In text indexing and other machine reading applications the term "bag of
words" is frequently used to underscore how processing algorithms often
represent text using a data structure (word histograms or weighted vectors)
where the original order of the words in sentence form is stripped away. While
"bag of words" might well serve as a cautionary reminder to programmers of the
essential violence perpetrated to a text and a call to critically question the
efficacy of methods based on subsequent transformations, the expression's use
seems in practice more like a badge of pride or a schoolyard taunt that would
go: Hey language: you're nothin' but a big BAG-OF-WORDS.
## Bag of words
In information retrieval and other so-called _machine-reading_ applications
(such as text indexing for web search engines) the term "bag of words" is used
to underscore how in the course of processing a text the original order of the
words in sentence form is stripped away. The resulting representation is then
a collection of each unique word used in the text, typically weighted by the
number of times the word occurs.
Bag of words, also known as word histograms or weighted term vectors, are a
standard part of the data engineer's toolkit. But why such a drastic
transformation? The utility of "bag of words" is in how it makes text amenable
to code, first in that it's very straightforward to implement the translation
from a text document to a bag of words representation. More significantly,
this transformation then opens up a wide collection of tools and techniques
for further transformation and analysis purposes. For instance, a number of
libraries available in the booming field of "data sciences" work with "high
dimension" vectors; bag of words is a way to transform a written document into
a mathematical vector where each "dimension" corresponds to the (relative)
quantity of each unique word. While physically unimaginable and abstract
(imagine each of Shakespeare's works as points in a 14 million dimensional
space), from a formal mathematical perspective, it's quite a comfortable idea,
and many complementary techniques (such as principle component analysis) exist
to reduce the resulting complexity.
What's striking about a bag of words representation, given is centrality in so
many text retrieval application is its irreversibility. Given a bag of words
representation of a text and faced with the task of producing the original
text would require in essence the "brain" of a writer to recompose sentences,
working with the patience of a devoted cryptogram puzzler to draw from the
precise stock of available words. While "bag of words" might well serve as a
cautionary reminder to programmers of the essential violence perpetrated to a
text and a call to critically question the efficacy of methods based on
subsequent transformations, the expressions use seems in practice more like a
badge of pride or a schoolyard taunt that would go: Hey language: you're
nothing but a big BAG-OF-WORDS. Following this spirit of the term, "bag of
words" celebrates a perfunctory step of "breaking" a text into a purer form
amenable to computation, to stripping language of its silly redundant
repetitions and foolishly contrived stylistic phrasings to reveal a purer
inner essence.
## Book of words
Lieber's Standard Telegraphic Code, first published in 1896 and republished in
various updated editions through the early 1900s, is an example of one of
several competing systems of telegraph code books. The idea was for both
senders and receivers of telegraph messages to use the books to translate
their messages into a sequence of code words which can then be sent for less
money as telegraph messages were paid by the word. In the front of the book, a
list of examples gives a sampling of how messages like: "Have bought for your
account 400 bales of cotton, March delivery, at 8.34" can be conveyed by a
telegram with the message "Ciotola, Delaboravi". In each case the reduction of
number of transmitted words is highlighted to underscore the efficacy of the
method. Like a dictionary or thesaurus, the book is primarily organized around
key words, such as _act_ , _advice_ , _affairs_ , _bags_ , _bail_ , and
_bales_ , under which exhaustive lists of useful phrases involving the
corresponding word are provided in the main pages of the volume. [1]
> [...] my focus in this chapter is on the inscription technology that grew
parasitically alongside the monopolistic pricing strategies of telegraph
companies: telegraph code books. Constructed under the bywords “economy,”
“secrecy,” and “simplicity,” telegraph code books matched phrases and words
with code letters or numbers. The idea was to use a single code word instead
of an entire phrase, thus saving money by serving as an information
compression technology. Generally economy won out over secrecy, but in
specialized cases, secrecy was also important.[2]
In Katherine Hayles' chapter devoted to telegraph code books she observes how:
> The interaction between code and language shows a steady movement away from
a human-centric view of code toward a machine-centric view, thus anticipating
the development of full-fledged machine codes with the digital computer. [3]
[](/wiki/index.php?title=File:Liebers_P1016851.JPG)
Aspects of this transitional moment are apparent in a notice included
prominently inserted in the Lieber's code book:
> After July, 1904, all combinations of letters that do not exceed ten will
pass as one cipher word, provided that it is pronounceable, or that it is
taken from the following languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish,
Portuguese or Latin -- International Telegraphic Conference, July 1903 [4]
Conforming to international conventions regulating telegraph communication at
that time, the stipulation that code words be actual words drawn from a
variety of European languages (many of Lieber's code words are indeed
arbitrary Dutch, German, and Spanish words) underscores this particular moment
of transition as reference to the human body in the form of "pronounceable"
speech from representative languages begins to yield to the inherent potential
for arbitrariness in digital representation.
What telegraph code books do is remind us of is the relation of language in
general to economy. Whether they may be economies of memory, attention, costs
paid to a telecommunicatons company, or in terms of computer processing time
or storage space, encoding language or knowledge in any form of writing is a
form of shorthand and always involves an interplay with what one expects to
perform or "get out" of the resulting encoding.
> Along with the invention of telegraphic codes comes a paradox that John
Guillory has noted: code can be used both to clarify and occlude. Among the
sedimented structures in the technological unconscious is the dream of a
universal language. Uniting the world in networks of communication that
flashed faster than ever before, telegraphy was particularly suited to the
idea that intercultural communication could become almost effortless. In this
utopian vision, the effects of continuous reciprocal causality expand to
global proportions capable of radically transforming the conditions of human
life. That these dreams were never realized seems, in retrospect, inevitable.
[5]
Far from providing a universal system of encoding messages in the English
language, Lieber's code is quite clearly designed for the particular needs and
conditions of its use. In addition to the phrases ordered by keywords, the
book includes a number of tables of terms for specialized use. One table lists
a set of words used to describe all possible permutations of numeric grades of
coffee (Choliam = 3,4, Choliambos = 3,4,5, Choliba = 4,5, etc.); another table
lists pairs of code words to express the respective daily rise or fall of the
price of coffee at the port of Le Havre in increments of a quarter of a Franc
per 50 kilos ("Chirriado = prices have advanced 1 1/4 francs"). From an
archaeological perspective, the Lieber's code book reveals a cross section of
the needs and desires of early 20th century business communication between the
United States and its trading partners.
The advertisements lining the Liebers Code book further situate its use and
that of commercial telegraphy. Among the many advertisements for banking and
law services, office equipment, and alcohol are several ads for gun powder and
explosives, drilling equipment and metallurgic services all with specific
applications to mining. Extending telegraphy's formative role for ship-to-
shore and ship-to-ship communication for reasons of safety, commercial
telegraphy extended this network of communication to include those parties
coordinating the "raw materials" being mined, grown, or otherwise extracted
from overseas sources and shipped back for sale.
## "Raw data now!"
From [La ville intelligente - Ville de la connaissance](/wiki/index.php?title
=La_ville_intelligente_-_Ville_de_la_connaissance "La ville intelligente -
Ville de la connaissance"):
Étant donné que les nouvelles formes modernistes et l'utilisation de matériaux
propageaient l'abondance d'éléments décoratifs, Paul Otlet croyait en la
possibilité du langage comme modèle de « [données
brutes](/wiki/index.php?title=Bag_of_words "Bag of words") », le réduisant aux
informations essentielles et aux faits sans ambiguïté, tout en se débarrassant
de tous les éléments inefficaces et subjectifs.
From [The Smart City - City of Knowledge](/wiki/index.php?title
=The_Smart_City_-_City_of_Knowledge "The Smart City - City of Knowledge"):
As new modernist forms and use of materials propagated the abundance of
decorative elements, Otlet believed in the possibility of language as a model
of '[raw data](/wiki/index.php?title=Bag_of_words "Bag of words")', reducing
it to essential information and unambiguous facts, while removing all
inefficient assets of ambiguity or subjectivity.
> Tim Berners-Lee: [...] Make a beautiful website, but first give us the
unadulterated data, we want the data. We want unadulterated data. OK, we have
to ask for raw data now. And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? Can
you say "raw"?
>
> Audience: Raw.
>
> Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say "data"?
>
> Audience: Data.
>
> TBL: Can you say "now"?
>
> Audience: Now!
>
> TBL: Alright, "raw data now"!
>
> [...]
>
> So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this -- the people who think
it's a great idea. And all the people -- and I think there's a lot of people
at TED who do things because -- even though there's not an immediate return on
the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has
done it -- they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does
things which would be good if everybody else did them. OK, so it's called
linked data. I want you to make it. I want you to demand it. [6]
## Un/Structured
As graduate students at Stanford, Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page had an
early interest in producing "structured data" from the "unstructured" web. [7]
> The World Wide Web provides a vast source of information of almost all
types, ranging from DNA databases to resumes to lists of favorite restaurants.
However, this information is often scattered among many web servers and hosts,
using many different formats. If these chunks of information could be
extracted from the World Wide Web and integrated into a structured form, they
would form an unprecedented source of information. It would include the
largest international directory of people, the largest and most diverse
databases of products, the greatest bibliography of academic works, and many
other useful resources. [...]
>
> **2.1 The Problem**
> Here we define our problem more formally:
> Let D be a large database of unstructured information such as the World
Wide Web [...] [8]
In a paper titled _Dynamic Data Mining_ Brin and Page situate their research
looking for _rules_ (statistical correlations) between words used in web
pages. The "baskets" they mention stem from the origins of "market basket"
techniques developed to find correlations between the items recorded in the
purchase receipts of supermarket customers. In their case, they deal with web
pages rather than shopping baskets, and words instead of purchases. In
transitioning to the much larger scale of the web, they describe the
usefulness of their research in terms of its computational economy, that is
the ability to tackle the scale of the web and still perform using
contemporary computing power completing its task in a reasonably short amount
of time.
> A traditional algorithm could not compute the large itemsets in the lifetime
of the universe. [...] Yet many data sets are difficult to mine because they
have many frequently occurring items, complex relationships between the items,
and a large number of items per basket. In this paper we experiment with word
usage in documents on the World Wide Web (see Section 4.2 for details about
this data set). This data set is fundamentally different from a supermarket
data set. Each document has roughly 150 distinct words on average, as compared
to roughly 10 items for cash register transactions. We restrict ourselves to a
subset of about 24 million documents from the web. This set of documents
contains over 14 million distinct words, with tens of thousands of them
occurring above a reasonable support threshold. Very many sets of these words
are highly correlated and occur often. [9]
## Un/Ordered
In programming, I've encountered a recurring "problem" that's quite
symptomatic. It goes something like this: you (the programmer) have managed to
cobble out a lovely "content management system" (either from scratch, or using
any number of helpful frameworks) where your user can enter some "items" into
a database, for instance to store bookmarks. After this ordered items are
automatically presented in list form (say on a web page). The author: It's
great, except... could this bookmark come before that one? The problem stems
from the fact that the database ordering (a core functionality provided by any
database) somehow applies a sorting logic that's almost but not quite right. A
typical example is the sorting of names where details (where to place a name
that starts with a Norwegian "Ø" for instance), are language-specific, and
when a mixture of languages occurs, no single ordering is necessarily
"correct". The (often) exascerbated programmer might hastily add an additional
database field so that each item can also have an "order" (perhaps in the form
of a date or some other kind of (alpha)numerical "sorting" value) to be used
to correctly order the resulting list. Now the author has a means, awkward and
indirect but workable, to control the order of the presented data on the start
page. But one might well ask, why not just edit the resulting listing as a
document? Not possible! Contemporary content management systems are based on a
data flow from a "pure" source of a database, through controlling code and
templates to produce a document as a result. The document isn't the data, it's
the end result of an irreversible process. This problem, in this and many
variants, is widespread and reveals an essential backwardness that a
particular "computer scientist" mindset relating to what constitutes "data"
and in particular it's relationship to order that makes what might be a
straightforward question of editing a document into an over-engineered
database.
Recently working with Nikolaos Vogiatzis whose research explores playful and
radically subjective alternatives to the list, Vogiatzis was struck by how
from the earliest specifications of HTML (still valid today) have separate
elements (OL and UL) for "ordered" and "unordered" lists.
> The representation of the list is not defined here, but a bulleted list for
unordered lists, and a sequence of numbered paragraphs for an ordered list
would be quite appropriate. Other possibilities for interactive display
include embedded scrollable browse panels. [10]
Vogiatzis' surprise lay in the idea of a list ever being considered
"unordered" (or in opposition to the language used in the specification, for
order to ever be considered "insignificant"). Indeed in its suggested
representation, still followed by modern web browsers, the only difference
between the two visually is that UL items are preceded by a bullet symbol,
while OL items are numbered.
The idea of ordering runs deep in programming practice where essentially
different data structures are employed depending on whether order is to be
maintained. The indexes of a "hash" table, for instance (also known as an
associative array), are ordered in an unpredictable way governed by a
representation's particular implementation. This data structure, extremely
prevalent in contemporary programming practice sacrifices order to offer other
kinds of efficiency (fast text-based retrieval for instance).
## Data mining
In announcing Google's impending data center in Mons, Belgian prime minister
Di Rupo invoked the link between the history of the mining industry in the
region and the present and future interest in "data mining" as practiced by IT
companies such as Google.
Whether speaking of bales of cotton, barrels of oil, or bags of words, what
links these subjects is the way in which the notion of "raw material" obscures
the labor and power structures employed to secure them. "Raw" is always
relative: "purity" depends on processes of "refinement" that typically carry
social/ecological impact.
Stripping language of order is an act of "disembodiment", detaching it from
the acts of writing and reading. The shift from (human) reading to machine
reading involves a shift of responsibility from the individual human body to
the obscured responsibilities and seemingly inevitable forces of the
"machine", be it the machine of a market or the machine of an algorithm.
From [X = Y](/wiki/index.php?title=X_%3D_Y "X = Y"):
Still, it is reassuring to know that the products hold traces of the work,
that even with the progressive removal of human signs in automated processes,
the workers' presence never disappears completely. This presence is proof of
the materiality of information production, and becomes a sign of the economies
and paradigms of efficiency and profitability that are involved.
The computer scientists' view of textual content as "unstructured", be it in a
webpage or the OCR scanned pages of a book, reflect a negligence to the
processes and labor of writing, editing, design, layout, typesetting, and
eventually publishing, collecting and cataloging [11].
"Unstructured" to the computer scientist, means non-conformant to particular
forms of machine reading. "Structuring" then is a social process by which
particular (additional) conventions are agreed upon and employed. Computer
scientists often view text through the eyes of their particular reading
algorithm, and in the process (voluntarily) blind themselves to the work
practices which have produced and maintain these "resources".
Berners-Lee, in chastising his audience of web publishers to not only publish
online, but to release "unadulterated" data belies a lack of imagination in
considering how language is itself structured and a blindness to the need for
more than additional technical standards to connect to existing publishing
practices.
Last Revision: 2*08*2016
1. ↑ Benjamin Franklin Lieber, Lieber's Standard Telegraphic Code, 1896, New York;
2. ↑ Katherine Hayles, "Technogenesis in Action: Telegraph Code Books and the Place of the Human", How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, 2006
3. ↑ Hayles
4. ↑ Lieber's
5. ↑ Hayles
6. ↑ Tim Berners-Lee: The next web, TED Talk, February 2009
7. ↑ "Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception." from Brin's [Stanford webpage](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/)
8. ↑ Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web, Sergey Brin, Proceedings of the WebDB Workshop at EDBT 1998,
9. ↑ Dynamic Data Mining: Exploring Large Rule Spaces by Sampling; Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998; p. 2
10. ↑ Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): "Internet Draft", Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel Connolly, June 1993,
11. ↑
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.