Elbakyan
Why Science is Better with Communism The Case of Sci-Hub transcript and translation
2016
# Transcript and translation of Sci-Hub presentation
_The University of North Texas 's [Open Access Symposium
2016](/symposium/2016/) included [a presentation via Skype by Alexandra
Elbakyan](/symposium/2016/why-science-better-communism-case-sci-hub), the
founder of Sci-Hub. [Elbakyan's
slides](http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc850001/) (and those of
other presenters) have been archived in the UNT Digital Library, and [video of
this presentation](https://youtu.be/hr7v5FF5c8M) (and others) is now available
on YouTube and soon in the UNT Digital Library._
_The presentation was entitled "Why Science is Better with Communism? The Case
of Sci-Hub." Below is an edited transcript of the presentation produced by
Regina Anikina and Kevin Hawkins, with a translation by Kevin Hawkins and Anna
Pechenina._
**Martin Halbert** : We have a recent addition to our lineup of speakers that
we'll start off the day with: Alexandra Elbakyan. As many of you know,
Alexandra is a Kazakhstani graduate student, computer programmer, and the
creator of the controversial Sci-Hub site. The New York Times has compared her
to Edward Snowden for leaking information and because she avoids American law,
but Ars Technica has compared her to Aaron Swartz--so a controversial figure.
We thought it was very important to include her in the dialog about open
access because we want, in this symposium series, to include all the different
perspectives on copyright, intellectual property, open access, and access to
scholarly information. So I'm delighted that we're actually able to have her
here via Skype to present.
---
**Alexandra Elbakyan** : First of all, thank you for inviting me to share my
views. My name is Alexandra. As you might have guessed, I represent the site
Sci-Hub. It was founded in 2011 and immediately became popular among the local
community, almost immediately began providing access to about 40 articles an
hour and now providing more than 200,000.
It has to be said that over the course of the site's development it was
strongly supported by donations, and when for various reasons we had to
suspend the service, there were many displeased users who clamored for the
project to return so that the work in their laboratory could continue.
This is the case not just in poor countries; I can say that in rich countries
the public also doesn't have access to scholarly articles. And not all
universities have subscriptions to those resources that are required for
research.
A few of our users insisted that we start charging users, for example, by
allowing one or two articles to be downloaded for free but charging for more,
so that the service would be supported by those who really need it. But I
didn't end up doing that because the goal of the resource is knowledge for
all.
Certain open-access advocates criticize the site, saying that what we really
need is for articles to be in open access from the start, by changing the
business models of publishers. I can respond by saying that the goal of the
project is first and foremost the dissemination of scholarly knowledge in
society, and we have to work in the conditions we find ourselves in. Of
course, if scholarly publishers had a different business model, then perhaps
this project wouldn't be necessary. We can also imagine that if humans had
wings, we wouldn't need airplanes. But in any case we need to fly, so we make
airplanes.
Scholarly publishers quickly dubbed the work of Sci-Hub as piracy. Admittedly
Sci-Hub violates the laws of copyright, but copyright is related to the rights
of intellectual property. That is, scholarly articles are the property of
publishers, and reading them for free turns out to be something like theft
according to the current law.
The concept of intellectual property itself is not new, although it can seem
otherwise. The history of copyright goes back to around the 18th century,
although the first mentions of something similar can be found in the Talmud.
It's just that recently copyright has been found at the center of passionate
debate since some are trying to forbid the free distribution of information in
the internet.
However, the central focus of the debate is on censorship and privacy. The
defense of intellectual property in the internet requires censorship of
websites, and that is consequently a violation of freedom of speech. This also
raises a question of interference in private life - that is, when the
government in some way monitors users who violate copyright. In principle this
is also an intrusion in communication.
However, the very essence of copyright - that is, the concept of intellectual
property - is almost never questioned. That is, whether knowledge can be
someone's property is rarely discussed.
However, our ancestors were even more daring. They did not just question
intellectual property but property in general. That is, there are works in
which we can find the appearance of the idea of communism. There's Thomas
More's _Utopia_ from the 16th century, but actually such works arose much
earlier, even in Ancient Greece where these questions were already been
discussed in 391 BCE.
If we look at the slogans of communism, we see that one of the core concepts
is the struggle against inequality, the revolt of the suppressed classes,
whose members don't have any power against those who have concentrated basic
resources and power in their hands, with the goal of redistributing these
resources.
We can see that even today there is a certain informational inequality, when,
for example, only students and employees of the most wealthy universities have
full access to scholarly information, while access can be completely lacking
for institutions at the next lower tier and for the general public.
An idea arises: if there isn't private property, then there's no basis for
unequal distribution of wealth. In our case as well: if there's no private
intellectual property and all scholarly publications are nationalized, then
all people will have equal access to knowledge.
However, a question arises: if there is no private property, then what can
stimulate a person to work? One of the ideas is that under communism, rather
than greed or aspiration for wealth being a stimulus for work, a person would
aspire to self-development and learning for the betterment of the world.
Even if such values can't be applied to society as a whole, they at least work
in the world of scholarship. Therefore in the Soviet Union there was a true
cult of science - statues were even erected to the glory of science - and
perhaps thanks to this our country was one of the first to go into space.
However, it's one thing to have a revolution, when there's a mass
redistribution of property in society, but an act of theft is another thing.
This, of course, is not yet a revolution, but it's a small protest against the
property rights and the unequal distribution of wealth. Theft as protest has
always been welcomed and approved of in all eras of society. For example, we
all know about Robin Hood, but there have actually been quite a few noble
bandits in history. I've listed just a few of them.
I think that if the state works well, then accordingly it has a working tax
system and a certain system of redistribution of wealth, and then,
accordingly, there's no cause for revolution, for example. But if for some
reasons the state works poorly, then people begin to solve the problem for
themselves. In this way, Sci-Hub is an appropriate response to the inequality
that has arisen due to lack of access to information.
Pictured is Aldar Köse, a Kazakh folk hero who used his cunning to deceive
wealthy beys and take possession of their property. It's interesting to note
that beys are always depicted as greedy and stupid. And if you look at what's
written in the blogosphere today about scholarly publishers, you can find
these same characteristics.
There's also the interesting figure of the ancient Greek god Hermes, the
patron of thieves. That is, theft was a sufficiently respected activity that
it had its own god.
There's a researcher named Norman Brown who wrote an academic work called
_Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth_. It turns out that this myth is
related to a certain revolution in ancient Greek society, when the lower
classes, which lacked property, began to rise up.
For example, the poet Theognis of Megara wrote that "those who were nothing
became everything" and vice versa. This is essentially one of the most well-
known communist slogans.
For the ancient Greeks this was related, again as Brown says, to the
appearance of trade. Trade was identified with theft. There was no clear
distinction between the exchange of legal and illegal goods - that is, trade
was just as much considered theft as what we call piracy today.
Why did it turn out this way? Because Hermes was originally a god of
boundaries and transitions. Therefore, we can think that property is related
to keeping something within boundaries. At the same time, the things that
Hermes protected - theft, trade and communication - are related to boundary-
crossing.
If we think about scholarly journals, then any journal is first of all a means
of communication, and therefore it's apparent that keeping journals in closed
access contradicts the essence of what they were intended for.
This is, of course, not even the most interesting thing.
Hermes actually evolved - that is, while he was once an intellectual deity, he
later came to be interpreted as the same as Thoth, the Egyptian god of
knowledge, and further came to oversee such things as astrology, alchemy, and
magic - that is, the things from which, you might say, contemporary sciences
arose. So we can say that contemporary science arose from theft.
Of course, someone can object, saying that contemporary science is very
different from esoterica, such as astrology and alchemy, but if we look at the
history of science, we see that contemporary science differs from the ancient
arts in the former being more open.
That is, when the movement towards greater openness appeared, contemporary
science also appeared. Once again this is not an argument in support of
scholarly publishers.
Indeed, in the cultural consciousness science and the process of learning have
always been closely associated with theft, beginning with the legend of Adam
and Eve and the forbidden tree, which is called simply "the tree of
knowledge." And it's interesting that Elsevier's logo depicts some kind of
tree, which, accordingly, raises associations with this tree in the Garden of
Eden - the tree of knowledge - from which it was forbidden to eat the fruit.
Likewise we can recall the well-known legend of Prometheus, a part of our
cultural consciousness, who stole some knowledge and brought it to humans.
Once again we see the connection between science and theft.
Nowadays, many scholars have described science as the knowledge of secrets.
However, if we look closely, we have to ask: what is a secret? A secret is
something private, in essence private property. Accordingly, the disclosure of
the secret signifies that it ceases to be property. Once again we see the
contradiction between scholarship and property rights.
We can recall Robert Merton, who studied research institutes and revealed four
basic ethical norms that in his opinion are important for their successful
functioning. One of them is communism - that is, knowledge is shared.
Accordingly, if we look at certain traditional communities, then we find that
those communities that function within a caste system (dividing people by
occupation) usually turn out to have certain castes of people with
intellectual occupations, and if you look at the ethical norms of such castes,
you find that they are also communistic. You can find this, for example, in
Plato. Or even if you look at India, you find the accumulation of wealth is
usually the occupation of another caste.
To sum up, we have the following take-aways. Science, as a part of culture, is
in conflict with private property. Accordingly, scholarly communication is a
dual conflict. What open access is doing is returning science to its essential
roots.
**Audience question** : I'm a former university press director. I'd just like
to point out also that "property is theft" is the watchword of French
anarchism, a famous phrase from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, so perhaps anarchism
and science are also inseparable. But my main question really has to do with a
challenge that a librarian named Rick Anderson posted on the Scholarly Kitchen
blog two days ago, and that has to do with the fact that evidently Sci-Hub
relies a lot on the access codes that faculty have given to Sci-Hub in one way
or another so that Sci-Hub can gain access to the electronic materials that it
then uses to post on its own site. What Anderson does is points out that if
that information falls into the wrong hands, there are all sorts of terrible
things that can be done because those access codes provide access to personal
information, to student data, to all sorts of other things that could be badly
misused, so my question to you is what assurances can you give us that that
kind of information will not fall into the wrong hands.
**Elbakyan** : Well, first of all I doubt that it's possible to gain access to
all the information that is listed in the post on the Scholarly Kitchen. As a
rule, these logins and passwords can only be used for access to the proxy
server through which you can download articles, whereas for access to other
things, such as email, the login and password won't work. [ _Audience reacts
with skepticism._ ]
**Audience question** : Earlier this week a number of us participated in a
panel presentation on scholarly publishing and social justice, and one of the
primary points that came out of that was that the people who create the
published product - not necessarily the scientist but the people who actually
do the work that results in the published product - deserve to be paid for
their labor, and there is definitely labor involved. So if you're replacing
the market for these publications and eliminating these people's opportunities
to make money, where is the appropriate distribution of wealth.
**Elbakyan** : First of all, we shouldn't confuse the compensation that a
person receives for their labor with the excessive profits that publishers
wring out by limiting access to information. For example, Sci-Hub also does a
fair amount of work and has high expenses, but these expenses are for some
reason covered by donations - that is, there's no need to close access to
information - that is, it's a red herring to say that if articles are
distributed for free, people won't have anything to eat. One does not follow
from the other. In my opinion, though, an optimal system for funding would
consist of grants, donations, and membership fees.
**Audience question** : You've spoken so far exclusively about Sci-Hub. I
wonder if you could comment just briefly on LibGen and whether you see the two
models as identical or whether there are any material differences between
LibGen and Sci-Hub.
**Elbakyan** : Well, LibGen is primarily a repository. It doesn't download
new articles but is more aimed at preserving that which has already been
downloaded.
Sollfrank & Dockray
Expanded Appropriation
2013
Sean Dockray
Expanded Appropriation
Berlin, 4 January 2013
[00:13]
Public School [00:17]
We decided to give up doing a gallery because… Well, for one, the material
conditions weren’t so great for it. But I think people who open up galleries
do it in really challenging conditions, so there is no reason why we couldn’t
have done a gallery in that basement. [00:37] I think we were actually
disinterested in exhibition as a format. After a few years – I mean, we did
something like 35 things that could easily be called exhibitions, in a span of
5 years leading up to that. [00:55] I think we just wanted to try something
else. And so we already had started a project called The Public School a year
prior, so we decided that we would use our space primarily as a school.
[01:10] At that time those two things happened. We eliminated the gallery and
then ended up with two new galleries and a school instead!
[01:20] What The Public School is… it’s been going now for five fears. It
began just as a structure or even a diagram, or an idea or something. [01:43]
And the idea is that people would propose things that they wanted to learn
about, or to teach to other people. And then there would be a kind of process
where we use our space or the Internet to allow people to sign up to say they
are also interested in this idea. And then the School’s job would be to turn
those ideas into real meetings of people, real classes where people got
together. [02:15] So in that sense the curriculum would be developed in
public. It wouldn't be public just simply in the sense that anyone could go to
it, but it’d be public in the sense that anyone could produce the form of it.
[02:32] And again, I need a lot more time, I think, to talk about all the
dimensions to it, but in broad strokes that’s kind of what it is. [02:43]
Although we started in Los Angeles, in the basement of our original gallery
five years ago, it’s now been in around a dozen cities around the world, where
people are operating according to the same process, and then sometimes in
conversation with one another. And there’ve been 500-600 classes, and 2000 or
so proposals made in that time.
[03:18]
Motivation
[03:22]
It was in the air at the time already, so I don’t think it’d be an entirely
independent impulse – number one. But I had actually tried to start a couple
of things that had failed. [03:41] Like Aaaaarg – I tried to set up some
physical reading groups that would complement the online archive. So, in Los
Angeles the idea would be that we’d meet and talk about things that were being
posted to the website. So, yes, reading groups. But they never really went
anywhere. They were always really small, and they kind of run out of steam
quite quickly because no one was interested. [04:10] So in a way The Public
School was a later iteration of something that I’d already been trying for a
while. But the other thing was that by doing these reading groups,
intuitively, I knew what was wrong. [04:31] Although I like to read, that is
not all of what education is to me. To me learning and education is something
that is more inclusive of a lot more of what we experience in life, than
simply theoretical discussions. The structures didn’t really allow that in a
way. [04:56] The Public School came out of just trying to imagine what kind of
structure would be inclusive to overcome some of those self-imposed
limitations. [05:14] I’m very interested in technology in a hands-on way. I
like to code and electronics – hacking around with electronics. And at the
same time, I like to read and I like to write. And then once you go down that
line then you think, well, I like music a lot and I like to play chess as
well. [05:46] I think about all these things that I like to do, and I just
thought about how a lot of these gestures towards education that I tried to do
previously, in no way embraced me as a whole person. So in that sense, it was
based in personal interest. [06:22] But the other personal interest had to do
with personal motivation, it had to do with running an art space for, at that
point, four years. And actually seeing the way that that happened, because I’m
not a curator. [06:38] And so the act of putting on exhibitions for me was
less about making value judgments, and more about trying to contribute to the
cultural life of my city, and also provide opportunities that didn’t exist in
Los Angeles. [06:57] For example, no one really knew how to show work with
technology, and we were able to, because, for instance I knew how to set up
projectors, fix electronics or get things to start and stop, and that kind of
stuff. [07:13] But over the course of running it, because it is an exhibition
space, I found myself put into the role of being a curator – Fiona and I both
did. And it was kind of an uncomfortable role to be deciding what became
visible and what wouldn’t be. [07:32] And one thing that was never visible was
the sort of mechanisms by which an institution made certain things visible.
[07:40] So the public in The Public School actually in a way is trying to
eliminate that whole apparatus, or at least, put that apparatus as something
that we didn’t want to be solely the ones interacting with. We wanted that
apparatus to be… that our entire community, the community of people who is
participating in the programme – that they were the ones responsible for it.
[08:14] So that would shift programming, but also accountability and all these
things, to the people who are actually participating in the life of the space.
[08:28]
Technical Infrastructure
[08:32]
The technical infrastructure is incredibly important because at the moment
that’s people’s primary experience of the project. They make proposals on the
website, and then the classes are actually organised by people through the
website. So the website, the entire technical infrastructure becomes the
engine for getting events to happen. [09:01] It’s not an essential part. At
the very beginning we did it on paper, and we had the website and the paper
kind of simultaneously. And we’d print things out onto paper that would be
accessible by coming into the space, and vice versa, we'd enter things from
the paper back into the website. [09:26] But at the moment it’s mostly
orchestrated through the website. And it’s been three versions of it, like
three separate pieces of software, and the last two it’s been Kayla Waldorf
and myself who have been programming it. And we have… [09:45] Number one,
we’ve organised lots of classes, so we’re very involved in the life of the
school. And in a way we try to programme the site according to (A) what would
make things work, but (B), like you say, in a way that expresses the politics,
as we see them, of the site. [10:14] And so almost at every level, at every
design decision that Kayla might be making, or every kind of code or database
decision, you know, interactive decision that I might be making – those
conversations and those ideas are finding their way into that. [10:45] And
vice versa, that you see code, in a certain way, as not determining politics,
but certainly influencing what people see as possible and also choices that
they see available to them, and things like that. [11:09] I guess as users of
the site, as organisers of The Public School and as programmers, this kind of
relationship between the project and the software is quite intertwined.
[11:28] And I don’t think that… I think that typically art institutions use a
website as a kind of publicity vehicle, as a kind of postcard or something
that fits into their broadcasting of a programme, as something as a glue
between their space and their audience. [11:49] And I think for us the website
is actually integral to the space and to the audience. There is more of a
continuum between the space, programme, website and audience.
[12:04]
Aaaaarg.org
[12:08]
It started out small. In a way, it was an extension of what I think as a
practice that all of us are familiar with, which is sharing books that we’ve
read, or sharing articles that we’ve read, especially if your work is somehow
in relationship to things that you might be reading. [12:41] In my
architecture school, for instance, we would read lots and lots, and then we’d
be making work in parallel. It wouldn’t be that either would determine the
other, but in the end, there is a strong relationship between the ideas that
you have and what you see as possible, and the things that you are reading.
[13:07] So as part of the student culture, especially among my friends, the
people that I identified with in school, we’d be discovering different parts
of the library independently. And then when we found something that was quite
moving in whatever way then we would photocopy it to keep it for ourselves
later. [13:34] And we’d also give it to each other as a kind of secret tool,
or something like that, you know, like you have the sense that when you found
something that is really good – and specially if other people aren’t even
interested – then you feel really empowered by having access to that, by being
able to read it and reread it. [14:02] And then you feel more empowered when
there is a community of other people. It may be a small one, but who have read
that thing as well, because then you start building a kind of shared frame of
reference, a shared vocabulary and a shared way of seeing the world, and
seeing what you’re working on. [14:22] And I think out of that comes projects,
like you actually work on projects together, you collaborate, you correspond
with other people or you actually share the work. And that’s what happened.
[14:41] I started Aaaaarg.org after I moved from New York to Los Angeles, so I
was quite far away from some of the people that I was working with – and just
continuing with that very basic activity of sharing reading material in order
to have that shared vocabulary to be able to work together.
[15:08]
Content
[15:12]
It turned out to be architecture at the very beginning. But we all had really
broad understandings of what architecture meant and what it included, so there
was a lot of media theory, art history and philosophy, and occasionally some
architecture too. [15:38] And so that became the initial kind of seed. And I
think everything has, as the site expanded from there, to be not just me and
some collaborators, or then collaborators of collaborators, and then friends
of those people, and so on. [16:03] It’s kind of a ripple effect outwards.
What happened was something that is quite common to almost any platform, which
is this kind of feedback. Even in an open structure, it's never truly open.
There’re always rules in place, there’s always a past history, and those two
things go a long way to influence what happens in the future. [16:33] I’m sure
a lot of people will come to the site who are interested in one thing, and
then find nothing in the site that speaks to them, and then disappear. Whereas
other people, the site really spoke to them, and so what they would contribute
can also fit according to that sense, to that inclination.
[16:59]
Dynamics of growth and community-building
[17:04]
Especially when I’m involved in this kind of projects, I don’t like being
alone. Obviously it contributes a lot to the work, not only because there’s
more people, but actually the kind of relationships and negotiations that
happen in that work are interesting in themselves. [17:29] So anyway, it was
never all that interesting for it to be a private library. I mean, we all have
private libraries, but there is this potential as well, which I think wasn’t
part of the project at the beginning, it really was a tool for sharing in a
particular kind of context. [17:56] But I think, obviously, you know, once
people saw it then they saw a sort of potential in it, because you see what
happens on the Internet and you know that in certain cases you can read from
it and you can write to it. [18:18] And you also know that, although there
still [are] various forms of digital exclusion, that it's quite accessible
relative to other forms, other libraries, like university libraries, for
instance.
[18:37]
Cornelia Sollfrank: It’s not just about having access to certain material, but
what is related to it, and what’s really important, is the dynamics of
building a community and the context, and even smaller discourses around
certain issues, which you don’t have necessarily if you just download a text.
Then you have the text but you don’t have somebody to talk to, or you don’t
write your opinion about it to someone. So that’s, I think, what comes with
the project, which makes it very valuable to a lot of people.
[19:13]
Yes. That’s going back to what I was saying about some of the failures before
The Public School, which was... As the site was growing, as Aaaaarg was
growing, all of a sudden there would be things in there that I didn’t know
about before, that someone felt it was important to share. [19:37] And because
someone felt that it was important to share it, I felt it was important to
read it. And I did, but then I wanted to read it with other people. [19:51]
So, some of those reading groups were always attempts to produce some social
context for the theory.
[20:06] Having a library as if the archive itself is the library – but having
that isn't really that interesting to me. What's interesting is having some
social context that I can feel involved in (not that I ‘have’ to be involved
in it), but having some social context to make use of that reading material.
[20:42]
Copyright
[20:47]
At the beginning it was never a component of the project, because of that sort
of natural extension between what I see as a perfectly… something that I think
that we all do already. And especially in architecture and art, if you are
involved in reading you give books to people. Like you gave me your book… And
I’ve passed on a number of books. [21:34] If I print out something to read and
I’m done with it, then I’m more likely to pass it on than I’m to shred it – I
have to keep it in my closet forever, what do I do with it? If I think I’m
truly done with it, even for a moment, then I’m more likely to pass it on.
[22:00] So at the beginning it had nothing to do with piracy, it had
everything to do with wanting to share things with other people. And a lot of
times it's not just in this abstract “I kind of like to share,” but it was
project-based, and I think it became a little bit more abstract. [22:24] But I
think actually over time, when people were sharing things, sometimes they did
it with this sort of abstract recipient of that sharing, and that they would
think, “I have access to this and I know that other people want access to it,
and so that’s going to be why I share it.” [22:46] In other cases, I know that
people were trying to organise a reading group, and this is quite common,
which is that people would be organising something and then how are they going
to distribute the reading material. Yes, they could give everyone a link to
Amazon so they all order their own book, maybe that would be better for
Amazon. [23:13] But there are another ways that they would organise the
reading material there. A lot of times the stuff they wanted to read was
already on Aaaaarg. Sometimes they had to upload a few new things. [23:26] And
so that’s how a lot of it grew and that’s why people are involved. And I think
sharing was what drove the project. And then it really wasn’t for 3 years that
even there was anything even relating to copyright issues. No one complained
for all that time. [23:53] And then when complains came in then, you know, we
responded by taking it down. It was quite simple. [24:05] But then later in
the life of the project, the copyright problems sort of, in a way,
retroactively made the project more about piracy than about sharing.
[24:22]
Attempts to control file-sharing
[24:26]
Either through making activity which used to be legal, illegal, or which used
to be in a kind of grey area because there wasn’t a framework in place for it,
that sort of draw hard lines to say that something in now illegal. [24:46] And
then there is the technological forms of negation, I think, which is to
actually make it impossible for people to do something that they used to be
able to do – signing copies of a file and not allowing it to open if it’s not
opening in the right place, or through the cloud, through this kind of new
marketing opportunities of centralising a lot of files in one place, and then
sort of governing the access through sites like Spotify. [25:29] Amazon does
the same thing, you know, also with their e-books, where they own the device,
the distribution network and the servers. And so by controlling the entire
pipeline, there’s a lot more control over what people do. [25:51] For
instance, you have to jailbreak the Kindle in to order to share a book. Again,
something that we used to be able to do, now we actually have to break the law
or break our devices. [26:05] So these two things, I think, are how it gets
dealt with. And of course, there’s always responses to those things. [26:12] I
think the technological one is a big [one] ... to me that’s the more
challenging one, especially now, because what’s been produced is much more
miniaturised and a lot more difficult to...
C.S.: Hack?
[26:30] Yes. And also you can’t hack the server farm that’s located in, you
know, this really remote part of some country that you’ve never been to.
Shouldn’t say never. In fact, I’ll say never, just to see if someone can.
[26:50] Positive things would be to say, if we take a more expansive view of
the economy, look at who is making money, and then make an appeal for that.
Because there are people who are making money, like Apple is making a lot of
money, and other people who aren’t making money. [27:15] And I don’t think you
can blame the readers, for instance, for the fact that writers and publishers
aren’t making money, because the readers are going into that too, because of
the same forces. [27:28] So you look at who is making the money, and I think
that is a political argument that needs to be made, that this money is
actually being kind of hoarded by some of these companies, because they are
sort of gaming the system and the restructuring of the economy, but also how
we consume entertainment, and all this kind of things, and the restructuring
of production around the globe.
[27:59] I don’t think sites like Aaaaarg do anything more than point out a
kind of dynamic that is existing in the world – to think that somehow you can
sort of turn that into something positive, you know, in a way that gets
capitalism to stop exploiting people – like it seems silly to me, capitalism
exploits people...
[28:31]
Publishing landscape
[28:35]
I think that the role of the publishers [is] already changing, because of the
Internet and because of companies like Amazon, who changed not only selling
books. They changed not only the bookstore, but also changed the entire
distribution model, which then changes the way publishers work – and more and
more, even the entire life cycle of a book, you know, from the writing to the
sort of organisation and communication, to the distribution to the
consumption. [29:09] The entire life cycle of a book is happening through
these networks, from the software that we write it on, and where is that stuff
stored, you know – is a Google Docs or some other thing? –, and our e-mails
that are circulating, and the accounting software. [29:31] A lot of it is
changing through the entire pipeline anyway, so to me, it’s really difficult
to say how publishing is changing because the entire flow, the entire
apparatus is changing.
[29:48] At the beginning, Aaaaarg was a way of bringing readers together, and
to allow readers to sort of give value to certain things that they were
reading. And I think that’s always been a form of publishing to me. [30:09]
Yes, someone is responsible for having the book edited, having it printed it,
distributing it, there’s a huge material expense in all of that. [30:21] But
then you also have the life of the book after it gets to the store. And it
continues to have a life, like sometimes it lives for decades and decades, and
it goes between readers, it goes through sidewalk vendors, and used book
stores, and sits on people’s libraries, and goes to public libraries. [30:44]
And I would say that Aaaaarg is sort of in that part of the life cycle.
[30:54] These platforms become sort of new publishers themselves, but I
haven’t really thought that kind of statement through enough. In a way, if
publishing is to make something public and to create publics, then of course,
that’s something that Aaaaarg has done since the beginning. [31:22] It made
things public to people who maybe didn’t exist for before, and it also
produced communities of people around books – I mean, if that’s what a
publication and a publisher does, then, of course, it kind of does that within
the context of the Internet, and it does that by both using and producing
social relations between people.
[31:50]
Reading / books
[31:54]
I have lots of books, and I buy them from anywhere. I buy them, as much as it
pains me to admit it, I buy them from Amazon, I buy them from bookstores, I
buy them from used books stores, I buy them on the street, I find them in
trash, I’ve photocopied so many parts of books at the library, because they
didn’t circulate or something, or because I only had four hours to look at the
book; I’ve gotten things for my friends, I’ve gotten things from classes that
I used to take when I was a student but I still have. [32:37] And then with
the Internet, then I'd see it on a screen, sometimes I print that out, you
know. I’m not a purist in any way about reading or about books, I’m not
particularly sentimental about ‘the book.’ Even though I love books and I see
what’s nice about them, I think that every sort of form a book takes has its
own kind of… there’s something unique about it. [33:11] Honestly, this kind
of, let’s say, increase in e-Pubs and PDFs hasn’t really changed my
relationship to books at all. It’s the same as it’s always been, which is,
I’ll read it, how I can get it. And maybe there’s slightly now forms, and
sometimes I read on a little… I bought a touchpad when they had a fire sale a
while ago, so I read on that.
[33:44] And maybe I’m making an obvious argument here, but you see, if you've
ever scanned a book you know that it takes time, and you know that you screw
up quite a lot, and sometimes those screw ups find their way in, and the
labour that goes into making a scan finds its way in. [34:02] And it’s only
through really good scans that you can manage to sort of eliminate a lot of
that, a lot of the traces of that labour. But I know that, in the entire
history of Aaaaarg, the files will always show the labour of the person who is
trying to get something up to share it with other people. It’s not a
frictionless easy activity, there is work that’s involved in it. [34:31] And I
find some of the scans were quite beautiful in that way, even when they
weren’t necessarily so good to read.
[34:41] There’s actually, if we go to scale… Again, I have way more books that
I could possibly read, physical books. And I’m going to continue buying more,
acquiring more through my entire life, I’m sure of it. And I think that’s just
part of loving books and loving to read, you have more than you can possibly
deal with. [35:11] And I think, on a level of scale, maybe, with the Internet
we find ourselves, in orders of magnitude, [with] more than we could possibly
deal with. But in a way, it’s the same kind of anxiety, and the limits are
more or less the same. [35:29] But then there are maybe even new opportunities
for new ways of reading that weren’t available before. I could flip through a
book in a certain way, but maybe now with the possibility of indexing the
whole content of a book, and doing searches, and creating ways of visually
displaying books and relationships between books, and between parts of books,
and this kind of things, and also making lists, and making lists with other
people – all of these maybe provide new ways of reading which weren't
available. [36:13] And of course it means that then other ways of reading that
get sort of buried and, you know, lost. And I’m sure that that's true too,
that slow deep reading maybe isn’t as prevalent as different types of
referencing and stuff. [36:32] Not to say that it’s totally identical, but
certainly an evolution. I don’t think that progression is so linear, that it’s
pure loss, or anything like that.
[36:44]
Form and content
[36:49] For me what’s interesting is to try and examine how structure and
form, or structure and content, form and content – I mean, that’s kind of
another on-going question, how structure is not divorced from content.
Structure is not simply a container for the content, any more than the mind
and body are distinct entities – but that the structure that something takes
influences the shape that content takes, and also the ways that people might
approach that context, or use it in this kind of things. And likewise, the
content begins to affect the structure as well. [37:47] Why I’m interested in
structures is because they aren’t deterministic, they don’t determine what’s
going to happen. And all the projects that you mention are things that I think
of, let’s say, as platforms or something, in the sense that they have… they
involve a lot of people quite often, more than just me, and they also have…
the duration is not specified in advance, and what’s going to happen in them
is not specified in advance. [38:30] So they’re experimental in that way, and
they have that in common. And that is what’s interesting to me, is the
production of situations where we don’t know what’s going to happen. [38:51]
And sometimes when focusing on a work you have vision for what that work is
going to be, and then all your work goes into realising that, and, of course,
you have surprises along the way, but then you get something that surprisingly
ends up like what you kind of imagined at the beginning – that way of working
doesn’t really interest me. I sort of become bored pretty early on in that
process. [39:23] Whereas the kind of longer term thing where the initial
conditions actually produce a situation that’s a little unstable, and
therefore what happens is also kind of unpredictable and unstable, to me this
is about opening up other possibilities for things as small as being together
for a short time, but also as big as ways of living.
[40:00] On the one level, these are structural projects, but on another level
they are all kind of structural appropriations in a way, or appropriations of
structures, like from a gallery, a library, a school, another gallery. [40:23]
And I was actually thinking about that I kind of wish that (and I imagine
soon, maybe in the next decade or two) an art historian will make this kind of
argument for evolving the concept of appropriation, to go beyond objects to…
Because in a way appropriation enters into the discourse when reproduction…
[40:52] I think appropriation it’s been something, let’s say, that maybe is a
historical concept. So at certain point in history maybe it even has a
different name, there’s different ways that it happens, there are different
cultural responses to it. [41:09] And I think that in the twentieth century,
especially with mechanical reproduction, appropriation becomes quite clear
what it is, because images or sounds, you know, things became distributed and
available for people to actually materially use. [41:30] And the tools that
people have available to make work as well allow for this type of reuse of
what’s being circulated through the world. [41:45] And I guess what I’m sort
of saying is, if that’s appropriation of objects, then there might even be a
time now, especially as the economy sort of shifted from being simply about
commodity – the production, and sale and consumption of commodities) – to now,
if we try to understand critically the economy now, it’s something that’s much
more complicated – it involves financialization, debt and derivative trading,
and all this kind of things. [42:25] And so, perhaps also if appropriation is
a historical idea, then appropriation also needs to be updated, and this would
mean – for me this would mean appropriation of systems. [42:46] So rather than
the appropriation of what’s been distributed, it’s the appropriation of the
system of distribution. And to me these are also projects that I get excited
about at the moment. [43:04] In a way it also makes sense, because if
photographs were circulating around the world, and that was, you know, a new
thing, to see that sort of imagery circulating in that way, at a certain point
in time a century ago; then now I think we are even having a similar reaction
to something like Facebook, which to me kind comes out of nowhere, and
suddenly it exists in the world as a structure that is organising a certain
part of the activity of, you know, hundreds of millions of people. [43:47] And
so I think, in a way, that’s the level on which maybe we can start thinking of
appropriation, at a level of this kind of large scale systems. But then that
brings up a whole new set of questions, like what do you call that, number
one. Number two, obviously the legal framework that’s in place, obviously that
will cause problems.