Graziano, Mars & Medak
Learning from #Syllabus
2019


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LEARNING FROM
#SYLLABUS
VALERIA GRAZIANO,
MARCELL MARS,
TOMISLAV MEDAK

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LEARNING FROM #SYLLABUS
VALERIA GRAZIANO, MARCELL MARS, TOMISLAV MEDAK
The syllabus is the manifesto of the 21st century.
—Sean Dockray and Benjamin Forster1
#Syllabus Struggles
In August 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old boy living in Ferguson, Missouri,
was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson. Soon after, as the civil protests denouncing police brutality and institutional racism began to mount across the United
States, Dr. Marcia Chatelain, Associate Professor of History and African American
Studies at Georgetown University, launched an online call urging other academics
and teachers ‘to devote the first day of classes to a conversation about Ferguson’ and ‘to recommend texts, collaborate on conversation starters, and inspire
dialogue about some aspect of the Ferguson crisis.’2 Chatelain did so using the
hashtag #FergusonSyllabus.
Also in August 2014, using the hashtag #gamergate, groups of users on 4Chan,
8Chan, Twitter, and Reddit instigated a misogynistic harassment campaign against
game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, media critic Anita Sarkeesian, as well as
a number of other female and feminist game producers, journalists, and critics. In the
following weeks, The New Inquiry editors and contributors compiled a reading list and
issued a call for suggestions for their ‘TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism’.3
In June 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United
States. In the weeks that followed, he became the presumptive Republican nominee,
and The Chronicle of Higher Education introduced the syllabus ‘Trump 101’.4 Historians N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain found ‘Trump 101’ inadequate, ‘a mock college syllabus […] suffer[ing] from a number of egregious omissions and inaccuracies’,
failing to include ‘contributions of scholars of color and address the critical subjects
of Trump’s racism, sexism, and xenophobia’. They assembled ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’.5
Soon after, in response to a video in which Trump engaged in ‘an extremely lewd
conversation about women’ with TV host Billy Bush, Laura Ciolkowski put together a
‘Rape Culture Syllabus’.6

1
2
3
4
5
6

Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office, ‘README.md’, Hyperreadings, 15 February
2018, https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.
Marcia Chatelain, ‘Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus’, Dissent Magazine, 28 November 2014,
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/teaching-ferguson-syllabus/.
‘TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism’, The New Inquiry, 2 September 2014, https://thenewinquiry.
com/tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
‘Trump 101’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 June 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/
Trump-Syllabus/236824/.
N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’, Public Books, 28 June 2016, https://
www.publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/.
Laura Ciolkowski, ‘Rape Culture Syllabus’, Public Books, 15 October 2016, https://www.
publicbooks.org/rape-culture-syllabus/.

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In April 2016, members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe established the Sacred Stone
Camp and started the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the construction of
which threatened the only water supply at the Standing Rock Reservation. The protest at the site of the pipeline became the largest gathering of native Americans in
the last 100 years and they earned significant international support for their ReZpect
Our Water campaign. As the struggle between protestors and the armed forces unfolded, a group of Indigenous scholars, activists, and supporters of the struggles of
First Nations people and persons of color, gathered under the name the NYC Stands
for Standing Rock Committee, put together #StandingRockSyllabus.7
The list of online syllabi created in response to political struggles has continued to
grow, and at present includes many more examples:
All Monuments Must Fall Syllabus
#Blkwomensyllabus
#BLMSyllabus
#BlackIslamSyllabus
#CharlestonSyllabus
#ColinKaepernickSyllabus
#ImmigrationSyllabus
Puerto Rico Syllabus (#PRSyllabus)
#SayHerNameSyllabus
Syllabus for White People to Educate Themselves
Syllabus: Women and Gender Non-Conforming People Writing about Tech
#WakandaSyllabus
What To Do Instead of Calling the Police: A Guide, A Syllabus, A Conversation, A
Process
#YourBaltimoreSyllabus
It would be hard to compile a comprehensive list of all the online syllabi that have
been created by social justice movements in the last five years, especially, but not
exclusively, those initiated in North America in the context of feminist and anti-racist
activism. In what is now a widely spread phenomenon, these political struggles use
social networks and resort to the hashtag template ‘#___Syllabus’ to issue calls for
the bottom-up aggregation of resources necessary for political analysis and pedagogy
centering on their concerns. For this reason, we’ll call this phenomenon ‘#Syllabus’.
During the same years that saw the spread of the #Syllabus phenomenon, university
course syllabi have also been transitioning online, often in a top-down process initiated
by academic institutions, which has seen the syllabus become a contested document
in the midst of increasing casualization of teaching labor, expansion of copyright protections, and technology-driven marketization of education.
In what follows, we retrace the development of the online syllabus in both of these
contexts, to investigate the politics enmeshed in this new media object. Our argument

7

‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://
nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.

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is that, on the one hand, #Syllabus names the problem of contemporary political culture as pedagogical in nature, while, on the other hand, it also exposes academicized
critical pedagogy and intellectuality as insufficiently political in their relation to lived
social reality. Situating our own stakes as both activists and academics in the present
debate, we explore some ways in which the radical politics of #Syllabus could be supported to grow and develop as an articulation of solidarity between amateur librarians
and radical educators.
#Syllabus in Historical Context: Social Movements and Self-Education
When Professor Chatelain launched her call for #FergusonSyllabus, she was mainly
addressing a community of fellow educators:
I knew Ferguson would be a challenge for teachers: When schools opened across
the country, how were they going to talk about what happened? My idea was simple, but has resonated across the country: Reach out to the educators who use
Twitter. Ask them to commit to talking about Ferguson on the first day of classes.
Suggest a book, an article, a film, a song, a piece of artwork, or an assignment that
speaks to some aspect of Ferguson. Use the hashtag: #FergusonSyllabus.8
Her call had a much greater resonance than she had originally anticipated as it reached
beyond the limits of the academic community. #FergusonSyllabus had both a significant impact in shaping the analysis and the response to the shooting of Michael
Brown, and in inspiring the many other #Syllabus calls that soon followed.
The #Syllabus phenomenon comprises different approaches and modes of operating. In some cases, the material is clearly claimed as the creation of a single individual, as in the case of #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus, which is prefaced on the project’s
landing page by a warning to readers that ‘material compiled in this syllabus should
not be duplicated without proper citation and attribution.’9 A very different position on
intellectual property has been embraced by other #Syllabus interventions that have
chosen a more commoning stance. #StandingRockSyllabus, for instance, is introduced as a crowd-sourced process and as a useful ‘tool to access research usually
kept behind paywalls.’10
The different workflows, modes of engagements, and positioning in relation to
intellectual property make #Syllabus readable as symptomatic of the multiplicity
that composes social justice movements. There is something old school—quite
literally—about the idea of calling a list of online resources a ‘syllabus’; a certain
quaintness, evoking thoughts of teachers and homework. This is worthy of investigation especially if contrasted with the attention dedicated to other online cultural
phenomena such as memes or fake news. Could it be that the online syllabus offers

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Marcia Chatelain, ‘How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson’, The Atlantic, 25
August 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/how-to-teach-kids-aboutwhats-happening-in-ferguson/379049/.
Frank Leon Roberts, ‘Black Lives Matter: Race, Resistance, and Populist Protest’, 2016, http://
www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/fall2016/.
‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://
nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.

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a useful, fresh format precisely for the characteristics that foreground its connections to older pedagogical traditions and techniques, predating digital cultures?
#Syllabus can indeed be analyzed as falling within a long lineage of pedagogical tools
created by social movements to support processes of political subjectivation and the
building of collective consciousness. Activists and militant organizers have time and
again created and used various textual media objects—such as handouts, pamphlets,
cookbooks, readers, or manifestos—to facilitate a shared political analysis and foment
mass political mobilization.
In the context of the US, anti-racist movements have historically placed great emphasis on critical pedagogy and self-education. In 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (an alliance of civil rights initiatives) and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), created a network of 41 temporary alternative
schools in Mississippi. Recently, the Freedom Library Project, a campaign born out
of #FergusonSyllabus to finance under-resourced pedagogical initiatives, openly
referenced this as a source of inspiration. The Freedom Summer Project of 1964
brought hundreds of activists, students, and scholars (many of whom were white)
from the north of the country to teach topics and issues that the discriminatory
state schools would not offer to black students. In the words of an SNCC report,
Freedom Schools were established following the belief that ‘education—facts to
use and freedom to use them—is the basis of democracy’,11 a conviction echoed
by the ethos of contemporary #Syllabus initiatives.
Bob Moses, a civil rights movement leader who was the head of the literary skills initiative in Mississippi, recalls the movement’s interest, at the time, in teaching methods
that used the very production of teaching materials as a pedagogical tool:
I had gotten hold of a text and was using it with some adults […] and noticed that
they couldn’t handle it because the pictures weren’t suited to what they knew […]
That got me into thinking about developing something closer to what people were
doing. What I was interested in was the idea of training SNCC workers to develop
material with the people we were working with.12
It is significant that for him the actual use of the materials the group created was much
less important than the process of producing the teaching materials together. This focus
on what could be named as a ‘pedagogy of teaching’, or perhaps more accurately ‘the
pedagogy of preparing teaching materials’, is also a relevant mechanism at play in the
current #Syllabus initiatives, as their crowdsourcing encourages different kinds of people
to contribute what they feel might be relevant resources for the broader movement.
Alongside the crucial import of radical black organizing, another relevant genealogy in
which to place #Syllabus would be the international feminist movement and, in particular, the strategies developed in the 70s campaign Wages for Housework, spearheaded

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12

Daniel Perlstein, ‘Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools’,
History of Education Quarterly 30.3 (Autumn 1990): 302.
Perlstein, ‘Teaching Freedom’: 306.

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by Selma James and Silvia Federici. The Wages for Housework campaign drove home
the point that unwaged reproductive labor provides a foundation for capitalist exploitation. They wanted to encourage women to denaturalize and question the accepted
division of labor into remunerated work outside the house and labor of love within
the confines of domesticity, discussing taboo topics such as ‘prostitution as socialized housework’ and ‘forced sterilization’ as issues impacting poor, often racialized,
women. The organizing efforts of Wages for Housework held political pedagogy at their
core. They understood that that pedagogy required:
having literature and other materials available to explain our goals, all written in a
language that women can understand. We also need different types of documents,
some more theoretical, others circulating information about struggles. It is important
that we have documents for women who have never had any political experience.
This is why our priority is to write a popular pamphlet that we can distribute massively and for free—because women have no money.13
The obstacles faced by the Wages for Housework campaign were many, beginning
with the issue of how to reach a dispersed constituency of isolated housewives
and how to keep the revolutionary message at the core of their claims accessible
to different groups. In order to tackle these challenges, the organizers developed
a number of innovative communication tactics and pedagogical tools, including
strategies to gain mainstream media coverage, pamphlets and leaflets translated
into different languages,14 a storefront shop in Brooklyn, and promotional tables at
local events.
Freedom Schools and the Wages for Housework campaign are only two amongst
the many examples of the critical pedagogies developed within social movements.
The #Syllabus phenomenon clearly stands in the lineage of this history, yet we should
also highlight its specificity in relation to the contemporary political context in which it
emerged. The #Syllabus acknowledges that since the 70s—and also due to students’
participation in protests and their display of solidarity with other political movements—
subjects such as Marxist critical theory, women studies, gender studies, and African
American studies, together with some of the principles first developed in critical pedagogy, have become integrated into the educational system. The fact that many initiators of #Syllabus initiatives are women and Black academics speaks to this historical
shift as an achievement of that period of struggles. However, the very necessity felt by
these educators to kick-start their #Syllabus campaigns outside the confines of academia simultaneously reveals the difficulties they encounter within the current privatized and exclusionary educational complex.

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Silvia Federici and Arlen Austin (eds) The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1977:
History, Theory and Documents. New York: Autonomedia, 2017: 37.
Some of the flyers and pamphlets were digitized by MayDay Rooms, ‘a safe haven for historical
material linked to social movements, experimental culture and the radical expression of
marginalised figures and groups’ in London, and can be found in their online archive: ‘Wages
for Housework: Pamphlets – Flyers – Photographs’, MayDay Rooms, http://maydayrooms.org/
archives/wages-for-housework/wfhw-pamphlets-flyers-photographs/.

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#Syllabus as a Media Object
Besides its contextualization within the historical legacy of previous grassroots mobilizations, it is also necessary to discuss #Syllabus as a new media object in its own
right, in order to fully grasp its relevance for the future politics of knowledge production and transmission.
If we were to describe this object, a #Syllabus would be an ordered list of links to
scholarly texts, news reports, and audiovisual media, mostly aggregated through a
participatory and iterative process, and created in response to political events indicative of larger conditions of structural oppression. Still, as we have seen, #Syllabus
as a media object doesn’t follow a strict format. It varies based on the initial vision
of their initiators, political causes, and social composition of the relevant struggle.
Nor does it follow the format of traditional academic syllabi. While a list of learning
resources is at the heart of any syllabus, a boilerplate university syllabus typically
also includes objectives, a timetable, attendance, coursework, examination, and an
outline of the grading system used for the given course. Relieved of these institutional
requirements, the #Syllabus typically includes only a reading list and a hashtag. The
reading list provides resources for understanding what is relevant to the here and
now, while the hashtag provides a way to disseminate across social networks the call
to both collectively edit and teach what is relevant to the here and now. Both the list
and the hashtag are specificities and formal features of the contemporary (internet)
culture and therefore merit further exploration in relation to the social dynamics at
play in #Syllabus initiatives.
The different phases of the internet’s development approached the problem of the
discoverability of relevant information in different ways. In the early days, the Gopher
protocol organized information into a hierarchical file tree. With the rise of World Wide
Web (WWW), Yahoo tried to employ experts to classify and catalog the internet into
a directory of links. That seemed to be a successful approach for a while, but then
Google (founded in 1998) came along and started to use a webgraph of links to rank
the importance of web pages relative to a given search query.
In 2005, Clay Shirky wrote the essay ‘Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and
Tags’,15 developed from his earlier talk ‘Folksonomies and Tags: The Rise of User-Developed Classification’. Shirky used Yahoo’s attempt to categorize the WWW to argue
against any attempt to classify a vast heterogenous body of information into a single
hierarchical categorical system. In his words: ‘[Yahoo] missed [...] that, if you’ve got
enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file
system. The links alone are enough.’ Those words resonated with many. By following
simple formatting rules, we, the internet users, whom Time magazine named Person of
the Year in 2006, proved that it is possible to collectively write the largest encyclopedia
ever. But, even beyond that, and as per Shirky’s argument, if enough of us organized
our own snippets of the vast body of the internet, we could replace old canons, hierarchies, and ontologies with folksonomies, social bookmarks, and (hash)tags.

15

Clay Shirky, ‘Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags’, 2005, http://shirky.com/writings/
herecomeseverybody/ontology_overrated.html.

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Very few who lived through those times would have thought that only a few years later
most user-driven services would be acquired by a small number of successful companies and then be shut down. Or, that Google would decide not to include the biggest
hashtag-driven platform, Twitter, into its search index and that the search results on
its first page would only come from a handful of usual suspects: media conglomerates, Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Reddit, Quora. Or, that Twitter would
become the main channel for the racist, misogynist, fascist escapades of the President
of United States.
This internet folk naivety—stoked by an equally enthusiastic, venture-capital-backed
startup culture—was not just naivety. This was also a period of massive experimental
use of these emerging platforms. Therefore, this history would merit to be properly
revisited and researched. In this text, however, we can only hint to this history: to contextualize how the hashtag as a formalization initially emerged, and how with time the
user-driven web lost some of its potential. Nonetheless, hashtags today still succeed in
propagating political mobilizations in the network environment. Some will say that this
propagation is nothing but a reflection of the internet as a propaganda machine, and
there’s no denying that hashtags do serve a propaganda function. However, it equally
matters that hashtags retain the capacity to shape coordination and self-organization,
and they are therefore a reflection of the internet as an organization machine.
As mentioned, #Syllabus as a media object is an ordered list of links to resources.
In the long history of knowledge retrieval systems and attempts to help users find
relevant information from big archives, the list on the internet continues in the tradition of the index card catalog in libraries, of charts in the music industry, or mixtapes
and playlists in popular culture, helping people tell their stories of what is relevant and
what isn’t through an ordered sequence of items. The list (as a format) together with
the hashtag find themselves in the list (pun intended) of the most iconic media objects
of the internet. In the network media environment, being smart in creating new lists
became the way to displace old lists of relevance, the way to dismantle canons, the
way to unlearn. The way to become relevant.
The Academic Syllabus Migrates Online
#Syllabus interventions are a challenge issued by political struggles to educators as
they expose a fundamental contradiction in the operations of academia. While critical pedagogies of yesteryear’s social movements have become integrated into the
education system, the radical lessons that these pedagogies teach students don’t
easily reconcile with their experience: professional practice courses, the rethoric of
employability and compulsory internships, where what they learn is merely instrumental, leaves them wondering how on earth they are to apply their Marxism or feminism
to their everyday lives?
Cognitive dissonance is at the basis of degrees in the liberal arts. And to make things
worse, the marketization of higher education, the growing fees and the privatization
of research has placed universities in a position where they increasingly struggle to
provide institutional space for critical interventions in social reality. As universities become more dependent on the ‘customer satisfaction’ of their students for survival, they
steer away from heated political topics or from supporting faculty members who might
decide to engage with them. Borrowing the words of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten,

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‘policy posits curriculum against study’,16 creating the paradoxical situation wherein
today’s universities are places in which it is possible to do almost everything except
study. What Harney and Moten propose instead is the re-appropriation of the diffuse
capacity of knowledge generation that stems from the collective processes of selforganization and commoning. As Moten puts it: ‘When I think about the way we use the
term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other
people.’17 And it is this practice of sharing a common repertoire—what Moten and
Harney call ‘rehearsal’18—that is crucially constitutive of a crowdsourced #Syllabus.
This contradiction and the tensions it brings to contemporary neoliberal academia can
be symptomatically observed in the recent evolution of the traditional academic syllabus. As a double consequence of (some) critical pedagogies becoming incorporated
into the teaching process and universities striving to reduce their liability risks, academic syllabi have become increasingly complex and extensive documents. They are
now understood as both a ‘social contract’ between the teachers and their students,
and ‘terms of service’19 between the institution providing educational services and the
students increasingly framed as sovereign consumers making choices in the market of
educational services. The growing official import of the syllabus has had the effect that
educators have started to reflect on how the syllabus translates the power dynamics
into their classroom. For instance, the critical pedagogue Adam Heidebrink-Bruno has
demanded that the syllabus be re-conceived as a manifesto20—a document making
these concerns explicit. And indeed, many academics have started to experiment with
the form and purpose of the syllabus, opening it up to a process of co-conceptualization with their students, or proposing ‘the other syllabus’21 to disrupt asymmetries.
At the same time, universities are unsurprisingly moving their syllabi online. A migration
that can be read as indicative of three larger structural shifts in academia.
First, the push to make syllabi available online, initiated in the US, reinforces the differential effects of reputation economy. It is the Ivy League universities and their professorial star system that can harness the syllabus to advertise the originality of their
scholarship, while the underfunded public universities and junior academics are burdened with teaching the required essentials. This practice is tied up with the replication
in academia of the different valorization between what is considered to be the labor of
production (research) and that of social reproduction (teaching). The low esteem (and
corresponding lower rewards and remuneration) for the kinds of intellectual labors that
can be considered labors of care—editing journals, reviewing papers or marking, for
instance—fits perfectly well with the gendered legacies of the academic institution.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, New York:
Autonomedia, 2013, p. 81.
17 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 110.
18 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 110.
19 Angela Jenks, ‘It’s In The Syllabus’, Teaching Tools, Cultural Anthropology website, 30 June 2016,
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/910-it-s-in-the-syllabu/.
20 Adam Heidebrink-Bruno, ‘Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture’,
Hybrid Pedagogy, 28 August 2014, http://hybridpedagogy.org/syllabus-manifesto-criticalapproach-classroom-culture/.
21 Lucy E. Bailey, ‘The “Other” Syllabus: Rendering Teaching Politics Visible in the Graduate
Pedagogy Seminar’, Feminist Teacher 20.2 (2010): 139–56.
16

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Second, with the withdrawal of resources to pay precarious and casualized academics during their ‘prep’ time (that is, the time in which they can develop new
course material, including assembling new lists of references, updating their courses as well as the methodologies through which they might deliver these), syllabi
now assume an ambivalent role between the tendencies for collectivization and
individualization of insecurity. The reading lists contained in syllabi are not covered
by copyrights; they are like playlists or recipes, which historically had the effect of
encouraging educators to exchange lesson plans and make their course outlines
freely available as a valuable knowledge common. Yet, in the current climate where
universities compete against each other, the authorial function is being extended
to these materials too. Recently, US universities have been leading a trend towards
the interpretation of the syllabus as copyrightable material, an interpretation that
opened up, as would be expected, a number of debates over who is a syllabus’
rightful owner, whether the academics themselves or their employers. If the latter interpretation were to prevail, this would enable universities to easily replace
academics while retaining their contributions to the pedagogical offer. The fruits of
a teacher’s labor could thus be turned into instruments of their own deskilling and
casualization: why would universities pay someone to write a course when they can
recycle someone else’s syllabus and get a PhD student or a precarious post doc to
teach the same class at a fraction of the price?
This tendency to introduce a logic of property therefore spurs competitive individualism and erasure of contributions from others. Thus, crowdsourcing the syllabus
in the context of growing precarization of labor risks remaining a partial process,
as it might heighten the anxieties of those educators who do not enjoy the security
of a stable job and who are therefore the most susceptible to the false promises of
copyright enforcement and authorship understood as a competitive, small entrepreneurial activity. However, when inserted in the context of live, broader political
struggles, the opening up of the syllabus could and should be an encouragement
to go in the opposite direction, providing a ground to legitimize the collective nature
of the educational process and to make all academic resources available without
copyright restrictions, while devising ways to secure the proper attribution and the
just remuneration of everyone’s labor.
The introduction of the logic of property is hard to challenge as it is furthered by commercial academic publishers. Oligopolists, such as Elsevier, are not only notorious for
using copyright protections to extract usurious profits from the mostly free labor of
those who write, peer review, and edit academic journals,22 but they are now developing all sorts of metadata, metrics, and workflow systems that are increasingly becoming central for teaching and research. In addition to their publishing business, Elsevier
has expanded its ‘research intelligence’ offering, which now encompasses a whole
range of digital services, including the Scopus citation database; Mendeley reference
manager; the research performance analytics tools SciVal and Research Metrics; the
centralized research management system Pure; the institutional repository and pub-

22 Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, ‘The Oligopoly of Academic
Publishers in the Digital Era’, PLoS ONE 10.6 (10 June 2015),https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502/.

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lishing platform Bepress; and, last but not least, grant discovery and funding flow tools
Funding Institutional and Elsevier Funding Solutions. Given how central digital services
are becoming in today’s universities, whoever owns these platforms is the university.
Third, the migration online of the academic syllabus falls into larger efforts by universities to ‘disrupt’ the educational system through digital technologies. The introduction
of virtual learning environments has led to lesson plans, slides, notes, and syllabi becoming items to be deposited with the institution. The doors of public higher education are being opened to commercial qualification providers by means of the rise in
metrics-based management, digital platforming of university services, and transformation of students into consumers empowered to make ‘real-time’ decisions on how to
spend their student debt.23 Such neoliberalization masquerading behind digitization
is nowhere more evident than in the hype that was generated around Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs), exactly at the height of the last economic crisis.
MOOCs developed gradually from the Massachusetts Institute of Techology’s (MIT) initial experiments with opening up its teaching materials to the public through the OpenCourseWare project in 2001. By 2011, MOOCs were saluted as a full-on democratization of access to ‘Ivy-League-caliber education [for] the world’s poor.’24 And yet, their
promise quickly deflated following extremely low completion rates (as low as 5%).25
Believing that in fifty years there will be no more than 10 institutions globally delivering
higher education,26 by the end of 2013 Sebastian Thrun (Google’s celebrated roboticist
who in 2012 founded the for-profit MOOC platform Udacity), had to admit that Udacity
offered a ‘lousy product’ that proved to be a total failure with ‘students from difficult
neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in
their lives.’27 Critic Aaron Bady has thus rightfully argued that:
[MOOCs] demonstrate what the technology is not good at: accreditation and mass
education. The MOOC rewards self-directed learners who have the resources and
privilege that allow them to pursue learning for its own sake [...] MOOCs are also a
really poor way to make educational resources available to underserved and underprivileged communities, which has been the historical mission of public education.28
Indeed, the ‘historical mission of public education’ was always and remains to this
day highly contested terrain—the very idea of a public good being under attack by
dominant managerial techniques that try to redefine it, driving what Randy Martin

23 Ben Williamson, ‘Number Crunching: Transforming Higher Education into “Performance Data”’,
Medium, 16 August 2018, https://medium.com/ussbriefs/number-crunching-transforming-highereducation-into-performance-data-9c23debc4cf7.
24 Max Chafkin, ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course’,
FastCompany, 14 November 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastianthrun-uphill-climb/.
25 ‘The Rise (and Fall?) Of the MOOC’, Oxbridge Essays, 14 November 2017, https://www.
oxbridgeessays.com/blog/rise-fall-mooc/.
26 Steven Leckart, ‘The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever’,
Wired, 20 March 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/.
27 Chafkin, ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun’.
28 Aaron Bady, ‘The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform’, Liberal Education 99.4 (Fall 2013),
https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/mooc-moment-and-end-reform.

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STATE MACHINES

aptly called the ‘financialization of daily life.’29 The failure of MOOCs finally points to a
broader question, also impacting the vicissitudes of #Syllabus: Where will actual study
practices find refuge in the social, once the social is made directly productive for capital at all times? Where will study actually ‘take place’, in the literal sense of the phrase,
claiming the resources that it needs for co-creation in terms of time, labor, and love?
Learning from #Syllabus
What have we learned from the #Syllabus phenomenon?
The syllabus is the manifesto of 21st century.
Political struggles against structural discrimination, oppression, and violence in the
present are continuing the legacy of critical pedagogies of earlier social movements
that coupled the process of political subjectivation with that of collective education.
By creating effective pedagogical tools, movements have brought educators and students into the fold of their struggles. In the context of our new network environment,
political struggles have produced a new media object: #Syllabus, a crowdsourced list
of resources—historic and present—relevant to a cause. By doing so, these struggles
adapt, resist, and live in and against the networks dominated by techno-capital, with
all of the difficulties and contradictions that entails.
What have we learned from the academic syllabus migrating online?
In the contemporary university, critical pedagogy is clashing head-on with the digitization of higher education. Education that should empower and research that should
emancipate are increasingly left out in the cold due to the data-driven marketization
of academia, short-cutting the goals of teaching and research to satisfy the fluctuating demands of labor market and financial speculation. Resistance against the capture of data, research workflows, and scholarship by means of digitization is a key
struggle for the future of mass intellectuality beyond exclusions of class, disability,
gender, and race.
What have we learned from #Syllabus as a media object?
As old formats transform into new media objects, the digital network environment defines the conditions in which these new media objects try to adjust, resist, and live. A
right intuition can intervene and change the landscape—not necessarily for the good,
particularly if the imperatives of capital accumulation and social control prevail. We
thus need to re-appropriate the process of production and distribution of #Syllabus
as a media object in its totality. We need to build tools to collectively control the workflows that are becoming the infrastructures on top of which we collaboratively produce
knowledge that is vital for us to adjust, resist, and live. In order to successfully intervene in the world, every aspect of production and distribution of these new media objects becomes relevant. Every single aspect counts. The order of items in a list counts.
The timestamp of every version of the list counts. The name of every contributor to

29 Randy Martin, Financialization Of Daily Life, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.

ACTIONS

127

every version of the list counts. Furthermore, the workflow to keep track of all of these
aspects is another complex media object—a software tool of its own—with its own order and its own versions. It is a recursive process of creating an autonomous ecology.
#Syllabus can be conceived as a recursive process of versioning lists, pointing to textual, audiovisual, or other resources. With all of the linked resources publicly accessible to all; with all versions of the lists editable by all; with all of the edits attributable to
their contributors; with all versions, all linked resources, all attributions preservable by
all, just such an autonomous ecology can be made for #Syllabus. In fact, Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office have already proposed such a methodology in
their Hyperreadings, a forkable readme.md plaintext document on GitHub. They write:
A text that by its nature points to other texts, the syllabus is already a relational
document acknowledging its own position within a living field of knowledge. It is
decidedly not self-contained, however it often circulates as if it were.
If a syllabus circulated as a HyperReadings document, then it could point directly to the texts and other media that it aggregates. But just as easily as it circulates, a HyperReadings syllabus could be forked into new versions: the syllabus
is changed because there is a new essay out, or because of a political disagreement, or because following the syllabus produced new suggestions. These forks
become a family tree where one can follow branches and trace epistemological
mutations.30
It is in line with this vision, which we share with the HyperReadings crew, and in line
with our analysis, that we, as amateur librarians, activists, and educators, make our
promise beyond the limits of this text.
The workflow that we are bootstrapping here will keep in mind every aspect of the media object syllabus (order, timestamp, contributor, version changes), allowing diversity
via forking and branching, and making sure that every reference listed in a syllabus
will find its reference in a catalog which will lead to the actual material, in digital form,
needed for the syllabus.
Against the enclosures of copyright, we will continue building shadow libraries and
archives of struggles, providing access to resources needed for the collective processes of education.
Against the corporate platforming of workflows and metadata, we will work with social
movements, political initiatives, educators, and researchers to aggregate, annotate,
version, and preserve lists of resources.
Against the extractivism of academia, we will take care of the material conditions that
are needed for such collective thinking to take place, both on- and offline.

30 Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office, ‘README.md’, Hyperreadings, 15 February
2018, https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.

128

STATE MACHINES

Bibliography
Bady, Aaron. ‘The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform’, Liberal Education 99.4 (Fall 2013), https://
www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/mooc-moment-and-end-reform/.
Bailey, Lucy E. ‘The “Other” Syllabus: Rendering Teaching Politics Visible in the Graduate Pedagogy
Seminar’, Feminist Teacher 20.2 (2010): 139–56.
Chafkin, Max. ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course’,
FastCompany, 14 November 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastianthrun-uphill-climb/.
Chatelain, Marcia. ‘How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson’, The Atlantic, 25 August
2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/how-to-teach-kids-about-whatshappening-in-ferguson/379049/.
_____. ‘Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus’, Dissent Magazine, 28 November 2014, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/teaching-ferguson-syllabus/.
Ciolkowski, Laura. ‘Rape Culture Syllabus’, Public Books, 15 October 2016, https://www.publicbooks.
org/rape-culture-syllabus/.
Connolly, N.D.B. and Keisha N. Blain. ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’, Public Books, 28 June 2016, https://www.
publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/.
Dockray, Sean, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office. ‘README.md’, HyperReadings, 15 February 2018,
https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.
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Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, New York:
Autonomedia, 2013.
Heidebrink-Bruno, Adam. ‘Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture’, Hybrid
Pedagogy, 28 August 2014, http://hybridpedagogy.org/syllabus-manifesto-critical-approach-classroom-culture/.
Jenks, Angela. ‘It’s In The Syllabus’, Teaching Tools, Cultural Anthropology website, 30 June 2016,
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/910-it-s-in-the-syllabus/.
Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, ‘The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era’, PLoS ONE 10.6 (10 June 2015), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502/.
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20 March 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/.
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History of Education Quarterly 30.3 (Autumn 1990).
Roberts, Frank Leon. ‘Black Lives Matter: Race, Resistance, and Populist Protest’, 2016, http://www.
blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/fall2016/.
‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.
Shirky, Clay. ‘Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags’, 2005, http://shirky.com/writings/
herecomeseverybody/ontology_overrated.html.
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com/blog/rise-fall-mooc/.
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tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
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Trump-Syllabus/236824/.
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archives/wages-for-housework/wfhw-pamphlets-flyers-photographs/.
Williamson, Ben. ‘Number Crunching: Transforming Higher Education into “Performance Data”’,
Medium, 16 August 2018, https://medium.com/ussbriefs/number-crunching-transforming-highereducation-into-performance-data-9c23debc4cf7/.


Mars, Medak & Sekulic
Taken Literally
2016


Taken literally
Marcell Mars
Tomislav Medak
Dubravka Sekulic

Free people united in building a society of
equals, embracing those whom previous
efforts have failed to recognize, are the historical foundation of the struggle against
enslavement, exploitation, discrimination
and cynicism. Building a society has never
been an easy-going pastime.
During the turbulent 20th century,
different trajectories of social transformation moved within the horizon set by
the revolutions of the 18th and 19th century: equality, brotherhood and liberty
– and class struggle. The 20th century experimented with various combinations
of economic and social rationales in the
arrangement of social reproduction. The
processes of struggle, negotiation, empowerment and inclusion of discriminated social groups constantly complexified and
dynamised the basic concepts regulating
social relations. However, after the process
of intensive socialisation in the form of either welfare state or socialism that dominated a good part of the 20th century, the
end of the century was marked by a return
in the regulation of social relations back
to the model of market domination and
private appropriation. Such simplification
and fall from complexity into a formulaic
state of affairs is not merely a symptom
of overall exhaustion, loss of imagination
and lacking perspective on further social
development, but rather indicates a cynical
abandonment of the effort to build society,
its idea, its vision – and, as some would
want, of society altogether.
In this article, we wish to revisit the
evolution of regulation of ownership in the
field of intellectual production and housing

as two examples of the historical dead-end
in which we find ourselves.
T H E C A P I TA L I S T M O D E
O F P RO D U C T I O N

According to the text-book definition, the
capitalist mode of production is the first
historical organisation of socio-economic relations in which appropriation of the
surplus from producers does not depend
on force, but rather on neutral laws of economic processes on the basis of which the
capitalist and the worker enter voluntarily
into a relation of production. While under
feudalism it was the aristocratic oligopoly
on violence that secured a hereditary hierarchy of appropriation, under capitalism the
neutral logic of appropriation was secured
by the state monopoly on violence. However, given that the early capitalist relations
in the English country-side did not emerge
outside the existing feudal inequalities, and
that the process of generalisation of capitalist relations, particularly after the rise of industrialisation, resulted in even greater and
even more hardened stratification, the state
monopoly on violence securing the neutral
logic of appropriation ended up mostly securing the hereditary hierarchy of appropriation. Although in the new social formation
neither the capitalist nor the worker was born
capitalist or born worker, the capitalist would
rarely become a worker and the worker a capitalist even rarer. However, under conditions
where the state monopoly on violence could
no longer coerce workers to voluntarily sell
their labour and where their resistance to
accept existing class relations could be

229

expressed in the withdrawal of their labour
power from the production process, their
consent would become a problem for the existing social model. That problem found its
resolution through a series of conflicts that
have resulted in historical concessions and
gains of class struggle ranging from guaranteed labor rights, through institutions of the
welfare state, to socialism.
The fundamental property relation
in the capitalist mode of production is that
the worker has an exclusive ownership over
his/her own labour power, while the capitalist has ownership over the means of production. By purchasing the worker's labour
power, the capitalist obtains the exclusive
right to appropriate the entire product of
worker's labour. However, as the regulation
of property in such unconditional formulaic
form quickly results in deep inequalities, it
could not be maintained beyond the early
days of capitalism. Resulting class struggles
and compromises would achieve a series of
conditions that would successively complexify the property relations.
Therefore, the issue of private property – which goods do we have the right to
call our own to the exclusion of others: our
clothes, the flat in which we live, means of
production, profit from the production process, the beach upon which we wish to enjoy
ourselves alone or to utilise by renting it out,
unused land in our neighbourhood – is not
merely a question of the optimal economic
allocation of goods, but also a question of
social rights and emancipatory opportunities that are required in order secure the
continuous consent of society's members to
its organisational arrangements.
230

Taken literally

OW NER S H I P R EG I M ES

Both the concept of private property over
land and the concept of copyright and
intellectual property have their shared
evolutionary beginnings during the early capitalism in England, at a time when
the newly emerging capitalist class was
building up its position in relation to the
aristocracy and the Church. In both cases, new actors entered into the processes
of political articulation, decision-making
and redistribution of power. However, the
basic process of ( re )defining relations has
remained ( until today ) a spatial demarcation: the question of who is excluded or
remains outside and how.
① In the early period of trade in books, after
the invention of the printing press in the 15th
century, the exclusive rights to commercial
exploitation of written works were obtained
through special permits from the Royal Censors, issued solely to politically loyal printers.
The copyright itself was constituted only in
the 17th century. It's economic function is to
unambiguously establish the ownership title
over the products of intellectual labour. Once
that title is established, there is a person with
whose consent the publisher can proceed in
commodifying and distributing the work to
the exclusion of others from its exploitation.
And while that right to economic benefit was
exclusively that of the publishers at the outset, as authors became increasingl aware that
the income from books guaranteed then an
autonomy from the sponsorship of the King
and the aristocracy, in the 19th century copyright gradually transformed into a legal right

that protected both the author and the publisher in equal measure. The patent rights underwent a similar development. They were
standardised in the 17th century as a precondition for industrial development, and were
soon established as a balance between the
rights of the individual-inventor and the
commercial interest of the manufacturer.
However, the balance of interests between the productive creative individuals
and corporations handling production and
distribution did not last long and, with
time, that balance started to lean further
towards protecting the interests of the corporations. With the growing complexity of
companies and their growing dependence
on intellectual property rights as instruments in 20th century competitive struggles, the economic aspect of intellectual
property increasingly passed to the corporation, while the author/inventor was
left only with the moral and reputational
element. The growing importance of intellectual property rights for the capitalist
economy has been evident over the last
three decades in the regular expansions of
the subject matter and duration of protection, but, most important of all – within
the larger process of integration of the capitalist world-system – in the global harmonisation and enforcement of rights protection. Despite the fact that the interests of
authors and the interests of corporations,
of the global south and the global north, of
the public interest and the corporate interest do not fall together, we are being given
a global and uniform – formulaic – rule of
the abstract logic of ownership, notwithstanding the diverging circumstances and

interests of different societies in the context of uneven development.
No-one is surprised today that, in
spite of their initial promises, the technological advances brought by the Internet,
once saddled with the existing copyright
regulation, did not enhance and expand
access to knowledge. But that dysfunction
is nowhere more evident than in academic publishing. This is a global industry of
the size of music recording industry dominated by an oligopoly of five major commercial publishers: Reed Elsevier, Taylor
& Francis, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and
Sage. While scientists write their papers,
do peer-reviews and edit journals for free,
these publishers have over past decades
taken advantage of their oligopolistic position to raise the rates of subscriptions they
sell mostly to publicly financed libraries at
academic institutions, so that the majority of libraries, even in the rich centres of
the global north, are unable to afford access to many journals. The fantastic profit
margins of over 30% that these publishers
reap from year to year are premised on denying access to scientific publications and
the latest developments in science not only
to the general public, but also students and
scholars around the world. Although that
oligopoly rests largely on the rights of the
authors, the authors receive no benefit
from that copyright. An even greater irony is, if they want to make their work open
access to others, the authors themselves or
the institutions that have financed the underlying research through the proxy of the
author are obliged to pay additionally to
the publishers for that ‘service’. ×
231

② With proliferation of enclosures and
signposts prohibiting access, picturesque
rural arcadias became landscapes of capitalistic exploitation. Those evicted by the
process of enclosure moved to the cities
and became wage workers. Far away from
the parts of the cities around the factories,
where working families lived squeezed
into one room with no natural light and
ventilation, areas of the city sprang up in
which the capitalists built their mansions.
At that time, the very possibility of participation in political life was conditioned
on private property, thus excluding and
discriminating by legal means entire social
groups. Women had neither the right to
property ownership nor inheritance rights.
Engels' description of the humiliating
living conditions of Manchester workers in
the 19th century pointed to the catastrophic
effects of industrialisation on the situation
of working class ( e.g. lower pay than during
the pre-industrial era ) and indicated that
the housing problem was not a direct consequence of exploitation but rather a problem
arising from inequitable redistribution of
assets. The idea that living quarters for the
workers could be pleasant, healthy and safe
places in which privacy was possible and
that that was not the exclusive right of the
rich, became an integral part of the struggle
for labor rights, and part of the consciousness of progressive, socially-minded architects and all others dedicated to solving the
housing problem.
Just as joining forces was as the
foundation of their struggle for labor and
political rights, joining forces was and has
remained the mechanism for addressing the
232

Taken literally

inadequate housing conditions. As early as
during the 19th century, Dutch working class
and impoverished bourgeoisie joined forces
in forming housing co-operatives and housing societies, squatting and building without permits on the edges of the cities. The
workers' struggle, enlightened bourgeoisie,
continued industrial development, as well
as the phenomenon of Utopian socialist-capitalists like Jean-Baptiste André Godin, who, for example, under the influence
of Charles Fourier's ideas, built a palace for
workers – the Familistery, all these exerted
pressure on the system and contributed to
the improvement of housing conditions for
workers. Still, the dominant model continued to replicate the rentier system in which
even those with inadequate housing found
someone to whom they could rent out a segment of their housing unit.
The general social collapse after
World War I, the Socialist Revolution and
the coming to power in certain European
cities of the social-democrats brought new
urban strategies. In ‘red’ Vienna, initially
under the urban planning leadership of
Otto Neurath, socially just housing policy
and provision of adequate housing was regarded as the city's responsibility. The city
considered the workers who were impoverished by the war and who sought a way out
of their homelessness by building housing
themselves and tilling gardens as a phenomenon that should be integrated, and
not as an error that needed to be rectified.
Sweden throughout the 1930s continued
with its right to housing policy and served
as an example right up until the mid-1970s
both to the socialist and ( capitalist ) wel-

fare states. The idea of ( private ) ownership became complexified with the idea
of social ownership ( in Yugoslavia ) and
public/social housing elsewhere, but since
the bureaucratic-technological system responsible for implementation was almost
exclusively linked with the State, housing
ended up in unwieldy complicated systems
in which there was under-investment in
maintenance. That crisis was exploited as
an excuse to impose as necessary paradigmatic changes that we today regard as the
beginning of neo-liberal policies.
At the beginning of the 1980s in
Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher created an atmosphere of a state of emergency
around the issue of housing ownership
and, with the passing of the Housing Act
in 1980, reform was set in motion that
would deeply transform the lives of the
Brits. The promises of a better life merely
based on the opportunity to buy and become a ( private ) owner never materialised.
The transition from the ‘right to housing’ and the ‘right to ( participation in the
market through ) purchase’ left housing
to the market. There the prices first fell
drastically at the beginning of the 1990s.
That was followed by a financialisation
and speculation on the property market
making housing space in cities like London primarily an avenue of investment, a
currency, a tax haven and a mechanism
by which the rich could store their wealth.
In today's generation, working and lower
classes, even sometimes the upper middle
class can no longer even dream of buying
a flat in London. ×

P L AT F O R M I SAT I O N

Social ownership and housing – understood both literally as living space, but
also as the articulation of the right to decent life for all members of society – which
was already under attack for decades prior,
would be caught completely unprepared
for the information revolution and its
zero marginal cost economy. Take for
example the internet innovation: after a
brief period of comradely couch-surfing,
the company AirBnB in an even shorter period transformed from the service
allowing small enterprising home owners to rent out their vacant rooms into a
catalyst for amassing the ownership over
housing stock with the sole purpose of
renting it out through AirBnb. In the
last phase of that transformation, new
start-ups appeared that offered to the
newly consolidated feudal lords the service of easier management of their housing ‘fleet’, where the innovative approach
boils down to the summoning of service
workers who, just like Uber drivers, seek
out blue dots on their smart-phone maps
desperately rushing – in fear of bad rating,
for a minimal fee and no taxes paid – to
turn up there before their equally precarious competition does. With these innovations, the residents end up being offered
shorter and shorter but increasingly more
expensive contracts on rental, while in a
worse case the flats are left unoccupied
because the rich owner-investors have
realised that an unoccupied flat is a more
profitable deal than a risky investment in
a market in crisis.

233

The information revolution stepped out
onto the historical stage with the promise
of radical democratisation of communication, culture and politics. Anyone could
become the media and address the global
public, emancipate from the constrictive
space of identity, and obtain access to entire
knowledge of the world. However, instead
of resulting in democratising and emancipatory processes, with the handing over of
Internet and technological innovation to the
market in 1990s it resulted in the gradual
disruption of previous social arrangements
in the allocation of goods and in the intensification of the commodification process.
That trajectory reached its full-blown development in the form of Internet platforms
that simultaneously enabled old owners of
goods to control more closely their accessibility and permited new owners to seek out
new forms of commercial exploitation. Take
for example Google Books, where the process of digitization of the entire printed culture of the world resulted in no more than
ad and retail space where only few books
can be accessed for free. Or Amazon Kinde,
where the owner of the platform has such
dramatic control over books that on behest
of copyright holders it can remotely delete
a purchased copy of a book, as quite indicatively happened in 2009 with Orwell's 1984.
The promised technological innovation that
would bring a new turn of the complexity in
the social allocation of goods resulted in a
simplification and reduction of everything
into private property.
The history of resistance to such extreme forms of enclosure of culture and
knowledge is only a bit younger than the
234

Taken literally

processes of commodification themselves
that had begun with the rise of trade in
books. As early as the French Revolution,
the confiscation of books from the libraries
of clergy and aristocracy and their transfer
into national and provincial libraries signalled that the right of access to knowledge
was a pre-condition for full participation
in society. For its part, the British labor
movement of the mid-19th century had to
resort to opening workers' reading-rooms,
projects of proletarian self-education and
the class struggle in order to achieve the
establishment of the institution of public
libraries financed by taxes, and the right
thereby for access to knowledge and culture for all members of society.
SHAD OW P U B L I C L I B R A R I ES

Public library as a space of exemption from
commodification of knowledge and culture
is an institution that complexifies the unconditional and formulaic application of
intellectual property rights, making them
conditional on the public interest that all
members of the society have the right of
access to knowledge. However, with the
transition to the digital, public libraries
have been radically limited in acquiring
anything they could later provide a decommodified access to. Publishers do not
wish to sell electronic books to libraries,
and when they do decide to give them a
lending licence, that licence runs out after 26 lendings. Closed platforms for electronic publications where the publishers
technologically control both the medium
and the ways the work can be used take us

back to the original and not very well-conceived metaphor of ownership – anyone
who owns the land can literally control
everything that happens on that land –
even if that land is the collective process
of writing and reading. Such limited space
for the activity of public libraries is in radical contrast to the potentials for universal
access to all of culture and knowledge that
digital distribution could make possible
at a very low cost, but with considerable
change in the regulation of intellectual production in society.
Since such change would not be in the
interest of formulaic application of intellectual property, acts of civil disobedience to
that regime have over the last twenty years
created a number of 'shadow public libraries'
that provide universal access to knowledge
and culture in the digital domain in the way
that the public libraries are not allowed to:
Library Genesis, Science Hub, Aaaaarg,
Monoskop, Memory of the World or Ubuweb. They all have a simple objective – to
provide access to books, journals and digitised knowledge to all who find themselves
outside the rich academic institutions of the
West and who do not have the privilege of
institutional access.
These shadow public libraries bravely remind society of all the watershed moments in the struggles and negotiations
that have resulted in the establishment
of social institutions, so as to first enable
the transition from what was an unjust,
discriminating and exploitative to a better society, and later guarantee that these
gains would not be dismantled or rescinded. That reminder is, however, more than a

mere hacker pastime, just as the reactions
of the corporations are not easy-going at
all: in mid-2015, Reed Elsevier initiated
a court case against Library Genesis and
Science Hub and by the end of 2015 the
court in New York issued a preliminary
injunction ordering the shut-down of
their domains and access to the servers. At
the same time, a court case was brought
against Aaaaarg in Quebec.
Shadow public libraries are also a
reminder of how technological complexity does not have to be harnessed only in
the conversion of socialised resources back
into the simplified formulaic logic of private property, how we can take technology
in our hands, in the hands of society that is
not dismantling its own foundations, but
rather taking care of and preserving what
is worthwhile and already built – and thus
building itself further. But, most powerfully shadow public libraries are a reminder to us of how the focus and objective of
our efforts should not be a world that can
be readily managed algorithmically, but a
world in which our much greater achievement is the right guaranteed by institutions – envisioned, demanded, struggled
for and negotiated – a society. Platformisation, corporate concentration, financialisation and speculation, although complex
in themselves, are in the function of the
process of de-socialisation. Only by the
re-introduction of the complexity of socialised management and collective re-appropriation of resources can technological
complexity in a world of escalating expropriation be given the perspective of universal sisterhood, equality and liberation.

235

 

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