Over the last few monsoons I lived with the dread that the rain would
eventually find its ways through my leaky terrace roof and destroy my books.
Last August my fears came true when I woke up in the middle of the night to
see my room flooded and water leaking from the roof and through the walls.
Much of the night was spent rescuing the books and shifting them to a dry
room. While timing and speed were essential to the task at hand they were also
the key hazards navigating a slippery floor with books perched till one’s
neck. At the end of the rescue mission, I sat alone, exhausted amongst a
mountain of books assessing the damage that had been done, but also having
found books I had forgotten or had not seen in years; books which I had
thought had been permanently borrowed by others or misplaced found their way
back as I set many aside in a kind of ritual of renewed commitment.
Sorting the badly damaged from the mildly wet, I could not help but think
about the fragile histories of books from the library of Alexandria to the
great Florence flood of 1966. It may have seemed presumptuous to move from the
precarity of one’s small library and collection to these larger events, but is
there any other way in which one experiences earth-shattering events if not
via a microcosmic filtering through one’s own experiences? I sent a distressed
email to a friend Sandeep a committed bibliophile and book collector with a
fantastic personal library, who had also been responsible for many of my new
acquisitions. He wrote back on August 17, and I quote an extract of the email:
> Dear Lawrence
>
> I hope your books are fine. I feel for you very deeply, since my nightmares
about the future all contain as a key image my books rotting away under a
steady drip of grey water. Where was this leak, in the old house or in the
new? I spent some time looking at the books themselves: many of them I greeted
like old friends. I see you have Lewis Hyde’s _Trickster Makes the World_ and
Edward Rice’s _Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton_ in the pile: both top-class
books. (Burton is a bit of an obsession with me. The man did and saw
everything there was to do and see, and thought about it all, and wrote it all
down in a massive pile of notes and manuscripts. He squirrelled a fraction of
his scholarship into the tremendous footnotes to the Thousand and One Nights,
but most of it he could not publish without scandalising the Victorians, and
then he died, and his widow made a bonfire in the backyard, and burnt
everything because she disapproved of these products of a lifetime’s labors,
and of a lifetime such as few have ever had, and no one can ever have again. I
almost hope there is a special hell for Isabel Burton to burn in.)
Moving from one’s personal pile to the burning of the work of one of the
greatest autodidacts of the nineteenth century and back it was strangely
comforting to be reminded that libraries—the greatest of time machines
invented—were testimonies to both the grandeur and the fragility of
civilizations. Whenever I enter huge libraries it is with a tingling sense of
excitement normally reserved for horror movies, but at the same time this same
sense of awe is often accompanied by an almost debilitating sense of what it
means to encounter finitude as it is dwarfed by centuries of words and
scholarship. Yet strangely when I think of libraries it is rarely the New York
public library that comes to mind even as I wish that we could have similar
institutions in India. I think instead of much smaller collections—sometimes
of institutions but often just those of friends and acquaintances. I enjoy
browsing through people’s bookshelves, not just to discern their reading
preferences or to discover for myself unknown treasures, but also to take
delight in the local logic of their library, their spatial preferences and to
understand the order of things not as a global knowledge project but as a
personal, often quirky rationale.
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_library-of-congress.jpg,2000 "Machine
room for book transportation at the Library of Congress, early 20th century.")
Machine room for book transportation at the Library of Congress, early 20th
century.
Like romantic love, bibliophilia is perhaps shaped by one’s first love. The
first library that I knew intimately was a little six by eight foot shop
hidden in a by-lane off one of the busiest roads in Bangalore, Commercial
street. From its name to what it contained, Mecca stores could well have been
transported out of an Arabian nights tale. One side of the store was lined
with plastic ware and kitchen utensils of every shape and size while the other
wall was piled with books, comics, and magazines. From my eight-year-old
perspective it seemed large enough to contain all the knowledge of the world.
I earned a weekly stipend packing noodles for an hour every day after school
in the home shop that my parents ran, which I used to either borrow or buy
second hand books from the store. I was usually done with them by Sunday and
would have them reread by Wednesday. The real anguish came in waiting from
Wednesday to Friday for the next set. After finally acquiring a small
collection of books and comics myself I decided—spurred on by a fatal
combination of entrepreneurial enthusiasm and a pedantic desire to educate
others—to start a small library myself. Packing my books into a small aluminum
case and armed with a makeshift ledger, I went from house to house convincing
children in the neighborhood to forgo twenty-five paisa in exchange for a book
or comic with an additional caveat that they were not to share them with any
of their friends. While the enterprise got off to a reasonable start it soon
met its end when I realized that despite my instructions, my friends were
generously sharing the comics after they were done with them, which thereby
ended my biblioempire ambitions.
Over the past few years the explosion of ebook readers and consequent rise in
the availability of pirated books have opened new worlds to my booklust.
[Library.nu](library.nu), which began as gigapedia, suddenly made the idea of
the universal library seem like reality. By the time it shut down in February
2012 the library had close to a million books and over half a million active
users. Bibliophiles across the world were distraught when the site was shut
down and if it were ever possible to experience what the burning of the
library of Alexandria must have felt it was that collective ache of seeing the
closure of [library.nu.](library.nu)
What brings together something as monumental as the New York public library, a
collective enterprise like [library.nu](library.nu) and Mecca stores if not
the word library? As spaces they may have little in common but as virtual
spaces they speak as equals even if the scale of their imagination may differ.
All of them partake of their share in the world of logotopias. In an
exhibition designed to celebrate the place of the library in art, architecture
and imagination the curator Sascha Hastings coined the term logotopia to
designate “word places”—a happy coincidence of architecture and language.
There is however a risk of flattening the differences between these spaces by
classifying them all under a single utopian ideal of the library. Imagination
after all has a geography and physiology and requires our alertness to these
distinctions. Lets think instead of an entire pantheon (both of spaces as well
as practices) that we can designate as shadow libraries (or shadow logotopias
if you like) which exist in the shadows cast by the long history of monumental
libraries. While they are often dwarfed by the idea of the library, like the
shadows cast by our bodies, sometimes these shadows surge ahead of the body.
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_london-blitz-WEB.jpg,2000 "The London
Library after the Blitz, c. 1940.")
The London Library after the Blitz, c. 1940.
At the heart of all libraries lies a myth—that of the burning of the library
of Alexandria. No one knows what the library of Alexandria looked like or
possesses an accurate list of its contents. What we have long known though is
a sense of loss. But a loss of what? Of all the forms of knowledge in the
world in a particular time. Because that was precisely what the library of
Alexandria sought to collect under its roofs. It is believed that in order to
succeed in assembling a universal library, King Ptolemy I wrote “to all the
sovereigns and governors on earth” begging them to send to him every kind of
book by every kind of author, “poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and
sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians, and all others too.” The king’s
scholars had calculated that five hundred thousand scrolls would be required
if they were to collect in Alexandria “all the books of all the peoples of the
world.”1
What was special about the Library of Alexandria was the fact that until then
the libraries of the ancient world were either private collections of an
individual or government storehouses where legal and literary documents were
kept for official reference. By imagining a space where the public could have
access to all the knowledge of the world, the library also expressed a new
idea of the human itself. While the library of Alexandria is rightfully
celebrated, what is often forgotten in the mourning of its demise is another
library—one that existed in the shadows of the grand library but whose
whereabouts ensured that it survived Caesar’s papyrus destroying flames.
According to the Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first
century BC, Alexandria boasted a second library, the so-called daughter
library, intended for the use of scholars not affiliated with the Museion. It
was situated in the south-western neighborhood of Alexandria, close to the
temple of Serapis, and was stocked with duplicate copies of the Museion
library’s holdings. This shadow library survived the fire that destroyed the
primary library of Alexandria but has since been eclipsed by the latter’s
myth.
Alberto Manguel says that if the library of Alexandria stood tall as an
expression of universal ambitions, there is another structure that haunts our
imagination: the tower of Babel. If the library attempted to conquer time, the
tower sought to vanquish space. He says “The Tower of Babel in space and the
Library of Alexandria in time are the twin symbols of these ambitions. In
their shadow, my small library is a reminder of both impossible yearnings—the
desire to contain all the tongues of Babel and the longing to possess all the
volumes of Alexandria.”2 Writing about the two failed projects Manguel adds
that when seen within the limiting frame of the real, the one exists only as
nebulous reality and the other as an unsuccessful if ambitious real estate
enterprise. But seen as myths, and in the imagination at night, the solidity
of both buildings for him is unimpeachable.3
The utopian ideal of the universal library was more than a question of built
up form or space or even the possibility of storing all of the knowledge of
the world; its real aspiration was in the illusion of order that it could
impose on a chaotic world where the lines drawn by a fine hairbrush
distinguished the world of animals from men, fairies from ghosts, science from
magic, and Europe from Japan. In some cases even after the physical structure
that housed the books had crumbled and the books had been reduced to dust the
ideal remained in the form of the order imagined for the library. One such
residual evidence comes to us by way of the _Pandectae_ —a comprehensive
bibliography created by Conrad Gesner in 1545 when he feared that the Ottoman
conquerors would destroy all the books in Europe. He created a bibliography
from which the library could be built again—an all embracing index which
contained a systematic organization of twenty principal groups with a matrix
like structure that contained 30,000 concepts.4
It is not surprising that Alberto Manguel would attempt write a literary,
historical and personal history of the library. As a seventeen-year-old man in
Buenos Aries, Manguel read for the blind seer Jorge Luis Borges who once
imagined in his appropriately named story—The Tower of Babel—paradise as a
kind of library. Modifying his mentor’s statement in what can be understood as
a gesture to the inevitable demands of the real and yet acknowledging the
possible pleasures of living in shadows, Manguel asserts that sometimes
paradise must adapt itself to suit circumstantial requirements. Similarly
Jacques Rancière writing about the libraries of the working class in the
eighteenth century tells us about Gauny a joiner and a boy in love with
vagrancy and botany who decides to build a library for himself. For the sons
of the poor proletarians living in Saint Marcel district, libraries were built
only a page at a time. He learnt to read by tracing the pages on which his
mother bought her lentils and would be disappointed whenever he came to the
end of a page and the next page was not available, even though he urged his
mother to buy her lentils from the same grocer. 5
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_DGF-D-Tropics-detail-hi-res-
WEB.jpg,2000 "Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Chronotopes & Dioramas , 2009.
Diorama installation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York.")
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, _Chronotopes & Dioramas_, 2009. Diorama
installation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York.
Is the utopian ideal of the universal library as exemplified by the library of
Alexandria or modernist pedagogic institutions of the twentieth century
adequate to the task of describing the space of the shadow library, or do we
need a different account of these other spaces? In an era of the ebook reader
where the line between a book and a library is blurred, the very idea of a
library is up for grabs. It has taken me well over two decades to build a
collection of a few thousand books while around two hundred thousand books
exist as bits and bytes on my computer. Admittedly hard drives crash and data
is lost, but is that the same threat as those of rain or fire? Which then is
my library and which its shadow? Or in the spirit of logotopias would it be
more appropriate to ask the spatial question: where is the library?
If the possibility of having 200,000 books on one’s computer feels staggering
here is an even more startling statistic. The Library of Congress which is the
largest library in the world with holdings of approximately thirty million
books, which would—if they were piled on the floor—cover 364 kilometers could
potentially fit into an SD card. It is estimated that by 2030 an ordinary SD
card will have the capacity of storing up to 64 TB and assuming each book were
digitized at an average size of 1MB it would technically be possible to fit
two Libraries of Congress in one’s pocket.
It sounds like science fiction, but isn’t it the case that much of the science
fiction of a decade ago finds itself comfortably within the weaves of everyday
life. How do we make sense of the future of the library? While it may be
tempting to throw our hands up in boggled perplexity about what it means to be
able to have thirty million books lets face it: the point of libraries have
never been that you will finish what’s there. Anyone with even a modest book
collection will testify to the impossibility of ever finishing their library
and if anything at all the library stands precisely at the cusp of our
finitude and our infinity. Perhaps that is what Borges—the consummate mixer of
time and space—meant when he described paradise as a library, not as a spatial
idea but a temporal one: that it was only within the confines of infinity that
one imagine finishing reading one’s library. It would therefore be more
interesting to think of the shadow library as a way of thinking about what it
means to dwell in knowledge. While all our aspirations for a habitat should
have a utopian element to them, lets face it, utopias have always been
difficult spaces to live in.
In contrast to the idea of utopia is heterotopia—a term with its origins in
medicine (referring to an organ of the body that had been dislodged from its
usual space) and popularized by Michel Foucault both in terms of language as
well as a spatial metaphor. If utopia exists as a nowhere or imaginary space
with no connection to any existing social spaces, then heterotopias in
contrast are realities that exist and are even foundational, but in which all
other spaces are potentially inverted and contested. A mirror for instance is
simultaneously a utopia (placeless place) even as it exists in reality. But
from the standpoint of the mirror you discover your absence as well. Foucault
remarks, “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this
place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once
absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and
absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this
virtual point which is over there.”6
In _The Order of Things_ Foucault sought to investigate the conceptual space
which makes the order of knowledge possible; in his famed reading of Borges’s
Chinese encyclopedia he argues that the impossibility involved in the
encyclopedia consists less in the fantastical status of the animals and their
coexistence with real animals such as (d) sucking pigs and (e) sirens, but in
where they coexist and what “transgresses the boundaries of all imagination,
of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which
links each of those categories to all the others.” 7 Heterotopias destabilize
the ground from which we build order and in doing so reframe the very
epistemic basis of how we know.
Foucault later developed a greater spatial understanding of heterotopias in
which he uses specific examples such as the cemetery (at once the space of the
familiar since everyone has someone in the cemetery and at the heart of the
city but also over a period of time the other city, where each family
possesses its dark resting place).8 Indeed, the paradox of heterotopias is
that they are both separate from yet connected to all other spaces. This
connectedness is precisely what builds contestation into heterotopias.
Imaginary spaces such as utopias exist completely outside of order.
Heteretopias by virtue of their connectedness become sites in which epistemes
collide and overlap. They bring together heterogeneous collections of unusual
things without allowing them a unity or order established through resemblance.
Instead, their ordering is derived from a process of similitude that produces,
in an almost magical, uncertain space, monstrous combinations that unsettle
the flow of discourse.
If the utopian ideal of the library was to bring together everything that we
know of the world then the length of its bookshelves was coterminous with the
breadth of the world. But like its predecessors in Alexandria and Babel the
project is destined to be incomplete haunted by what it necessarily leaves out
and misses. The library as heterotopia reveals itself only through the
interstices and lays bare the fiction of any possibility of a coherent ground
on which a knowledge project can be built. Finally there is the question of
where we stand once the grounds that we stand on itself has been dislodged.
The answer from my first foray into the tiny six by eight foot Mecca store to
the innumerable hours spent on [ library.nu]( library.nu) remains the same:
the heterotopic pleasure of our finite selves in infinity.
×
This essay is a part of a work I am doing for an exhibition curated by Raqs
Media Collective, Sarai Reader 09. The show began on August 19, 2012, with a
deceptively empty space containing only the proposal, with ideas for the
artworks to come over a period of nine months. See .
**Lawrence Liang** is a researcher and writer based at the Alternative Law
Forum, Bangalore. His work lies at the intersection of law and cultural
politics, and has in recent years been looking at question of media piracy. He
is currently finish a book on law and justice in Hindi cinema.
It is hard to avoid the feeling these days that the future is behind us. It’s
not so much that time has stopped, but rather that the sense of promise and
purpose that once drove historical progress has become impossible to sustain.
On the one hand, the faith in modernist, nationalist, or universalist utopias
continues to retreat, while on the other, a more immediate crisis of faith has
accompanied the widespread sense of diminishing economic prospects felt in so
many places. Not to mention...
Over the last few monsoons I lived with the dread that the rain would
eventually find its ways through my leaky terrace roof and destroy my books.
Last August my fears came true when I woke up in the middle of the night to
see my room flooded and water leaking from the roof and through the walls.
Much of the night was spent rescuing the books and shifting them to a dry
room. While timing and speed were essential to the task at hand they were also
the key hazards navigating a slippery floor...
Metahaven
## [Captives of the Cloud: Part I](/journal/37/61232/captives-of-the-cloud-
part-i/)
We are the voluntary prisoners of the cloud; we are being watched over by
governments we did not elect. Wael Ghonim, Google's Egyptian executive, said:
“If you want to liberate a society just give them the internet.” 1 But how
does one liberate a society that already has the internet? In a society
permanently connected through pervasive broadband networks, the shared
internet is, bit by bit and piece by piece, overshadowed by the “cloud.” The
Coming of the Cloud The cloud,...
Amelia Groom
## [There’s Nothing to See Here: Erasing the
Monochrome](/journal/37/61233/there-s-nothing-to-see-here-erasing-the-
monochrome/)
There was once a typist from Texas named Bette Nesmith Graham, who wasn’t very
good at her job. In 1951 she started erasing her typing mistakes with a white
tempera paint solution she mixed in her kitchen blender. She called her
invention Mistake Out and began distributing small green bottles of it to her
coworkers. In 1956 she founded the delectably named Mistake Out Company.
Shortly after, she was apparently fired from her typist job because she made a
“mistake” that she failed to cover...
Nato Thompson
## [The Last Pictures: Interview with Trevor Paglen](/journal/37/61238/the-
last-pictures-interview-with-trevor-paglen/)
In 1963 NASA launched the first communications satellite, Syncom 2, into a
geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, humans have slowly
and methodically added to this space-based communications infrastructure.
Currently, more than 800 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit form a man-made
ring of satellites around Earth at an altitude of 36,000 kilometers. Most of
these spacecraft powered down long ago, yet continue to float aimlessly around
the planet. Geostationary satellites...
Claire Tancons
## [Carnival to Commons: Pussy Riot, Punk Protest, and the Exercise of
Democratic Culture](/journal/37/61239/carnival-to-commons-pussy-riot-punk-
protest-and-the-exercise-of-democratic-culture/)
Once again, the press has dismissed a popular movement as carnival—this time
not Occupy Wall Street, but the anti-Putin protests. On March 1, 2012, in a
Financial Times article titled “Carnival spirit is not enough to change
Russia,” Konstantin von Eggert wrote, “One cannot sustain [the movement] on
carnival spirit alone.” 1 A little over a week later, Reuters sought to close
the debate with an article by Alissa de Carbonnel, in which she announced,
“The carnival is over for Russia’s...
Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood
## [Breaking the Contract](/journal/37/61241/breaking-the-contract/)
1\. The Contract The Duchampian revolution leads not to the liberation of the
artist from work, but to his or her proletarization via alienated construction
and transportation work. In fact, contemporary art institutions no longer need
an artist as a traditional producer. Rather, today the artist is more often
hired for a certain period of time as a worker to realize this or that
institutional project. — Boris Groys 1 When his readymades entered the space
of art, Duchamp...
Shadow Libraries
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Notes - Shadow Libraries
1
Esther Shipman and Sascha Hastings eds., _Logotopia: The Library in
Architecture Art and the Imagination,_ (Cambridge Galleries: Abc Art Books
Canada, 2008).
Go to Text
2
Alberto Manguel, “My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds. _Logotopia, The
Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC
Art Books Canada, 2008)._
Go to Text
3
Alberto Manguel, _The Library at Night_ , (Yale University Press 2009).
Go to Text
4
Ray Hastings and Esther Shipman, eds. _Logotopia: The Library in Architecture
Art and the Imagination_. Cambridge Galleries / ABC Art Books Canada, 2008.
Go to Text
5
Jacques Rancière, _The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France,_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
Go to Text
6
Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in _Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology_ ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179; For Foucault on
language and heterotopias see _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences,_ (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Go to Text
7
Ibid, xv.
Go to Text
8
In Foucault, “Different Spaces,” which was presented as a lecture to the
_Architecture Studies Circle_ in 1967, a few years after the writing of _The
Order of Things_.
Go to Text
Esther Shipman and Sascha Hastings eds., _Logotopia: The Library in
Architecture Art and the Imagination,_ (Cambridge Galleries: Abc Art Books
Canada, 2008).
Alberto Manguel, “My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds. _Logotopia, The
Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC
Art Books Canada, 2008)._
Alberto Manguel, _The Library at Night_ , (Yale University Press 2009).
Ray Hastings and Esther Shipman, eds. _Logotopia: The Library in Architecture
Art and the Imagination_. Cambridge Galleries / ABC Art Books Canada, 2008.
Jacques Rancière, _The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France,_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in _Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology_ ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179; For Foucault on
language and heterotopias see _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences,_ (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Ibid, xv.
In Foucault, “Different Spaces,” which was presented as a lecture to the
_Architecture Studies Circle_ in 1967, a few years after the writing of _The
Order of Things_.
Dockray, Forster & Public Office
README.md
2018
## Introduction
How might we ensure the survival and availability of community libraries,
individual collections and other precarious archives? If these libraries,
archives and collections are unwanted by official institutions or, worse,
buried beneath good intentions and bureaucracy, then what tools and platforms
and institutions might we develop instead?
While trying to both formulate and respond to these questions, we began making
Dat Library and HyperReadings:
**Dat Library** distributes libraries across many computers so that many
people can provide disk space and bandwidth, sharing in the labour and
responsibility of the archival infrastructure.
**HyperReadings** implements ‘reading lists’ or a structured set of pointers
(a list, a syllabus, a bibliography, etc.) into one or more libraries,
_activating_ the archives.
## Installation
The easiest way to get started is to install [Dat Library as a desktop
app](http://dat-dat-dat-library.hashbase.io), but there is also a programme
called ‘[datcat](http://github.com/sdockray/dat-cardcat)’, which can be run on
the command line or included in other NodeJS projects.
## Accidents of the Archive
The 1996 UNESCO publication [Lost Memory: Libraries and Archives Destroyed in
the Twentieth Century](http://www.stephenmclaughlin.net/ph-
library/texts/UNESCO%201996%20-%20Lost%20Memory_%20Libraries%20and%20Archives%20Destroyed%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century.pdf)
makes the fragility of historical repositories startlingly clear. “[A]cidified
paper that crumbles to dust, leather, parchment, film and magnetic light
attacked by light, heat humidity or dust” all assault archives. “Floods,
fires, hurricanes, storms, earthquakes” and, of course, “acts of war,
bombardment and fire, whether deliberate or accidental” wiped out significant
portions of many hundreds of major research libraries worldwide. When
expanding the scope to consider public, private, and community libraries, that
number becomes uncountable.
Published during the early days of the World Wide Web, the report acknowledges
the emerging role of digitization (“online databases, CD-ROM etc.”), but today
we might reflect on the last twenty years, which has also introduced new forms
of loss.
Digital archives and libraries are subject to a number of potential hazards:
technical accidents like disk failures, accidental deletions, misplaced data
and imperfect data migrations, as well as political-economic accidents like
defunding of the hosting institution, deaccessioning parts of the collection
and sudden restrictions of access rights. Immediately after library.nu was
shut down on the grounds of copyright infringement in 2012, [Lawrence Liang
wrote](https://kafila.online/2012/02/19/library-nu-r-i-p/) of feeling “first
and foremost a visceral experience of loss.”
Whatever its legal status, the abrupt absence of a collection of 400,000 books
appears to follow a particularly contemporary pattern. In 2008, Aaron Swartz
moved millions of US federal court documents out from behind a paywall,
resulting in a trial and an FBI investigation. Three years later he was
arrested and indicted for a similar gesture, systematically downloading
academic journal articles from JSTOR. That year, Kazakhstani scientist
Alexandra Elbakyan began [Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub) in
response to scientific journal articles that were prohibitively expensive for
scholars based outside of Western academic institutions. (See for further analysis and an alternative
approach to the same issues: “When everyone is librarian, library is
everywhere.”) The repository, growing to more than 60 millions papers, was
sued in 2015 by Elsevier for $15 million, resulting in a permanent injunction.
Library Genesis, another library of comparable scale, finds itself in a
similar legal predicament.
Arguably one of the largest digital archives of the “avant-garde” (loosely
defined), UbuWeb is transparent about this fragility. In 2011, its founder
[Kenneth Goldsmith wrote](http://www.ubu.com/resources/): “by the time you
read this, UbuWeb may be gone. […] Never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu
could vanish for any number of reasons: our ISP pulls the plug, our university
support dries up, or we simply grow tired of it.” Even the banality of
exhaustion is a real risk to these libraries.
The simple fact is that some of these libraries are among the largest in the
world yet are subject to sudden disappearance. We can only begin to guess at
what the contours of “Lost Memory: Libraries and Archives Destroyed in the
Twenty-First Century” will be when it is written ninety years from now.
## Non-profit, non-state archives
Cultural and social movements have produced histories which are only partly
represented in state libraries and archives. Often they are deemed too small
or insignificant or, in some cases, dangerous. Most frequently, they are not
deemed to be anything at all — they are simply neglected. While the market,
eager for new resources to exploit, might occasionally fill in the gaps, it is
ultimately motivated by profit and not by responsibility to communities or
archives. (We should not forget the moment [Amazon silently erased legally
purchased copies of George Orwell’s
1984](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html)
from readers’ Kindle devices because of a change in the commercial agreement
with the publisher.)
So, what happens to these minor libraries? They are innumerable, but for the
sake of illustration let’s say that each could be represented by a single
book. Gathered together, these books would form a great library (in terms of
both importance and scale). But to extend the metaphor, the current reality
could be pictured as these books flying off their shelves to the furthest
reaches of the world, their covers flinging open and the pages themselves
scattering into bookshelves and basements, into the caring hands of relatives
or small institutions devoted to passing these words on to future generations.
While the massive digital archives listed above (library.nu, Library Genesis,
Sci-Hub, etc.) could play the role of the library of libraries, they tend to
be defined more as sites for [biblioleaks](https://www.jmir.org/2014/4/e112/).
Furthermore, given the vulnerability of these archives, we ought to look for
alternative approaches that do not rule out using their resources, but which
also do not _depend_ on them.
Dat Library takes the concept of “a library of libraries” not to manifest it
in a single, universal library, but to realise it progressively and partially
with different individuals, groups and institutions.
## Archival properties
So far, the emphasis of this README has been on _durability_ , and the
“accidents of the archive” have been instances of destruction and loss. The
persistence of an archive is, however, no guarantee of its _accessibility_ , a
common reality in digital libraries where access management is ubiquitous.
Official institutions police access to their archives vigilantly for the
ostensible purpose of preservation, but ultimately create a rarefied
relationship between the archives and their publics. Disregarding this
precious tendency toward preciousness, we also introduce _adaptability_ as a
fundamental consideration in the making of the projects Dat Library and
HyperReadings.
To adapt is to fit something for a new purpose. It emphasises that the archive
is not a dead object of research but a set of possible tools waiting to be
activated in new circumstances. This is always a possibility of an archive,
but we want to treat this possibility as desirable, as the horizon towards
which these projects move. We know how infrastructures can attenuate desire
and simply make things difficult. We want to actively encourage radical reuse.
In the following section, we don’t define these properties but rather discuss
how we implement (or fail to implement) them in software, while highlighting
some of the potential difficulties introduced.
### Durability
In 1964, in the midst of the “loss” of the twentieth-century, Paul Baran’s
RAND Corporation publication [On Distributed
Communications](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf)
examined “redundancy as one means of building … highly survivable and reliable
communications systems”, thus midwifing the military foundations of the
digital networks that we operate within today. While the underlying framework
of the Internet generally follows distributed principles, the client–server/
request–response model of the HTTP protocol is highly centralised in practice
and is only as durable as the server.
Capitalism places a high value on originality and novelty, as exemplified in
art where the ultimate insult would to be the label “redundant”. Worse than
being derivative or merely unoriginal, being redundant means having no reason
to exist — a uselessness that art can’t tolerate. It means wasting a perfectly
good opportunity to be creative or innovative. In a relational network, on the
other hand, redundancy is a mode of support. It doesn’t stimulate competition
to capture its effects, but rather it is a product of cooperation. While this
attitude of redundancy arose within a Western military context, one can’t help
but notice that the shared resources, mutual support, and common
infrastructure seem fundamentally communist in nature. Computer networks are
not fundamentally exploitative or equitable, but they are used in specific
ways and they operate within particular economies. A redundant network of
interrelated, mutually supporting computers running mostly open-source
software can be the guts of an advanced capitalist engine, like Facebook. So,
could it be possible to organise our networked devices, embedded as they are
in a capitalist economy, in an anti-capitalist way?
Dat Library is built on the [Dat
Protocol](https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/papers/dat-paper.md),
a peer-to-peer protocol for syncing folders of data. It is not the first
distributed protocol ([BitTorrent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent)
is the best known and is noted as an inspiration for Dat), nor is it the only
new one being developed today ([IPFS](https://ipfs.io) or the Inter-Planetary
File System is often referenced in comparison), but it is unique in its
foundational goals of preserving scientific knowledge as a public good. Dat’s
provocation is that by creating custom infrastructure it will be possible to
overcome the accidents that restrict access to scientific knowledge. We would
specifically acknowledge here the role that the Dat community — or any
community around a protocol, for that matter — has in the formation of the
world that is built on top of that protocol. (For a sense of the Dat
community’s values — see its [code of conduct](https://github.com/datproject
/Code-of-Conduct/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md).)
When running Dat Library, a person sees their list of libraries. These can be
thought of as similar to a
[torrent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrent_file), where items are stored
across many computers. This means that many people will share in the provision
of disk space and bandwidth for a particular library, so that when someone
loses electricity or drops their computer, the library will not also break.
Although this is a technical claim — one that has been made in relation to
many projects, from Baran to BitTorrent — it is more importantly a social
claim: the users and lovers of a library will share the library. More than
that, they will share in the work of ensuring that it will continue to be
shared.
This is not dissimilar to the process of reading generally, where knowledge is
distributed and maintained through readers sharing and referencing the books
important to them. As [Peter Sloterdijk
describes](https://rekveld.home.xs4all.nl/tech/Sloterdijk_RulesForTheHumanZoo.pdf),
written philosophy is “reinscribed like a chain letter through the
generations, and despite all the errors of reproduction — indeed, perhaps
because of such errors — it has recruited its copyists and interpreters into
the ranks of brotherhood (sic)”. Or its sisterhood — but, the point remains
clear that the reading / writing / sharing of texts binds us together, even in
disagreement.
### Accessibility
In the world of the web, durability is synonymous with accessibility — if
something can’t be accessed, it doesn’t exist. Here, we disentangle the two in
order to consider _access_ independent from questions of resilience.
##### Technically Accessible
When you create a new library in Dat, a unique 64-digit “key” will
automatically be generated for it. An example key is
`6f963e59e9948d14f5d2eccd5b5ac8e157ca34d70d724b41cb0f565bc01162bf`, which
points to a library of texts. In order for someone else to see the library you
have created, you must provide to them your library’s unique key (by email,
chat, on paper or you could publish it on your website). In short, _you_
manage access to the library by copying that key, and then every key holder
also manages access _ad infinitum_.
At the moment this has its limitations. A Dat is only writable by a single
creator. If you want to collaboratively develop a library or reading list, you
need to have a single administrator managing its contents. This will change in
the near future with the integration of
[hyperdb](https://github.com/mafintosh/hyperdb) into Dat’s core. At that
point, the platform will enable multiple contributors and the management of
permissions, and our single key will become a key chain.
How is this key any different from knowing the domain name of a website? If a
site isn’t indexed by Google and has a suitably unguessable domain name, then
isn’t that effectively the same degree of privacy? Yes, and this is precisely
why the metaphor of the key is so apt (with whom do you share the key to your
apartment?) but also why it is limited. With the key, one not only has the
ability to _enter_ the library, but also to completely _reproduce_ the
library.
##### Consenting Accessibility
When we say “accessibility”, some hear “information wants to be free” — but
our idea of accessibility is not about indiscriminate open access to
everything. While we do support, in many instances, the desire to increase
access to knowledge where it has been restricted by monopoly property
ownership, or the urge to increase transparency in delegated decision-making
and representative government, we also recognise that Indigenous knowledge
traditions often depend on ownership, control, consent, and secrecy in the
hands of the traditions’ people. [see [“Managing Indigenous Knowledge and
Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual
Property”](https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/system/files_force/Aus%20Indigenous%20Knowledge%20and%20Libraries.pdf?download=1),
pg 83] Accessibility understood in merely quantitative terms isn’t able to
reconcile these positions, which this is why we refuse to limit “access” to a
question of technology.
While “digital rights management” technologies have been developed almost
exclusively for protecting the commercial interests of capitalist property
owners within Western intellectual property regimes, many of the assumptions
and technological implementations are inadequate for the protection of
Indigenous knowledge. Rather than describing access in terms of commodities
and ownership of copyright, it might be defined by membership, status or role
within a community, and the rules of access would not be managed by a
generalised legal system but by the rules and traditions of the people and
their knowledge. [[“The Role of Information Technologies in Indigenous
Knowledge
Management”](https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/system/files_force/Aus%20Indigenous%20Knowledge%20and%20Libraries.pdf?download=1),
101-102] These rights would not expire, nor would they be bought and sold,
because they are shared, i.e., held in common.
It is important, while imagining the possibilities of a technological
protocol, to also consider how different _cultural protocols_ might be
implemented and protected through the life of a project like Dat Library.
Certain aspects of this might be accomplished through library metadata, but
ultimately it is through people hosting their own archives and libraries
(rather than, for example, having them hosted by a state institution) that
cultural protocols can be translated and reproduced. Perhaps we should flip
the typical question of how might a culture exist within digital networks to
instead ask how should digital networks operate within cultural protocols?
### Adaptability (ability to use/modify as one’s own)
Durability and accessibility are the foundations of adoptability. Many would
say that this is a contradiction, that adoption is about use and
transformation and those qualities operate against the preservationist grain
of durability, that one must always be at the expense of the other. We say:
perhaps that is true, but it is a risk we’re willing to take because we don’t
want to be making monuments and cemeteries that people approach with reverence
or fear. We want tools and stories that we use and adapt and are always making
new again. But we also say: it is through use that something becomes
invaluable, which may change or distort but will not destroy — this is the
practical definition of durability. S.R. Ranganathan’s very first Law of
Library Science was [“BOOKS ARE FOR
USE”](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b99721;view=1up;seq=37),
which we would extend to the library itself, such that when he arrives at his
final law, [“THE LIBRARY IS A LIVING
ORGANISM”](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b99721;view=1up;seq=432),
we note that to live means not only to change, but also to live _in the
world_.
To borrow and gently distort another concept of Raganathan’s concepts, namely
that of ‘[Infinite
Hospitality](http://www.dextersinister.org/MEDIA/PDF/InfiniteHospitality.pdf)’,
it could be said that we are interested in ways to construct a form of
infrastructure that is infinitely hospitable. By this we mean, infrastructure
that accommodates the needs and desires of new users/audiences/communities and
allows them to enter and contort the technology to their own uses. We really
don’t see infrastructure as aimed at a single specific group, but rather that
it should generate spaces that people can inhabit as they wish. The poet Jean
Paul once wrote that books are thick letters to friends. Books as
infrastructure enable authors to find their friends. This is how we ideally
see Dat Library and HyperReadings working.
## Use cases
We began work on Dat Library and HyperReadings with a range of exemplary use
cases, real-world circumstances in which these projects might intervene. Not
only would the use cases make demands on the software we were and still are
beginning to write, but they would also give us demands to make on the Dat
protocol, which is itself still in the formative stages of development. And,
crucially, in an iterative feedback loop, this process of design produces
transformative effects on those situations described in the use cases
themselves, resulting in further new circumstances and new demands.
### Thorunka
Wendy Bacon and Chris Nash made us aware of Thorunka and Thor.
_Thorunka_ and _Thor_ were two underground papers in the early 1970’s that
spewed out from a censorship controversy surrounding the University of New
South Wales student newspaper _Tharunka_. Between 1971 and 1973, the student
magazine was under focused attack from the NSW state police, with several
arrests made on charges of obscenity and indecency. Rather than ceding to the
charges, this prompted a large and sustained political protest from Sydney
activists, writers, lawyers, students and others, to which _Thorunka_ and
_Thor_ were central.
> “The campaign contested the idea of obscenity and the legitimacy of the
legal system itself. The newspapers campaigned on the war in Vietnam,
Aboriginal land rights, women’s and gay liberation, and the violence of the
criminal justice system. By 1973 the censorship regime in Australia was
broken. Nearly all the charges were dropped.” – [Quotation from the 107
Projects Event](http://107.org.au/event/tharunka-thor-journalism-politics-
art-1970-1973/).
Although the collection of issues of _Tharunka_ is largely accessible [via
Trove](http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/24773115), the subsequent issues
of _Thorunka_ , and later _Thor_ , are not. For us, this demonstrates clearly
how collections themselves can encourage modes of reading. If you focus on
_Tharunka_ as a singular and long-standing periodical, this significant
political moment is rendered almost invisible. On the other hand, if the
issues are presented together, with commentary and surrounding publications,
the political environment becomes palpable. Wendy and Chris have kindly
allowed us to make their personal collection available via Dat Library (the
key is: 73fd26846e009e1f7b7c5b580e15eb0b2423f9bea33fe2a5f41fac0ddb22cbdc), so
you can discover this for yourself.
### Academia.edu alternative
Academia.edu, started in 2008, has raised tens of millions of dollars as a
social network for academics to share their publications. As a for-profit
venture, it is rife with metrics and it attempts to capitalise on the innate
competition and self-promotion of precarious knowledge workers in the academy.
It is simultaneously popular and despised: popular because it fills an obvious
desire to share the fruits of ones intellectual work, but despised for the
neoliberal atmosphere that pervades every design decision and automated
correspondence. It is, however, just trying to provide a return on investment.
[Gary Hall has written](http://www.garyhall.info/journal/2015/10/18/does-
academiaedu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant.html) that “its financial
rationale rests … on the ability of the angel-investor and venture-capital-
funded professional entrepreneurs who run Academia.edu to exploit the data
flows generated by the academics who use the platform as an intermediary for
sharing and discovering research”. Moreover, he emphasises that in the open-
access world (outside of the exploitative practice of for-profit publishers
like Elsevier, who charge a premium for subscriptions), the privileged
position is to be the one “ _who gate-keeps the data generated around the use
of that content_ ”. This lucrative position has been produced by recent
“[recentralising tendencies](http://commonstransition.org/the-revolution-will-
not-be-decentralised-blockchains/)” of the internet, which in Academia’s case
captures various, scattered open access repositories, personal web pages, and
other archives.
Is it possible to redecentralise? Can we break free of the subjectivities that
Academia.edu is crafting for us as we are interpellated by its infrastructure?
It is incredibly easy for any scholar running Dat Library to make a library of
their own publications and post the key to their faculty web page, Facebook
profile or business card. The tricky — and interesting — thing would be to
develop platforms that aggregate thousands of these libraries in direct
competition with Academia.edu. This way, individuals would maintain control
over their own work; their peer groups would assist in mirroring it; and no
one would be capitalising on the sale of data related to their performance and
popularity.
We note that Academia.edu is a typically centripetal platform: it provides no
tools for exporting one’s own content, so an alternative would necessarily be
a kind of centrifuge.
This alternative is becoming increasingly realistic. With open-access journals
already paving the way, there has more recently been a [call for free and open
access to citation data](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/06
/scholars-push-free-access-online-citation-data-saying-they-need-and-deserve-
access). [The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)](https://i4oc.org) is
mobilising against the privatisation of data and working towards the
unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data. We see their new
database of citations as making this centrifugal force a possibility.
### Publication format
In writing this README, we have strung together several references. This
writing might be published in a book and the references will be listed as
words at the bottom of the page or at the end of the text. But the writing
might just as well be published as a HyperReadings object, providing the
reader with an archive of all the things we referred to and an editable
version of this text.
A new text editor could be created for this new publication format, not to
mention a new form of publication, which bundles together a set of
HyperReadings texts, producing a universe of texts and references. Each
HyperReadings text might reference others, of course, generating something
that begins to feel like a serverless World Wide Web.
It’s not even necessary to develop a new publication format, as any book might
be considered as a reading list (usually found in the footnotes and
bibliography) with a very detailed description of the relationship between the
consulted texts. What if the history of published works were considered in
this way, such that we might always be able to follow a reference from one
book directly into the pages of another, and so on?
### Syllabus
The syllabus is the manifesto of the twenty-first century. From [Your
Baltimore “Syllabus”](https://apis4blacklives.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/your-
baltimore-syllabus/), to
[#StandingRockSyllabus](https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/),
to [Women and gender non-conforming people writing about
tech](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qx8JDqfuXoHwk4_1PZYWrZu3mmCsV_05Fe09AtJ9ozw/edit),
syllabi are being produced as provocations, or as instructions for
reprogramming imaginaries. They do not announce a new world but they point out
a way to get there. As a programme, the syllabus shifts the burden of action
onto the readers, who will either execute the programme on their own fleshy
operating system — or not. 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.
## Proposition (or Presuppositions)
While the software that we have started to write is a proposition in and of
itself, there is no guarantee as to _how_ it will be used. But when writing,
we _are_ imagining exactly that: we are making intuitive and hopeful
presuppositions about how it will be used, presuppositions that amount to a
set of social propositions.
### The role of individuals in the age of distribution
Different people have different technical resources and capabilities, but
everyone can contribute to an archive. By simply running the Dat Library
software and adding an archive to it, a person is sharing their disk space and
internet bandwidth in the service of that archive. At first, it is only the
archive’s index (a list of the contents) that is hosted, but if the person
downloads the contents (or even just a small portion of the contents) then
they are sharing in the hosting of the contents as well. Individuals, as
supporters of an archive or members of a community, can organise together to
guarantee the durability and accessibility of an archive, saving a future
UbuWeb from ever having to worry about if their ‘ISP pulling the plug’. As
supporters of many archives, as members of many communities, individuals can
use Dat Library to perform this function many times over.
On the Web, individuals are usually users or browsers — they use browsers. In
spite of the ostensible interactivity of the medium, users are kept at a
distance from the actual code, the infrastructure of a website, which is run
on a server. With a distributed protocol like Dat, applications such as
[Beaker Browser](https://beakerbrowser.com) or Dat Library eliminate the
central server, not by destroying it, but by distributing it across all of the
users. Individuals are then not _just_ users, but also hosts. What kind of
subject is this user-host, especially as compared to the user of the server?
Michel Serres writes in _The Parasite_ :
> “It is raining; a passer-by comes in. Here is the interrupted meal once
more. Stopped for only a moment, since the traveller is asked to join the
diners. His host does not have to ask him twice. He accepts the invitation and
sits down in front of his bowl. The host is the satyr, dining at home; he is
the donor. He calls to the passer-by, saying to him, be our guest. The guest
is the stranger, the interrupter, the one who receives the soup, agrees to the
meal. The host, the guest: the same word; he gives and receives, offers and
accepts, invites and is invited, master and passer-by… An invariable term
through the transfer of the gift. It might be dangerous not to decide who is
the host and who is the guest, who gives and who receives, who is the parasite
and who is the table d’hote, who has the gift and who has the loss, and where
hospitality begins with hospitality.” — Michel Serres, The Parasite (Baltimore
and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 15–16.
Serres notes that _guest_ and _host_ are the same word in French; we might say
the same for _client_ and _server_ in a distributed protocol. And we will
embrace this multiplying hospitality, giving and taking without measure.
### The role of institutions in the age of distribution
David Cameron launched a doomed initiative in 2010 called the Big Society,
which paired large-scale cuts in public programmes with a call for local
communities to voluntarily self-organise to provide these essential services
for themselves. This is not the political future that we should be working
toward: since 2010, austerity policies have resulted in [120,000 excess deaths
in England](http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/11/e017722). In other words,
while it might seem as though _institutions_ might be comparable to _servers_
, inasmuch as both are centralised infrastructures, we should not give them up
or allow them to be dismantled under the assumption that those infrastructures
can simply be distributed and self-organised. On the contrary, institutions
should be defended and organised in order to support the distributed protocols
we are discussing.
One simple way for a larger, more established institution to help ensure the
durability and accessibility of diverse archives is through the provision of
hardware, network capability and some basic technical support. It can back up
the archives of smaller institutions and groups within its own community while
also giving access to its own archives so that those collections might be put
to new uses. A network of smaller institutions, separated by great distances,
might mirror each other’s archives, both as an expression of solidarity and
positive redundancy and also as a means of circulating their archives,
histories and struggles amongst each of the others.
It was the simultaneous recognition that some documents are too important to
be privatised or lost to the threats of neglect, fire, mould, insects, etc.,
that prompted the development of national and state archives (See page 39 in
[Beredo, B. C., Import of the archive: American colonial bureaucracy in the
Philippines, 1898-1916](http://hdl.handle.net/10125/101724)). As public
institutions they were, and still are, tasked with often competing efforts to
house and preserve while simultaneously also ensuring access to public
documents. Fire and unstable weather understandably have given rise to large
fire-proof and climate-controlled buildings as centralised repositories,
accompanied by highly regulated protocols for access. But in light of new
technologies and their new risks, as discussed above, it is compelling to
argue now that, in order to fulfil their public duty, public archives should
be distributing their collections where possible and providing their resources
to smaller institutions and community groups.
Through the provision of disk space, office space, grants, technical support
and employment, larger institutions can materially support smaller
organisations, individuals and their archival afterlives. They can provide
physical space and outreach for dispersed collectors, gathering and piecing
together a fragmented archive.
But what happens as more people and collections are brought in? As more
institutional archives are allowed to circulate outside of institutional
walls? As storage is cut loose from its dependency on the corporate cloud and
into forms of interdependency, such as mutual support networks? Could this
open up spaces for new forms of not-quite-organisations and queer-
institutions? These would be almost-organisations that uncomfortable exist
somewhere between the common categorical markings of the individual and the
institution. In our thinking, its not important what these future forms
exactly look like. Rather, as discussed above, what is important to us is that
in writing software we open up spaces for the unknown, and allow others agency
to build the forms that work for them. It is only in such an atmosphere of
infinite hospitality that we see the future of community libraries, individual
collections and other precarious archives.
## A note on this text
This README was, and still is being, collaboratively written in a
[Git](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git)
[repository](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repository_\(version_control\)).
Git is a free and open-source tool for version control used in software
development. All the code for Hyperreadings, Dat Library and their numerous
associated modules are managed openly using Git and hosted on GitHub under
open source licenses. In a real way, Git’s specification formally binds our
collaboration as well as the open invitation for others to participate. As
such, the form of this README reflects its content. Like this text, these
projects are, by design, works in progress that are malleable to circumstances
and open to contributions, for example by opening a pull request on this
document or raising an issue on our GitHub repositories.