If the appetite to read comes with reading, then open text archive Aaaaarg.org
is a great place to stimulate and sate your hunger. Here, Matthew Fuller talks
to long-term observer Sean Dockray about the behaviour of text and
bibliophiles in a text-circulation network
Sean Dockray is an artist and a member of the organising group for the LA
branch of The Public School, a geographically distributed and online platform
for the self-organisation of learning.1 Since its initiation by Telic Arts, an
organisation which Sean directs, The Public School has also been taken up as a
model in a number of cities in the USA and Europe.2
We met to discuss the growing phenomenon of text-sharing. Aaaaarg.org has
developed over the last few years as a crucial site for the sharing and
discussion of texts drawn from cultural theory, politics, philosophy, art and
related areas. Part of this discussion is about the circulation of texts,
scanned and uploaded to other sites that it provides links to. Since
participants in The Public School often draw from the uploads to form readers
or anthologies for specific classes or events series, this project provides a
useful perspective from which to talk about the nature of text in the present
era.
**Sean Dockray** **:** People usually talk about three key actors in
discussions about publishing, which all play fairly understandable roles:
readers; publishers; and authors.
**Matthew Fuller:** Perhaps it could be said that Aaaaarg.org suggests some
other actors that are necessary for a real culture of text; firstly that books
also have some specific kind of activity to themselves, even if in many cases
it is only a latent quality, of storage, of lying in wait and, secondly, that
within the site, there is also this other kind of work done, that of the
public reception and digestion, the response to the texts, their milieu, which
involves other texts, but also systems and organisations, and platforms, such
as Aaaaarg.
Image: A young Roland Barthes, with space on his bookshelf
**SD:** Where even the three actors aren't stable! The people that are using
the site are fulfilling some role that usually the publisher has been doing or
ought to be doing, like marketing or circulation.
**MF:** Well it needn't be seen as promotion necessarily. There's also this
kind of secondary work with critics, reviewers and so on - which we can say is
also taken on by universities, for instance, and reading groups, magazines,
reviews - that gives an additional life to the text or brings it particular
kinds of attention, certain kind of readerliness.
**SD:** Situates it within certain discourses, makes it intelligible in a way,
in a different way.
**MF:** Yes, exactly, there's this other category of life to the book, which
is that of the kind of milieu or the organisational structure in which it
circulates and the different kind of networks of reference that it implies and
generates. Then there's also the book itself, which has some kind of agency,
or at least resilience and salience, when you think about how certain books
have different life cycles of appearance and disappearance.
**SD:** Well, in a contemporary sense, you have something like _Nights of
Labour_ , by Ranci _è_ re - which is probably going to be republished or
reprinted imminently - but has been sort of invisible, out of print, until, by
surprise, it becomes much more visible within the art world or something.
**MF:** And it's also been interesting to see how the art world plays a role
in the reverberations of text which isn't the same as that in cultural theory
or philosophy. Certainly _Nights of Labour_ , something that is very close to
the role that cultural studies plays in the UK, but which (cultural studies)
has no real equivalent in France, so then, geographically and linguistically,
and therefore also in a certain sense conceptually, the life of a book
exhibits these weird delays and lags and accelerations, so that's a good
example. I'm interested in what role Aaaaarg plays in that kind of
proliferation, the kind of things that books do, where they go and how they
become manifest. So I think one of the things Aaaaarg does is to make books
active in different ways, to bring out a different kind of potential in
publishing.
**SD:** Yes, the debate has tended so far to get stuck in those three actors
because people tend to end up picking a pair and placing them in opposition to
one another, especially around intellectual property. The discussion is very
simplistic and ends up in that way, where it's the authors against readers, or
authors against their publishers, with the publishers often introducing
scarcity, where the authors don't want it to be - that's a common argument.
There's this situation where the record industry is suing its own audience.
That's typically the field now.
**MF:** So within that kind of discourse of these three figures, have there
been cases where you think it's valid that there needs to be some form of
scarcity in order for a publishing project to exist?
**SD:** It's obviously not for me to say that there does or doesn't need to be
scarcity but the scarcity that I think we're talking about functions in a
really specific way: it's usually within academic publishing, the book or
journal is being distributed to a few libraries and maybe 500 copies of it are
being printed, and then the price is something anywhere from $60 to $500, and
there's just sort of an assumption that the audience is very well defined and
stable and able to cope with that.
**MF:** Yeah, which recognises that the audiences may be stable as an
institutional form, but not that over time the individual parts of say that
library user population change in their relationship to the institution. If
you're a student for a few years and then you no longer have access, you lose
contact with that intellectual community...
**SD:** Then people just kind of have to cling to that intellectual community.
So when scarcity functions like that, I can't think of any reason why that
_needs_ to happen. Obviously it needs to happen in the sense that there's a
relatively stable balance that wants to perpetuate itself, but what you're
asking is something else.
**MF:** Well there are contexts where the publisher isn't within that academic
system of very high costs, sustained by volunteer labour by academics, the
classic peer review system, but if you think of more of a trade publisher like
a left or a movement or underground publisher, whose books are being
circulated on Aaaaarg...
**SD:** They're in a much more precarious position obviously than a university
press whose economics are quite different, and with the volunteer labour or
the authors are being subsidised by salary - you have to look at the entire
system rather than just the publication. But in a situation where the
publisher is much more precarious and relying on sales and a swing in one
direction or another makes them unable to pay the rent on a storage facility,
one can definitely see why some sort of predictability is helpful and
necessary.
**MF:** So that leads me to wonder whether there are models of publishing that
are emerging that work with online distribution, or with the kind of thing
that Aaaaarg does specifically. Are there particular kinds of publishing
initiatives that really work well in this kind of context where free digital
circulation is understood as an a priori, or is it always in this kind of
parasitic or cyclical relationship?
**SD:** I have no idea how well they work actually; I don't know how well,
say, Australian publisher re.press, works for example. 3 I like a lot of what
they publish, it's given visibility when re.press distributes it and that's a
lot of what a publisher's role seems to be (and what Aaaaarg does as well).
But are you asking how well it works in terms of economics?
**MF:** Well, just whether there's new forms of publishing emerging that work
well in this context that cut out some of the problems ?
**SD:** Well, there's also the blog. Certain academic discourses, philosophy
being one, that are carried out on blogs really work to a certain extent, in
that there is an immediacy to ideas, their reception and response. But there's
other problems, such as the way in which, over time, the posts quickly get
forgotten. In this sense, a publication, a book, is kind of nice. It
crystallises and stays around.
**MF:** That's what I'm thinking, that the book is a particular kind of thing
which has it's own quality as a form of media. I also wonder whether there
might be intermediate texts, unfinished texts, draft texts that might
circulate via Aaaaarg for instance or other systems. That, at least to me,
would be kind of unsatisfactory but might have some other kind of life and
readership to it. You know, as you say, the blog is a collection of relatively
occasional texts, or texts that are a work in progress, but something like
Aaaaarg perhaps depends upon texts that are finished, that are absolutely the
crystallisation of a particular thought.
Image: The Tree of Knowledge as imagined by Hans Sebald Beham in his 1543
engraving _Adam and Eve_
**SD:** Aaaaarg is definitely not a futuristic model. I mean, it occurs at a
specific time, which is while we're living in a situation where books exist
effectively as a limited edition. They can travel the world and reach certain
places, and yet the readership is greatly outpacing the spread and
availability of the books themselves. So there's a disjunction there, and
that's obviously why Aaaaarg is so popular. Because often there are maybe no
copies of a certain book within 400 miles of a person that's looking for it,
but then they can find it on that website, so while we're in that situation it
works.
**MF:** So it's partly based on a kind of asymmetry, that's spatial, that's
about the territories of publishers and distributors, and also a kind of
asymmetry of economics?
**SD:** Yeah, yeah. But others too. I remember when I was affiliated with a
university and I had JSTOR access and all these things and then I left my job
and then at some point not too long after that my proxy access expired and I
no longer had access to those articles which now would cost $30 a pop just to
even preview. That's obviously another asymmetry, even though, geographically
speaking, I'm in an identical position, just that my subject position has
shifted from affiliated to unaffiliated.
**MF:** There's also this interesting way in which Aaaaarg has gained
different constituencies globally, you can see the kind of shift in the texts
being put up. It seems to me anyway there are more texts coming from non-
western authors. This kind of asymmetry generates a flux. We're getting new
alliances between texts and you can see new bibliographies emerge.
**SD:** Yeah, the original community was very American and European and
gradually people were signing up at other places in order to have access to a
lot of these texts that didn't reach their libraries or their book stores or
whatever. But then there is a danger of US and European thought becoming
central. A globalisation where a certain mode of thought ends up just erasing
what's going on already in the cities where people are signing up, that's a
horrible possible future.
**MF:** But that's already something that's _not_ happening in some ways?
**SD:** Exactly, that's what seems to be happening now. It goes on to
translations that are being put up and then texts that are coming from outside
of the set of US and western authors and so, in a way, it flows back in the
other direction. This hasn't always been so visible, maybe it will begin to
happen some more. But think of the way people can list different texts
together as ‘issues' - a way that you can make arbitrary groupings - and
they're very subjective, you can make an issue named anything and just lump a
bunch of texts in there. But because, with each text, you can see what other
issues people have also put it in, it creates a trace of its use. You can see
that sometimes the issues are named after the reading groups, people are using
the issues format as a collecting tool, they might gather all Portuguese
translations, or The Public School uses them for classes. At other times it's
just one person organising their dissertation research but you see the wildly
different ways that one individual text can be used.
**MF:** So the issue creates a new form of paratext to the text, acting as a
kind of meta-index, they're a new form of publication themselves. To publish a
bibliography that actively links to the text itself is pretty cool. That also
makes me think within the structures of Aaaaarg it seems that certain parts of
the library are almost at breaking point - for instance the alphabetical
structure.
**SD:** Which is funny because it hasn't always been that alphabetical
structure either, it used to just be everything on one page, and then at some
point it was just taking too long for the page to load up A-Z. And today A is
as long as the entire index used to be, so yeah these questions of density and
scale are there but they've always been dealt with in a very ad hoc kind of
way, dealing with problems as they come. I'm sure that will happen. There
hasn't always been a search and, in a way, the issues, along with
alphabetising, became ways of creating more manageable lists, but even now the
list of issues is gigantic. These are problems of scale.
**MF:** So I guess there's also this kind of question that emerges in the
debate on reading habits and reading practices, this question of the breadth
of reading that people are engaging in. Do you see anything emerging in
Aaaaarg that suggests a new consistency of handling reading material? Is there
a specific quality, say, of the issues? For instance, some of them seem quite
focused, and others are very broad. They may provide insights into how new
forms of relationships to intellectual material may be emerging that we don't
quite yet know how to handle or recognise. This may be related to the lament
for the classic disciplinary road of deep reading of specific materials with a
relatively focused footprint whereas, it is argued, the net is encouraging a
much wider kind of sampling of materials with not necessarily so much depth.
**SD:** It's partially driven by people simply being in the system, in the
same way that the library structures our relationship to text, the net does it
in another way. One comment I've heard is that there's too much stuff on
Aaaaarg, which wasn't always the case. It used to be that I read every single
thing that was posted because it was slow enough and the things were short
enough that my response was, ‘Oh something new, great!' and I would read it.
But now, obviously that is totally impossible, there's too much; but in a way
that's just the state of things. It does seem like certain tactics of making
sense of things, of keeping things away and letting things in and queuing
things for reading later become just a necessary part of even navigating. It's
just the terrain at the moment, but this is only one instance. Even when I was
at the university and going to libraries, I ended up with huge stacks of books
and I'd just buy books that I was never going to read just to have them
available in my library, so I don't think feeling overwhelmed by books is
particularly new, just maybe the scale of it is. In terms of how people
actually conduct themselves and deal with that reality, it's difficult to say.
I think the issues are one of the few places where you would see any sort of
visible answers on Aaaaarg, otherwise it's totally anecdotal. At The Public
School we have organised classes in relationship to some of the issues, and
then we use the classes to also figure out what texts we are going to be
reading in the future, to make new issues and new classes. So it becomes an
organising group, reading and working its way through subject matter and
material, then revisiting that library and seeing what needs to be there.
**MF:** I want to follow that kind of strand of habits of accumulation,
sorting, deferring and so on. I wonder, what is a kind of characteristic or
unusual reading behavior? For instance are there people who download the
entire list? Or do you see people being relatively selective? How does the
mania of the net, with this constant churning of data, map over to forms of
bibliomania?
**SD:** Well, in Aaaaarg it's again very specific. Anecdotally again, I have
heard from people how much they download and sometimes they're very selective,
they just see something that's interesting and download it, other times they
download everything and occasionally I hear about this mania of mirroring the
whole site. What I mean about being specific to Aaaaarg is that a lot of the
mania isn't driven by just the need to have everything; it's driven by the
acknowledgement that the source is going to disappear at some point. That
sense of impending disappearance is always there, so I think that drives a lot
of people to download everything because, you know, it's happened a couple
times where it's just gone down or moved or something like that.
**MF:** It's true, it feels like something that is there even for a few weeks
or a few months. By a sheer fluke it could last another year, who knows.
**SD:** It's a different kind of mania, and usually we get lost in this
thinking that people need to possess everything but there is this weird
preservation instinct that people have, which is slightly different. The
dominant sensibility of Aaaaarg at the beginning was the highly partial and
subjective nature to the contents and that is something I would want to
preserve, which is why I never thought it to be particularly exciting to have
lots of high quality metadata - it doesn't have the publication date, it
doesn't have all the great metadata that say Amazon might provide. The system
is pretty dismal in that way, but I don't mind that so much. I read something
on the Internet which said it was like being in the porn section of a video
store with all black text on white labels, it was an absolutely beautiful way
of describing it. Originally Aaaaarg was about trading just those particular
moments in a text that really struck you as important, that you wanted other
people to read so it would be very short, definitely partial, it wasn't a
completist project, although some people maybe treat it in that way now. They
treat it as a thing that wants to devour everything. That's definitely not the
way that I have seen it.
**MF:** And it's so idiosyncratic I mean, you know it's certainly possible
that it could be read in a canonical mode, you can see that there's that
tendency there, of the core of Adorno or Agamben, to take the a's for
instance. But of the more contemporary stuff it's very varied, that's what's
nice about it as well. Alongside all the stuff that has a very long-term
existence, like historical books that may be over a hundred years old, what
turns up there is often unexpected, but certainly not random or
uninterpretable.
Image: French art historian André Malraux lays out his _Musée Imaginaire_ ,
1947
**SD:** It's interesting to think a little bit about what people choose to
upload, because it's not easy to upload something. It takes a good deal of
time to scan a book. I mean obviously some things are uploaded which are, have
always been, digital. (I wrote something about this recently about the scan
and the export - the scan being something that comes out of a labour in
relationship to an object, to the book, and the export is something where the
whole life of the text has sort of been digital from production to circulation
and reception). I happen to think of Aaaaarg in the realm of the scan and the
bootleg. When someone actually scans something they're potentially spending
hours because they're doing the work on the book they're doing something with
software, they're uploading.
**MF:** You could say with PDFs they have to be searchable texts?
**SD:** I'm sure a lot of people would prefer that. Even I would prefer it a
lot of the time. But again there is the idiosyncratic nature of what appears,
and there is also the idiosyncratic nature of the technical quality and
sometimes it's clear that the person that uploads something just has no real
experience of scanning anything. It's kind of an inevitable outcome. There are
movie sharing sites that are really good about quality control both in the
metadata and what gets up; but I think that if you follow that to the end,
then basically you arrive at the exported version being the Platonic text, the
impossible, perfect, clear, searchable, small - totally eliminating any trace
of what is interesting, the hand of reading and scanning, and this is what you
see with a lot of the texts on Aaaaarg. You see the hand of the person who's
read that book in the past, you see the hand of the person who scanned it.
Literally, their hand is in the scan. This attention to the labour of both
reading and redistributing, it's important to still have that.
**MF:** You could also find that in different ways for instance with a pdf, a
pdf that was bought directly as an ebook that's digitally watermarked will
have traces of the purchaser coded in there. So then there's also this work of
stripping out that data which will become a new kind of labour. So it doesn't
have this kind of humanistic refrain, the actual hand, the touch of the
labour. This is perhaps more interesting, the work of the code that strips it
out, so it's also kind of recognising that code as part of the milieu.
**SD:** Yeah, that is a good point, although I don't know that it's more
interesting labour.
**MF:** On a related note, The Public School as a model is interesting in that
it's kind of a convention, it has a set of rules, an infrastructure, a
website, it has a very modular being. Participants operate with a simple
organisational grammar which allows them to say ‘I want to learn this' or ‘I
want to teach this' and to draw in others on that basis. There's lots of
proposals for classes, some of them don't get taken up, but it's a process and
a set of resources which allow this aggregation of interest to occur. I just
wonder how you saw that kind of ethos of modularity in a way, as a set of
minimum rules or set of minimum capacities that allow a particular set of
things occur?
**SD:** This may not respond directly to what you were just talking about, but
there's various points of entry to the school and also having something that
people feel they can take on as their own and I think the minimal structure
invites quite a lot of projection as to what that means and what's possible
with it. If it's not doing what you want it to do or you think, ‘I'm not sure
what it is', there's the sense that you can somehow redirect it.
**MF:** It's also interesting that projection itself can become a technical
feature so in a way the work of the imagination is done also through this kind
of tuning of the software structure. The governance that was handled by the
technical infrastructure actually elicits this kind of projection, elicits the
imagination in an interesting way.
**SD:** Yeah, yeah, I totally agree and, not to put too much emphasis on the
software, although I think that there's good reason to look at both the
software and the conceptual diagram of the school itself, but really in a way
it would grind to a halt if it weren't for the very traditional labour of
people - like an organising committee. In LA there's usually around eight of
us (now Jordan Biren, Solomon Bothwell, Vladada Gallegos, Liz Glynn, Naoko
Miyano, Caleb Waldorf, and me) who are deeply involved in making that
translation of these wishes - thrown onto the website that somehow attract the
other people - into actual classes.
**MF:** What does the committee do?
**SD:** Even that's hard to describe and that's what makes it hard to set up.
It's always very particular to even a single idea, to a single class proposal.
In general it'd be things like scheduling, finding an instructor if an
instructor is what's required for that class. Sometimes it's more about
finding someone who will facilitate, other times it's rounding up materials.
But it could be helping an open proposal take some specific form. Sometimes
it's scanning things and putting them on Aaaaarg. Sometimes, there will be a
proposal - I proposed a class in the very, very beginning on messianic time, I
wanted to take a class on it - and it didn't happen until more than a year and
a half later.
**MF:** Well that's messianic time for you.
**SD:** That and the internet. But other times it will be only a week later.
You know we did one on the Egyptian revolution and its historical context,
something which demanded a very quick turnaround. Sometimes the committee is
going to classes and there will be a new conflict that arises within a class,
that they then redirect into the website for a future proposal, which becomes
another class: a point of friction where it's not just like next, and next,
and next, but rather it's a knot that people can't quite untie, something that
you want to spend more time with, but you may want to move on to other things
immediately, so instead you postpone that to the next class. A lot of The
Public School works like that: it's finding momentum then following it. A lot
of our classes are quite short, but we try and string them together. The
committee are the ones that orchestrate that. In terms of governance, it is
run collectively, although with the committee, every few months people drop
off and new people come on. There are some people who've been on for years.
Other people who stay on just for that point of time that feels right for
them. Usually, people come on to the committee because they come to a lot of
classes, they start to take an interest in the project and before they know it
they're administering it.
**Matthew Fuller's <[m.fuller@gold.ac.uk](mailto:m.fuller@gold.ac.uk)> most
recent book, _Elephant and Castle_ , is forthcoming from Autonomedia. **
**He is collated at**
**Footnotes**
1
2 [http://telic.info/ ](http://telic.info/)
3
Graziano
Pirate Care: How do we imagine the health care for the future we want?
2018
Pirate Care - How do we imagine the health care for the future we want?
Oct 5, 2018 · 19 min read
by Valeria Graziano
A recent trend to reimagine the systems of care for the future is based on many of the principles of self-organization. From the passive figure of the patient — an aptly named subject, patiently awaiting aid from medical staff and carers — researchers and policymakers are moving towards a model defined as people-powered health — where care is discussed as transforming from a top-down service to a network of coordinated actors.
At the same time, for large numbers of people, to self-organize around their own healthcare needs is not a matter of predilection, but increasingly one of necessity. In Greece, where the measures imposed by the Troika decimated public services, a growing number of grassroots clinics set up by the Solidarity Movement have been providing medical attention to those without a private insurance. In Italy, initiatives such as the Ambulatorio Medico Popolare in Milan offer free consultations to migrants and other vulnerable citizens.
The new characteristic in all of these cases is the fact that they frame what they do in clearly political terms, rejecting or sidestepping the more neutral ways in which the third sector and the NGOs have long presented care practices as apolitical, as ways to help out that should never ask questions bigger than the problems they set out to confront, and as standing beyond left and right (often for the sake of not alienating potential donors and funders).
Rather, the current trends towards self-organization in health care are very vocal and clear in their messages: the care system is in crisis, and we need to learn from what we know already. One thing we know is that the market or the financialization of assets cannot be the solution (do you remember when just a few years ago Occupy was buying back healthcare debts from financial speculators, thus saving thousands Americans from dire economic circumstances? Or that scene from Michael Moore’s Sicko, the documentary where a guy has to choose which finger to have amputated because he does not have enough cash for saving both?).
Another thing we also know is that we cannot simply hold on to past models of managing the public sector, as most national healthcare systems were built for the needs of the last century. Administrations have been struggling to adapt to the changing nature of health conditions (moving from a predominance of epidemic to chronic diseases) and the different needs of today’s populations. And finally, we most definitely know that to go back to even more conservative ideas that frame care as a private issue that should fall on the shoulders of family members (and most often, of female relatives) or hired servants (also gendered and racialised) is not the best we can come up with.
Among the many initiatives that are rethinking how we organize the provision of health and care in ways that are accessible, fair, and efficient, there are a number of actors — mostly small organizations — who are experimenting with the opportunities introduced by digital technologies. While many charities and NGOs remain largely ignorant of the opportunities offered by technology, these new actors are developing DIY devices, wearables, 3D-printed bespoke components, apps and smart objects to intervene in areas otherwise neglected by the bigger players in the care system. These practices are presenting a new mode of operating that I want to call ‘pirate care’.
Pirate Care
Piracy and Care are not always immediately relatable notions. The figure of the pirate in popular and media cultures is often associated with cunning intelligence and masculine modes of action, of people running servers which are allowing people to illegally download music or movie files. One of the very first organizations that articulated the stakes of sharing knowledge was actually named Piratbyrån. “When you pirate mp3s, you are downloading communism” was a popular motto at the time. And yet, bringing the idea of a pirate ethics into resonance with contemporary modes of care invites a different consideration for practices that propose a paradigm change and therefore inevitably position themselves in tricky positions vis-à-vis the law and the status quo. I have been noticing for a while now that another kind of contemporary pirate is coming to the fore in our messy society in the midst of many crises. This new kind of pirate could be best captured by another image: this time it is a woman, standing on the dock of a boat sailing through the Caribbean sea towards the Mexican Gulf, about to deliver abortion pills to other women for whom this option is illegal in their country.
Women on Waves, founded in 1999, engages in its abortion-on-boat missions every couple of years. They are mostly symbolic actions, as they are rather expensive operations, and yet they are potent means for stirring public debate and have often been met with hostility — even military fleets. So far, they have visited seven countries so far, including Mexico, Guatemala and, more recently, Ireland and Poland, where feminists movements have been mobilizing in huge numbers to reclaim reproductive rights.
According to official statistics, more than 47,000 women die every year from complications resulting from illegal, unsafe abortion procedures, a service used by over 21 million women who do not have another choice. As Leticia Zenevich, spokesperson of Women on Waves, told HuffPost: “The fact that women need to leave the state sovereignty to retain their own sovereignty ― it makes clear states are deliberately stopping women from accessing their human right to health.” Besides the boat campaigns, the organization also runs Women on Web, an online medical abortion service active since 2005. The service is active in 17 languages, and it is helping more than 100,000 women per year to get information and access abortion pills. More recently, Women on Waves also begun experimenting with the use of drones to deliver the pills in countries impacted by restrictive laws (such as Poland in 2015 and Northern Ireland in 2016).
Women on Waves are the perfect figure to begin to illustrate my idea of ‘pirate care’. By this term I want to bring attention to an emergent phenomenon in the contemporary world, where more and more often initiatives that want to bring support and care to the most vulnerable subjects in the most unstable situations, increasingly have to do so by operating in that grey zone that exists between the gaps left open by various rules, laws and technologies. Some thrive in this shadow area, carefully avoiding calling attention to themselves for fear of attracting ferocious polemics and the trolling that inevitably accompanies them. In other cases, care practices that were previously considered the norm have now been pushed towards illegality.
Consider for instance the situation highlighted by the Docs Not Cops campaign that started in the UK four years ago, when the government had just introduced its ‘hostile environment’ policy with the aim to make everyday life as hard as possible for migrants with an irregular status. Suddenly, medical staff in hospitals and other care facilities were supposed to carry out document checks before being allowed to offer any assistance. Their mobilization denounced the policy as an abuse of mandate on the part of the Home Office and a threat to public health, given that it effectively discouraged patients to seek help for fear of retaliations. Another sadly famous example of this trend of pushing many acts of care towards illegality would the straitjacketing and criminalization of migrant rescuing NGOs in the Mediterranean on the part of various European countries, a policy led by Italian government. Yet another example would be the increasing number of municipal decrees that make it a crime to offer food, money or shelter to the homeless in many cities in North America and Europe.
Hacker Ethics
This scenario reminds us of the tragic story of Antigone and the age-old question of what to do when the relationship between what the law says and one what feels it is just becomes fraught with tensions and contradictions. Here, the second meaning of ‘pirate care’ becomes apparent as it points to the way in which a number of initiatives have been responding to the current crisis by mobilizing tactics and ethics as first developed within the hacker movement.
As described by Steven Levy in Hackers, the general principles of a hacker ethic include sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to knowledge and tools, and an effort of contributing to society’s democratic wellbeing. To which we could add, following Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, that “bureaucracy should not be allowed to get in the way of doing anything useful.” While here Stallman was reflecting on the experience of the M.I.T. AI Lab in 1971, his critique of bureaucracy captures well a specific trait of the techno-political nexus that is also shaping the present moment: as more technologies come to mediate everyday interactions, they are also reshaping the very structure of the institutions and organizations we inhabit, so that our lives are increasingly formatted to meet the requirements of an unprecedented number of standardised procedures, compulsory protocols, and legal obligations.
According to anthropologists David Graeber, we are living in an era of “total bureaucratization”. But while contemporary populism often presents bureaucracy as a problem of the public sector, implicitly suggesting “the market” to be the solution, Graeber’s study highlights how historically all so-called “free markets” have actually been made possible through the strict enforcement of state regulations. Since the birth of the modern corporation in 19th century America, “bureaucratic techniques (performance reviews, focus groups, time allocation surveys …) developed in financial and corporate circles came to invade the rest of society — education, science, government — and eventually, to pervade almost every aspect of everyday life.”
The forceps and the speculum
And thus, in resonance with the tradition of hacker ethics, a number of ‘pirate care’ practices are intervening in reshaping what looking after our collective health will look like in the future. CADUS, for example, is a Berlin based NGO which has recently set up a Crisis Response Makerspace to build open and affordable medical equipment specifically designed to bring assistance in extreme crisis zones where not many other organizations would venture, such as Syria and Northern Iraq. After donating their first mobile hospital to the Kurdish Red Crescent last year, CADUS is now working to develop a second version, in a container this time, able to be deployed in conflict zones deprived of any infrastructure, and a civil airdrop system to deliver food and medical equipment as fast as possible. The fact that CADUS adopted the formula of the makerspace to invent open emergency solutions that no private company would be interested in developing is not a coincidence, but emerges from a precise vision of how healthcare innovations should be produced and disseminated, and not only for extreme situations.
“Open source is the only way for medicine” — says Marcus Baw of Open Health Hub — as “medical software now is medicine”. Baw has been involved in another example of ‘pirate care’ in the UK, founding a number of initiatives to promote the adoption of open standards, open source code, and open governance in Health IT. The NHS spends about £500 million each time it refreshes Windows licenses, and aside from avoiding the high costs, an open source GP clinical system would be the only way to address the pressing ethical issue facing contemporary medicine: as software and technology become more and more part of the practice of medicine itself, they need to be subject to peer-review and scrutiny to assess their clinical safety. Moreover, that if such solutions are found to be effective and safe lives, it is the duty of all healthcare practitioners to share their knowledge with the rest of humanity, as per the Hippocratic Oath. To illustrate what happens when medical innovations are kept secret, Baw shares the story of the Chamberlen family of obstetricians, who kept the invention of the obstetric forceps, a family trade secret for over 150 years, using the tool only to treat their elite clientele of royals and aristocracy. As a result, thousands of mothers and babies likely died in preventable circumstances.
It is perhaps significant that such a sad historical example of the consequences ofclosed medicine must come from the field of gynaecology, one of the most politically charged areas of medical specialization to this day. So much so that last year another collective of ‘pirate carers’ named GynePunk developed a biolab toolkit for emergency gynaecological care, to allow those excluded from the reproductive healthcare — undocumented migrants, trans and queer women, drug users and sex workers — to perform basic checks on their own bodily fluids. Their prototypes include a centrifuge, a microscope and an incubator that can be cheaply realised by repurposing components of everyday items such as DVD players and computer fans, or by digital fabrication. In 2015, GynePunk also developed a 3D-printable speculum and — who knows? — perhaps their next project might include a pair of forceps…
As the ‘pirate care’ approach keeps proliferating more and more, its tools and modes of organizing is keeping alive a horizon in which healthcare is not de facto reduced to a privilege.
PS. This article was written before the announcement of the launch of Mediterranea, which we believe to be another important example of pirate care. #piratecare #abbiamounanave
Dockray & Liang
Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
2015
# Sean Dockray & Lawrence Liang — Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the
Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
 Abdel Kader
Haïdara, a librarian who smuggled hundreds of thousands of manuscripts from
jihadist-occupied Timbuktu to safety in Bamako, stands with ancient volumes
from Timbuktu packed into metal trunks. Photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images.
_Foederis aequas Dicamus leges _
(Let us make fair terms for the compact.)
—Virgil’s _Aeneid_ , XI
Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.1All excerpts from _The
Social Contract_ are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _The Social Contract: And,
The First and Second Discourses_, ed. Susan Dunn and Gita May (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2002).
> _June 30, 2015_
>
> _Dear Sean,_
>
> _I have been asked by Raqs Media Collective to contribute to a special
ongoing issue of _e-flux journal _that is part of the Venice Biennale. Raqs’s
section in the issue rethinks Rousseau’s social contract and the possibility
of its being rewritten, as a way of imagining social bonds and solidarities
that can help instigate and affirm a vision of the world as a space of
potential._
>
> _I was wondering if you would join me in a conversation on shadow libraries
and social contracts. The entire universe of the book-sharing communities
seems to offer the possibility of rethinking the terms of the social contract
and its associated terms (consent, general will, private interest, and so on).
While the rise in book sharing is at one level a technological phenomenon (a
library of 100,000 books put in PDF format can presently fit on a one-terabyte
drive that costs less than seventy-five dollars), it is also about how we
think of transformations in social relations mediated by sharing books._
>
> _If the striking image of books in preprint revolution was of being “in
chains,” as Rousseau puts it, I am prompted to wonder about the contemporary
conflict between the digital and mechanisms of control. Are books born free
but are everywhere in chains, or is it the case that they have been set free?
In which case are they writing new social contracts?_
>
> _I was curious about whether you, as the founder of _[
_Aaaaarg.org_](http://aaaaarg.org/) _, had the idea of a social contract in
mind, or even a community, when you started?_
>
> _Lawrence_
**Book I, Chapter VI : The Social Pact**
To find a form of association that may defend and protect with the whole force
of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of
which each, joining together with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and
remain as free as before.’’ Such is the fundamental problem to which the
social contract provides the solution.
We can reduce it to the following terms: ‘‘Each of us puts in common his
person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and
in return each member becomes an indivisible part of the whole.’’
> _June 30, 2015_
>
> _Dear Lawrence,_
>
> _I am just listing a few ideas to put things out there and am happy to try
other approaches:_
>
> _—To think about the two kinds of structure that digital libraries take:
either each library is shared by many user-librarians or there is a library
for each person, shared with all the others. It’s a technological design
question, yes, but it also suggests different social contracts?_
>
> _—What is subtracted when we subtract your capacity/right to share a book
with others, when every one of us must approach the market anew to come into
contact with it? But to take a stab at misappropriating the terms you’ve
listed, consent, what libraries do I consent to? Usually the consent needs to
come from the library, in the form of a card or something, but we don’t ask
enough what we want, maybe. Also what about a social contract of books? Does a
book consent to being in a library? What rights does it have or expect?_
>
> _I really loved the math equation Rousseau used to arrive at the general
will: if you subtract the pluses and minuses of particular wills that cancel
each other out, then the general will is the sum of the differences! But why
does the general need to be the lowest common denominator—certainly there are
more appropriate mathematical concepts that have been developed in the past
few hundred years?_
>
> _Sean_
**Book I, Chapter II: Primitive Societies**
This common liberty is a consequence of man’s nature. His first law is to
attend to his own survival, his first concerns are those he owes to himself;
and as soon as he reaches the age of rationality, being sole judge of how to
survive, he becomes his own master.
It is the relation of things and not of men that constitutes war; and since
the state of war cannot arise from simple personal relations, but only from
real relations, private war—war between man and man—cannot exist either in the
state of nature, where there is no settled ownership, or in the social state,
where everything is under the authority of the laws.
> _July 1, 2015_
>
> _Dear Lawrence,_
>
> _Unlike a logic of exchange, or of offer and return with its demands for
reciprocity, the logic of sharing doesn’t ask its members for anything in
return. There are no guarantees that the one who gives a book will get back
anything, whether that is money, an equivalent book, or even a token of
gratitude. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent someone from taking without
giving. I think a logic of sharing will look positively illogical across the
course of its existence. But to me, this is part of the appeal: that it can
accommodate behaviors and relationships that might be impossible within the
market._
>
> _But if there is a lack of a contract governing specific exchanges, then
there is something at another level that defines and organizes the space of
sharing, that governs its boundaries, and that establishes inclusions and
exclusions. Is this something ethics? Identity? Already I am appealing to
something that itself would be shared, and would this sharing precede the
material sharing of, for example, a library? Or would the shared
ethics/identity/whatever be a symptom of the practice of sharing? Well, this
is perhaps the conclusion that anthropologists might come to when trying to
explain the sharing practices of hunter-gatherer societies, but a library?_
>
> _Sean_
>
>
>
> _July 1, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean,_
>
> _I liked your question of what might account for a sharing instinct when it
comes to books, and whether we appeal to something that already exists as a
shared ethics or identity, or is sharing the basis of a shared
ethics/identity? I have to say that while I have never thought of my own book-
collecting through the analogy of hunter-gatherers, the more I think about it,
the more sense it makes to me. Linguistically we always speak of going on book
hunts and my daily trawling through the various shadow libraries online does
seem to function by way of a hunting-gathering mentality._
>
> _Often I download books I know that I will never personally read because I
know that it may either be of interest to someone else, or that the place of a
library is the cave where one gathers what one has hunted down, not just for
oneself but for others. I also like that we are using so-called primitive
metaphors to account for twenty-first-century digital practices, because it
allows us the possibility of linking these practices to a primal instinct of
sharing, which precedes our encounter with the social norms that classify and
partition that instinct (legal, illegal, authorized, and so on). _
>
> _I don’t know if you remember the meeting that we had in Mumbai a few years
ago—among the other participants, we had an academic from Delhi as an
interlocutor. He expressed an absolute terror at what he saw as the “tyranny
of availability” in online libraries. In light of the immense number of books
available in electronic copies and on our computers or hard discs, he felt
overwhelmed and compared his discomfort with that of being inside a large
library and not knowing what to do. Interestingly, he regularly writes asking
me to supply him with books that he can’t find or does not have access to._
>
> _This got me thinking about the idea of a library and what it may mean, in
its classical sense and its digital sense. An encounter with any library,
especially when it manifests itself physically, is one where you encounter
your own finitude in the face of what seems like the infinity of knowledge.
But personally this sense of awe has also been tinged with an immense
excitement and possibility. The head rush of wanting to jump from a book on
forgotten swear words to an intellectual biography of Benjamin, and the
tingling anticipation as you walk out of the library with ten books, captures
for me more than any other experience the essence of the word potential._
>
> _I have a modest personal library of around four thousand books, which I
know will be kind of difficult for me to finish in my lifetime even if I stop
adding any new books, and yet the impulse to add books to our unending list
never fades. And if you think about this in terms of the number of books that
reside on our computers, then the idea of using numbers becomes a little
pointless, and we need some other way or measure to make sense of our
experience._
>
> _Lawrence_
**Book I, Chapter VII: The Sovereign**
Every individual can, as a man, have a particular will contrary to, or
divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen; his private
interest may appear to him quite different from the common interest; his
absolute and naturally independent existence may make him envisage what he
owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would
be less harmful to others than the payment of it would be onerous to him.
> _July 12, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean,_
>
> _There is no symbol that to my mind captures the regulated nature of the
library more than that of the board that hushes you with its capitalized
SILENCE. Marianne Constable says, “One can acknowledge the figure of silence
in the library and its persistence, even as one may wonder what a silent
library would be, whether libraries ever are silent, and what the various
silences—if any—in a library could be.”_
>
> _If I had to think about the nature of the social contract and the
possibilities of its rewriting from the site of the library one encounters
another set of silent rules and norms. If social contracts are narrative
compacts that establish a political community under the sign of a sovereign
collective called the people, libraries also aspire to establish an authority
in the name of the readers and to that extent they share a common constitutive
character. But just as there is a foundational scandal of absence at the heart
of the social contract that presumes our collective consent (what Derrida
describes as the absence of the people and the presence of their signature)
there seems to be a similar silence in the world of libraries where readers
rarely determine the architecture, the logic, or the rules of the library._
>
> _So libraries have often mirrored, rather than inverted, power relations
that underlie the social contracts that they almost underwrite._ _In contrast
I am wondering if the various shadow libraries that have burgeoned online, the
portable personal libraries that are shared offline: Whether all of them
reimagine the social contract of libraries, and try to create a more insurgent
imagination of the library?_
>
> _Lawrence_
>
>
>
> _July 13, 2015_
>
> _Hi Lawrence,_
>
> _As you know, I’m very interested in structures that allow the people within
ways to meaningfully reconfigure them. This is distinct from participation or
interaction, where the structures are inquisitive or responsive, but not
fundamentally changeable._
>
> _I appreciate the idea that a library might have, not just a collection of
books or a system of organizing, but its own social contract. In the case of
Aaaaarg, as you noticed, it is not explicit. Not only is there no statement as
such, there was never a process prior to the library in which something like a
social contract was designed._
>
> _I did ask users to write out a short statement of their reason for joining
Aaaaarg and have around fifty thousand of these expressions of intention. I
think it’s more interesting to think of the social contract, or at least a
"general will," in terms of those. If Rousseau distinguished between the will
of all and the general will, in a way that could be illustrated by the catalog
of reasons for joining Aaaaarg. Whereas the will of all might be a sum of all
the reasons, the general will would be the sum of what remains after you "take
away the pluses and minuses that cancel one another." I haven’t done the math,
but I don’t think the general will, the general reason, goes beyond a desire
for access._
>
> _To summarize a few significant groupings:_
>
> _—To think outside institutions; _
> _—To find things that one cannot find; _
> _—To have a place to share things;_
> _—To act out a position against intellectual property; _
> _—A love of books (in whatever form)._
>
> _What I do see as common across these groupings is that the desire for
access is, more specifically, a desire to have a relationship with texts and
others that is not mediated by market relations._
>
> _In my original conception of the site, it would be something like a
collective commonplace. Like commonplacing, the excerpts that people would
keep were those parts of texts that seemed particularly useful, that produced
a spark that one wanted to share. This is important: that it was the
experience of being electrified in some way that people were sharing and not a
book as such. Over time, things changed and the shared objects became more
complete so to say, and less “subjective,” but I hope that there is still that
spark. But, at this point, I realize that I am just another one of the many
wills, and just one designer of whatever social contract is underlying the
library._
>
> _So, again—What is the social contract? It wasn’t determined in advance and
it is not written in any about section or FAQ. I would say that it is, like
the library itself, something that is growing and evolving over time, wouldn’t
you?_
>
> _Sean_
**Book II, Chapter VIII : The People**
As an architect, before erecting a large edifice, examines and tests the soil
in order to see whether it can support the weight, so a wise lawgiver does not
begin by drawing up laws that are good in themselves, but considers first
whether the people for whom he designs them are fit to maintain them.
> _July 15, 2015_
>
> _Lawrence,_
>
> _There are many different ways of organizing a library, of structuring it,
and it’s the same for online libraries. I think the most interesting
conversation would not be to bemoan the digital for overloading our ability to
be discerning, or to criticize it for not conforming to the kind of economy
that we expected publishing to have, or become nostalgic for book smells; but
to actually really wonder what it is that could make these libraries great,
places that will be missed in the future if they go away. To me, this is the
most depressing thing about the unfortunate fact that digital shadow libraries
have to operate somewhat below the radar: it introduces a precariousness that
doesn’t allow imagination to really expand, as it becomes stuck on techniques
of evasion, distribution, and redundancy. But what does it mean when a library
functions transnationally? When its contents can be searched? When reading
interfaces aren’t bound by the book form? When its contents can be referenced
from anywhere?_
>
> _What I wanted when building Aaaaarg.org the first time was to make it
useful, in the absolute fullest sense of the word, something for people who
saw books not just as things you buy to read because they’re enjoyable, but as
things you need to have a sense of self, of orientation in the world, to learn
your language and join in the conversation you are a part of—a library for
people who related to books like that._
>
> _Sean_
>
>
>
> _July 17, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean_,
>
> _To pick up on the reasons that people give for joining Aaaaarg.org: even
though Aaaaarg.org is not bound by a social contract, we do see the
outlines—through common interests and motivations—of a fuzzy sense of a
community. And the thing with fuzzy communities is that they don’t necessarily
need to be defined with the same clarity as enumerated communities, like
nations, do. Sudipta Kaviraj, who used the term fuzzy communities, also speaks
of a “narrative contract”—perhaps a useful way to think about how to make
sense of the bibliophilic motivations and intentions, or what you describe as
the “desire to have a relationship with texts and others that is not mediated
by market relations.”_
>
> _This seems a perfectly reasonable motivation except that it is one that
would be deemed impossible at the very least, and absurd at worst by those for
whom the world of books and ideas can only be mediated by the market. And it’s
this idea of the absurd and the illogical that I would like to think a little
bit about via the idea of the ludic, a term that I think might be useful to
deploy while thinking of ways of rewriting the social contract: a ludic
contract, if you will, entered into through routes allowed by ludic libraries.
_
>
> _If we trace the word ludic back to its French and Latin roots, we find it
going back to the idea of playing (from Latin _ludere _"to play" or _ludique
_“spontaneously playful”), but today it has mutated into most popular usage
(ludicrous) generally used in relation to an idea that is so impossible it
seems absurd. And more often than not the term conveys an absurdity associated
with a deviation from well-established norms including utility, seriousness,
purpose, and property._
>
> _But what if our participation in various forms of book sharing was less
like an invitation to enter a social contract, and more like an invitation to
play? But play what, you may ask, since the term play has childish and
sometimes frivolous connotation to it? And we are talking here about serious
business. Gadamer proposes that rather than the idea of fun and games, we can
think with the analogy of a cycle, suggesting that it was important not to
tighten the nuts on the axle too much, or else the wheel could not turn. “It
has to have some play in it … and not too much play, or the wheel will fall
off. It was all about _spielraum _, ‘play-room,’ some room for play. It needs
space.” _
>
> _The ludic, or the invitation to the ludic in this account, is first and
foremost a necessary relief—just as playing is—from constraining situations
and circumstances. They could be physical, monetary, or out of sheer
nonavailability (thus the desire for access could be thought of as a tactical
maneuver to create openings). They could be philosophical constraints
(epistemological, disciplinary), social constraints (divisions of class, work,
and leisure time). At any rate all efforts at participating in shadow
libraries seem propelled by an instinct to exceed the boundaries of the self
however defined, and to make some room for play or to create a “ludic
spaciousness,” as it were. _
>
> _The spatial metaphor is also related to the bounded/unbounded (another name
for freedom I guess) and to the extent that the unbounded allows us a way into
our impossible selves; they share a space with dreams, but rarely do we think
of the violation of the right to access as fundamentally being a violation of
our right to dream. Your compilation of the reasons that people wanted to join
Aaaaarg may well be thought of as an archive of one-sentence-long dreams of
the ludic library. _
>
> _If for Bachelard the house protects the dreamer, the library for me is a
ludic shelter, which brings me back to an interesting coincidence. I don’t
know what it is that prompted you to choose the name Aaaaarg.org; I don’t know
if you are aware it binds you irrevocably (to use the legal language of
contracts) with one of the very few theorists of the ludic, the Dutch
philosopher Johan Huizinga, who coined the word _homo ludens _(as against the
more functional, scientific homo sapiens or functional homo faber). In his
1938 text Huizinga observes that “the fun of playing, resists all analysis,
all logical interpretation,” and as a concept it cannot be reduced to any
other mental category. He feels that no language really has an exact
equivalent to the word fun but the closest he comes in his own language is the
Dutch word _aardigkeit, _so the line between aaaarg and aaard may have well
have been dreamt of before Aaaaarg.org even started._
>
> _More soon,_
>
> _Lawrence_
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