonomous from other titles on offer, and
subjects it to the rules of the market—with a price tag and
copyright notice attached. But for scholars and artists, these
are rarely an issue. Most academic work is subsidized from
public sources in the first place, and many would prefer to
give their work away for free since openness attracts more
citations. Why they opt to submit to the market is for quality
editing and an increase of their own symbolic value in direct
proportion to the ranking of their publishing house. This
is not dissimilar from the music industry. And indeed, for
many the goal is to compose chants that would gain popularity across academia and get their place in the popular
imagination.
On the other hand, besides providing access, digital
libraries are also fit to provide context by treating publications as a corpus of texts that can be accessed through an
unlimited number of interfaces designed with an understanding of the functionality of databases and an openness
to the imagination of the community of users. This can
be done by creating layers of classification, interlinking
bodies of texts through references, creating alternative
indexes of persons, things and terms, making full-text
search possible, making visual search possible—across
the whole of corpus as well as its parts, and so on. Isn’t
this what makes a difference? To be sure, websites such
as Aaaaarg and Monoskop have explored only the tip of
AD
Indeed, looking at the archive in many alternative ways has
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COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
the iceberg of possibilities. There is much more to tinker
and hack around.
within a given text and within a discourse in which it is
embedded. What is specific to digital text, however, is that
we can search it in milliseconds. Full-text search is enabled
by the index—search engines operate thanks to bots that
assign each expression a unique address and store it in a
database. In this respect, the index usually found at the
end of a printed book is something that has been automated
with the arrival of machine search.
In other words, even though knowledge in the age of the
internet is still being shaped by the departmentalization of
academia and its related procedures and rituals of discourse
production, and its modes of expression are centred around
the verbal rhetoric, the flattening effects of the index really
transformed the ways in which we come to ‘know’ things.
To ‘write’ a ‘book’ in this context is to produce a searchable
database instead.
AD
It is interesting that whilst the accessibility and search potential has radically changed, the content, a book or any other
text, is still a particular kind of thing with its own characteristics and forms. Whereas the process of writing texts seems
hard to change, would you be interested in creating more
alliances between texts to bring out new bibliographies? In
this sense, starting to produce new texts, by including other
texts and documents, like emails, visuals, audio, CD-ROMs,
or even un-published texts or manuscripts?
DB
Currently Monoskop is compiling more and more ‘source’
bibliographies, containing digital versions of actual texts
they refer to. This has been very much in focus in the past
two or three years and Monoskop is now home to hundreds
of bibliographies of twentieth-century artists, writers, groups,
and movements as well as of various theories and human7
ities disciplines.7 As the next step I would like to move
See for example
on to enabling full-text search within each such biblioghttps://monoskop.
org/Foucault,
raphy. This will make more apparent that the ‘source’
https://monoskop.
bibliography
is a form of anthology, a corpus of texts
org/Lissitzky,
https://monoskop.
representing a discourse. Another issue is to activate
org/Humanities.
cross-references
within texts—to turn page numbers in
All accessed
28 May 2016.
bibliographic citations inside texts into hyperlinks leading
to other texts.
This is to experiment further with the specificity of digital text. Which is different both to oral speech and printed
books. These can be described as three distinct yet mutually
encapsulated domains. Orality emphasizes the sequence
and narrative of an argument, in which words themselves
are imagined as constituting meaning. Specific to writing,
on the other hand, is referring to the written record; texts
are brought together by way of references, which in turn
create context, also called discourse. Statements are ‘fixed’
to paper and meaning is constituted by their contexts—both
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LOST AND LIVING (IN) ARCHIVES
AD
So, perhaps we finally have come to ‘the death of the author’,
at least in so far as that automated mechanisms are becoming active agents in the (re)creation process. To return to
Monoskop in its current form, what choices do you make
regarding the content of the repositories, are there things
you don’t want to collect, or wish you could but have not
been able to?
DB
In a sense, I turned to a wiki and started Monoskop as
a way to keep track of my reading and browsing. It is a
by-product of a succession of my interests, obsessions, and
digressions. That it is publicly accessible is a consequence
of the fact that paper notebooks, text files kept offline and
private wikis proved to be inadequate at the moment when I
needed to quickly find notes from reading some text earlier.
It is not perfect, but it solved the issue of immediate access
and retrieval. Plus there is a bonus of having the body of
my past ten or twelve years of reading mutually interlinked
and searchable. An interesting outcome is that these ‘notes’
are public—one is motivated to formulate and frame them
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COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
as to be readable and useful for others as well. A similar
difference is between writing an entry in a personal diary
and writing a blog post. That is also why the autonomy
of technical infrastructure is so important here. Posting
research notes on Facebook may increase one’s visibility
among peers, but the ‘terms of service’ say explicitly that
anything can be deleted by administrators at any time,
without any reason. I ‘collect’ things that I wish to be able
to return to, to remember, or to recollect easily.
AD
Can you describe the process, how do you get the books,
already digitized, or do you do a lot yourself? In other words,
could you describe the (technical) process and organizational aspects of the project?
DB
In the beginning, I spent a lot of time exploring other digital
libraries which served as sources for most of the entries on
Log (Gigapedia, Libgen, Aaaaarg, Bibliotik, Scribd, Issuu,
Karagarga, Google filetype:pdf). Later I started corresponding with a number of people from around the world (NYC,
Rotterdam, Buenos Aires, Boulder, Berlin, Ploiesti, etc.) who
contribute scans and links to scans on an irregular basis.
Out-of-print and open-access titles often come directly from
authors and publishers. Many artists’ books and magazines
were scraped or downloaded through URL manipulation
from online collections of museums, archives and libraries.
Needless to say, my offline archive is much bigger than
what is on Monoskop. I tend to put online the files I prefer
not to lose. The web is the best backup solution I have
found so far.
The Monoskop wiki is open for everyone to edit; any user
can upload their own works or scans and many do. Many of
those who spent more time working on the website ended up
being my friends. And many of my friends ended up having
an account as well :). For everyone else, there is no record
kept about what one downloaded, what one read and for
how long... we don’t care, we don’t track.
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AD
In what way has the larger (free) publishing context changed
your project, there are currently several free texts sharing
initiatives around (some already before you started like Textz.
com or Aaaaarg), how do you collaborate, or distinguish
from each other?
DB
It should not be an overstatement to say that while in the
previous decade Monoskop was shaped primarily by the
‘media culture’ milieu which it intended to document, the
branching out of its repository of highlighted publications
Monoskop Log in 2009, and the broadening of its focus to
also include the whole of the twentieth and twenty-first
century situates it more firmly in the context of online
archives, and especially digital libraries.
I only got to know others in this milieu later. I approached
Sean Dockray in 2010, Marcell Mars approached me the
following year, and then in 2013 he introduced me to Kenneth Goldsmith. We are in steady contact, especially through
public events hosted by various cultural centres and galleries.
The first large one was held at Ljubljana’s hackerspace Kiberpipa in 2012. Later came the conferences and workshops
organized by Kuda at a youth centre in Novi Sad (2013), by
the Institute of Network Cultures at WORM, Rotterdam (2014),
WKV and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2014),
Mama & Nova Gallery in Zagreb (2015), ECC at Mundaneum,
Mons (2015), and most recently by the Media Department
8
of the University of Malmo (2016).8
For more information see,
The leitmotif of all these events was the digital library
https://monoskop.org/
Digital_libraries#
and their atmosphere can be described as the spirit of
Workshops_and_
early
hacker culture that eventually left the walls of a
conferences.
Accessed 28 May 2016.
computer lab. Only rarely there have been professional
librarians, archivists, and publishers among the speakers, even though the voices represented were quite diverse.
To name just the more frequent participants... Marcell
and Tom Medak (Memory of the World) advocate universal
access to knowledge informed by the positions of the Yugoslav
219
COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
Marxist school Praxis; Sean’s work is critical of the militarization and commercialization of the university (in the
context of which Aaaaarg will always come as secondary, as
an extension of The Public School in Los Angeles); Kenneth
aims to revive the literary avant-garde while standing on the
shoulders of his heroes documented on UbuWeb; Sebastian
Lütgert and Jan Berger are the most serious software developers among us, while their projects such as Textz.com and
Pad.ma should be read against critical theory and Situationist cinema; Femke Snelting has initiated the collaborative
research-publication Mondotheque about the legacy of the
early twentieth century Brussels-born information scientist
Paul Otlet, triggered by the attempt of Google to rebrand him
as the father of the internet.
I have been trying to identify implications of the digital-networked textuality for knowledge production, including humanities research, while speaking from the position
of a cultural worker who spent his formative years in the
former Eastern Bloc, experiencing freedom as that of unprecedented access to information via the internet following
the fall of Berlin Wall. In this respect, Monoskop is a way
to bring into ‘archival consciousness’ what the East had
missed out during the Cold War. And also more generally,
what the non-West had missed out in the polarized world,
and vice versa, what was invisible in the formal Western
cultural canons.
There have been several attempts to develop new projects,
and the collaborative efforts have materialized in shared
infrastructure and introductions of new features in respective platforms, such as PDF reader and full-text search on
Aaaaarg. Marcell and Tom along with their collaborators have
been steadily developing the Memory of the World library and
Sebastian resuscitated Textz.com. Besides that, there are
overlaps in titles hosted in each library, and Monoskop bibliographies extensively link to scans on Libgen and Aaaaarg,
while artists’ profiles on the website link to audio and video
recordings on UbuWeb.
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AD
It is interesting to hear that there weren’t any archivist or
professional librarians involved (yet), what is your position
towards these professional and institutional entities and
persons?
DB
As the recent example of Sci-Hub showed, in the age of
digital networks, for many researchers libraries are primarily free proxies to corporate repositories of academic
9
journals.9 Their other emerging role is that of a digital
For more information see,
repository of works in the public domain (the role piowww.sciencemag.org/
news/2016/04/whosneered in the United States by Project Gutenberg and
downloading-piratedInternet Archive). There have been too many attempts
papers-everyone.
Accessed 28 May 2016.
to transpose librarians’ techniques from the paperbound
world into the digital domain. Yet, as I said before, there
is much more to explore. Perhaps the most exciting inventive approaches can be found in the field of classics, for
example in the Perseus Digital Library & Catalog and the
Homer Multitext Project. Perseus combines digital editions
of ancient literary works with multiple lexical tools in a way
that even a non-professional can check and verify a disputable translation of a quote. Something that is hard to
imagine being possible in print.
AD
I think it is interesting to see how Monoskop and other
repositories like it have gained different constituencies
globally, for one you can see the kind of shift in the texts
being put up. From the start you tried to bring in a strong
‘eastern European voice’, nevertheless at the moment the
content of the repository reflects a very western perspective on critical theory, what are your future goals. And do
you think it would be possible to include other voices? For
example, have you ever considered the possibility of users
uploading and editing texts themselves?
DB
The site certainly started with the primary focus on east-central European media art and culture, which I considered
221
COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
myself to be part of in the early 2000s. I was naive enough
to attempt to make a book on the theme between 2008–2010.
During that period I came to notice the ambivalence of the
notion of medium in an art-historical and technological
sense (thanks to Florian Cramer). My understanding of
media art was that it is an art specific to its medium, very
much in Greenbergian terms, extended to the more recent
‘developments’, which were supposed to range from neo-geometrical painting through video art to net art.
At the same time, I implicitly understood art in the sense
of ‘expanded arts’, as employed by the Fluxus in the early
1960s—objects as well as events that go beyond the (academic) separation between the arts to include music, film,
poetry, dance, design, publishing, etc., which in turn made
me also consider such phenomena as experimental film,
electro-acoustic music and concrete poetry.
Add to it the geopolitically unstable notion of East-Central
Europe and the striking lack of research in this area and
all you end up with is a headache. It took me a while to
realize that there’s no point even attempting to write a coherent narrative of the history of media-specific expanded
arts of East-Central Europe of the past hundred years. I
ended up with a wiki page outlining the supposed mile10
stones along with a bibliography.10
https://monoskop.
For this strand, the wiki served as the main notebook,
org/CEE. Accessed
28 May 2016. And
leaving behind hundreds of wiki entries. The Log was
https://monoskop.
more or less a ‘log’ of my research path and the presence
org/Central_and_
Eastern_Europe_
of ‘western’ theory is to a certain extent a by-product of
Bibliography.
my search for a methodology and theoretical references.
Accessed 28 May 2016.
As an indirect outcome, a new wiki section was
launched recently. Instead of writing a history of mediaspecific ‘expanded arts’ in one corner of the world, it takes
a somewhat different approach. Not a sequential text, not
even an anthology, it is an online single-page annotated
index, a ‘meta-encyclopaedia’ of art movements and styles,
intended to offer an expansion of the art-historical canonical
prioritization of the western painterly-sculptural tradition
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11
https://monoskop.
org/Art. Accessed
28 May 2016.
to also include other artists and movements around the
world.11
AD
Can you say something about the longevity of the project?
You briefly mentioned before that the web was your best
backup solution. Yet, it is of course known that websites
and databases require a lot of maintenance, so what will
happen to the type of files that you offer? More and more
voices are saying that, for example, the PDF format is all
but stable. How do you deal with such challenges?
DB
Surely, in the realm of bits, nothing is designed to last
forever. Uncritical adoption of Flash had turned out to be
perhaps the worst tragedy so far. But while there certainly
were more sane alternatives if one was OK with renouncing its emblematic visual effects and aesthetics that went
with it, with PDF it is harder. There are EPUBs, but scholarly publications are simply unthinkable without page
numbers that are not supported in this format. Another
challenge the EPUB faces is from artists' books and other
design- and layout-conscious publications—its simplified
HTML format does not match the range of possibilities for
typography and layout one is used to from designing for
paper. Another open-source solution, PNG tarballs, is not
a viable alternative for sharing books.
The main schism between PDF and HTML is that one represents the domain of print (easily portable, and with fixed
page size), while the other the domain of web (embedded
within it by hyperlinks pointing both directions, and with
flexible page size). EPUB is developed with the intention of
synthetizing both of them into a single format, but instead
it reduces them into a third container, which is doomed to
reinvent the whole thing once again.
It is unlikely that there will appear an ultimate convertor
between PDF and HTML, simply because of the specificities
of print and the web and the fact that they overlap only in
some respects. Monoskop tends to provide HTML formats
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COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
next to PDFs where time allows. And if the PDF were to
suddenly be doomed, there would be a big conversion party.
On the side of audio and video, most media files on
Monoskop are in open formats—OGG and WEBM. There
are many other challenges: keeping up-to-date with PHP
and MySQL development, with the MediaWiki software
and its numerous extensions, and the mysterious ICANN
organization that controls the web domain.
as an imperative to us to embrace redundancy, to promote
spreading their contents across as many nodes and sites
as anyone wishes. We may look at copying not as merely
mirroring or making backups, but opening up for possibilities to start new libraries, new platforms, new databases.
That is how these came about as well. Let there be Zzzzzrgs,
Ůbuwebs and Multiskops.
AD
What were your biggest challenges beside technical ones?
For example, have you ever been in trouble regarding copyright issues, or if not, how would you deal with such a
situation?
DB
Monoskop operates on the assumption of making transformative use of the collected material. The fact of bringing
it into certain new contexts, in which it can be accessed,
viewed and interpreted, adds something that bookstores
don’t provide. Time will show whether this can be understood as fair use. It is an opt-out model and it proves to
be working well so far. Takedowns are rare, and if they are
legitimate, we comply.
AD
Perhaps related to this question, what is your experience
with users engagement? I remember Sean (from Aaaaarg,
in conversation with Matthew Fuller, Mute 2011) saying
that some people mirror or download the whole site, not
so much in an attempt to ‘have everything’ but as a way
to make sure that the content remains accessible. It is a
conscious decision because one knows that one day everything might be taken down. This is of course particularly
pertinent, especially since while we’re doing this interview
Sean and Marcell are being sued by a Canadian publisher.
DB
That is absolutely true and any of these websites can disappear any time. Archives like Aaaaarg, Monoskop or UbuWeb
are created by makers rather than guardians and it comes
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Bibliography
Fuller, Matthew. ‘In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with
Sean Dockray’. Mute, 4 May 2011. www.metamute.org/editorial/
articles/paradise-too-many-books-interview-seandockray. Accessed 31 May 2016.
Online digital libraries
Aaaaarg, http://aaaaarg.fail.
Bibliotik, https://bibliotik.me.
Issuu, https://issuu.com.
Karagarga, https://karagarga.in.
Library Genesis / LibGen, http://gen.lib.rus.ec.
Memory of the World, https://library.memoryoftheworld.org.
Monoskop, https://monoskop.org.
Pad.ma, https://pad.ma.
Scribd, https://scribd.com.
Textz.com, https://textz.com.
UbuWeb, www.ubu.com.
The Guide to techno-galactic software observing was compiled by Carlin
Wing, Martino Morandi, Peggy Pierrot, Anita, Christoph Haag, Michael
Murtaugh, Femke Snelting
License: Free Art License
Support:
Sources:
Constant, February 2018
::: {.footnotes}
1. [[[Haraway]{.fname}, [Donna]{.gname}, [Galison]{.fname},
[Peter]{.gname} and [Stump]{.fname}, [David J]{.gname}: [Modest
Witness: Feminist Diffractions in Science Studies]{.title},
[Stanford University Press]{.publisher}, [1996]{.date}.
]{.collection} [-\>](#eeffecbe)]{#ebceffee}
2. [Worksessions are intensive transdisciplinary moments, organised
twice a year by Constant. They aim to provide conditions for
participants with different experiences and capabilities to
Constant
The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation
2018
::: {.toc}
[Introduction](#mtljymuz) [Encounter several collections of historical
hardware back-to-back](#njm5zwm4) [Interview people about their
histories with software](#mguzmza4) [Ask several people from different
fields and age-groups the same question: \"***What is
software?***\"](#odfkotky) [FMEM and /DEV/MEM](#mzcxodix)
[Pan/Monopsychism](#m2mwogri) [Fountain refreshment](#ndawnmy5) [Create
\"nannyware\": Software that observes and addresses the user](#mtk5yjbl)
[Useless scroll against productivity](#yzuwmdq4) [Investigating how
humans and machines negotiate the experience of time](#m2vjndu3)
[Quine](#nmi5mgjm) [Glossaries as an exercise](#zwu0ogu0) [Adding
qualifiers](#mja0m2i5) [Searching \"software\" through
software](#mmmwmje2) [Persist in calling everyone a Software Curious
Person](#ndhkmwey) [Setup a Relational software observatory consultancy
(RSOC)](#mmu1mgy0) [Agile Sun Salutation](#mta1ntzm) [Hand
reading](#mdu0mmji) [Bug reporting for sharing observations](#yznjodq3)
[Interface Détournement](#ytu5y2qy) [Comportments of software
(softwear)](#y2q4zju5) [Continuous integration](#mwrhm2y4) [make make
do](#zdixmgrm) [Flowcharts (Flow of the chart -- chart of the flow on
demand!)](#zweymtni) [Something in the Middle Maybe (SitMM)](#ywfin2e4)
[What is it like to be AN ELEVATOR?](#ntlimgqy) [Side Channel
Analysis](#ndg2zte4) [Compiling a bestiary of software logos](#njmzmjm1)
[Encounter several collections of historical hardware
back-to-back](#njm5zwm4) [Testing the testbed: testing software with
observatory ambitions (SWOA)](#mmy2zgrl) [Prepare a reader to think
theory with software](#mmmzmmrh)
:::
[]{#mtljymuz .anchor}
A guide to techno-galactic software observation
> I am less interested in the critical practice of reflection, of
> showing once-again that the emperor has no clothes, than in finding a
> way to *diffract* critical inquiry in order to make difference
> patterns in a more worldly way.^[1](#ebceffee)^
The techno-galactic software survival guide that you are holding right
now was collectively produced as an outcome of the Techno-Galactic
Software Observatory. This guide proposes several ways to achieve
critical distance from the seemingly endless software systems that
surround us. It offers practical and fantastical tools for the tactical
(mis)use of software, empowering/enabling users to resist embedded
paradigms and assumptions. It is a collection of methods for approaching
software, experiencing its myths and realities, its risks and benefits.
With the rise of online services, the use of software has increasingly
been knitted into the production of software, even while the rhetoric,
rights, and procedures continue to suggest that use and production
constitute separate realms. This knitting together and its corresponding
disavowal have an effect on the way software is used and produced, and
radically alters its operative role in society. The shifts ripple across
galaxies, through social structures, working conditions and personal
relations, resulting in a profusion of apparatuses aspiring to be
seamless while optimizing and monetizing individual and collective flows
of information in line with the interests of a handful of actors. The
diffusion of software services affects the personal, in the form of
intensified identity shaping and self-management. It also affects the
public, as more and more libraries, universities and public
infrastructures as well as the management of public life rely on
\"solutions\" provided by private companies. Centralizing data flows in
the clouds, services blur the last traces of the thin line that
separates bio- from necro-politics.
Given how fast these changes resonate and reproduce, there is a growing
urgency to engage in a critique of software that goes beyond taking a
distance, and that deals with the fact that we are inevitably already
entangled. How can we interact, intervene, respond and think with
software? What approaches can allow us to recognize the agency of
different actors, their ways of functioning and their politics? What
methods of observation enable critical inquiry and affirmative discord?
What techniques can we apply to resurface software where it has melted
into the infrastructure and into the everyday? How can we remember that
software is always at work, especially where it is designed to disappear
into the background?
We adopted the term of observation for a number of reasons. We regard
observation as a way to approach software, as one way to organize
engagement with its implications. Observation, and the enabling of
observation through intensive data-centric feedback mechanisms, is part
of the cybernetic principles that underpin present day software
production. Our aim was to scrutinize this methodology in its many
manifestations, including in \"observatories\" \-- high cost
infrastructures \[testing infrastructures?CITECLOSE23310 of observation
troubled by colonial, imperial traditions and their problematic
divisions of nature and culture \-- with the hope of opening up
questions about who gets to observe software (and how) and who is being
observed by software (and with what impact)? It is a question of power,
one that we answer, at least in part, with critical play.
We adopted the term techno-galactic to match the advertised capability
of \"scaling up to the universe\" that comes in contemporary paradigms
of computation, and to address different scales of software communities
and related political economies that involve and require observation.
Drawing on theories of software and computation developed in academia
and elsewhere, we grounded our methods in hands-on exercises and
experiments that you now can try at home. This Guide to Techno-Galactic
Software Observation offers methods developed in and inspired by the
context of software production, hacker culture, software studies,
computer science research, Free Software communities, privacy activism,
and artistic practice. It invites you to experiment with ways to stay
with the trouble of software.
The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory
----------------------------------------
In the summer of 2017, around thirty people gathered in Brussels to
explore practices of proximate critique with and of software in the
context of a worksession entitled \"Techno-Galactic Software
Observatory\".^[2](#bcaacdcf)^ The worksession called for
software-curious people of all kinds to ask questions about software.
The intuition behind such a call was that different types of engagement
requires a heterogeneous group of participants with different levels of
expertise, skill and background. During three sessions of two days,
participants collectively inspected the space-time of computation and
probed the universe of hardware-software separations through excursions,
exercises and conversations. They tried out various perspectives and
methods to look at the larger picture of software as a concept, as a
practice, and as a set of techniques.
The first two days of The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory included
visits to the Musée de l\'Informatique Pionnière en
Belgique^[3](#aaceaeff)^ in Namur and the Computermuseum
KULeuven^[4](#afbebabd)^. In the surroundings of these collections of
historical 'numerical artefacts', we started viewing software in a
long-term context. It offered us the occasion to reflect on the
conditions of its appearance, and allowed us to take on current-day
questions from a genealogical perspective. What is software? How did it
appear as a concept, in what industrial and governmental circumstances?
What happens to the material conditions of its production (minerals,
factory labor, hardware) when it evaporates into a cloud?
The second two days we focused on the space-time dimension of IT
development. The way computer programs and operating systems are
manufactured changed tremendously through time, and so did its
production times and places. From military labs via the mega-corporation
cubicles to the open-space freelancer utopia, what ruptures and
continuities can be traced in the production, deployment, maintenance
and destruction of software? From time-sharing to user-space partitions
and containerization, what separations were and are at work? Where and
when is software made today?
The Walk-in Clinic
------------------
The last two days at the Techno-galactic software observatory were
dedicated to observation and its consequences. The development of
software encompasses a series of practices whose evocative names are
increasingly familiar: feedback, report, probe, audit, inspect, scan,
diagnose, explore, test \... What are the systems of knowledge and power
within which these activities take place, and what other types of
observation are possible? As a practical set for our investigations, we
set up a walk-in clinic on the 25th floor of the World Trade Center,
where users and developers could arrive with software-questions of all
kinds.
> Do you suffer from the disappearance of your software into the cloud,
> feel oppressed by unequal user privilege, or experience the torment of
> software-ransom of any sort? Bring your devices and interfaces to the
> World Trade Center! With the help of a clear and in-depth session, at
> the Techno-Galactic Walk-In Clinic we guarantee immediate results. The
> Walk-In Clinic provides free hands-on observations to software curious
> people of all kinds. A wide range of professional and amateur
> practitioners will provide you with
> Software-as-a-Critique-as-a-Service on the spot. Available services
> range from immediate interface critique, collaborative code
> inspection, data dowsing, various forms of network analyses,
> unusability testing, identification of unknown viruses, risk
> assessment, opening of black-boxes and more. Free software
> observations provided. Last intake at 16:45.\
> (invitation to the Walk-In Clinic, June 2017)
On the following pages: Software as a Critique as a Service (SaaCaaS)
Directory and intake forms for Software Curious People (SCP).
The survival techniques described in the following guide are to be used
at your own risk in case of emergency regarding software curiosity. The
publisher will not accept any responsability in case of damages caused
by misuse, misundestanding of instruction or lack of curiosity. By
trying the action exposed in the guide, you accept the responsability of
loosing data or altering hardware, including hard disks, usb key, cloud
storage, screens by throwing them on the floor, or even when falling on
the floor with your laptop by tangling your feet in an entanglement of
cables. No harm has been done to human, animal, computers or plants
while creating the guide. No firearms or any kind of weapon is needed in
order to survive software.\
Just a little bit of patience.
**Software observation survival stresses**
**Physical fitness plays a great part of software observation. Be fit or
CTRL-Quit.**
When trying to observe software you might experience stresses as such :
*Anxiety*Sleep deprivation *Forgetting about eating*Loss of time
tracking
**Can you cope with software ? You have to.**
> our methods for observation, like mapping, come with their luggage.
[Close encounters]{.grouping} []{#njm5zwm4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.visit)
Encounter several collections of historical hardware
back-to-back]{.method .descriptor} [How]{.how .empty .descriptor}
This can be done by identifying one or more computer museums and visit
them with little time in-between. Visiting a friend with a large
basement and lots of left-over computer equipment can help. Seeing and
possibly touching hardware from different contexts
(state-administration, business, research, \...), periods of time,
cultural contexts (California, Germany, French-speaking Belgium) and
price ranges allows you to sense the interactions between hardware and
software development.
[Note: It\'s a perfect way to hear people speak about the objects and
their contexts, how they worked or not and how objects are linked one
with another. It also shows the economic and cultural aspects of
softwares.]{.note .descriptor} [WARNING: **DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR
MUTILATE**]{.warning .descriptor} [Example: Spaghetti Suitcase]{.example
.descriptor}
At one point during the demonstration of a Bull computer, the guide
revealed the system\'s \"software\" \-- a suitcase sized module with
dozens of patch cords. She made the comment that the term \"spaghetti
code\" (a derogatory expression about early code usign many \"GOTO\"
statments) had its origin in this physical arrangement of code as
patchings.
Preserving old hardware in order to observe physical manifestation of
software. See software here : we did experienced the incredible
possibility of actually touching software.
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/wednesday/IMG\_20170607\_113634\_585.jpg]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/resizes/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMG\_1163.JPG?m=1496916927]{.tmp}
[Example: Playing with the binary. Bull cards. Happy operator! Punch
card plays.]{.example .descriptor}
\"The highlight of the collection is to revive a real punch card
workshop of the 1960s.\"
[Example: Collection de la Maison des Écritures d\'Informatique & Bible,
Maredsous]{.example .descriptor}
The particularity of the collection lies in the fact that it\'s the
conservation of multiple stages of life of a software since its initial
computerization until today. The idea of introducing informatics into
the work of working with/on the Bible (versions in Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
and French) dates back to 1971, via punch card recordings and their
memorization on magnetic tape. Then came the step of analyzing texts
using computers.
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/resizes/Preparing-the-Techno-galactic-Software-Observatory/DSC05019.JPG?m=1490635726]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.jean.heuns]{.tmp}
[]{#mguzmza4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.jean.heuns)
Interview people about their histories with software]{.method
.descriptor} [What: Observe personnal narratives around software
history. Retrace the path of relation to software, how it changed during
the years and what are the human access memories that surrounds it. To
look at software through personal relations and emotions.]{.what
.descriptor} [How: Interviews are a good way to do it. Informal
conversations also.]{.how .descriptor}
Jean Heuns has been collecting servers, calculators, softwares, magnetic
tapes hard disks for xxx years. Found an agreement for them to be
displayed in the department hallways. Department of Computer sciences -
Kul Leuven.
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3350.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3361.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3356.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3343.JPG]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#odfkotky .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.samequestion)
Ask several people from different fields and age-groups the same
question: \"***What is software?***\"]{.method .descriptor} [Remember:
The answers to this question will vary depending on who is asking it to
who.]{.remember .descriptor} [What: By paying close attention to the
answers, and possibly logging them, observations on the ambiguous place
and nature of software can be made.]{.what .descriptor}
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
Jean Huens (system administrator at the department of Computer Science,
KULeuven): \"*It is difficult to answer the question \'what is
software\', but I know what is good software*\"
Thomas Cnudde (hardware designer at ESAT - COSIC, Computer Security and
Industrial Cryptography, KULeuven): \"*Software is a list of sequential
instructions! Hardware for me is made of silicon, software a sequence of
bits in a file. But naturally I am biased: I\'m a hardware designer so I
like to consider it as unique and special*\".
Amal Mahious (Director of NAM-IP, Namur): \"*This, you have to ask the
specialists.*\"
` {.verbatim}
*what is software?
--the unix filesystem says: it's a file----what is a file?
----in the filesystem, if you ask xxd:
------ it's a set of hexadecimal bytes
-------what is hexadecimal bytes?
------ -b it's a set of binary 01s
----if you ask objdump
-------it's a set of instructions
--side channel researching also says:
----it's a set of instructions
--the computer glossary says:
----it's a computer's programs, plus the procedure for their use http://etherbox.local/home/pi/video/A_Computer_Glossary.webm#t=02:26
------ a computer's programs is a set of instrutions for performing computer operations `
[Remember: To answer the question \"*what is software*\" depends on the
situation, goal, time, and other contextual influences.]{.remember
.descriptor} [TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.everyonescp]{.tmp}
[]{#mzcxodix .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.devmem) FMEM
and /DEV/MEM]{.method .descriptor} [What: Different ways of exploring
your memory (RAM). Because in unix everything is a file, you can access
your memory as if it were a file.]{.what .descriptor} [Urgency: To try
and observe the operational level of software, getting closer to the
workings, the instruction-being of an executable/executing file, the way
it is when it is loaded into memory rather than when it sits in the
harddisk]{.urgency .descriptor} [Remember: In Unix-like operating
systems, a device file or special file is an interface for a device
driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. In
the early days you could fully access your memory via the memory device
(`/dev/mem`) but over time the access was more and more restricted in
order to avoid malicious processes to directly access the kernel memory.
The kernel option CONFIG\_STRICT\_DEVMEM was introduced in kernel
version 2.6 and upper (2.6.36--2.6.39, 3.0--3.8, 3.8+HEAD). So you\'ll
need to use the Linux kernel module fmem: this module creates
`/dev/fmem` device, that can be used for accessing physical memory
without the limits of /dev/mem (1MB/1GB, depending on
distribution).]{.remember .descriptor}
`/dev/mem` tools to explore processes stored in the memory
ps ax | grep process
cd /proc/numberoftheprocess
cat maps
\--\> check what it is using
The proc filesystem is a pseudo-filesystem which provides an interface
to kernel data structures. It is commonly mounted at `/proc`. Most of it
is read-only, but some files allow kernel variables to be changed.
dump to a file\--\>change something in the file\--\>dump new to a
file\--\>diff oldfile newfile
\"where am i?\"
to find read/write memory addresses of a certain process\
`awk -F "-| " '$3 ~ /rw/ { print $1 " " $2}' /proc/PID/maps`{.bash}
Besides opening the memory dump with an hex editor you can also try and
explore it with other tools or devices. You can open it as a raw image,
you can play it as a sound or perhaps send it directly to your
frame-buffer device (`/dev/fb0`).
[WARNING: Although your memory may look like/sound like/read like
gibberish, it may contain sensitive information about you and your
computer!]{.warning .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/Screenshot\_from\_2017-06-07\_164407.png]{.tmp}
[TODO: BOX: Forensic and debuggung tools can be used to explore and
problematize the layers of abstraction of computing.]{.tmp} [TODO:
RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.monopsychism]{.tmp}
[]{#m2mwogri .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.monopsychism)
Pan/Monopsychism]{.method .descriptor} [What: Reading and writing
sectors of memory from/to different computers]{.what .descriptor} [How:
Shell commands and fmem kernel module]{.how .descriptor} [Urgency:
Memory, even when it is volatile, is a trace of the processes happening
in your computer in the form of saved information, and is therefore more
similar to a file than to a process. Challenging the file/process
divide, sharing memory with others will allow a more intimate relation
with your and other\'s computers.]{.urgency .descriptor} [About:
Monopsychism is the philosophical/theological doctrine according to
which there exists but one intellect/soul, shared by all beings.]{.about
.descriptor} [TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.devmem]{.tmp} [Note: The
parallel allocation and observation of the same memory sector in two
different computers is in a sense the opposite process of machine
virtualization, where the localization of multiple virtual machines in
one physical comptuers can only happen by rigidly separating the memory
sectors dedicated to the different virtual machines.]{.note .descriptor}
[WARNING: THIS METHOD HAS NOT BEEN TESTED, IT CAN PROBABLY DAMAGE YOUR
RAM MEMORY AND/OR COMPUTER]{.warning .descriptor}
First start the fmem kernel module in both computers:
`sudo sh fmem/run.sh`{.bash}
Then load part of your computer memory into the other computer via dd
and ssh:
or it could go through the memory of different computers one after the other and take and leave something there `
[Temporality]{.grouping} []{#ndawnmy5 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.fountain)
Fountain refreshment]{.method .descriptor} [What: Augmenting a piece of
standardised office equipment designed to dispense water to perform a
decorative function.]{.what .descriptor} [How: Rearranging space as
conditioning observations (WTC vs. Museum vs. University vs. Startup
Office vs. Shifting Walls that became Water Fountains)]{.how
.descriptor} [Who: Gaining access to standardised water dispensing
equipment turned out to be more difficult than expected as such
equipment is typically licensed / rented rather than purchased outright.
Acquiring a unit that could be modified required access to secondary
markets of second hand office equiment in order to purchase a disused
model.]{.who .descriptor} [Urgency: EU-OSHA (European Agency for Safety
and Health at Work) Directive 2003/10/EC noise places describes the
minimum health and safety requirements regarding the exposure of workers
to the risks arising from physical agents (noise). However no current
European guidelines exist on the potential benefitial uses of tactially
designed additive noise systems.]{.urgency .descriptor}
The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory -- Comfortable silence, one way
mirrors
A drinking fountain and screens of one-way mirrors as part of the work
session \"*The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory*\" organised by
Constant.
For the past 100 years the western ideal of a corporate landscape has
been has been moving like a pendulum, oscillating between grids of
cubicles and organic, open landscapes, in a near to perfect 25-year
rhythm. These days the changes in office organisation is supplemented by
sound design, in corporate settings mostly to create comfortable
silence. Increase the sound and the space becomes more intimate, the
person on the table next to you can not immediately hear what you are
saying. It seems that actual silence in public and corporate spaces has
not been sought after since the start of the 20th century. Actual
silence is not at the moment considered comfortable. One of the visible
symptoms of our desire to take the edge off the silence is to be
observed through the appearance of fountains in public space. The
fountains purpose being to give off neutral sound, like white noise
without the negative connotations. However as a sound engineer\'s
definition of noise is unwanted sound that all depends on ones personal
relation to the sound of dripping water.
This means that there needs to be a consistent inoffensiveness to create
comfortable silence.
In corporate architecture the arrival of glass buildings were originally
seen as a symbol of transparency, especially loved by governmental
buildings. Yet the reflectiveness of this shiny surface once combined
with strong light -- known as the treason of the glass -- was only
completely embraced at the invention of one-way-mirror foil. And it was
the corporate business-world that would come to be known for their
reflective glass skyscrapers. As the foil reacts to light, it appears
transparent to someone standing in the dark, while leaving the side with
the most light with an opaque surface. Using this foil as room dividers
in a room with a changing light, what is hidden or visible will vary
throughout the day. So will the need for comfortable silence. Disclaimer
:\
Similar to the last 100 years of western office organisation,\
this fountain only has two modes:\
on or off
If it is on it also offers two options\
cold water and hot water
This fountain has been tampered with and has not in any way been
approved by a proffesional fountain cleaner. I do urge you to consider
this before you take the decision to drink from the fountain.
Should you chose to drink from the fountain, then I urge you to write
your name on your cup, in the designated area, for a customised
experience of my care for you.
Nannyware is software meant to protect users while limiting their space
of activity. It is software that passive-aggressively suggests or
enforces some kind of discipline. In other words, create a form of
parental control extended to adults by means of user experience / user
interfaces.
Nannyware is a form of Content-control software: software designed to
restrict or control the content a reader is authorised to access,
especially when utilised to restrict material delivered over the
Internet via the Web, e-mail, or other means. Content-control software
determines what content will be available or be blocked.
[How]{.how .empty .descriptor}
> \[\...RestrictionsCITECLOSE23310 can be applied at various levels: a
> government can attempt to apply them nationwide (see Internet
> censorship), or they can, for example, be applied by an ISP to its
> clients, by an employer to its personnel, by a school to its students,
> by a library to its visitors, by a parent to a child\'s computer, or
> by an individual user to his or her own computer.^[5](#fcefedaf)^
[Who]{.who .empty .descriptor}
> Unlike filtering, accountability software simply reports on Internet
> usage. No blocking occurs. In setting it up, you decide who will
> receive the detailed report of the computer's usage. Web sites that
> are deemed inappropriate, based on the options you've chosen, will be
> red-flagged. Because monitoring software is of value only "after the
> fact", we do not recommend this as a solution for families with
> children. However, it can be an effective aid in personal
> accountability for adults. There are several available products out
> there.^[6](#bffbbeaf)^
[Urgency]{.urgency .empty .descriptor}
> As with all new lifestyle technologies that come along, in the
> beginning there is also some chaos until their impact can be assessed
> and rules put in place to bring order and respect to their
> implementation and use in society. When the automobile first came into
> being there was much confusion regarding who had the right of way, the
> horse or the car. There were no paved roads, speed limits, stop signs,
> or any other traffic rules. Many lives were lost and much property was
> destroyed as a result. Over time, government and society developed
> written and unwritten rules as to the proper use of the
> car.^[7](#bbfcbcfa)^
[WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor}
> Disadvantages of explicit proxy deployment include a user\'s ability
> to alter an individual client configuration and bypass the proxy. To
> counter this, you can configure the firewall to allow client traffic
> to proceed only through the proxy. Note that this type of firewall
> blocking may result in some applications not working
> properly.^[8](#ededebde)^
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
> The main problem here is that the settings that are required are
> different from person to person. For example, I use workrave with a 25
> second micropause every two and a half minute, and a 10 minute
> restbreak every 20 minutes. I need these frequent breaks, because I\'m
> recovering from RSI. And as I recover, I change the settings to fewer
> breaks. If you have never had any problem at all (using the computer,
> that is), then you may want much fewer breaks, say 10 seconds
> micropause every 10 minutes, and a 5 minute restbreak every hour. It
> is very hard to give proper guidelines here. My best advice is to play
> around and see what works for you. Which settings \"feel right\".
> Basically, that\'s how Workrave\'s defaults evolve.^[9](#cfbbbfdd)^
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Content-control software\](
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2008/05/03/nannyware.jpg )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[A \"nudge\" from your music player
\](http://img.wonderhowto.com/img/10/25/63533437022064/0/disable-high-volume-warning-when-using-headphones-your-samsung-galaxy-s4.w654.jpg)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Emphasis on the body\]
(http://classicallytrained.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/take-a-break.jpg)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[ \"Slack is trying to be my friend but it\'s more
like a slightly insensitive and slightly bossy acquaintance.\"
\@briecode \] (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuZLgV4XgAAYexX.jpg)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Slack is trying to be my friend but it\'s more like
a slightly insensitive and slightly bossy acquaintance.\]
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuZLgV4XgAAYexX.jpg)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE
HERE:
!\[\](https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi0.wp.com%2Fatherbeg.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F06%2FWorkrave-Restbreak-Shoulder.png&f=1)]{.tmp}
Facebook is working on an app to stop you from drunk-posting \"Yann
LeCun, who overseas the lab, told Wired magazine that the program would
be like someone asking you, \'Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you
sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?\'\"
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[This Terminal Dashboard Reminds You to Take a Break
When You\'re Lost Deep Inside the Command
Line\](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s\--\_of0PoM2\--/c\_fit,fl\_progressive,q\_80,w\_636/eegvqork0qizokwrlemz.png)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](http://waterlog.gd/images/homescreen.png)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
!\[\](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6oKTduWcAEruIE.jpg:large)]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#yzuwmdq4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.scrollresistance)
Useless scroll against productivity]{.method .descriptor} []{#m2vjndu3
.anchor} [[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.time)
Investigating how humans and machines negotiate the experience of
time]{.method .descriptor} [What]{.what .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE
HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/Screenshot\_from\_2017-06-10\_172547.png]{.tmp}
[How: python script]{.how .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty
.descriptor}
` {.verbatim}
# ends of time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Exact moment of the epoch:
03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038
## commands
local UNIX time of this machine
%XBASHCODE: date +%s
UNIX time + 1
%BASHCODE: echo $((`date +%s` +1 ))
## goodbye unix time
while :
do
sleep 1
figlet $((2147483647 - `date +%s`))
done
# Sundial Time Protocol Group tweaks
printf 'Current Time in Millennium Unix Time: '
printf $((2147483647 - `date +%s`))
echo
sleep 2
echo $((`cat ends-of-times/idletime` + 2)) > ends-of-times/idletime
idletime=`cat ends-of-times/idletime`
echo
figlet "Thank you for having donated 2 seconds to our ${idletime} seconds of collective SSH pause "
echo
echo
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} [Languaging]{.grouping} []{#nmi5mgjm .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.quine)
Quine]{.method .descriptor} [What: A program whose function consists of
displaying its own code. Also known as \"self-replicating
program\"]{.what .descriptor} [Why: Quines show the tension between
\"software as language\" and \"software as operation\".]{.why
.descriptor} [How: By running a quine you will get your code back. You
may do a step forward and wonder about functionality and aesthetics,
uselessness and performativity, data and code.]{.how .descriptor}
[Example: A quine (Python). When executed it outputs the same text as
the source:]{.example .descriptor}
` {.sourceCode .python}
s = 's = %r\nprint(s%%s)'
print(s%s) `
[Example: A oneline unibash/etherpad quine, created during relearn
2017:]{.example .descriptor}
The encounter with quines may deeply affect you. You may want to write
one and get lost in trying to make an ever shorter and more elegant one.
You may also take quines as point of departure or limit-ideas for
exploring software dualisms.
\"A quine is without why. It prints because it prints. It pays no
attention to itself, nor does it asks whether anyone sees it.\" \"Aquine
is aquine is aquine. \" Aquine is not a quine This is not aquine
[Remember: Although seemingly absolutely useless, quines can be used as
exploits.]{.remember .descriptor}
Exploring boundaries/tensions
databases treat their content as data (database punctualization) some
exploits manage to include operations in a database
[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.monopsychism]{.tmp}
[]{#zwu0ogu0 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.glossary)
Glossaries as an exercise]{.method .descriptor} [What: Use the technique
of psychanalytic listening to compile (gather, collect, bring together)
a list of key words for understanding software.]{.what .descriptor}
[How: Create a shared document that participants can add words to as
their importance emerges.To do pyschoanalytic listening, let your
attention float freely, hovering evenly, over a conversation or a text
until something catches its ear. Write down what your ear/eye catches.
When working in a collective context invite others to participate in
this project and describe the practice to them. Each individual may move
in and out of this mode of listening according to their interest and
desire and may add as many words to the list as they want. Use this list
to create an index of software observation.]{.how .descriptor} [When:
This is best done in a bounded context. In the case of the
Techno-Galactic Observatory, our bounded contexts includes the six day
work session and the pages and process of this publication.]{.when
.descriptor} [Who: The so-inclined within the group]{.who .descriptor}
[Urgency: Creating and troubling categories]{.urgency .descriptor}
[Note: Do not remove someone else\'s word from the glossary during the
accumulation phase. If an editing and cutting phase is desired this
should be done after the collection through collective consensus.]{.note
.descriptor} [WARNING: This method is not exclusive to and was not
developed for software observation. It may lead to awareness of
unconscious processes and to shifts in structures of feeling and
relation.]{.warning .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
` {.verbatim}
Agile
Code
Colonial
Command Line
Communication
Connectivity
Emotional
Galaxies
Green
Guide
Kernel
Imperial
Issues
Machine
Mantra
Memory
Museum
Observation
ProductionPower
Programmers
Progress
Relational
Red
Scripting
Scrum
Software
Survival
Technology
Test
Warning
WhiteBoard
Yoga `
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mja0m2i5 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.validation)
Adding qualifiers]{.method .descriptor} [Remember: \"\[V\]alues are
properties of things and states of affairs that we care about and strive
to attain\...vlaues expressed in technical systems are a function of
their uses as well as their features and designs.\" Values at Play in
Digital Games, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum]{.remember
.descriptor} [What: Bringing a moral, ethical, or otherwise
evaluative/adjectival/validating lens.]{.what .descriptor} [How:
Adjectives create subcategories. They narrow the focus by naming more
specifically the imagined object at hand and by implicitly excluding all
objects that do not meet the criteria of the qualifier. The more
adjectives that are added, the easier it becomes to answer the question
what is software. Or so it seems. Consider what happens if you add the
words good, bad, bourgeois, queer, stable, or expensive to software. Now
make a list of adjectives and try it for yourself. Level two of this
exercise consists of observing a software application and deducing from
this the values of the individuals, companies, and societies that
produced it.]{.how .descriptor} [Note: A qualifier may narrow down
definitions to undesirable degrees.]{.note .descriptor} [WARNING: This
exercise may be more effective at identifying normative and ideological
assumptions at play in the making, distributing, using, and maintaining
of software than at producing a concise definition.]{.warning
.descriptor} [Example: \"This morning, Jan had difficulties to answer
the question \"what is software\", but he said that he could answer the
question \"what is good software\". What is good software?]{.example
.descriptor} [TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mmmwmje2 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.softwarethrough)
Searching \"software\" through software]{.method .descriptor} [What: A
quick way to sense the ambiguity of the term \'software\', is to go
through the manual files on your hard drive and observe in which cases
is the term used.]{.what .descriptor} [How: command-line oneliner]{.how
.descriptor} [Why: Software is a polymorphic term that take different
meanings and comes with different assumptions for the different agents
involved in its production, usage and all other forms of encounter and
subjection. From the situated point of view of the software present on
your machine, when and why does software call itself as such?]{.why
.descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
so software exists only outside your computer? only in general terms?
checking for the word software in all man pages:
grep -nr software /usr/local/man
!!!!
software appears only in terms of license:
This program is free software
This software is copyright (c)
we don\'t run software. we still run programs.\
nevertheless software is everywhere
[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.samequestion]{.tmp}
[]{#ndhkmwey .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.everyonescp)
Persist in calling everyone a Software Curious Person]{.method
.descriptor} [What: Persistance in naming is a method for changing a
person\'s relationship to software by (sometimes forcibly) call everyone
a Software Curious Person.]{.what .descriptor} [How: Insisting on
curiosity as a relation, rather than for example \'fear\' or
\'admiration\' might help cut down the barriers between different types
of expertise and allows multiple stakeholders feel entitled to ask
questions, to engage, to investigate and to observe.]{.how .descriptor}
[Urgency: Software is too important to not be curious about.
Observations could benefit from recognising different forms of
knowledge. It seems important to engage with software through multiple
interests, not only by means of technical expertise.]{.urgency
.descriptor} [Example: This method was used to address each of the
visitors at the Techno-Galactic Walk-in Clinic.]{.example .descriptor}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} [Healing]{.grouping} []{#mmu1mgy0 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.relational)
Setup a Relational software observatory consultancy (RSOC)]{.method
.descriptor} [Remember]{.remember .empty .descriptor}
- Collectivise research around hacking to save time.
- Self-articulate software needs as your own Operating (system)
perspective.
- Change the lens by looking to software through a time perspective.
[What: By paying a visit to our ethnomethodology interview practice
you'll learn to observe software from different angles / perspectives.
Our practionners passion is to make the \"what is the relation to
software\" discussion into a service.]{.what .descriptor} [How: Reading
the signs. Considering the everchanging nature of software development
and use and its vast impact on globalized societies, it is necessary to
recognize some of the issues of how software is (often) either
passively-perceived or actively-observed, without an articulation of the
relations. We offer a method to read the signs of the relational aspect
of software observance. It\'s a crucial aspect of our guide. It will
give you another view on software that will shape your ability to
survive any kind of software disaster.]{.how .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE
HERE: !\[Reading the signs. From: John \"Lofty\" Wiseman, SAS Survival
Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Anywhere\](
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/index.php/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMAG1319
)]{.tmp} [WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: have a
advertising blob for the RSOC with a smiling doctor welcoming
image]{.tmp} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
What follows is an example of a possible diagnostic questionnaire.
Sample Questionnaire
--------------------
**What to expect** You will obtain a cartography of software users
profiles. It will help you to shape your own relation to software. You
will be able to construct your own taxonomy and classifcation of
software users that is needed in order to find a means of rescue in case
of a software catastrophy.
- SKILLS\
- What kind of user would you say that you are?
- What is your most frequently used type of software?
- How often do you install/experiment/learn new software?
- History
- What is your first recollection of software use?
- How often do / when did you last purchase software or pay for a
software service?
- Ethics
- What is the software feature you care about the most?
- Do you use any free software?
- if yes than
- do you remember your first attempt at using this software
service? Do you still use it? If not why?
- Do you pay for media distribution/streaming services?
- Do you remember your first attempt at using free software and how
did that make you feel?
- Have you used any of these software services : facebook, dating app
(grindr, tinder, etc.), twitter, instagram or equivalent.
- Can you talk about your favorite apps or webtools that you use
regularly?
- What is most popular software your friends use?
- SKILL
- Would you say that you are a specilised user?
- Have you ever used the command line?
- Do you know about scripting?
- Have you ever edited an HTML page? A CSS file? A PHP file? A
configuration file?
- Can you talk about your most technical encounter with your computer
/ telephone?
- ECONOMY\
- How do you pay for your software use?
- Please elaborate (for example, do you buy the software? /
contribute in kind / deliver services or support)
- What is the last software that you paid for using?
- What online services are you currently paying for?
- Is someone paying for your use of service?
- Personal
- What stories do you have concerning contracts and administration in
relation to your software, Internet or computer?
- How does software help you shape your relations with other people?
- From which countries does your softwares come from / reside? How do
you feel about that?
- Have you ever read a terms of software service, what about one that
is not targeting the American market?
Possible/anticipated user profiles
----------------------------------
### \...meAsHardwareOwnerSoftwareUSER:
\"I did not own a computer personally until very very late as I did not
enjoy gaming as a kid or had interest in spending much time behind PC
beyond work (and work computer). My first was hence I think in 2005 and
it was a SGI workstation that was the computer of the year 2000 (cost
10.000USD) and I got it for around 300USD. Proprietary drivers for
unified graphics+RAM were never released, so it remained a software
dead-end in gorgeous blue curved chassis
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/pics/vwdocs.jpg\"
### \...meAsSoftwareCONSUMER:
\"I payed/purchased software only twice in my life (totalling less then
25eur), as I could access most commercial software as widely pirated in
Balkans and later had more passion for FLOSS anyway, this made me relate
to software as material to exchange and work it, rather than commodity
goods I could or not afford.\"
### \...meAsSoftwareINVESTOR:
\"I did it as both of those apps were niche products in early beta (one
was Jeeper Elvis, real-time-non-linear-video-editor for BeOS) that
failed to reach market, but I think I would likely do it again and only
in that mode (supporting the bleeding edge and off-stream work), but
maybe with more than 25eur.\"
### \...meAsSoftwareUserOfOS:
\"I would spend most of 80s ignoring computers, 90ties figuring out
software from high-end to low-end, starting with OSF/DecAlpha and SunOS,
than IRIX and MacOS, finally Win 95/98 SE, that permanently pushed me
into niches (of montly LINUX distro install fests, or even QNX/Solaris
experiments and finally BeOS use).\"
### \...meAsSoftwareWEBSURFER:
\"I got used to websurfing in more than 15 windows on UNIX systems and
never got used to less than that ever since, furthermore with addition
of more browser options this number only multiplied (always wondered if
my first system was Windows 3.11 - would I be a more focused person and
how would that form my relations to browser windows\>tabs).\"
### \...meAsSoftwareUserOfPropertarySoftware:
\"I signed one NDA contract in person on the paper and with ink on a
rainy day while stopping of at trainstaion in north Germany for the
software that was later to be pulled out of market due to problematic
licencing agreement (intuitivly I knew it was wrong) - it had too much
unprofessional pixeleted edges in its graphics.
### \...meAsSoftwareUserOfDatingWebsites:
\"I got one feature request implemented by a prominent dating website
(to search profiles by language they speak), however I was never
publicly acknowledged (though I tried to make use of it few times), that
made our relations feel a bit exploitative and underappreciated. \"
### \...meAsSoftwareUserTryingToGoPRO:
\"my only two attempts to get into the software company failed as they
insisted on full time commitments. Later I found out ones were
intimidated in interview and other gave it to a person that negotiated
to work part time with friend! My relation to professionalism is likely
equally complex and pervert as one to the software.\"
Case study : W. W.
------------------
\...ww.AsExperiencedAdventerousUSER - experiments with software every
two days as she uses FLOSS and Gnu/Linux, cares the most for maliabity
of the software - as a result she has big expectations of flexibility
even in software category which is quite conventional and stability
focused like file-hosting.
\...ww.AsAnInevstorInSoftware - paid compiled version of FLOSS audio
software 5 years ago as she is supportive of economy and work around
production, maintainance and support, but she also used closed
hardware/software where she had to agree on licences she finds unfair,
but then she was hacking it in order to use it as an expert - when she
had time.
\...ww.AsCommunicationSoftwareUSER - she is not using commercial social
networks, so she is very concious of information transfers and time
relations, but has no strong media/format/design focus.
Q: What is your first recollection of software use?\
A: ms dos in 1990 at school \_ i was 15 or 16. oh no 12. Basic in 1986.
Q: What are the emotions related to this use?\
A: fun. i\'m good at this. empowering
Q: How often do / when did you last purchase software or pay for a
software service?\
A: I paid for ardour five years ago. I paid the developper directly. For
the compiled version. I paid for the service. I pay for my website and
email service at domaine public.
Q: What kind of user would you say you are?\
A: An experienced user drawing out the line. I don\'t behave.
Q: Is there a link between this and your issue?\
A: Even if it\'s been F/LOSS there is a lot of decision power in my
package.
Q: What is your most frequently used type of software?\
A: Web browser. email. firefox & thunderbird
Q: How often do you install/experiment/learn new software?\
A: Every two days. I reinstall all the time. my old lts system died.
stop being supported last april. It was linux mint something.
Q: Do you know about scripting?\
A: I do automating scripts for any operation i have to doi several times
like format conversion.
Q: Can you talk about your most technical encounter with your computer /
telephone?\
A: I\'ve tried to root it. but i didn\'t succeed.
Q: How much time do you wish to spend on such activities like hacking,
rooting your device?\
A: hours. you should take your time
Q: Did you ever sign licence agreement you were not agree with? How does
that affect you?\
A: This is the first thing your when you have a phone. it\'s obey or
die.
Q: What is the software feature you care for the most?\
A: malleability. different ways to approach a problem, a challenge, an
issue.
Q: Do you use any free software?\
A: yes. there maybe are some proprietary drivers.
Q: Do you remember your first attempt at using free software and how did
that make you feel?\
A: Yes i installed my dual boot in \... 10 years ago. scared and
powerful.
Q: Do you use one of this software service: facebook, dating app (grindr
of sort), twitter, instagram or equivalent?\
A: Google, gmail that\'s it
Q: Can you talk about your favorite apps or webtools that you use
regularly?\
A: Music player. vanilla music and f-droid. browser. I pay attention to
clearing my history, no cookies. I also have iceweasel. Https by
default. Even though i have nothing to hide.
Q: What stories around contracts and administration in relation to your
software internet or computer?\
A: Nothing comes to my mind. i\'m not allowed to do, to install on
phone. When it\'s an old phone, there is nothing left that is working
you have to do it.
Q: How does software help you shape your relations with other people?\
A: It\'s a hard question. if it\'s communication software of course
it\'s it\'s nature to be related to other people.there is an expectency
of immediate reply, of information transfer\...It\'s troubling your
relation with people in certain situations.
Q: From which countries does your softwares live / is coming from? How
do you feel about that?\
A: i think i chose the netherlands as a miror. you are hoping to reflect
well in this miror.
Q: Have you ever read a terms of software service; one that is not
targeting the American market?\
A: i have read them. no.
> Agile software development describes a set of values and principles
> for software development under which requirements and solutions evolve
> through the collaborative effort of self-organizing cross-functional
> teams. It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early
> delivery, and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and
> flexible response to change. These principles support the definition
> and continuing evolution of many software development
> methods.^[10](#dbabcece)^
[What: You will be observing yourself]{.what .descriptor} [How]{.how
.empty .descriptor}
> Scrum is a framework for managing software development. It is designed
> for teams of three to nine developers who break their work into
> actions that can be completed within fixed duration cycles (called
> \"sprints\"), track progress and re-plan in daily 15-minute stand-up
> meetings, and collaborate to deliver workable software every sprint.
> Approaches to coordinating the work of multiple scrum teams in larger
> organizations include Large-Scale Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
> and Scrum of Scrums, among others.^[11](#eefcbaac)^
[When: Anywhere where it\'s possible to lie on the floor]{.when
.descriptor} [Who]{.who .empty .descriptor}
> Self-organization and motivation are important, as are interactions
> like co-location and pair programming. It is better to have a good
> team of developers who communicate and collaborate well, rather than a
> team of experts each operating in isolation. Communication is a
> fundamental concept.^[12](#fbaeffab)^
[Urgency: Using Agile software development methods to develop a new path
into your professional and personal life towards creativity, focus and
health.]{.urgency .descriptor} [WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor}
> The agile movement is in some ways a bit like a teenager: very
> self-conscious, checking constantly its appearance in a mirror,
> accepting few criticisms, only interested in being with its peers,
> rejecting en bloc all wisdom from the past, just because it is from
> the past, adopting fads and new jargon, at times cocky and arrogant.
> But I have no doubts that it will mature further, become more open to
> the outside world, more reflective, and also therefore more
> effective.^[13](#edabeeaf)^
Hello and welcome to the presentation of the agile yoga methodology. I
am Allegra, and today I\'m going to be your personal guide to YOGA, an
acronym for why organize? Go agile! I\'ll be part of your team today and
we\'ll do a few exercises together as an introduction to a new path into
your professional and personal life towards creativity, focus and
health.
A few months ago, I was stressed, overwhelmed with my work, feeling
alone, inadequate, but since I started practicing agile yoga, I feel
more productive. I have many clients as an agile yoga coach, and I\'ve
seen new creative business opportunities coming to me as a software
developer.
For this first experience with the agile yoga method and before we do
physical exercises together, I would like to invite you to close your
eyes. Make yourself comfortable, lying on the floor, or sitting with
your back on the wall. Close your eyes, relax. Get comfortable. Feel the
weight of your body on the floor or on the wall. Relax.
Leave your troubles at the door. Right now, you are not procrastinating,
you are having a meeting at the \,
a professional building dedicated to business, you are meeting yourself,
you are your own business partner, you are one. You are building your
future.
You are in a room standing with your team, a group of lean programmers.
You are watching a white board together. You are starting your day, a
very productive day as you are preparing to run a sprint together. Now
you turn towards each other, making a scrum with your team, you breathe
together, slowly, inhaling and exhaling together, slowly, feeling the
air in and out of your body. Now you all turn towards the sun to prepare
to do your ASSanas, the agile Sun Salutations or ASS with the team
dedicated ASS Master. She\'s guiding you. You start with Namaskar, the
Salute. your palms joined together, in prayer pose. you all reflect on
the first principle of the agile manifesto. your highest priority is to
satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable
software.
Next pose, is Ardha Chandrasana or (Half Moon Pose). With a deep
inhalation, you raise both arms above your head and tilt slightly
backward arching your back. you welcome changing requirements, even late
in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer\'s
competitive advantage. then you all do Padangusthasana (Hand to Foot
Pose). With a deep exhalation, you bend forward and touch the mat, both
palms in line with your feet, forehead touching your knees. you deliver
working software frequently.
Surya Darshan (Sun Sight Pose). With a deep inhalation, you take your
right leg away from your body, in a big backward step. Both your hands
are firmly planted on your mat, your left foot between your hands. you
work daily throughout the project, business people and developers
together. now, you\'re flowing into Purvottanasana (Inclined Plane) with
a deep inhalation by taking your right leg away from your body, in a big
backward step. Both your hands are firmly planted on your mat, your left
foot between your hands. you build projects around motivated
individuals. you give them the environment and support they need, and
you trust them to get the job done.
You\'re in Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog Pose). With a deep
exhalation, you shove your hips and butt up towards the ceiling, forming
an upward arch. Your arms are straight and aligned with your head. The
most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and
within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Then, Sashtang Dandawat (Forehead, Chest, Knee to Floor Pose). With a
deep exhalation, you lower your body down till your forehead, chest,
knees, hands and feet are touching the mat, your butt tilted up. Working
software is the primary measure of progress.
Next is Bhujangasana (Cobra Pose). With a deep inhalation, you slowly
snake forward till your head is up, your back arched concave, as much as
possible. Agile processes promote sustainable development. You are all
maintaining a constant pace indefinitely, sponsors, developers, and
users together.
Now back into Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog Pose).
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances
agility.
And then again to Surya Darshan (Sun Sight Pose). Simplicity\--the art
of maximizing the amount of work not done\--is essential. Then to
Padangusthasana (Hand to Foot Pose). The best architectures,
requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
You all do again Ardha Chandrasana (Half Moon Pose). At regular
intervals, you as the team reflect on how to become more effective, then
tune and adjust your behavior accordingly. you end our ASSanas session
with a salute to honor your agile yoga practices. you have just had a
productive scrum meeting. now i invite you to open your eyes, move your
body around a bit, from the feet up to the head and back again.
Stand up on your feet and let\'s do a scrum together if you\'re ok being
touched on the arms by someone else. if not, you can do it on your own.
so put your hands on the shoulder of the SCP around you. now we\'re
joined together, let\'s look at the screen together as we inhale and
exhale. syncing our body together to the rythms of our own internal
software, modulating our oxygen level intake requirements to the oxygen
availability of our service facilities.
Now, let\'s do together a couple of exercise to protect and strengthen
our wrists. as programmers, as internauts, as entrepreneurs, they are a
very crucial parts of the body to protect. in order to be able to type,
to swipe, to shake hands vigourously, we need them in good health. So
bring to hands towards each other in a prayer pose, around a book, a
brick. You can do it without but I\'m using my extreme programming book
- embrace change - for that. So press the palms together firmly, press
the pad of your fingers together. do that while breathing in and out
twice.
Now let\'s expand our arms towards us, in the air, face and fingers
facing down. like we\'re typing. make your shoulders round. let\'s
breath while visualizing in our heads the first agile mantra :
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Now let\'s bring back the arms next to the body and raise them again.
And let\'s move our hands towards the ceiling this time. Strenghtening
our back. In our head, the second mantra. Working software over
comprehensive documentation. now let\'s bring back the hands in the
standing position. Then again the first movement while visualizing the
third mantra : Customer collaboration over contract negotiation and then
the second movement thinking about the fourth and last mantra :
Responding to change over following a plan and of course we continue
breathing. Now to finish this session, let\'s do a sprint together in
the corridor !
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/guide/agileyoga/8-Poses-Yoga-Your-Desk.contours.png
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/guide/agileyoga/gayolab-office-chair-for-yoga.contours.png
)]{.tmp} [TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mdu0mmji .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.blobservation)
Hand reading]{.method .descriptor} [How: Visit the Future Blobservation
Booth to have your fortunes read and derive life insight from the wisdom
of software.]{.how .descriptor} [What: Put your hand in the reading
booth and get your line read.]{.what .descriptor} [Why: The hand which
holds your mouse everyday hides many secrets.]{.why .descriptor}
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
` {.verbatim .wrap}
* sample reading timeline:
* 15:00 a test user, all tests clear and systems are online a user who said goodbye to us another user a user who thought it'd be silly to say thank you to the machine but thank you very much another kind user who said thank you yet another kind user another user, no feeback a nice user who found the reading process relieving yet another kind user a scared user! took the hand out but ended up trusting the system. "so cool thanks guys" another user a young user! this is a funny computer
* 15:35 another nice user
* 15:40 another nice user
* 15:47 happy user (laughing)
* 15:51 user complaining about her fortune, saying it's not true. Found the reading process creepy but eased up quickly
* 15:59 another nice user: http://etherbox.local:9001/p/SCP.sedyst.md
* 16:06 a polite user
* 16:08 a friendly playful user (stephanie)
* 16:12 a very giggly user (wendy)
* 16:14 a playful user - found the reading process erotic - DEFRAGMENTING? NO! Thanks Blobservation http://etherbox.local:9001/p/SCP.loup.md
* 16:19 a curious user
* 16:27 a friendly user but oh no, we had a glitch and computer crashed. But we still delivered the fortune. We got a thank you anyway
* 16:40 a nice user, the printer jammed but it was sorted out quickly *16:42 another nice user
* 16:50 nice user (joak)
* 16:52 yet another nice user (jogi)
* 16:55 happy user! (peter w)
* 16:57 more happy user (pierre h)
* 16:58 another happy user
* 17:00 super happy user (peggy)
* 17:02 more happy user `
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
> Software time is not the same as human time. Computers will run for AS
> LONG AS THEY WILL BE ABLE TO, provided sufficient power is available.
> You, as a human, don\'t have the luxury of being always connected to
> the power grid and this have to rely on your INTERNAL BATTERY. Be
> aware of your power cycles and set yourself to POWER-SAVING MODE
> whenever possible.
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/resizes/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMAG1407.jpg?m=1497344230]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#yznjodq3 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.dirty) Bug
reporting for sharing observations]{.method .descriptor} [What: Etherpad
had stopped working but it was unclear why. Where does etherpad
\'live\'?]{.what .descriptor} [How: Started by looking around the pi\'s
filesystem by reading /var/log/syslog in /opt/etherpad and in a
subdirectory named var/ there was dirty.db, and dirty it was.]{.how
.descriptor} [When: Monday morning]{.when .descriptor} [Urgency:
Software (etherpad) not working and the Walk-in Clinic was about to
start.]{.urgency .descriptor} [Note:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.inventory.jogi]{.note
.descriptor}
from jogi\@mur.at to \[Observatory\] When dirty.db get\'s dirty
Dear all,
as promised yesterday, here my little report regarding the broken
etherpad.
\ \#\#\# When dirty.db get\'s dirty
When I got to WTC on Monday morning the etherpad on etherbox.local was
disfunct. Later someone said that in fact etherpad had stopped working
the evening before, but it was unclear why. So I started looking around
the pi\'s filesystem to find out what was wrong. Took me a while to find
the relevant lines in /var/log/syslog but it became clear that there was
a problem with the database. Which database? Where does etherpad
\'live\'? I found it in /opt/etherpad and in a subdirectory named var/
there it was: dirty.db, and dirty it was.
A first look at the file revealed no apparent problem. The last lines
looked like this:
What I did not see at the time was that there were some (AFAIR something
around 150) binary zeroes at the end of the file. I used tail for the
first look and that tool silently ignored the zeroes at the end of the
file. It was Martino who suggested using different tools (xxd in that
case) and that showed the cause of the problem. The file looked
something like this:
which means: write the first 793080162 blocks of size 1 byte to a new
file. After half an hour or so I checked on the size of the new file and
saw that some 10% of the copying had been done. No way this would get
done in time for the walk-in-clinic. Back to the drawing board.
Using a text editor was no real option btw since even vim has a hard
time with binary zeroes and the file was really big. But there was
hexedit! Martino installed it and copied dirty.db onto his computer.
After some getting used to the various commands to navigate in hexedit
the unwanted zeroes were gone in an instant. The end of the file looked
like this now:
Martino asked about the trailing \'.\' character and I checked a
different copy of the file. No \'.\' there, so that had to go too. My
biggest mistake in a long time! The \'.\' we were seeing in Martino\'s
copy of the file was in fact a \'\' (0a)! We did not realize that,
copied the file back to etherbox.local and waited for etherpad to resume
it\'s work. But no luck there, for obvious reasons.
We ended up making backups of dirty.db in various stages of deformation
and Martino started a brandnew pad so we could use pads for the walk-
in-clinic. The processing tool chain has been disabled btw. We did not
want to mess up any of the already generated .pdf, .html and .md files.
We still don\'t know why exactly etherpad stopped working sometime
Sunday evening or how the zeroes got into the file dirty.db. Anita
thought that she caused the error when she adjusted time on
etherbox.local, but the logfile does not reflect that. The last clean
entry in /var/log/syslog regarding nodejs/etherpad is recorded with a
timestamp of something along the line of \'Jun 10 10:17\'. Some minutes
later, around \'Jun 10 10:27\' the first error appears. These timestamps
reflect the etherbox\'s understanding of time btw, not \'real time\'.
It might be that the file just got too big for etherpad to handle it.
The size of the repaired dirty.db file was already 757MB. That could btw
explain why etherpad was working somewhat slugishly after some days.
There is still a chance that the time adjustment had an unwanted side
effect, but so far there is no obvious reason for what had happened.
\ \-- J.Hofmüller
> The analysis of common sense, as opposed to the exercise of it, must
> then begin by redrawing this erased distinction between the mere
> matter-of-fact apprehension of reality\--or whatever it is you want to
> call what we apprehend merely and matter-of-factly\--and
> down-to-earth, colloquial wisdom, judgements, and assessments of it.
[What: Observe and catalog the common gestures, common comportments, and
common sense(s) surrounding software.]{.what .descriptor} [How: This can
be done through observation of yourself or others. Separate the
apprehended and matter of fact from the meanings, actions, reactions,
judgements, and assessments that the apprehension occasions. Step 1:
Begin by assembling a list of questions such as: When you see a software
application icon what are you most likely to do? When a software
application you are using presents you with a user agreement what are
you most likely to do? When a software applciation does something that
frustrates you what are you most likely to do? When a software
application you are using crashes what are you most likely to do? Step
2: Write down your responses and the responses of any subjects you are
observing. Step 3: For each question, think up three other possible
responses. Write these down. Step 4: (this step is only for the very
curious) Try the other possible responses out the next time you
encounter each of the given scenarios.]{.how .descriptor} [Note: The
common senses and comportments of software are of course informed and
conditioned by those of hardware and so perhaps this is more accurately
a method for articulating comportments of computing.]{.note .descriptor}
[WARNING: Software wears on both individual and collective bodies and
selves. Software may harm your physical and emotional health and that of
your society both by design and by accident.]{.warning .descriptor}
[TODO: RELATES TO Agile Sun Salutation, Natasha Schull\'s Addicted by
Design]{.tmp} [Flow-regulation, logistics, seamlessness]{.grouping}
[]{#mwrhm2y4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.continuousintegration)
Continuous integration]{.method .descriptor} [What: Continuous
integration is a sophisticated form of responsibility management: it is
the fascia of services. Continous integration picks up after all other
services and identifies what needs to happen so that they can work in
concert. Continuous integration is a way of observing the evolution of
(micro)services through cybernetic (micro)management.]{.what
.descriptor} [How: Continuous integration keeps track of changes to all
services and allows everyone to observe if they still can work together
after all the moving parts are fitted together.]{.how .descriptor}
[When: Continuous integration comes to prominence in a world of
distributed systems where there are many parts being organized
simultaneously. Continuous integration is a form of observation that
helps (micro)services maintain a false sense of independence and
decentralization while constantly subjecting them to centralized
feedback.]{.when .descriptor} [Who: Continuous integration assumes that
all services will submit themselves to the feedback loops of continuous
integration. This could be a democratic process or not.]{.who
.descriptor} [Urgency: Continuous integration reconfigures divisions of
labor in the shadows of automation. How can we surface and question its
doings and undoings?]{.urgency .descriptor} [WARNING: When each service
does one thing well, the service makers tend to assume everybody else is
doing the things they do not want to do.]{.warning .descriptor}
At TGSO continuous integration was introduced as a service that responds
to integration hell when putting together a number of TGSO services for
a walk-in software clinic. Due to demand, the continuous integration
service was extended to do \"service discovery\" and \"load balancing\"
once the walk-in clinic was in operation.
Continuous integration worked by visiting the different services of the
walk-in clinic to check for updates, test the functionality and think
through implications of integration with other services. If the pieces
didn\'t fit, continuous integration delivered error messages and
solution options.
When we noticed that software curious persons visiting the walk-in
clinic may have troubles finding the different services, and that some
services may be overloaded with software curious persons, continuous
integration was extended. We automated service registration using
colored tape and provided a lookup registry for software curious
persons.
Load balancing meant that software curious persons were forwarded to
services that had capacity. If all other services were full, the load
balancer defaulted to sending the software curious person to the [Agile
Sun
Salutation](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.agile.yoga)
service.
[WARNING: At TGSO the bundling of different functionalities into the
continuous integration service broke the \"do one thing well\"
principle, but saved the day (we register this as technical debt for the
next iteration of the walk-in clinic).]{.warning .descriptor} [Remember:
Continous integration may be the string that holds your current software
galaxy together.]{.remember .descriptor}
\"More technically, I am interested in how things bounce around in
computer systems. I am not sure if these two things are relted, but I
hope continuous integration will help me.\"
[]{#zdixmgrm .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.pipeline) make
make do]{.method .descriptor} [What: Makefile as a method for
quick/collective assemblages + observing amalgamates/pipelines]{.what
.descriptor} [Note: Note:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/etherdump/makefile.raw.html]{.note
.descriptor}
etherpad-\>md-\>pdf-\>anything pipeline. makefile as a method for
quick/collective assemblages + observing amalgamates/pipelines CHRISTOPH
[]{#zweymtni .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.ssogy)
Flowcharts (Flow of the chart -- chart of the flow on demand!)]{.method
.descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE:
!\[\]( http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/ibm-ruler.jpg
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/burroughs-ruler.jpg
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/rectangle.png )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/curly\_rec.png
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/curly\_rec-2.png
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/flag.png )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/trapec.png )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Claude Shannon Information Diagram Blanked: Silvio
Lorusso\](
http://silviolorusso.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/shannon\_comm\_channel.gif
)]{.tmp} [TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp}
[Beingontheside/inthemiddle/behind]{.grouping} []{#ywfin2e4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.somethinginthemiddlemaybe)
Something in the Middle Maybe (SitMM)]{.method .descriptor} [What: The
network traffic gets observed. There are different sniffing software out
there which differ in granularity and how far the user can taylor the
different functionality. SitMM builds on one of these tools called
[scapy](http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/).]{.what .descriptor}
[How: SitMM takes a closer look at the network traffic coming from/going
to a software curious person\'s device. The software curious person
using SitMM may ask to filter the traffic based on application or device
of interest.]{.how .descriptor} [Who]{.who .empty .descriptor}
The software curious person gets to observe their own traffic. Ideally,
observing ones own network traffic should be available to anyone, but
using such software can be deemed illegal under different jurisdictions.
For example, in the US wiretap law limit packet-sniffing to parties
owning the network that is being sniffed or the availability of consent
from one of the communicating parties. Section 18 U.S. Code § 2511 (2)
(a) (i) says:
> It shall not be unlawful \... to intercept \... while engaged in any
> activity which is a necessary incident to the rendition of his service
> or to the protection of the rights or property of the provider of that
> service
See here for a
[paper](http://spot.colorado.edu/%7Esicker/publications/issues.pdf) on
the topic. Google went on a big legal spree to defend their right to
capture unencrypted wireless traffic with google street view cars. The
courts were concerned about wiretapping and infringements on the privacy
of users, and not with the leveraging of private and public WiFi
infrastructure for the gain of a for profit company. The case raises
hard questions about the state, ownership claims and material reality of
WiFi signals. So, while WiFi sniffing is common and the tools like SitMM
are widely available, it is not always possible for software curious
persons to use them legally or to neatly filter out \"their traffic\"
from that of \"others\".
[When: SitMM can be used any time a software curious person feels the
weight of the (invisible) networks.]{.when .descriptor} [Why: SitMM is
intended to be a tool that gives artists, designers and educators an
easy to use custom WiFi router to work with networks and explore the
aspects of our daily communications that are exposed when we use WiFi.
The goal is to use the output to encourage open discussions about how we
use our devices online.]{.why .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty
.descriptor}
Snippets of a Something In The Middle, Maybe - Report
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#ntlimgqy .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.whatisitliketobeanelevator)
What is it like to be AN ELEVATOR?]{.method .descriptor} [What:
Understanding software systems by becoming them]{.what .descriptor}
[TODO: extend this text \.... how to observe software in the world
around you. How to observe an everyday software experience and translate
this into a flowchart )]{.tmp} [How: Creating a flowchart to incarnate a
software system you use everyday]{.how .descriptor} [WARNING: Uninformed
members of the public may panic when confronted with a software
performance in a closed space.]{.warning .descriptor} [Example: What is
it like to be an elevator?]{.example .descriptor}
` {.verbatim}
what
is
it
like
to be
an
elevator?
from 25th floor to 1st floor
light on button light of 25th floor
check current floor
if current floor is 25th floor
no
if current floor is ...
go one floor up
... smaller than 25th floor
go one floor down
... bigger than 25th floor
stop elevator
turn button light off of 25th floor
turn door light on
open door of elevator
play sound opening sequence
yes
start
user pressed button of 25th floor
close door of elevator
if door is closed
user pressed 1st floor button
start timer for door closing
if timer is running more than three seconds
yes
yes
light on button
go one floor down
no
if current floor is 1st floor
update floor indicator
check current floor
stop elevator
no
yes
light off button
turn door light on
open door of elevator
play sound opening sequence
end
update floor indicator `
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/joseph/flowchart.pdf]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#ndg2zte4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.sidechannel)
Side Channel Analysis]{.method .descriptor} [Urgency: Side Channel
attacks are possible by disregarding the abstraction of software into
pure logic: the physical effects of the running of the software become
backdoors to observe its functioning, both threatening the control of
processes and the re-affirming the materiality of software.]{.urgency
.descriptor} [WARNING: **engineers are good guys!**]{.warning
.descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE:
https://www.tek.com/sites/default/files/media/image/119-4146-00%20Near%20Field%20Probe%20Set.png.jpg]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/index.php/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3377]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} [Collections / collecting]{.grouping}
[]{#njmzmjm1 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.bestiary)
Compiling a bestiary of software logos]{.method .descriptor} [What:
Since the early days of GNU-linux and cemented through the ubiquitous
O\'Reilly publications, the visual culture of software relies heavily on
animal representations. But what kinds of animals, and to what
effect?]{.what .descriptor} [How]{.how .empty .descriptor}
Compile a collection of logos and note the metaphors for observation: \*
stethoscope \* magnifying glass \* long neck (giraffe)
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
` {.verbatim}
% http://animals.oreilly.com/browse/
% [check Testing the testbed pads for examples]
% [something on bestiaries] `
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#njm5zwm4 .anchor} []{#mmy2zgrl .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.testingtestbed)
Testing the testbed: testing software with observatory ambitions
(SWOA)]{.method .descriptor} [WARNING: this method may make more sense
if you first take a look at the [Something in the Middle Maybe
(SitMM)](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.sitmm) which is
an instance of a SWOA]{.warning .descriptor} [How: The interwebs hosts
many projects that aim to produce software for observing software, (from
now on Software With Observatory Ambitions (SWOA)). A comparative
methodology can be produced by testing different SWOA to observe
software of interest. Example: use different sniffing software to
observe wireless networks, e.g., wireshark vs tcpdump vs SitMM.
Comparing SWOA reveals what is seen as worthy of observation (e.g., what
protocols, what space, which devices), the granularity of the
observation (e.g., how is the observation captured, in what detail), the
logo and conceptual framework of choice etc. This type of observation
may be turned into a service (See also: Something in the Middle Maybe
(SitMM)).]{.how .descriptor} [When: Ideally, SWOA can be used everywhere
and in every situation. In reality, institutions, laws and
administrators like to limit the use of SWOA on infrastructures to
people who are also administering these networks. Hence, we are
presented with the situation that the use of SWOA is condoned when it is
down by researchers and pen testers (e.g., they were hired) and shunned
when done by others (often subject to name calling as hackers or
attackers).]{.when .descriptor} [What: Deep philosophical moment: most
software has a recursive observatory ambition (it wants to be observed
in its execution, output etc.). Debuggers, logs, dashboards are all
instances of software with observatory ambitions and can not be
separated from software itself. Continuous integration is the act of
folding the whole software development process into one big feedback
loop. So, what separates SWOA from software itself? Is it the intention
of observing software with a critical, agonistic or adversarial
perspective vs one focused on productivity and efficiency that
distinguishes SWOA from software? What makes SWOA a critical practice
over other forms of sotware observation. If our methodology is testing
SWOA, then is it a meta critique of critique?]{.what .descriptor} [Who:
If you can run multiple SWOAs, you can do it. The question is: will
people like it if you turn your gaze on their SWOA based methods of
observation? Once again we find that observation can surface power
asymmetries and lead to defensiveness or desires to escape the
observation in the case of the observed, and a instinct to try to
conceal that observation is taking place.]{.who .descriptor} [Urgency:
If observation is a form of critical engagement in that it surfaces the
workings of software that are invisible to many, it follows that people
would develop software to observe (SWOAs). Testing SWOAs puts this form
of critical observation to test with the desire to understand how what
is made transparent through each SWOA also makes things invisible and
reconfigures power.]{.urgency .descriptor} [Note: Good SWOA software
usually uses an animal as a logo.:D]{.note .descriptor} [WARNING: Many
of the SWOA projects we looked at are promises more than running
software/available code. Much of it is likely to turn into obsolete
gradware, making testing difficult.]{.warning .descriptor} [TODO:
RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.bestiary]{.tmp} [TODO:
RELATES TO http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.sitmm]{.tmp}
[]{#mmmzmmrh .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.reader)
Prepare a reader to think theory with software]{.method .descriptor}
[What: Compile a collection of texts about software.]{.what .descriptor}
[How: Choose texts from different realms. Software observations are
mostly done in the realm of the technological and the pragmatic. Also
the ecology of texts around software includes first and foremost
manuals, technical documentation and academic papers by software
engineers and these all \'live\' in different realms. More recently, the
field of software studies opened up additional perspectives fuelled by
cultural studies and sometimes filosophy. By compiling a reader \...
ways of speaking/writing about. Proximity.]{.how .descriptor}
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
` {.verbatim .wrap}
Pull some quotes from the reader, for example from the chapter: Observation and its consequences
Lilly Irani, Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship, 2015 http://sci-hub.bz/10.1177/0162243915578486
Kara Pernice (Nielsen Norman Group), Talking with Participants During a Usability Test, January 26, 2014, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/talking-to-users/
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive. 2004 http://texttechnology.mcmaster.ca/pdf/vol13_2_06.pdf
Alexander R. Galloway, The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism, Critical Inquiry. 2013, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Galloway,%20Poverty%20of%20Philosophy.pdf
Edward Alcosser, James P. Phillips, Allen M. Wolk, How to Build a Working Digital Computer. Hayden Book Company, 1968. https://archive.org/details/howtobuildaworkingdigitalcomputer_jun67
Matthew Fuller, "It looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft Word", Nettime, 5 Sep 2000. https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/xpDrXE_VQeeuDDpc5RrywyTJwbzD8eatYGHKmyT2A_HnIHKb
Barbara P. Aichinger, DDR Memory Errors Caused by Row Hammer. 2015 www.memcon.com/pdfs/proceedings2015/SAT104_FuturePlus.pdf
Fangfei Liu, Yuval Yarom, Qian Ge, Gernot Heiser, Ruby B. Lee. Last-Level Cache Side-Channel Attacks are Practical. 2015 http://palms.ee.princeton.edu/system/files/SP_vfinal.pdf `
[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.samequestion]{.tmp}
[]{#ytjmmmni .anchor}
Colophon
The Guide to techno-galactic software observing was compiled by Carlin
Wing, Martino Morandi, Peggy Pierrot, Anita, Christoph Haag, Michael
Murtaugh, Femke Snelting
License: Free Art License
Support:
Sources:
Constant, February 2018
::: {.footnotes}
1. [[[Haraway]{.fname}, [Donna]{.gname}, [Galison]{.fname},
[Peter]{.gname} and [Stump]{.fname}, [David J]{.gname}: [Modest
Witness: Feminist Diffractions in Science Studies]{.title},
[Stanford University Press]{.publisher}, [1996]{.date}.
]{.collection} [-\>](#eeffecbe)]{#ebceffee}
2. [Worksessions are intensive transdisciplinary moments, organised
twice a year by Constant. They aim to provide conditions for
participants with different experiences and capabilities to
temporarily link their practice and to develop ideas, prototypes and
research projects together. For the worksessions, primarily Free,
Libre and Open Source software is used and material that is
available under ??? [-\>](#fcdcaacb)]{#bcaacdcf}
3. [http://www.nam-ip.be [-\>](#ffeaecaa)]{#aaceaeff}
4. [http://www.etwie.be/database/actor/computermuseum-ku-leuven
[-\>](#dbabebfa)]{#afbebabd}
5. [[contributors]{.fname}, [Wikipedia]{.gname}: [Content-control
software --- Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia]{.title},
[2018]{.date}. [-\>](#fadefecf)]{#fcefedaf}
6. [[UrbanMinistry.org]{.fname}, [TechMission]{.gname}:
[SafeFamilies.org \| Accountability Software: Encyclopedia of Urban
Ministry]{.title}, [2018]{.date}. [-\>](#faebbffb)]{#bffbbeaf}
7. [[Content Watch Holdings]{.fname}, [Inc]{.gname}: [Protecting Your
Family]{.title}, [2018]{.date}. [-\>](#afcbcfbb)]{#bbfcbcfa}
8. [[websense.com]{.fname}, []{.gname}: [Explicit and transparent proxy
deployments]{.title}, [2012]{.date}. [-\>](#edbedede)]{#ededebde}
9. [[workrave.org]{.fname}, []{.gname}: [Frequently Asked
Questions]{.title}, [2018]{.date}. [-\>](#ddfbbbfc)]{#cfbbbfdd}
10. [[contributors]{.fname}, [Wikipedia]{.gname}: [Agile software
development --- Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia]{.title},
[2018]{.date}. [-\>](#ececbabd)]{#dbabcece}
11. [[contributors]{.fname}, [Wikipedia]{.gname}: [Scrum (software
development) --- Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia]{.title},
[2018]{.date}. [-\>](#caabcfee)]{#eefcbaac}
12. [[contributors]{.fname}, [Wikipedia]{.gname}: [The Manifesto for
Agile Software Development]{.title}, [2018]{.date}.
[-\>](#baffeabf)]{#fbaeffab}
13. [[Kruchten]{.fname}, [Philippe]{.gname}: [Agile's Teenage
Crisis?]{.title}, [2011]{.date}. [-\>](#faeebade)]{#edabeeaf}
:::
Bodo
Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era
2015
Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era
Balazs Bodo
Abstract
In the digital era where, thanks to the ubiquity of electronic copies, the book is no longer a scarce
resource, libraries find themselves in an extremely competitive environment. Several different actors are
now in a position to provide low cost access to knowledge. One of these competitors are shadow libraries
- piratical text collections which have now amassed electronic copies of millions of copyrighted works
and provide access to them usually free of charge to anyone around the globe. While such shadow
libraries are far from being universal, they are able to offer certain services better, to more people and
under more favorable terms than most public or research libraries. This contribution offers insights into
the development and the inner workings of one of the biggest scientific shadow libraries on the internet in
order to understand what kind of library people create for themselves if they have the means and if they
don’t have to abide by the legal, bureaucratic and economic constraints that libraries usually face. I argue
that one of the many possible futures of the library is hidden in the shadows, and those who think of the
future of libraries can learn a lot from book pirates of the 21 st century about how users and readers expect
texts in electronic form to be stored, organized and circulated.
“The library is society’s last non-commercial meeting place which the majority of the population uses.”
(Committee on the Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society, 2010)
“With books ready to be shared, meticulously cataloged, everyone is a librarian. When everyone is
librarian, library is everywhere.” – Marcell Mars, www.memoryoftheworld.org
I have spent the last few months in various libraries visiting - a library. I spent countless hours in the
modest or grandiose buildings of the Harvard Libraries, the Boston and Cambridge Public Library
systems, various branches of the Openbare Bibliotheek in Amsterdam, the libraries of the University of
Amsterdam, with a computer in front of me, on which another library was running, a library which is
perfectly virtual, which has no monumental buildings, no multi-million euro budget, no miles of stacks,
no hundreds of staff, but which has, despite lacking all what apparently makes a library, millions of
literary works and millions of scientific books, all digitized, all available at the click of the mouse for
everyone on the earth without any charge, library or university membership. As I was sitting in these
1
Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
physical spaces where the past seemed to define the present, I was wondering where I should look to find
the library of the future: down to my screen or up around me.
The library on my screen was Aleph, one of the biggest of the countless piratical text collections on the
internet. It has more than a million scientific works and another million literary works to offer, all free to
download, without any charge or fee, for anyone on the net. I’ve spent months among its virtual stacks,
combing through the catalogue, talking to the librarians who maintain the collection, and watching the
library patrons as they used the collection. I kept going back to Aleph both as a user and as a researcher.
As a user, Aleph offered me books that the local libraries around me didn’t, in formats that were more
convenient than print. As a researcher, I was interested in the origins of Aleph, its modus operandi, its
future, and I was curious where the journey to which it has taken the book-readers, authors, publishers
and libraries would end.
In this short essay I will introduce some of the findings of a two year research project conducted on
Aleph. In the project I looked at several things. I reconstructed the pirate library’s genesis in order to
understand the forces that called it to life and shaped its development. I looked at its catalogue to
understand what it has to offer and how that piratical supply of books is related to the legal supply of
books through libraries and online distributors. I also acquired data on its usage, so was able to
reconstruct some aspects of piratical demand. After a short introduction, in the first part of this essay I
will outline some of the main findings, and in the second part will situate the findings in the wider context
of the future of libraries.
Book pirates and shadow librarians
Book piracy has a fascinating history, tightly woven into the history of the printing press (Judge, 1934),
into the history of censorship (Wittmann, 2004), into the history of copyright (Bently, Davis, & Ginsburg,
2010; Bodó, 2011a) and into the history of European civilization (Johns, 2010). Book piracy, in the 21st or
in the mid-17th century is an activity that has deep cultural significance, because ultimately it is a story
about how knowledge is circulated beyond and often against the structures of political and economic
power (Bodó, 2011b), and thus it is a story about the changes this unofficial circulation of knowledge
brings.
There are many different types of book pirates. Some just aim for easy money, others pursue highly
ideological goals, but they are invariably powerful harbingers of change. The emergence of black markets
whether they be of culture, of drugs or of arms is always a symptom, a warning sign of a friction between
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supply and demand. Increased activity in the grey and black zones of legality marks the emergence of a
demand which legal suppliers are unwilling or unable to serve (Bodó, 2011a). That friction, more often
than not, leads to change. Earlier waves of book piracy foretold fundamental economic, political, societal
or technological shifts (Bodó, 2011b): changes in how the book publishing trade was organized (Judge,
1934; Pollard, 1916, 1920); the emergence of the new, bourgeois reading class (Patterson, 1968; Solly,
1885); the decline of pre-publication censorship (Rose, 1993); the advent of the Reformation and of the
Enlightenment (Darnton, 1982, 2003), or the rapid modernization of more than one nation (Khan &
Sokoloff, 2001; Khan, 2004; Yu, 2000).
The latest wave of piracy has coincided with the digital revolution which, in itself, profoundly upset the
economics of cultural production and distribution (Landes & Posner, 2003). However technology is not
the primary cause of the emergence of cultural black markets like Aleph. The proliferation of computers
and the internet has just revealed a more fundamental issue which all has to do with the uneven
distribution of the access to knowledge around the globe.
Sometimes book pirates do more than just forecast and react to changes that are independent of them.
Under certain conditions, they themselves can be powerful agents of change (Bodó, 2011b). Their agency
rests on their ability to challenge the status quo and resist cooptation or subjugation. In that effect, digital
pirates seem to be quite resilient (Giblin, 2011; Patry, 2009). They have the technological upper hand and
so far they have been able to outsmart any copyright enforcement effort (Bodó, forthcoming). As long as
it is not completely possible to eradicate file sharing technologies, and as long as there is a substantial
difference between what is legally available and what is in demand, cultural black markets will be here to
compete with and outcompete the established and recognized cultural intermediaries. Under this constant
existential threat, business models and institutions are forced to adapt, evolve or die.
After the music and audiovisual industries, now the book industry has to address the issue of piracy.
Piratical book distribution services are now in direct competition with the bookstore on the corner, the
used book stall on the sidewalk, they compete with the Amazons of the world and, like it or not, they
compete with libraries. There is, however, a significant difference between the book and the music
industries. The reluctance of music rights holders to listen to the demands of their customers caused little
damage beyond the markets of recorded music. Music rights holders controlled their own fates and those
who wanted to experiment with alternative forms of distribution had the chance to do so. But while the
rapid proliferation of book black markets may signal that the book industry suffers from similar problems
as the music industry suffered a decade ago, the actions of book publishers, the policies they pursue have
impact beyond the market of books and directly affect the domain of libraries.
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
The fate of libraries is tied to the fate of book markets in more than one way. One connection is structural:
libraries emerged to remedy the scarcity in books. This is true both for the pre-print era as well as in the
Gutenberg galaxy. In the era of widespread literacy and highly developed book markets, libraries offer
access to books under terms publishers and booksellers cannot or would not. Libraries, to a large extent,
are defined to complement the structure of the book trade. The other connection is legal. The core
activities of the library (namely lending, copying) are governed by the same copyright laws that govern
authors and publishers. Libraries are one of the users in the copyright system, and their existence depends
on the limitations of and exceptions to the exclusive rights of the rights holders. The space that has been
carved out of copyright to enable the existence of libraries has been intensely contested in the era of
postmodern copyright (Samuelson, 2002) and digital technologies. This heavy legal and structural
interdependence with the market means that libraries have only a limited control over their own fate in the
digital domain.
Book pirates compete with some of the core services of libraries. And as is usually the case with
innovation that has no economic or legal constraints, pirate libraries offer, at least for the moment,
significantly better services than most of the libraries. Pirate libraries offer far more electronic books,
with much less restrictions and constraints, to far more people, far cheaper than anyone else in the library
domain. Libraries are thus directly affected by pirate libraries, and because of their structural
interdependence with book markets, they also have to adjust to how the commercial intermediaries react
to book piracy. Under such conditions libraries cannot simply count on their survival through their legacy.
Book piracy must be taken seriously, not just as a threat, but also as an opportunity to learn how shadow
libraries operate and interact with their users. Pirate libraries are the products of readers (and sometimes
authors), academics and laypeople, all sharing a deep passion for the book, operating in a zone where
there is little to no obstacle to the development of the “ideal” library. As such, pirate libraries can teach
important lessons on what is expected of a library, how book consumption habits evolve, and how
knowledge flows around the globe.
Pirate libraries in the digital age
The collection of texts in digital formats was one of the first activities that computers enabled: the text file
is the native medium of the computer, it is small, thus it is easy to store and copy. It is also very easy to
create, and as so many projects have since proved, there are more than enough volunteers who are willing
to type whole books into the machine. No wonder that electronic libraries and digital text repositories
were among the first “mainstream” application of computers. Combing through large stacks of matrix-
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in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
printer printouts of sci-fi classics downloaded from gopher servers is a shared experience of anyone who
had access to computers and the internet before it was known as the World Wide Web.
Computers thus added fresh momentum to the efforts of realizing the age-old dream of the universal
library (Battles, 2004). Digital technologies offered a breakthrough in many of the issues that previously
posed serious obstacles to text collection: storage, search, preservation, access have all become cheaper
and easier than ever before. On the other hand, a number of key issues remained unresolved: digitization
was a slow and cumbersome process, while the screen proved to be too inconvenient, and the printer too
costly an interface between the text file and the reader. In any case, ultimately it wasn’t these issues that
put a break to the proliferation of digital libraries. Rather, it was the realization, that there are legal limits
to the digitization, storage, distribution of copyrighted works on the digital networks. That realization
soon rendered many text collections in the emerging digital library scene inaccessible.
Legal considerations did not destroy this chaotic, emergent digital librarianship and the collections the adhoc, accidental and professional librarians put together. The text collections were far too valuable to
simply delete them from the servers. Instead, what happened to most of these collections was that they
retreated from the public view, back into the access-controlled shadows of darknets. Yesterday’s gophers
and anonymous ftp servers turned into closed, membership only ftp servers, local shared libraries residing
on the intranets of various academic, business institutions and private archives stored on local hard drives.
The early digital libraries turned into book piracy sites and into the kernels of today’s shadow libraries.
Libraries and other major actors, who decided to start large scale digitization programs soon needed to
find out that if they wanted to avoid costly lawsuits, then they had to limit their activities to work in the
public domain. While the public domain is riddled with mind-bogglingly complex and unresolved legal
issues, but at least it is still significantly less complicated to deal with than copyrighted and orphan works.
Legally more innovative, (or as some would say, adventurous) companies, such as Google and Microsoft,
who thought they had sufficient resources to sort out the legal issues soon had to abandon their programs
or put them on hold until the legal issues were sorted out.
There were, however, a large group of disenfranchised readers, library patrons, authors and users who
decided to ignore the legal problems and set out to build the best library that could possibly be built using
the digital technologies. Despite the increased awareness of rights holders to the issue of digital book
piracy, more and more communities around text collections started defy the legal constraints and to
operate and use more or less public piratical shadow libraries.
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
Aleph1
Aleph2 is a meta-library, and currently one of the biggest online piratical text collections on the internet.
The project started on a Russian bulletin board devoted to piracy in around 2008 as an effort to integrate
various free-floating text collections that circulated online, on optical media, on various public and private
ftp servers and on hard-drives. Its aim was to consolidate these separate text collections, many of which
were created in various Russian academic institutions, into a single, unified catalog, standardize the
technical aspects, add and correct missing or incorrect metadata, and offer the resulting catalogue,
computer code and the collection of files as an open infrastructure.
From Russia with love
It is by no means a mistake that Aleph was born in Russia. In post-Soviet Russia the unique constellation
of several different factors created the necessary conditions for the digital librarianship movement that
ultimately led to the development of Aleph. A rich literary legacy, the Soviet heritage, the pace with
which various copying technologies penetrated the market, the shortcomings of the legal environment and
the informal norms that stood in for the non-existent digital copyrights all contributed to the emergence of
the biggest piratical library in the history of mankind.
Russia cherishes a rich literary tradition, which suffered and endured extreme economic hardships and
political censorship during the Soviet period (Ermolaev, 1997; Friedberg, Watanabe, & Nakamoto, 1984;
Stelmakh, 2001). The political transformation in the early 1990’s liberated authors, publishers, librarians
and readers from much of the political oppression, but it did not solve the economic issues that stood in
the way of a healthy literary market. Disposable income was low, state subsidies were limited, the dire
economic situation created uncertainty in the book market. The previous decades, however, have taught
authors and readers how to overcome political and economic obstacles to access to books. During the
Soviet times authors, editors and readers operated clandestine samizdat distribution networks, while
informal book black markets, operating in semi-private spheres, made uncensored but hard to come by
books accessible (Stelmakh, 2001). This survivalist attitude and the skills that came with it became handy
in the post-Soviet turmoil, and were directly transferable to the then emerging digital technologies.
1
I have conducted extensive research on the origins of Aleph, on its catalogue and its users. The detailed findings, at
the time of writing this contribution are being prepared for publication. The following section is brief summary of
those findings and is based upon two forthcoming book chapters on Aleph in a report, edited by Joe Karaganis, on
the role of shadow libraries in the higher education systems of multiple countries.
2
Aleph is a pseudonym chosen to protect the identity of the shadow library in question.
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
Russia is not the only country with a significant informal media economy of books, but in most other
places it was the photocopy machine that emerged to serve such book grey/black markets. In pre-1990
Russia and in other Eastern European countries the access to this technology was limited, and when
photocopiers finally became available, computers were close behind them in terms of accessibility. The
result of the parallel introduction of the photocopier and the computer was that the photocopy technology
did not have time to lock in the informal market of texts. In many countries where the photocopy machine
preceded the computer by decades, copy shops still capture the bulk of the informal production and
distribution of textbooks and other learning material. In the Soviet-bloc PCs instantly offered a less costly
and more adaptive technology to copy and distribute texts.
Russian academic and research institutions were the first to have access to computers. They also had to
somehow deal with the frustrating lack of access to up-to-date and affordable western works to be used in
education and research (Abramitzky & Sin, 2014). This may explain why the first batch of shadow
libraries started in a number of academic/research institutions such as the Department of Mechanics and
Mathematics (MexMat) at Moscow State University. The first digital librarians in Russia were
mathematicians, computer scientists and physicists, working in those institutions.
As PCs and internet access slowly penetrated Russian society, an extremely lively digital librarianship
movement emerged, mostly fuelled by enthusiastic readers, book fans and often authors, who spared no
effort to make their favorite books available on FIDOnet, a popular BBS system in Russia. One of the
central figures in these tumultuous years, when typed-in books appeared online by the thousands, was
Maxim Moshkov, a computer scientist, alumnus of the MexMat, and an avid collector of literary works.
His digital library, lib.ru was at first mostly a private collection of literary texts, but soon evolved into the
number one text repository which everyone used to depose the latest digital copy on a newly digitized
book (Мошков, 1999). Eventually the library grew so big that it had to be broken up. Today it only hosts
the Russian literary classics. User generated texts, fan fiction and amateur production was spin off into the
aptly named samizdat.lib.ru collection, low brow popular fiction, astrology and cheap romance found its
way into separate collections, and so did the collection of academic/scientific books, which started an
independent life under the name of Kolkhoz. Kolkhoz, which borrowed its name from the commons
based agricultural cooperative of the early Soviet era, was both a collection of scientific texts, and a
community of amateur librarians, who curated, managed and expanded the collection.
Moshkov and his library introduced several important norms into the bottom-up, decentralized, often
anarchic digital library movement that swept through the Russian internet in the late 1990’s, early 2000’s.
First, lib.ru provided the technological blueprint for any future digital library. But more importantly,
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in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
Moshkov’s way of handling the texts, his way of responding to the claims, requests, questions, complaints
of authors and publishers paved the way to the development of copynorms (Schultz, 2007) that continue
to define the Russian digital library scene until today. Moshkov was instrumental in the creation of an
enabling environment for the digital librarianship while respecting the claims of authors, during times
when the formal copyright framework and the enforcement environment was both unable and unwilling to
protect works of authorship (Elst, 2005; Sezneva, 2012).
Guerilla Open Access
Around the time of the late 2000’s when Aleph started to merge the Kolkhoz collection with other, freefloating texts collections, two other notable events took place. It was in 2008 when Aaron Swartz penned
his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (Swartz, 2008), in which he called for the liberation and sharing of
scientific knowledge. Swartz forcefully argued that scientific knowledge, the production of which is
mostly funded by the public and by the voluntary labor of academics, cannot be locked up behind
corporate paywalls set up by publishers. He framed the unauthorized copying and transfer of scientific
works from closed access text repositories to public archives as a moral act, and by doing so, he created
an ideological framework which was more radical and promised to be more effective than either the
creative commons (Lessig, 2004) or the open access (Suber, 2013) movements that tried to address the
access to knowledge issues in a more copyright friendly manner. During interviews, the administrators of
Aleph used the very same arguments to justify the raison d'être of their piratical library. While it seems
that Aleph is the practical realization of Swartz’s ideas, it is hard to tell which served as an inspiration for
the other.
It was also in around the same time when another piratical library, gigapedia/library.nu started its
operation, focusing mostly on making freely available English language scientific works (Liang, 2012).
Until its legal troubles and subsequent shutdown in 2012, gigapedia/library.nu was the biggest English
language piratical scientific library on the internet amassing several hundred thousand books, including
high-quality proofs ready to print and low resolution scans possibly prepared by a student or a lecturer.
During 2012 the mostly Russian-language and natural sciences focused Alephs absorbed the English
language, social sciences rich gigapedia/library.nu, and with the subsequent shutdown of
gigapedia/library.nu Aleph became the center of the scientific shadow library ecosystem and community.
Aleph by numbers
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
By adding pre-existing text collections to its catalogue Aleph was able to grow at an astonishing rate.
Aleph added, on average 17.500 books to its collection each month since 2009, and as a result, by April
2014 is has more than 1.15 million documents. Nearly two thirds of the collection is in English, one fifth
of the documents is in Russian, while German works amount to the third largest group with 8.5% of the
collection. The rest of the major European languages, like French or Spanish have less than 15000 works
each in the collection.
More than 50 thousand publishers have works in the library, but most of the collection is published by
mainstream western academic publishers. Springer published more than 12% of the works in the
collection, followed by the Cambridge University Press, Wiley, Routledge and Oxford University Press,
each having more than 9000 works in the collection.
Most of the collection is relatively recent, more than 70% of the collection being published in 1990 or
after. Despite the recentness of the collection, the electronic availability of the titles in the collection is
limited. While around 80% of the books that had an ISBN number registered in the catalogue3 was
available in print either as a new copy or a second hand one, only about one third of the titles were
available in e-book formats. The mean price of the titles still in print was 62 USD according to the data
gathered from Amazon.com.
The number of works accessed through of Aleph is as impressive as its catalogue. In the three months
between March and June, 2012, on average 24.000 documents were downloaded every day from one of
its half-a-dozen mirrors.4 This means that the number of documents downloaded daily from Aleph is
probably in the 50 to 100.000 range. The library users come from more than 150 different countries. The
biggest users in terms of volume were the Russian Federation, Indonesia, USA, India, Iran, Egypt, China,
Germany and the UK. Meanwhile, many of the highest per-capita users are Central and Eastern European
countries.
What Aleph is and what it is not
Aleph is an example of the library in the post scarcity age. It is founded on the idea that books should no
longer be a scarce resource. Aleph set out to remove both sources of scarcity: the natural source of
3
Market availability data is only available for that 40% of books in the Aleph catalogue that had an ISBN number
on file. The titles without a valid ISBN number tend to be older, Russian language titles, in general with low
expected print and e-book availability.
4
Download data is based on the logs provided by one of the shadow library services which offers the books in
Aleph’s catalogue as well as other works also free and without any restraints or limitations.
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scarcity in physical copies is overcome through distributed digitization; the artificial source of scarcity
created by copyright protection is overcome through infringement. The liberation from both constraints is
necessary to create a truly scarcity free environment and to release the potential of the library in the postscarcity age.
Aleph is also an ongoing demonstration of the fact that under the condition of non-scarcity, the library can
be a decentralized, distributed, commons-based institution created and maintained through peer
production (Benkler, 2006). The message of Aleph is clear: users left to their own devices, can produce a
library by themselves for themselves. In fact, users are the library. And when everyone has the means to
digitize, collect, catalogue and share his/her own library, then the library suddenly is everywhere. Small
individual and institutional collections are aggregated into Aleph, which, in turn is constantly fragmented
into smaller, local, individual collections as users download works from the collection. The library is
breathing (Battles, 2004) books in and out, but for the first time, this circulation of books is not a zero
sum game, but a cumulative one: with every cycle the collection grows.
On the other hand Aleph may have lots of books on offer, but it is clear that it is neither universal in its
scope, nor does it fulfill all the critical functions of a library. Most importantly Aleph is disembedded
from the local contexts and communities that usually define the focus of the library. While it relies on the
availability of local digital collections for its growth, it has no means to play an active role in its own
development. The guardians of Aleph can prevent books from entering the collection, but they cannot
pay, ask or force anyone to provide a title if it is missing. Aleph is reliant on the weak copy-protection
technologies of official e-text repositories and the goodwill of individual document submitters when it
comes to the expansion of the collection. This means that the Aleph collection is both fragmented and
biased, and it lacks the necessary safeguards to ensure that it stays either current or relevant.
Aleph, with all its strengths and weaknesses carries an important lesson for the discussions on the future
of libraries. In the next section I’ll try situate these lessons in the wider context of the library in the post
scarcity age.
The future of the library
There is hardly a week without a blog post, a conference, a workshop or an academic paper discussing the
future of libraries. While existing libraries are buzzing with activity, librarians are well aware that they
need to re-define themselves and their institutions, as the book collections around which libraries were
organized slowly go the way the catalogue has gone: into the digital realm. It would be impossible to give
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a faithful summary of all the discussions on the future of libraries is such a short contribution. There are,
however, a few threads, to which the story of Aleph may contribute.
Competition
It is very rare to find the two words: libraries and competition in the same sentence. No wonder: libraries
enjoyed a near perfect monopoly in their field of activity. Though there may have been many different
local initiatives that provided free access to books, as a specialized institution to do so, the library was
unmatched and unchallenged. This monopoly position has been lost in a remarkably short period of time
due to the internet and the rapid innovations in the legal e-book distribution markets. Textbooks can be
rented, e-books can be lent, a number of new startups and major sellers offer flat rate access to huge
collections. Expertise that helps navigate the domains of knowledge is abundant, there are multiple
authoritative sources of information and meta-information online. The search box of the library catalog is
only one, and not even the most usable of all the different search boxes one can type a query in5.
Meanwhile there are plenty of physical spaces which offer good coffee, an AC plug, comfortable chairs
and low levels of noise to meet, read and study from local cafes via hacker- and maker spaces, to coworking offices. Many library competitors have access to resources (human, financial, technological and
legal) way beyond the possibilities of even the richest libraries. In addition, publishers control the
copyrights in digital copies which, absent of well fortified statutory limitations and exceptions, prevent
libraries keeping up with the changes in user habits and with the competing commercial services.
Libraries definitely feel the pressure. “Libraries’ offers of materials […] compete with many other offers
that aim to attract the attention of the public. […] It is no longer enough just to make a good collection
available to the public.” (Committee on the Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society, 2010) As a
response, libraries have developed different strategies to cope with this challenge. The common thread in
the various strategy documents is that they try to redefine the library as a node in the vast network of
institutions that provide knowledge, enable learning, facilitate cooperation and initiate dialogues. Some of
the strategic plans redefine the library space as an “independent medium to be developed” (Committee on
the Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society, 2010), and advise libraries to transform themselves into
culture and community centers which establish partnerships with citizens, communities and with other
public and private institutions. Some librarians propose even more radical ways of keeping the library
5
ArXiv, SSRN, RePEc, PubMed Central, Google Scholar, Google Books, Amazon, Mendeley, Citavi,
ResearchGate, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Khan Academy, specialized twitter and other
social media accounts are just a few of the available discovery services.
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relevant by, for example, advocating more opening hours without staff and hosting more user-governed
activities.
In the research library sphere, the Commission on the Future of the Library, a task force set up by the
University of California Berkeley defined the values the university research library will add in the digital
age as “1) Human expertise; 2) Enabling infrastructure; and 3) Preservation and dissemination of
knowledge for future generations.” (Commission on the Future of the Library, 2013). This approach is
from among the more conservative ones, still relying on the hope that libraries can offer something
unique that no one else is able to provide. Others, working at the Association of Research Libraries are
more like their public library counterparts, defining the future role of the research libraries as a “convener
of ‘conversations’ for knowledge construction, an inspiring host; a boundless symposium; an incubator;
a 3rd space both physically and virtually; a scaffold for independence of mind; and a sanctuary for
freedom of expression, a global entrepreneurial engine” (Pendleton-Jullian, Lougee, Wilkin, & Hilton,
2014), in other words, as another important, but in no way unique node in the wider network of
institutions that creates and distributes knowledge.
Despite the differences in priorities, all these recommendations carry the same basic message. The unique
position of libraries in the center of a book-based knowledge economy, on the top of the paper-bound
knowledge hierarchy is about to be lost. As libraries are losing their monopoly of giving low cost, low
restrictions access to books which are scarce by nature, and they are losing their privileged and powerful
position as the guardians of and guides to the knowledge stored in the stacks. If they want to survive, they
need to find their role and position in a network of institutions, where everyone else is engaged in
activities that overlap with the historic functions of the library. Just like the books themselves, the power
that came from the privileged access to books is in part dispersed among the countless nodes in the
knowledge and learning networks, and in part is being captured by those who control the digital rights to
digitize and distribute books in the digital era.
One of the main reasons why libraries are trying to redefine themselves as providers of ancillary services
is because the lack of digital lending rights prevents them from competing on their own traditional home
turf - in giving free access to knowledge. The traditional legal limitations and exceptions to copyright that
enabled libraries to fulfill their role in the analogue world do not apply in the digital realm. In the
European Union, the Infosoc Directive (“Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of
copyright and related rights in the information society,” 2001) allows for libraries to create digital copies
for preservation, indexing and similar purposes and allows for the display of digital copies on their
premises for research and personal study (Triaille et al., 2013). While in theory these rights provide for
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the core library services in the digital domain, their practical usefulness is rather limited, as off-premises
e-lending of copyrighted works is in most cases6 only possible through individual license agreements with
publishers.
Under such circumstances libraries complain that they cannot fulfill their public interest mission in the
digital era. What libraries are allowed to do under their own under current limitations and exceptions, is
seen as inadequate for what is expected of them. But to do more requires the appropriate e-lending
licenses from rights holders. In many cases, however, libraries simply cannot license digitally for e-lending. In those cases when licensing is possible, they see transaction costs as prohibitively high; they
feel that their bargaining positions vis-à-vis rightholders is unbalanced; they do not see that the license
terms are adapted to libraries’ policies, and they fear that the licenses provide publishers excessive and
undue influence over libraries (Report on the responses to the Public Consultation on the Review of the
EU Copyright Rules, 2013).
What is more, libraries face substantial legal uncertainties even where there are more-or-less well defined
digital library exceptions. In the EU, questions such as whether the analogue lending rights of libraries
extend to e-books, whether an exhaustion of the distribution right is necessary to enjoy the lending
exception, and whether licensing an e-book would exhaust the distribution right are under consideration
by the Court of Justice of the European Union in a Dutch case (Rosati, 2014b). And while in another case
(Case C-117/13 Technische Universität Darmstadt v Eugen Ulmer KG) the CJEU reaffirmed the rights of
European libraries to digitize books in their collection if that is necessary to give access to them in digital
formats on their premises, it also created new uncertainties by stating that libraries may not digitize their
entire collections (Rosati, 2014a).
US libraries face a similar situation, both in terms of the narrowly defined exceptions in which libraries
can operate, and the huge uncertainty regarding the limits of fair use in the digital library context. US
rights holders challenged both Google’s (Authors Guild v Google) and the libraries (Authors Guild v
HathiTrust) rights to digitize copyrighted works. While there seems to be a consensus of courts that the
mass digitization conducted by these institutions was fair use (Diaz, 2013; Rosati, 2014c; Samuelson,
2014), the accessibility of the scanned works is still heavily limited, subject to licenses from publishers,
the existence of print copies at the library and the institutional membership held by prospective readers.
While in the highly competitive US e-book market many commercial intermediaries offer e-lending
6
The notable exception being orphan works which are presumed to be still copyrighted, but without an identifiable
rights owner. In the EU, the Directive 2012/28/EU on certain permitted uses of orphan works in theory eases access
to such works, but in practice its practical impact is limited by the many constraints among its provisions. Lacking
any orphan works legislation and the Google Book Settlement still in limbo, the US is even farther from making
orphan works generally accessible to the public.
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
licenses to e-book catalogues of various sizes, these arrangements also carry the danger of a commercial
lock-in of the access to digital works, and render libraries dependent upon the services of commercial
providers who may or may not be the best defenders of public interest (OECD, 2012).
Shadow libraries like Aleph are called into existence by the vacuum that was left behind by the collapse
of libraries in the digital sphere and by the inability of the commercial arrangements to provide adequate
substitute services. Shadow libraries are pooling distributed resources and expertise over the internet, and
use the lack of legal or technological barriers to innovation in the informal sphere to fill in the void left
behind by libraries.
What can Aleph teach us about the future of libraries?
The story of Aleph offers two, closely interrelated considerations for the debate on the future of libraries:
a legal and an organizational one. Aleph operates beyond the limits of legality, as almost all of its
activities are copyright infringing, including the unauthorized digitization of books, the unauthorized
mass downloads from e-text repositories, the unauthorized acts of uploading books to the archive, the
unauthorized distribution of books, and, in most countries, the unauthorized act of users’ downloading
books from the archive. In the debates around copyright infringement, illegality is usually interpreted as a
necessary condition to access works for free. While this is undoubtedly true, the fact that Aleph provides
no-cost access to books seems to be less important than the fact that it provides an access to them in the
first place.
Aleph is a clear indicator of the volume of the demand for current books in digital formats in developed
and in developing countries. The legal digital availability, or rather, unavailability of its catalogue also
demonstrates the limits of the current commercial and library based arrangements that aim to provide low
cost access to books over the internet. As mentioned earlier, Aleph’s catalogue is mostly of recent books,
meaning that 80% of the titles with a valid ISBN number are still in print and available as a new or used
print copy through commercial retailers. What is also clear, that around 66% of these books are yet to be
made available in electronic format. While publishers in theory have a strong incentive to make their most
recent titles available as e-books, they lag behind in doing so.
This might explain why one third of all the e-book downloads in Aleph are from highly developed
Western countries, and two third of these downloads are of books without a kindle version. Having access
to print copies either through libraries or through commercial retailers is simply not enough anymore.
Developing countries are a slightly different case. There, compared to developed countries, twice as many
14
Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
of the downloads (17% compared to 8% in developed countries) are of titles that aren’t available in print
at all. Not having access to books in print seems to be a more pressing problem for developing countries
than not having access to electronic copies. Aleph thus fulfills at least two distinct types of demand: in
developed countries it provides access to missing electronic versions, in developing countries it provides
access to missing print copies.
The ability to fulfill an otherwise unfulfilled demand is not the only function of illegality. Copyright
infringement in the case of Aleph has a much more important role: it enables the peer production of the
library. Aleph is an open source library. This means that every resource it uses and every resource it
creates is freely accessible to anyone for use without any further restrictions. This includes the server
code, the database, the catalogue and the collection. The open source nature of Aleph rests on the
ideological claim that the scientific knowledge produced by humanity, mostly through public funds
should be open for anyone to access without any restrictions. Everything else in and around Aleph stems
from this claim, as they replicate the open access logic in all the other aspects of Aleph’s operation. Aleph
uses the peer produced Open Library to fetch book metadata, it uses the bittorrent and ed2k P2P networks
to store and make books accessible, it uses Linux and MySQL to run its code, and it allows its users to
upload books and edit book metadata. As a consequence of its open source nature, anyone can contribute
to the project, and everyone can enjoy its benefits.
It is hard to quantify the impact of this piratical open access library on education, science and research in
various local contexts where Aleph is the prime source of otherwise inaccessible books. But it is
relatively easy to measure the consequences of openness at the level of the Aleph, the library. The
collection of Aleph was created mostly by those individuals and communities who decided to digitize
books by themselves for their own use. While any single individual is only capable of digitizing a few
books at the maximum, the small contributions quickly add up. To digitize the 1.15 million documents in
the Aleph collection would require an investment of several hundred million Euros, and a substantial
subsequent investment in storage, collection management and access provision (Poole, 2010). Compared
to these figures the costs associated with running Aleph is infinitesimal, as it survives on the volunteer
labor of a few individuals, and annual donations in the total value of a few thousand dollars. The hundreds
of thousands who use Aleph on a more or less regular basis have an immense amount of resources, and by
disregarding the copyright laws Aleph is able to tap into those resources and use them for the
development of the library. The value of these resources and of the peer produced library is the difference
between the actual costs associated with Aleph, and the investment that would be required to create
something remotely similar.
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
The decentralized, collaborative mass digitization and making available of current, thus most relevant
scientific works is only possible at the moment through massive copyright infringement. It is debatable
whether the copyrighted corpus of scientific works should be completely open, and whether the blatant
disregard of copyrights through which Aleph achieved this openness is the right path towards a more
openly accessible body of scientific knowledge. It is also yet to be measured what effects shadow libraries
may have on the commercial intermediaries and on the health of scientific publishing and science in
general. But Aleph, in any case, is a case study in the potential benefits of open sourcing the library.
Conclusion
If we can take Aleph as an expression of what users around the globe want from a library, then the answer
is that there is a strong need for a universally accessible collection of current, relevant (scientific) books
in restrictions-free electronic formats. Can we expect any single library to provide anything even remotely
similar to that in the foreseeable future? Does such a service have a place in the future of libraries? It is as
hard to imagine the future library with such a service as without.
While the legal and financial obstacles to the creation of a scientific library with as universal reach as
Aleph may be difficult the overcome, other aspects of it may be more easily replicable. The way Aleph
operates demonstrates the amount of material and immaterial resources users are willing to contribute to
build a library that responds to their needs and expectations. If libraries plan to only ‘host’ user-governed
activities, it means that the library is still imagined to be a separate entity from its users. Aleph teaches us
that this separation can be overcome and users can constitute a library. But for that they need
opportunities to participate in the production of the library: they need the right to digitize books and copy
digital books to and from the library, they need the opportunity to participate in the cataloging and
collection building process, they need the opportunity to curate and program the collection. In other
words users need the chance to be librarians in the library if they wish to do so, and so libraries need to be
able to provide access not just to the collection but to their core functions as well. The walls that separate
librarians from library patrons, private and public collections, insiders and outsiders can all prevent the
peer production of the library, and through that, prevent the future that is the closest to what library users
think of as ideal.
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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate
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