Tenen & Foxman
Book Piracy as Peer Preservation
2014
Book Piracy as Peer Preservation {#book-piracy-as-peer-preservation .entry-title}
**Abstract**
In describing the people, books, and technologies behind one of the
largest "shadow libraries" in the world, we find a tension between the
dynamics of sharing and preservation. The paper proceeds to
contextualize contemporary book piracy historically, challenging
accepted theories of peer production. Through a close analysis of one
digital library's system architecture, software and community, we assert
that the activities cultivated by its members are closer to that of
conservationists of the public libraries movement, with the goal of
preserving rather than mass distributing their collected material.
Unlike common peer production models emphasis is placed on the expertise
of its members as digital preservations, as well as the absorption of
digital repositories. Additionally, we highlight issues that arise from
their particular form of distributed architecture and community.
>
>
> *Literature is the secretion of civilization, poetry of the ideal.
> That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why
> poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first
> instructors of the people. That is why Shakespeare must be translated
> in France. That is why Molière must be translated in England. That is
> why comments must be made on them. That is why there must be a vast
> public literary domain. That is why all poets, all philosophers, all
> thinkers, all the producers of the greatness of the mind must be
> translated, commented on, published, printed, reprinted, stereotyped,
> distributed, explained, recited, spread abroad, given to all, given
> cheaply, given at cost price, given for nothing.*
> ^[1](#fn-2025-1){#fnref-2025-1}^
**Introduction**
The big money (and the bandwidth) in online media is in film, music, and
software. Text is less profitable for copyright holders; it is cheaper
to duplicate and easier to share. Consequently, issues surrounding the
unsanctioned sharing of print material receive less press and scant
academic attention. The very words, "book piracy," fail to capture the
spirit of what is essentially an Enlightenment-era project, openly
embodied in many contemporary "shadow libraries":^[2](#fn-2025-2){#fnref-2025-2}^
in the words of Victor Hugo, to establish a "vast public
literary domain." Writers, librarians, and political activists from Hugo
to Leo Tolstoy and Andrew Carnegie have long argued for unrestricted
access to information as a form of a public good essential to civic
engagement. In that sense, people participating in online book exchanges
enact a role closer to that of a librarian than that of a bootlegger or
a plagiarist. Whatever the reader's stance on the ethics of copyright
and copyleft, book piracy should not be dismissed as mere search for
free entertainment. Under the conditions of "digital
disruption,"^[3](#fn-2025-3){#fnref-2025-3}^ when the traditional
institutions of knowledge dissemination---the library, the university,
the newspaper, and the publishing house---feel themselves challenged and
transformed by the internet, we can look to online book sharing
communities for lessons in participatory governance, technological
innovation, and economic sustainability.
The primary aims of this paper are ethnographic and descriptive: to
study and to learn from a library that constitutes one of the world's
largest digital archives, rivaling *Google Books*, *Hathi Trust*, and
*Europeana*. In approaching a "thick description" of this archive we
begin to broach questions of scope and impact. We would like to ask:
Who? Where? and Why? What kind of people distribute books online? What
motivates their activity? What technologies enable the sharing of print
media? And what lessons can we draw from them? Our secondary aim is to
continue the work of exploring the phenomenon of book sharing more
widely, placing it in the context of other commons-based peer production
communities like Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia. The archetypal model
of peer production is one motivated by altruistic participation. But the
very history of public libraries is one that combines the impulse to
share and to protect. To paraphrase Jacques Derrida
^[4](#fn-2025-4){#fnref-2025-4}^ writing in "Archive Fever," the archive
shelters memory just as it shelters itself from memory. We encompass
this dual dynamic under the term "peer preservation," where the
logistics of "peers" and of "preservation" can sometimes work at odds to
one another.
Academic literature tends to view piracy on the continuum between free
culture and intellectual property rights. On the one side, an argument
is made for unrestricted access to information as a prerequisite to
properly deliberative democracy.^[5](#fn-2025-5){#fnref-2025-5}^ On this
view, access to knowledge is a form of political power, which must be
equitably distributed, redressing regional and social imbalances of
access.^[6](#fn-2025-6){#fnref-2025-6}^ The other side offers pragmatic
reasoning related to the long-term sustainability of the cultural
sphere, which, in order to prosper, must provide proper economic
incentives to content creators.^[7](#fn-2025-7){#fnref-2025-7}^
It is our contention that grassroots file sharing practices cannot be
understood solely in terms of access or intellectual property. Our field
work shows that while some members of the book sharing community
participate for activist or ideological reasons, others do so as
collectors, preservationists, curators, or simply readers. Despite
romantic notions to the contrary, reading is a social and mediated
activity. The reader encounters texts in conversation, through a variety
of physical interfaces and within an ecosystem of overlapping
communities, each projecting their own material contexts, social norms,
and ideologies. A technician who works in a biology laboratory, for
example, might publish closed-access peer-review articles by day, as
part of his work collective, and release terabytes of published material
by night, in the role of a moderator for an online digital library. Our
approach then, is to capture some of the complexity of such an
ecosystem, particularly in the liminal areas where people, texts, and
technology converge.
**Ethics disclaimer**
Research for this paper was conducted under the aegis of piracyLab, an
academic collective exploring the impact of technology on the spread of
knowledge globally.^[8](#fn-2025-8){#fnref-2025-8}^ One of the lab's
first tasks was to discuss the ethical challenges of collaborative
research in this space. The conversation involved students, faculty,
librarians, and informal legal council. Neutrality, to the extent that
it is possible, emerged as one of our foundational principles. To keep
all channels of communication open, we wanted to avoid bias and to give
voice to a diversity of stakeholders: from authors, to publishers, to
distributors, whether sanctioned or not. Following a frank discussion
and after several iterations, we drafted an ethics charter that
continues to inform our work today. The charter contains the following
provisions:
-- We neither condone nor condemn any forms of information exchange.\
-- We strive to protect our sources and do not retain any identifying
personal information.\
-- We seek transparency in sharing our methods, data, and findings with
the widest possible audience.\
-- Credit where credit is due. We believe in documenting attribution
thoroughly.\
-- We limit our usage of licensed material to the analysis of metadata,
with results used for non-commercial, nonprofit, educational purposes.\
-- Lab participants commit to abiding by these principles as long as
they remain active members of the research group.
In accordance with these principles and following the practice of
scholars like Balazs Bodo ^[9](#fn-2025-9){#fnref-2025-9}^, Eric Priest
^[10](#fn-2025-10){#fnref-2025-10}^, and Ramon Lobato and Leah Tang
^[11](#fn-2025-11){#fnref-2025-11}^, we redact the names of file sharing
services and user names, where such names are not made explicitly public
elsewhere.
**Centralization**
We begin with the intuition that all infrastructure is social to an
extent. Even private library collections cannot be said to reflect the
work of a single individual. Collective forces shape furniture, books,
and the very cognitive scaffolding that enables reading and
interpretation. Yet, there are significant qualitative differences in
the systems underpinning private collections, public libraries, and
unsanctioned peer-to-peer information exchanges like *The Pirate Bay*,
for example. Given these differences, the recent history of online book
sharing can be divided roughly into two periods. The first is
characterized by local, ad-hoc peer-to-peer document exchanges and the
subsequent growth of centralized content aggregators. Following trends
in the development of the web as a whole, shadow libraries of the second
period are characterized by communal governance and distributed
infrastructure.
Shadow libraries of the first period resemble a private library in that
they often emanate from a single authoritative source--a site of
collection and distribution associated with an individual collector,
sometimes explicitly. The library of Maxim Moshkov, for example,
established in 1994 and still thriving at *lib.ru*, is one of the most
visible collections of this kind. Despite their success, such libraries
are limited in scale by the means and efforts of a few individuals. Due
to their centralized architecture they are also susceptible to legal
challenges from copyright owners and to state intervention.
Shadow libraries responded to these problems by distributing labor,
responsibility, and infrastructure, resulting in a system that is more
robust, more redundant, and more resistant to any single point of
failure or control.
The case of *Gigapedia* (later *library.nu*) and its related file
hosting service *ifile.it* demonstrates the successes and the
deficiencies of the centralized digital library model. Arguably among
the largest and most popular virtual libraries online in the period of
2009-2011, the sites were operated by Irish
nationals^[12](#fn-2025-12){#fnref-2025-12}^ on domains registered in
Italy and on the island state of Niue, with servers on the territory of
Germany and Ukraine. At its peak, *library.nu* (LNU) hosted more than
400,000 books and was purported to make an "estimated turnover of EUR 8
million (USD 10,602,400) from advertising revenues, donations and sales
of premium-level accounts," at least according to a press release made
by the International Publishers Association
(IPA).^[13](#fn-2025-13){#fnref-2025-13}^\
*Archived version of library.nu, circa 12/10/2010*
Its apparent popularity notwithstanding, *LNU/Gigapedia* was supported
by relatively simple architecture, likely maintained by a lone
developer-administrator. The site itself consisted of a catalog of
digital books and related metadata, including title, author, year of
publication, number of pages, description, category classification, and
a number of boolean parameters (whether the file is bookmarked,
paginated, vectorized, is searchable, and has a cover). Although the
books could be hosted anywhere, many in the catalog resided on the
servers of a "cyberlocker" service *ifile.it*, affiliated with the main
site. Not strictly a single-source archive, *LNU/Gigapedia* was
nevertheless a federated entity, tied to a single site and to a single
individual. On February 15, 2012, in a Munich court, the IPA, in
conjunction with a consortium of international publishing houses and the
help of the German law firm Lausen
Rechtsanwalte,^[14](#fn-2025-14){#fnref-2025-14}^ served judicial
cease-and-desist orders naming both sites (*Gigapedia* and *ifile.it*).
Seventeen injunctions were sought in Ireland, with the consequent
voluntary shut-down of both domains, which for a brief time redirected
visitors first to *Google Books* and then to *Blue Latitudes*, a *New
York Times* bestseller about pirates, for sale on *Amazon*.
Figure 1: Archived version of library.nu, circa 12/10/2010
:::
The relatively brief, by library standards, existence of *LNU/Gigapedia*
underscores a weakness in the federated library model. The site
flourished as long as it did not attract the ire of the publishing
industry. A lack of redundancy in the site's administrative structure
paralleled its lack on the server level. Once the authorities were able
to establish the identity of the site's operators (via *Paypal*
receipts, according to a partner at Lausen Rechtsanwalte), the project
was forced to shut down irrevocably.^[15](#fn-2025-15){#fnref-2025-15}^
The system's single point of origin proved also to be its single point
of failure.
Jens Bammel, Secretary General of the IPA, called the action "an
important step towards a more transparent, honest and fair trade of
digital content on the Internet."^[16](#fn-2025-16){#fnref-2025-16}^ The
rest of the internet mourned the passage of "the greatest, largest and
the best website for downloading
eBooks,"^[17](#fn-2025-17){#fnref-2025-17}^ comparing the demise of
*LNU/Gigapedia* to the burning of the ancient Library of
Alexandria.^[18](#fn-2025-18){#fnref-2025-18}^ Readers from around the
world flocked to sites like *Reddit* and *TorrentFreak* to express their
support and anger. For example, one reader wrote on *TorrentFreak*:
> I live in Macedonia (the Balkans), a country where the average salary
> is somewhere around 200eu, and I'm a student, attending a MA degree in
> communication sci. \[...\] where I come from the public library is not
> an option. \[...\] Our libraries are so poor, mostly containing 30year
> or older editions of books that almost never refer to the field of
> communication or any other contemporary science. My professors never
> hide that they use sites like library.nu \[...\] Original textbooks
> \[...\] are copy-printed handouts of some god knows how obtained
> original \[...\] For a country like Macedonia and the Balkans region
> generally THIS IS A APOCALYPTIC SCALE DISASTER! I really feel like the
> dark age is just around the corner these
> days.^[19](#fn-2025-19){#fnref-2025-19}^
A similar comment on *Reddit* reads:
> This is the saddest news of the year...heart-breaking...shocking...I
> was so attached to this site...I am from a third world country where
> buying original books is way too expensive if we see currency exchange
> rates...library.nu was a sea of knowledge for me and I learnt a lot
> from it \[...\] RIP library.nu...you have ignited several minds with
> free knowledge.^[20](#fn-2025-20){#fnref-2025-20}^
Another redditor wrote:
> This was an invaluable resource for international academics. The
> catalog of libraries overseas often cannot meet the needs of
> researchers in fields not specific to the country in which they are
> located. My doctoral research has taken a significant blow due to this
> recent shutdown \[...\] Please publishers, if you take away such a
> valuable resource, realize that you have created a gap that will be
> filled. This gap can either be filled by you or by
> us.^[21](#fn-2025-21){#fnref-2025-21}^
Another concludes:
> This just makes me want to start archiving everything I can get my
> hands on.^[22](#fn-2025-22){#fnref-2025-22}^
These anecdotal reports confirm our own experiences of studying and
teaching at universities with a diverse audience of international
students, who often recount a similar personal narrative. *Gigapedia*
and analogous sites fulfilled an unmet need in the international market,
redressing global inequities of access to
information.^[23](#fn-2025-23){#fnref-2025-23}^
But, being a cyberlocker-based service, *Gigapedia* did not succeed in
cultivating a meaningful sense of a community (even though it supported
a forum for brief periods of its existence). As Lobato and Tang
^[24](#fn-2025-24){#fnref-2025-24}^ write in their paper on
cyberlocker-based media distribution systems, cyberlockers in general
"do not foster collaboration and co-creation," taking an "instrumental
view of content hosted on their
sites."^[25](#fn-2025-25){#fnref-2025-25}^ Although not strictly a
cyberlocker, *LNU/Gigapedia* fit the profile of a passive,
non-transformative site by these criteria. For Lobato and Tang, the
rapid disappearance of many prominent cyberlocker sites underscores the
"structural instability" of "fragile file-hosting
ecology."^[26](#fn-2025-26){#fnref-2025-26}^ In our case, it would be
more precise to say that cyberlocker architecture highlights rather the
structural instability of centralized media archives, and not of file
sharing communities in general. Although bereaved readers were concerned
about the irrevocable loss of a valuable resource, digital libraries
that followed built a model of file sharing that is more resilient, more
transparent, and more participatory than their *LNU/Gigapedia*
predecessors.
**Distribution**
In parallel with the development of *LNU/Gigapedia*, a group of Russian
enthusiasts were working on a meta-library of sorts, under the name of
*Aleph*. Records of *Aleph's* activity go back at least as far as 2009.
Colloquially known as "prospectors," the volunteer members of *Aleph*
compiled library collections widely available on the gray market, with
an emphasis on academic and technical literature in Russian and
English.\
*DVD case cover of "Traum's library" advertising "more than 167,000
books" in fb2 format. Similar DVDs sell for around 1,000 RUB (\$25-30
US) on the streets of Moscow.*
At its inception, *Aleph* aggregated several "home-grown" archives,
already in wide circulation in universities and on the gray market.
These included:
-- *KoLXo3*, a collection of scientific texts that was at one time
distributed on 20 DVDs, overlapping with early Gigapedia efforts;\
-- *mexmat*, a library collected by the members of Moscow State
University's Department of Mechanics and Mathematics for internal use,
originally distributed through private FTP servers;\
-- *Homelab*, *Ihtik*, and *Ingsat* libraries;\
-- the Foreign Fiction archive collected from IRC \#\*\*\*
2003.09-2011.07.09 and the Internet Library;\
-- the *Great Science Textbooks* collection and, later, over 20 smaller
miscellaneous archives.^[27](#fn-2025-27){#fnref-2025-27}^
In retrospect, we can categorize the founding efforts along three
parallel tracks: 1) as the development of "front-end" server software
for searching and downloading books, 2) as the organization of an online
forum for enthusiasts willing to contribute to the project, and 3) the
collection effort required to expand and maintain the "back-end" archive
of documents, primarily in .pdf and .djvu
formats.^[28](#fn-2025-28){#fnref-2025-28}^ "What do we do?" writes one
of the early volunteers (in 2009) on the topic of "Outcomes, Goals, and
Scope of the Project." He answers: "we loot sites with ready-made
collections," "sort the indices in arbitrary normalized formats," "for
uncatalogued books we build a 'technical index': name of file, size,
hashcode," "write scripts for database sorting after the initial catalog
process," "search the database," "use the database for the construction
of an accessible catalog," "build torrents for the distribution of files
in the collection."^[29](#fn-2025-29){#fnref-2025-29}^ But, "everything
begins with the forum," in the words of another founding
member.^[30](#fn-2025-30){#fnref-2025-30}^ *Aleph*, the very name of the
group, reflects the aspiration to develop a "platform for the inception
of subsequent and more user-friendly" libraries--a platform "useful for
the developer, the reader, and the
librarian."^[31](#fn-2025-31){#fnref-2025-31}^\
Aleph's *anatomy*
Figure 2: DVD case cover of "Traum's library" advertising "more than
167,000 books
:::
What is *Aleph*? Is it a collection of books? A community? A piece of
software? What makes a library? When attempting to visualize Aleph's
constituents (Figure 3), it seems insufficient to point to books alone,
or to social structure, or to technology in the absence of people and
content. Taking a systems approach to description, we understand a
library to comprise an assemblage of books, people, and infrastructure,
along with their corresponding words and texts, rules and institutions,
and shelves and servers.^[32](#fn-2025-32){#fnref-2025-32}^ In this
light, *Aleph*'s iteration on *LNU/Gigapedia* lies not in technological
advancement alone, but in system architecture, on all levels of
analysis.
Where the latter relied on proprietary server applications, *Aleph*
built software that enabled others to mirror and to serve the site in
its entirety. The server was written by d\* from www.l\*.com (Bet),
utilizing a codebase common to several similar large book-sharing
communities. The initial organizational efforts happened on a sub-forum
of a popular torrent tracker (*RR*). Fifteen founding members reached
early consensus to start hashing document filenames (using the MD5
message-digest algorithm), rather than to store files as is, with their
appropriate .pdf or .mobi extensions.^[33](#fn-2025-33){#fnref-2025-33}^
Bit-wise hashing was likely chosen as a (computationally) cheap way to
de-duplicate documents, since two identical files would hash into an
identical string. Hashing the filenames was hoped to have the
side-effect of discouraging direct (file system-level) browsing of the
archive.^[34](#fn-2025-34){#fnref-2025-34}^ Instead, the books were
meant to be accessed through the front-end "librarian" interface, which
added a layer of meta-data and search tools. In other words, the group
went out of its way to distribute *Aleph* as a library and not merely as
a large aggregation of raw files.
Site volunteers coordinate their efforts asynchronously, by means of a
simple online forum (using *phpBB* software), open to all interested
participants. Important issues related to the governance of the
project--decisions about new hardware upgrades, software design, and
book acquisition--receive public airing. For example, at one point, the
site experienced increased traffic from *Google* searches. Some senior
members welcomed the attention, hoping to attract new volunteers. Others
worried increased visibility would bring unwanted scrutiny. To resolve
the issue, a member suggested delisting the website by altering the
robots.txt configuration file and thereby blocking *Google*
crawlers.^[35](#fn-2025-35){#fnref-2025-35}^ Consequently, the site
would become invisible to *Google*, while remaining freely accessible
via a direct link. Early conversations on *RR*, reflect a consistent
concern about the archive's longevity and its vulnerability to official
sanctions. Rather than following the cyber-locker model of distribution,
the prospectors decided to release canonical versions of the library in
chunks, via *BitTorrent*--a distributed protocol for file sharing.
Another decision was made to "store" the library on open trackers (like
*The Pirate Bay*), rather than tying it to a closed, by-invitation-only
community. Although *LN/Gigapedia* was already decentralized to an
extent, the archeology of the community discussion reveals a multitude
of concious choices that work to further atomize *Aleph* and to
decentralize it along the axes of the collection, governance, and
engineering.
By March of 2009 these efforts resulted in approximately 79k volumes or
around 180gb of data.^[36](#fn-2025-36){#fnref-2025-36}^ By December of
the same year, the moderators began talking about a terabyte, 2tb in
2010, and around 7tb by 2011.^[37](#fn-2025-37){#fnref-2025-37}^ By
2012, the core group of "prospectors" grew to 1,000 registered users.
*Aleph*'s main mirror received over a million page views per month and
about 40,000 unique visits per day.^[38](#fn-2025-38){#fnref-2025-38}^
An online eBook piracy report estimates a combined total of a million
unique visitors per day for *Aleph* and its
mirrors.^[39](#fn-2025-39){#fnref-2025-39}^
As of January 2014, the *Aleph* catalog contains over a million books
(1,021,000) and over 15 million academic articles, "weighing in" at just
under 10tb. Most remarkably, one of the world's largest digital
libraries operates on an annual budget of \$1,900
US.^[40](#fn-2025-40){#fnref-2025-40}^
\#\#\# Vulnerability\
Distributed architecture gives *Aleph* significant advantages over its
federated predecessors. Were *Aleph* servers to go offline the archive
would survive "in the cloud" of the *BitTorrent* network. Should the
forum (*Bet*) close, another online forum could easily take its place.
And were *Aleph* library portal itself go dark, other mirrors would (and
usually do) quickly take its place.
But the decentralized model of content distribution is not without its
challenges. To understand them, we need to review some of the
fundamentals behind the *BitTorrent* protocol. At its bare minimum (as
it was described in the original specification by Bram Cohen) the
protocol involves a "seeder," someone willing to share something it its
entirety; a "leecher," someone downloading shared data; and a torrent
"tracker" that coordinates activity between seeders and
leechers.^[41](#fn-2025-41){#fnref-2025-41}^
Imagine a music album sharing agreement between three friends, where,
initially, only one holds a copy of some album: for example, Nirvana's
*Nevermind*. Under the centralized model of file sharing, the friend
holding the album would transmit two copies, one to each friend. The
power of *BitTorrent* comes from shifting the burden of sharing from a
single seeder (friend one) to a "swarm" of leechers (friends two and
three). On this model, the first leecher joining the network (friend
two, in our case) would begin to get his data from the seeder directly,
as before. But the second leecher would receive some bits from the
seeder and some from the first leecher, in a non-linear, asynchronous
fashion. In our example, we can imagine the remaining friend getting
some songs from the first friend and some from the second. The friend
who held the album originally now transmitted something less than two
full copies of the album, since the other two friends exchanged some
bits of information between themselves, lessening the load on the
original album holder.
When downloading from the *BitTorrent* network, a peer may receive some
bits from the beginning of the document, some from the middle, and some
from the end, in parts distributed among the members of the swarm. A
local application called the "client" is responsible for checking the
integrity of the pieces and for reassembling the them into a coherent
whole. A torrent "tracker" coordinates the activity between peers,
keeping track of who has what where. Having received the whole document,
a leecher can, in turn, become a seeder by sharing all of his downloaded
bits with the remaining swarm (who only have partial copies). The
leecher can also take the file offline, choosing not to share at
all.^[42](#fn-2025-42){#fnref-2025-42}^
The original protocol left torrent trackers vulnerable to charges of
aiding and abetting copyright
infringement.^[43](#fn-2025-43){#fnref-2025-43}^ Early in 2008, Cohen
extended *BitTorrent* to make use of "distributed sloppy hash tables"
(DHT) for storing peer locations without resorting to a central tracker.
Under these new guidelines, each peer would maintain a small routing
table pointing to a handful of nearby peer locations. In effect, DHT
placed additional responsibility on the swarm to become a tracker of
sorts, however "sloppy" and imperfect. By November of of 2009, *Pirate
Bay* announced its transition away from tracking entirely, in favor of
DHT and the related PEX and Magnetic Links protocols. At the time they
called it, "world's most resilient
tracking."^[44](#fn-2025-44){#fnref-2025-44}^
Despite these advancements, the decentralized model of file sharing
remains susceptible to several chronic ailments. The first follows from
the fact that ad-hoc distribution networks privilege popular material. A
file needs to be actively traded to ensure its availability. If nobody
is actively sharing and downloading Nirvana's *Nevermind*, the album is
in danger of fading out of the cloud. As one member wrote succinctly on
*Gimel* forums, "unpopular files are in danger of become
inaccessible."^[45](#fn-2025-45){#fnref-2025-45}^ This dynamic is less
of a concern for Hollywood blockbusters, but more so for "long tail"
specialized materials of the sort found in *Aleph*, and indeed, for
*Aleph* itself as a piece of software distributed through the network.
*Aleph* combats the problem of fading torrents by renting
"seedboxes"--servers dedicated to keeping the *Aleph* seeds containing
the archive alive, preserving the availability of the collection. The
server in production as of 2014 can serve up to 12tb of data speeds of
100-800 megabits per second. Other file sharing communities address the
issue by enforcing a certain download to upload ratio on members of
their network.
The lack of true anonymity is the second problem intrinsic to the
*BitTorrent* protocol. Peers sharing bits directly cannot but avoid
exposing their IP address (unless these are masked behind virtual
private networks or TOR relays). A "Sybil" attack becomes possible when
a malicious peer shares bits in bad faith, with the intent to log IP
addresses.^[46](#fn-2025-46){#fnref-2025-46}^ Researchers exploring this
vector of attack were able to harvest more than 91,000 IP addresses in
less than 24 hours of sharing a popular television
show.^[47](#fn-2025-47){#fnref-2025-47}^ They report that more than 9%
of requests made to their servers indicated "modified clients", which
are likely also to be running experiments in the DHT. Legitimate
copyright holders and copyright "trolls" alike have used this
vulnerability to bring lawsuits against individual sharers in
court.^[48](#fn-2025-48){#fnref-2025-48}^
These two challenges are further exacerbated in the case of *Aleph*,
which uses *BitTorrent* to distribute large parts of its own
architecture. These parts are relatively large--around 40-50GB each.
Long-term sustainability of *Aleph* as a distributed system therefore
requires a rare participant: one interested in downloading the archive
as a whole (as opposed to downloading individual books), one who owns
the hardware to store and transmit terabytes of data, and one possessing
the technical expertise to do so safely.
**Peer preservation**
In light of the challenges and the effort involved in maintaining the
archive, one would be remiss to describe *Aleph* merely in terms of book
piracy, understood in conventional terms of financial gain, theft, or
profiteering. Day-to-day labor of the core group is much more
comprehensible as a mode of commons-based peer production, which is, in
the canonical definition, work made possible by a "networked
environment," "radically decentralized, collaborative, and
non-proprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely
distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other
without relying on either market signals or managerial
commands."^[49](#fn-2025-49){#fnref-2025-49}^ *Aleph* answers the
definition of peer production, resembling in many respects projects like
*Linux*, *Wikipedia*, and *Project Gutenberg*.
Yet, *Aleph* is also patently a library. Its work can and should be
viewed in the broader context of Enlightenment ideals: access to
literacy, universal education, and the democratization of knowledge. The
very same ideals gave birth to the public library movement as a whole at
the turn of the 20th century, in the United States, Europe, and
Russia.^[50](#fn-2025-50){#fnref-2025-50}^ Parallels between free
library movements of the early 20th and the early 21st centuries point
to a social dynamic that runs contrary to the populist spirit of
commons-based peer production projects, in a mechanism that we describe
as peer preservation. The idea encompasses conflicting drives both to
share and to hoard information.
The roots of many public libraries lie in extensive private collections.
Bodleian Library at Oxford, for example, traces its origins back to the
collections of Thomas Cobham, Bishop of Worcester, Humphrey, Duke of
Gloucester, and to Thomas Bodley, himself an avid book collector.
Similarly, Poland's Zaluski Library, one of Europe's oldest, owes its
existence to the collecting efforts of the Zaluski brothers, both
bishops and bibliophiles.^[51](#fn-2025-51){#fnref-2025-51}^ As we
mentioned earlier, *Aleph* too began its life as an aggregator of
collections, including the personal libraries of Moshkov and Traum. When
books are scarce, private libraries are a sign of material wealth and
prestige. In the digital realm, where the cost of media acquisition is
low, collectors amass social capital. *Aleph* extends its collecting
efforts on *RR*, a much larger, moderated torrent exchange forum and
tracker. *RR* hosts a number of sub-forums dedicated to the exchange of
software, film, music, and books (where members of *Aleph* often make an
appearance). In the exchange economy of symbolic goods, top collectors
are known by their standing in the community, as measured by their
seniority, upload and download ratios, and the number of "releases." A
release is more than just a file: it must not duplicate items in the
archive and follows strict community guidelines related to packaging,
quality, and meta-data accompanying the document. Less experienced
members of the community treat high status numbers with reverence and
respect.
According to a question and answer session with an official *RR*
representative, *RR* is not particularly friendly to new
users.^[52](#fn-2025-52){#fnref-2025-52}^ In fact, high barriers to
entry are exactly what differentiates *RR* from sites like *The Pirate
Bay* and other unmoderated, open trackers. *RR* prides itself on the
"quality of its moderation." Unlike *Pirate Bay*, *RR* sees itself as a
"media library", where content is "organized and properly shelved." To
produce an acceptable book "release" one needs to create a package of
files, including well-formatted meta-data (following strict stylistic
rules) in the header, the name of the book, an image of its cover, the
year of release, author, genre, publisher, format, language, a required
description, and screenshots of a sample page. The files must be named
according to a convention, be "of the same kind" (that is belong to the
same collection), and be of the right size. Home-made scans are
discouraged and governed by a 1,000-words instruction manual. Scanned
books must have clear attribution to the releaser responsible for
scanning and processing.
More than that, guidelines indicate that smaller releases should be
expected to be "absorbed" into larger ones. In this way, a single novel
by Charles Dickens can and will be absorbed into his collected works,
which might further be absorbed into "Novels of 19th Century," and then
into "Foreign Fiction" (as a hypothetical, but realistic example).
According to the rules, the collection doing the absorbing must be "at
least 50% larger than the collection it is absorbing." Releases are
further governed by a subset or rules particular to the forum
subsections (e.g. journals, fiction, documentation, service manuals,
etc.).^[53](#fn-2025-53){#fnref-2025-53}^
All this to say that although barriers to acquisition are low, the
barriers to active participation are high and continually *increase with
time*. The absorption of smaller collections by larger favors the
veterans. Rules and regulations grow in complexity with the maturation
of the community, further widening the rift between senior and junior
peers. We are then witnessing something like the institutionalization of
a professional "librarian" class, whose task it is to protect the
collection from the encroachment of low-quality contributors. Rather
than serving the public, a librarian's primary commitment is to the
preservation of the archive as a whole. Thus what starts as a true peer
production project, may, in the end, grow to erect solid walls to
peering. This dynamic is already embodied in the history of public
libraries, where amateur librarians of the late 19th century eventually
gave way to their modern degree-holding counterparts. The conflicting
logistics of access and preservation may lead digital library
development along a similar path.
The expression of this dual push and pull dynamic in the observed
practices of peer preservation communities conforms to Derrida's insight
into the nature of the archive. Just as the walls of a library serve to
shelter the documents within, they also isolate the collection from the
public at large. Access and preservation, in that sense, subsist at
opposite and sometime mutually exclusive ends of the sharing spectrum.
And it may be that this dynamic is particular to all peer production
communities, like *Wikipedia*, which, according to recent studies, saw a
decline in new contributors due to increasingly strict rule
enforcement.^[54](#fn-2025-54){#fnref-2025-54}^ However, our results are
merely speculative at the moment. The analysis of a large dataset we
have collected as corollary to our field work online may offer further
evidence for these initial intuitions. In the meantime, it is not enough
to conclude that brick-and-mortar libraries should learn from these
emergent, distributed architectures of peer preservation. If the future
of *Aleph* is leading to increased institutionalization, the community
may soon face the fate embodied by its own procedures: the absorption of
smaller, wonderfully messy, ascending collections into larger, more
established, and more rigid social structures.
**Biographies**
Dennis Tenen teaches in the fields of new media and digital humanities
at Columbia University, Department of English and Comparative
Literature. His research often happens at the intersection of people,
texts, and technology. He is currently writing a book on minimal
computing, called *Plain Text*.
Maxwell Foxman is an adjunct professor at Marymount Manhattan College
and a PhD candidate in Communications at Columbia University, where he
studies the use and adoption of digital media into everyday life. He has
written on failed social media and on gamification in electoral
politics, newsrooms, and mobile media.
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1907), 230. [[↩](#fnref-2025-1)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-1}
2. [Lawrence Liang, "Shadow Libraries E-Flux," 2012.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-2)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-2}
3. [McKendrick, Joseph. *Libraries: At the Epicenter of the Digital
Disruption, The Library Resource Guide Benchmark Study on 2013/14
Library Spending Plans* (Unisphere Media, 2013).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-3)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-3}
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(July 1995): 9--63.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-4)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-4}
5. [Yochai Benkler, *The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom* (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), 92; Paul DiMaggio et al., "Social Implications of the
Internet," *Annual Review of Sociology* 27 (January 2001): 320; Zizi
Papacharissi "The Virtual Sphere the Internet as a Public Sphere,"
*New Media & Society* 4.1 (2002): 9--27; Craig Calhoun "Information
Technology and the International Public Sphere," in *Shaping the
Network Society: the New Role of Civil Society in Cyberspace*, ed.
Douglas Schuler and Peter Day (MIT Press, 2004), 229--52.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-5)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-5}
6. [Benkler, *The Wealth of Networks*, 442; Manuel Castells,
"Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society,"
*International Journal of Communication* (2007): 251; Lawrence
Lessig *Free Culture:How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to
Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity* (The Penguin Press, 2004);
Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing Without
Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 153.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-6)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-6}
7. [Brian R. Day "In Defense of Copyright: Creativity, Record Labels,
and the Future of Music," *Seton Hall Journal of Sports and
Entertainment Law*, 21.1 (2011); William M. Landes and Richard A.
Posner, *The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law*
(Harvard University Press, 2003). For further discussion see
Steve P. Calandrillo, "Economic Analysis of Property Rights in
Information: Justifications and Problems of Exclusive Rights,
Incentives to Generate Information, and the Alternative of a
Government-Run Reward System" *Fordham Intellectual Property, Media
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and Culture in Copyright Theory," *U.C. Davis Law Review* 40 (2006):
1151; Justin Hughes "Philosophy of Intellectual Property,"
*Georgetown Law Journal* 77 (1988): 303.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-7)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-7}
8. [[piracylab.org](“http://piracylab.org”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-8)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-8}
9. ["Set the Fox to Watch the Geese: Voluntary IP Regimes in Piratical
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-9)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-9}
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-10)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-10}
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-11)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-11}
12. [The injunctions name I\* and F\* N\* (also known as Smiley).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-12)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-12}
13. ["Publishers Strike Major Blow against Internet Piracy" last
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-13)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-13}
14. [Including the German Publishers and Booksellers Association,
Cambridge University Press, Georg Thieme, Harper Collins, Hogrefe,
Macmillan Publishers Ltd., Cengage Learning, Elsevier, John Wiley &
Sons, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education Ltd., Pearson
Education Inc., Oxford University Press, Springer, Taylor & Francis,
C.H. Beck as well as Walter De Gruyter. The legal proceedings are
also supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the
Dutch Publishers Association (NUV), the Italian Publishers
Association (AIE) and the International Association of Scientific
Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-14)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-14}
15. [Andrew Losowsky, "Book Downloading Site Targeted in Injunctions
Requested by 17 Publishers," *Huffington Post*, accessed on
September 1, 2014,
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-15)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-15}
16. [International Publishers Association.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-16)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-16}
17. [Vik, "Gigapedia: The greatest, largest and the best website for
downloading eBooks," Emotionallyspeaking.com, last edited on August
10, 2009 and archived on July 15, 2012,
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-17)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-17}
18. [Anonymous author, "Library.nu: Modern era's 'Destruction of the
Library of Alexandria,'" *Breaking Culture* (on tublr.com), last
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-18)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-18}
19. [[http://torrentfreak.com/book-publishers-shut-down-library-nu-and-ifile-it-120215](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140110050710/http://torrentfreak.com/book-publishers-shut-down-library-nu-and-ifile-it-120215”)
archived on January 10, 2014.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-19)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-19}
20. [[http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu\_admin\_the\_website\_is\_shutting\_down\_due](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140110050450/http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu_admin_the_website_is_shutting_down_due”)
archived on January 10, 2014.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-20)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-20}
21. [[http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu\_admin\_the\_website\_is\_shutting\_down\_due](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140110050450/http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu_admin_the_website_is_shutting_down_due”)
orchived on January 10, 2014.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-21)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-21}
22. [[www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu\_admin\_the\_website\_is\_shutting\_down\_due](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140110050450/http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu_admin_the_website_is_shutting_down_due”)
archived on January 10, 2014.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-22)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-22}
23. [This point is made at length in the report on media piracy in
emerging economies, released by the American Assembly in 2011. See
Joe Karaganis, ed. *Media Piracy in Emerging Economies* (Social
Science Research Network, March 2011),
[http://piracy.americanassembly.org/the-report/](“http://piracy.americanassembly.org/the-report/”), I.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-23)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-23}
24. [Lobato and Tang, "The Cyberlocker Gold Rush."
[[↩](#fnref-2025-24)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-24}
25. [Lobato and Tang, "The Cyberlocker Gold Rush," 9.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-25)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-25}
26. [Lobato and Tang, "The Cyberlocker Gold Rush," 7.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-26)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-26}
27. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=169; GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=299.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-27)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-27}
28. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=299.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-28)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-28}
29. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=169. All quotes translated from Russian
by the authors, unless otherwise noted.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-29)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-29}
30. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6999&p=41911.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-30)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-30}
31. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=757.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-31)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-31}
32. [In this sense, we see our work as complementary to but not
exhausted by infrastructure studies. See Geoffrey C. Bowker and
Susan Leigh Star, *Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its
Consequences* (The MIT Press, 1999); Paul N. Edwards, "Y2K:
Millennial Reflections on Computers as Infrastructure," *History and
Technology* 15.1-2 (1998): 7--29; Paul N. Edwards, "Infrastructure
and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History
of Sociotechnical Systems," in *Modernity and Technology*, 2003,
185--225; Paul N. Edwards et al., "Introduction: an Agenda for
Infrastructure Studies," *Journal of the Association for Information
Systems* 10.5 (2009): 364--74; Brian Larkin "Degraded Images,
Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy,"
*Public Culture* 16.2 (2004): 289--314; Brian Larkin "Pirate
Infrastructures," in *Structures of Participation in Digital
Culture*, ed. Joe Karaganis (New York: SSRC, 2008), 74--87; Susan
Leigh Star and Geoffrey C. Bowker, "How to Infrastructure," in
*Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Social Consequences of
ICTs*, (SAGE Publications Ltd, 2010), 230--46.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-32)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-32}
33. [For information on cryptographic hashing see Praveen Gauravaram and
Lars R. Knudsen, "Cryptographic Hash Functions," in *Handbook of
Information and Communication Security*, ed. Peter Stavroulakis and
Mark Stamp (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010), 59--79.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-33)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-33}
34. [See GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=55kj and
GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18&sid=936.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-34)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-34}
35. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=714.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-35)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-35}
36. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=47.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-36)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-36}
37. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=175&hilit=RR&start=25.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-37)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-37}
38. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=104&start=450.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-38)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-38}
39. [URL redacted; These numbers should be taken as a very rough
estimate because 1) we do not consider Alexa to be a reliable source
for web traffic and 2) some of the other figures cited in the report
are suspicious. For example, *Aleph* has a relatively small archive
of foreign fiction, at odds with the reported figure of 800,000
volumes. [[↩](#fnref-2025-39)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-39}
40. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=7061.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-40)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-40}
41. ["The BitTorrent Protocol Specification," last modified October 20,
2012 and archived on June 13, 2014,
[http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep\_0003.html](“http://web.archive.org/web/20140613190300/http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-41)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-41}
42. [For more information on BitTorrent, see Bram Cohen, *Incentives
Build Robustness in BitTorrent*, last modified on May 22, 2003,
[http://www.bittorrent.org/bittorrentecon.pdf](“http://www.bittorrent.org/bittorrentecon.pdf”);
Ricardo Salmon, Jimmy Tran, and Abdolreza Abhari, "Simulating a File
Sharing System Based on BitTorrent," in *Proceedings of the 2008
Spring Simulation Multiconference*, SpringSim '08 (San Diego, CA,
USA: Society for Computer Simulation International, 2008), 21:1--5.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-42)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-42}
43. [In 2008 *The Pirate Bay* co-founders Peter Sunde, Gottfrid
Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundstromwere were charged
with "conspiracy to break copyright related offenses" in Sweden. See
Simon Johnson for Reuters.com, "Pirate Bay Copyright Test Case
Begins in Sweden," last edited on February 16, 2009 and archived on
August 4, 2014,
[http://uk.reuters.com/article/2009/02/16/tech-us-sweden-piratebay-idUKTRE51F3K120090216](http://web.archive.org/web/20140804000829/http://uk.reuters.com/article/2009/02/16/tech-us-sweden-piratebay-idUKTRE51F3K120090216”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-43)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-43}
44. [TPB, "Worlds most resiliant tracking," last edited November 17,
2009 and archived on August 4, 2014,
[thepiratebay.se/blog/175](“http://web.archive.org/web/20140804015645/http://thepiratebay.se/blog/175”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-44)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-44}
45. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6999.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-45)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-45}
46. [Thibault Cholez, Isabelle Chrisment, and Olivier Festor "Evaluation
of Sybil Attacks Protection Schemes in KAD," in *Scalability of
Networks and Services*, ed. Ramin Sadre and Aiko Pras, Lecture Notes
in Computer Science 5637 (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009), 70--82.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-46)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-46}
47. [J.P. Timpanaro et al., "BitTorrent's Mainline DHT Security
Assessment," in *2011 4th IFIP International Conference on New
Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS)*, 2011, 1--5.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-47)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-47}
48. [Ernesto, "US P2P Lawsuit Shows Signs of a 'Pirate Honeypot',"
Technology, *TorrentFreak*, last edited in June 2011 and archived on
January 14, 2014,
[http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-p2p-lawsuit-shows-signs-of-a-pirate-honeypot-110601/](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140114200326/http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-p2p-lawsuit-shows-signs-of-a-pirate-honeypot-110601/”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-48)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-48}
49. [Benkler *The Wealth of Networks*, 60.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-49)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-49}
50. [On the free and public library movement in England and the United
States see Thomas Greenwood, *Public Libraries: a History of the
Movement and a Manual for the Organization and Management of Rate
Supported Libraries* (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1890);
Elizabeth Akers Allen and James Phinney Baxter, *Dedicatory
Exercises of the Baxter Building* (Auburn, Me: Lakeside Press,
1889). To read more about the history of free and public library
movements in Russia see Mary Stuart, "The Evolution of Librarianship
in Russia: the Librarians of the Imperial Public Library,
1808-1868," *The Library Quarterly* 64.1 (January 1994): 1--29; Mary
Stuart, "Creating a National Library for the Workers' State: the
Public Library in Petrograd and the Rumiantsev Library Under
Bolshevik Rule," *The Slavonic and East European Review* 72.2 (April
1994): 233--58; Mary Stuart "The Ennobling Illusion: the Public
Library Movement in Late Imperial Russia," *The Slavonic and East
European Review* 76.3 (July 1998): 401--40.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-50)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-50}
51. [Michael H. Harris, *History of Libraries of the Western World*,
(London: Scarecrow Press, 1999), 136.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-51)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-51}
52. [http://s\*.d\*.ru/comments/508985/.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-52)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-52}
53. [RR/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1590026.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-53)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-53}
54. [Aaron Halfaker et al."The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration
System: How Wikipedia's Reaction to Popularity Is Causing Its
Decline," *American Behavioral Scientist*, December 2012.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-54)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-54}
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WHW
There Is Something Political in the City Air
2016
What, How & for Whom / WHW
“There is something political in the city air”*
The curatorial collective What,
How & for Whom / WHW, based
in Zagreb and Berlin, examine
the interconnections between
contemporary art and political and
social strata, including the role of art
institutions in contemporary society.
In the present essay, their discussion
of recent projects they curated
highlights the struggle for access to
knowledge and the free distribution
of information, which in Croatia also
means confronting the pressures
of censorship and revisionism
in the writing of history and the
construction of the future.
Contemporary art’s attempts to come to terms with its evasions in delivering on the promise of its own intrinsic capacity to propose alternatives, and
to do better in the constant game of staying ahead of institutional closures
and marketization, are related to a broader malady in leftist politics. The
crisis of organizational models and modes of political action feels especially acute nowadays, after the latest waves of massive political mobilization
and upheaval embodied in such movements as the Arab Spring and Occupy and the widespread social protests in Southern Europe against austerity
measures – and the failure of these movements to bring about structural
changes. As we witnessed in the dramatic events that unfolded through the
spring and summer of 2015, even in Greece, where Syriza was brought to
power, the people’s will behind newly elected governments proved insufficient to change the course of austerity politics in Europe. Simultaneously,
a series of conditional gains and effective defeats gave rise to the alarming
ascent of radical right-wing populism, against which the left has failed to
provide any real vision or driving force.
Both the practice of political articulation and the political practices of
art have been affected by the hollowing and disabling of democracy related
to the ascendant hegemony of the neoliberal rationale that shapes every
domain of our lives in accordance with a specific image of economics,1
as well as the problematic “embrace of localism and autonomy by much
of the left as the pure strategy”2 and the left’s inability to destabilize the
dominant world-view and reclaim the future.3 Consequently, art practices
increasingly venture into novel modes of operation that seek to “expand
our collective imagination beyond what capitalism allows”.4 They not only
point to the problems but address them head on. By negotiating art’s autonomy and impact on the social, and by conceptualizing the whole edifice
of art as a social symptom, such practices attempt to do more than simply
squeeze novel ideas into exhausted artistic formats and endow them with
political content that produces “marks of distinction”,5 which capital then
exploits for the enhancement of its own reproduction.
The two projects visited in this text both work toward building truly
accessible public spaces. Public Library, launched by Marcell Mars and
Tomislav Medak in 2012, is an ongoing media and social project based on
ideas from the open-source software movement, while Autonomy Cube, by
artist Trevor Paglen and the hacker and computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, centres on anonymized internet usage in the post–Edward
*
1
2
3
4
5
David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Verso, London and New York, 2012, p. 117.
See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Zone books,
New York, 2015.
Harvey, Rebel Cities, p. 83.
See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World
Without Work, Verso, London and New York, 2015.
Ibid., p. 495.
See Harvey, Rebel Cities, especially pp. 103–109.
“There is something political in the city air”
289
Snowden world of unprecedented institutionalized surveillance. Both projects operate in tacit alliance with art institutions that more often than not
are suffering from a kind of “mission drift” under pressure to align their
practices and structures with the profit sector, a situation that in recent
decades has gradually become the new norm.6 By working within and with
art institutions, both Public Library and Autonomy Cube induce the institutions to return to their initial mission of creating new common spaces
of socialization and political action. The projects develop counter-publics
and work with infrastructures, in the sense proposed by Keller Easterling:
not just physical networks but shared standards and ideas that constitute
points of contact and access between people and thus rule, govern, and
control the spaces in which we live.7
By building a repository of digitized books, and enabling others to do this
as well, Public Library promotes the idea of the library as a truly public institution that offers universal access to knowledge, which “together with
free public education, a free public healthcare, the scientific method, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Wikipedia, and free software,
among others – we, the people, are most proud of ”, as the authors of the
project have said.8 Public Library develops devices for the free sharing of
books, but it also functions as a platform for advocating social solidarity
in free access to knowledge. By ignoring and avoiding the restrictive legal
regime for intellectual property, which was brought about by decades of
neoliberalism, as well as the privatization or closure of public institutions,
spatial controls, policing, and surveillance – all of which disable or restrict
possibilities for building new social relations and a new commons – Public
Library can be seen as part of the broader movement to resist neoliberal
austerity politics and the commodification of knowledge and education
and to appropriate public spaces and public goods for common purposes.
While Public Library is fully engaged with the movement to oppose the
copyright regime – which developed as a kind of rent for expropriating the
commons and reintroducing an artificial scarcity of cognitive goods that
could be reproduced virtually for free – the project is not under the spell of
digital fetishism, which until fairly recently celebrated a new digital commons as a non-frictional space of smooth collaboration where a new political and economic autonomy would be forged that would spill over and
undermine the real economy and permeate all spheres of life.9 As Matteo
Pasquinelli argues in his critique of “digitalism” and its celebration of the
6
7
8
9
See Brown, Undoing the Demos.
Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, Verso, London and
New York, 2014.
Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug, and Tomislav Medak, “Public Library”, in Public Library,
ed. Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, and What, How & for Whom / WHW, exh. publication, What, How & for Whom / WHW and Multimedia Institute, Zagreb, 2015, p. 78.
See Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, and Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2008.
290
What, How & for Whom / WHW
virtues of the information economy with no concern about the material
basis of production, the information economy is a parasite on the material
economy and therefore “an accurate understanding of the common must
be always interlinked with the real physical forces producing it and the material economy surrounding it.”10
Public Library emancipates books from the restrictive copyright regime
and participates in the exchange of information enabled by digital technology, but it also acknowledges the labour and energy that make this possible. There is labour that goes into the cataloguing of the books, and labour
that goes into scanning them before they can be brought into the digital
realm of free reproduction, just as there are the ingenuity and labour of
the engineers who developed a special scanner that makes it easier to scan
books; also, the scanner needs to be installed, maintained, and fed books
over hours of work. This is where the institutional space of art comes in
handy by supporting the material production central to the Public Library
endeavour. But the scanner itself does not need to be visible. In 2014, at
the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, we curated the
exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, which dealt with conflicts triggered by
struggles over access to knowledge and the effects that knowledge, as the
basis of capital reproduction, has on the totality of workers’ lives. In the
exhibition, the production funds allocated to Public Library were used to
build the book scanner at Calafou, an anarchist cooperative outside Barcelona. The books chosen for scanning were relevant to the exhibition’s
themes – methods of reciprocal learning and teaching, forms of social and
political organization, the history of the Spanish Civil War, etc. – and after
being scanned, they were uploaded to the Public Library website. All that
was visible in the exhibition itself was a kind of index card or business card
with a URL link to the Public Library website and a short statement (fig. 1):
A public library is:
• free access to books for every member of society
• library catalog
• librarian
With books ready to be shared, meticulously cataloged, everyone is a
librarian. When everyone is librarian, the library is everywhere.11
Public Library’s alliance with art institutions serves to strengthen the
cultural capital both for the general demand to free books from copyright
restrictions on cultural goods and for the project itself – such cultural capital could be useful in a potential lawsuit. Simultaneously, the presence and
realization of the Public Library project within an exhibition enlists the host
institution as part of the movement and exerts influence on it by taking
the museum’s public mission seriously and extending it into a grey zone of
10
11
Ibid., p. 29.
Mars, Zarroug, and Medak, “Public Library”, p. 85.
“There is something political in the city air”
291
questionable legality. The defence of the project becomes possible by making the traditional claim of the “autonomy” of art, which is not supposed
to assert any power beyond the museum walls. By taking art’s autonomy
at its word, and by testing the truth of the liberal-democratic claim that
the field of art is a field of unlimited freedom, Public Library engages in a
kind of “overidentification” game, or what Keller Easterling, writing about
the expanded activist repertoire in infrastructure space, calls “exaggerated
compliance”.12 Should the need arise, as in the case of a potential lawsuit
against the project, claims of autonomy and artistic freedom create a protective shroud of untouchability. And in this game of liberating books from
the parochial capitalist imagination that restricts their free circulation, the
institution becomes a complicit partner. The long-acknowledged insight
that institutions embrace and co-opt critique is, in this particular case, a
win-win situation, as Public Library uses the public status of the museum
as a springboard to establish the basic message of free access and the free
circulation of books and knowledge as common sense, while the museum
performs its mission of bringing knowledge to the public and supporting
creativity, in this case the reworking, rebuilding and reuse of technology
for the common good. The fact that the institution is not naive but complicit produces a synergy that enhances potentialities for influencing and
permeating the public sphere. The gesture of not exhibiting the scanner in
the museum has, among other things, a practical purpose, as more books
would be scanned voluntarily by the members of the anarchist commune
in Calafou than would be by the overworked museum staff, and employing
somebody to do this during the exhibition would be too expensive (and the
mantra of cuts, cuts, cuts would render negotiation futile). If there is a flirtatious nod to the strategic game of not exposing too much, it is directed less
toward the watchful eyes of the copyright police than toward the exhibition
regime of contemporary art group shows in which works compete for attention, the biggest scarcity of all. Public Library flatly rejects identification
with the object “our beloved bookscanner” (as the scanner is described on
the project website13), although it is an attractive object that could easily
be featured as a sculpture within the exhibition. But its efficacy and use
come first, as is also true of the enigmatic business card–like leaflet, which
attracts people to visit the Public Library website and use books, not only to
read them but also to add books to the library: doing this in the privacy of
one’s home on one’s own computer is certainly more effective than doing
it on a computer provided and displayed in the exhibition among the other
art objects, films, installations, texts, shops, cafés, corridors, exhibition
halls, elevators, signs, and crowds in a museum like Reina Sofia.
For the exhibition to include a scanner that was unlikely to be used or
a computer monitor that showed the website from which books might be
12
13
Easterling, Extrastatecraft, p. 492.
See https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2012/10/28/our-belovedbookscanner-2/ (accessed July 4, 2016).
292
What, How & for Whom / WHW
downloaded, but probably not read, would be the embodiment of what
philosopher Robert Pfaller calls “interpassivity”, the appearance of activity or a stand-in for it that in fact replaces any genuine engagement.14 For
Pfaller, interpassivity designates a flight from engagement, a misplaced libidinal investment that under the mask of enjoyment hides aversion to an
activity that one is supposed to enjoy, or more precisely: “Interpassivity is
the creation of a compromise between cultural interests and latent cultural
aversion.”15 Pfaller’s examples of participation in an enjoyable process that
is actually loathed include book collecting and the frantic photocopying of
articles in libraries (his book was originally published in 2002, when photocopying had not yet been completely replaced by downloading, bookmarking, etc.).16 But he also discusses contemporary art exhibitions as sites of
interpassivity, with their overabundance of objects and time-based works
that require time that nobody has, and with the figure of the curator on
whom enjoyment is displaced – the latter, he says, is a good example of
“delegated enjoyment”. By not providing the exhibition with a computer
from which books can be downloaded, the project ensures that books are
seen as vehicles of knowledge acquired by reading and not as immaterial
capital to be frantically exchanged; the undeniable pleasure of downloading and hoarding books is, after all, just one step removed from the playground of interpassivity that the exhibition site (also) is.
But Public Library is hardly making a moralistic statement about the
virtues of reading, nor does it believe that ignorance (such as could be
overcome by reading the library’s books) is the only obstacle that stands
in the way of ultimate emancipation. Rather, the project engages with, and
contributes to, the social practice that David Harvey calls “commoning”:
“an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-becreated social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and
livelihood”.17 Public Library works on the basis of commoning and tries to
enlist others to join it, which adds a distinctly political dimension to the
sabotage of intellectual property revenues and capital accumulation.
The political dimension of Public Library and the effort to form and
publicize the movement were expressed more explicitly in the Public Li14
15
16
17
Robert Pfaller, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners, Verso, London and New York, 2014.
Ibid., p. 76.
Pfaller’s book, which first appeared in German, was published in English only in 2014.
His ideas have gained greater relevance over time, not only as the shortcomings of the
immensely popular social media activism became apparent – where, as many critics
have noted, participation in political organizing and the articulation of political tasks
and agendas are often replaced by a click on an icon – but also because of Pfaller’s
broader argument about the self-deception at play in interpassivity and its role in eliciting enjoyment from austerity measures and other calamities imposed on the welfare
state by the neoliberal regime, which since early 2000 has exceeded even the most sober (and pessimistic) expectations.
Ibid., p. 73.
“There is something political in the city air”
293
brary exhibition in 2015 at Gallery Nova in Zagreb, where we have been
directing the programme since 2003. If the Public Library project was not
such an eminently collective practice that pays no heed to the author function, the Gallery Nova show might be considered something like a solo exhibition. As it was realized, the project again used art as an infrastructure
and resource to promote the movement of freeing books from copyright
restrictions while collecting legitimization points from the art world as enhanced cultural capital that could serve as armour against future attacks
by the defenders of the holy scripture of copyright laws. But here the more
important tactic was to show the movement as an army of many and to
strengthen it through self-presentation. The exhibition presented Public
Library as a collection of collections, and the repertory form (used in archive science to describe a collection) was taken as the basic narrative procedure. It mobilized and activated several archives and open digital repositories, such as MayDay Rooms from London, The Ignorant Schoolmaster and
His Committees from Belgrade, Library Genesis and Aaaaaarg.org, Catalogue
of Free Books, (Digitized) Praxis, the digitized work of the Midnight Notes
Collective, and Textz.com, with special emphasis on activating the digital
repositories UbuWeb and Monoskop. Not only did the exhibition attempt to
enlist the gallery audience but, equally important, the project was testing
its own strength in building, articulating, announcing, and proposing, or
speculating on, a broader movement to oppose the copyright of cultural
goods within and adjacent to the art field.
Presenting such a movement in an art institution changes one of the
basic tenets of art, and for an art institution the project’s main allure probably lies in this kind of expansion of the art field. A shared politics is welcome, but nothing makes an art institution so happy as the sense of purpose that a project like Public Library can endow it with. (This, of course,
comes with its own irony, for while art institutions nowadays compete for
projects that show emphatically how obsolete the aesthetic regime of art is,
they continue to base their claims of social influence on knowledge gained
through some form of aesthetic appreciation, however they go about explaining and justifying it.) At the same time, Public Library’s nonchalance
about institutional maladies and anxieties provides a homeopathic medicine whose effect is sometimes so strong that discussion about placebos
becomes, at least temporarily, beside the point. One occasion when Public
Library’s roving of the political terrain became blatantly direct was the exhibition Written-off: On the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Operation
Storm, which we organized in the summer of 2015 at Gallery Nova (figs.
2–4).
The exhibition/action Written-off was based on data from Ante Lesaja’s
extensive research on “library purification”, which he published in his book
Knjigocid: Uništavanje knjige u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih (Libricide: The Destruction
of Books in Croatia in the 1990s).18 People were invited to bring in copies of
18
Ante Lesaja, Knjigocid: Uništavanje knjige u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih, Profil and Srbsko narodno
294
What, How & for Whom / WHW
books that had been removed from Croatian public libraries in the 1990s.
The books were scanned and deposited in a digital archive; they then became available on a website established especially for the project. In Croatia during the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of books were removed from
schools and factories, from public, specialized, and private libraries, from
former Yugoslav People’s Army centres, socio-political organizations, and
elsewhere because of their ideologically inappropriate content, the alphabet they used (Serbian Cyrillic), or the ethnic or political background of the
authors. The books were mostly thrown into rubbish bins, discarded on
the street, destroyed, or recycled. What Lesaja’s research clearly shows is
that the destruction of the books – as well as the destruction of monuments
to the People’s Liberation War (World War II) – was not the result of individuals running amok, as official accounts preach, but a deliberate and systematic action that symbolically summarizes the dominant politics of the
1990s, in which war, rampant nationalism, and phrases about democracy
and sovereignty were used as a rhetorical cloak to cover the nakedness of
the capitalist counter-revolution and criminal processes of dispossession.
Written-off: On the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Operation Storm
set up scanners in the gallery, initiated a call for collecting and scanning
books that had been expunged from public institutions in the 1990s, and
outlined the criteria for the collection, which corresponded to the basic
domains in which the destruction of the books, as a form of censorship,
was originally implemented: books written in the Cyrillic alphabet or in
Serbian regardless of the alphabet; books forming a corpus of knowledge
about communism, especially Yugoslav communism, Yugoslav socialism,
and the history of the workers’ struggle; and books presenting the anti-Fascist and revolutionary character of the People’s Liberation Struggle during
World War II.
The exhibition/action was called Written-off because the removal and
destruction of the books were often presented as a legitimate procedure
of library maintenance, thus masking the fact that these books were unwanted, ideologically unacceptable, dangerous, harmful, unnecessary, etc.
Written-off unequivocally placed “book destruction” in the social context
of the period, when the destruction of “unwanted” monuments and books
was happening alongside the destruction of homes and the killing of “unwanted” citizens, outside of and prior to war operations. For this reason,
the exhibition was dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of Operation
Storm, the final military/police operation in what is called, locally, the
Croatian Homeland War.19
The exhibition was intended as a concrete intervention against a political logic that resulted in mass exile and killing, the history of which is
glossed over and critical discussion silenced, and also against the official
19
vijeće, Zagreb, 2012.
Known internationally as the Croatian War of Independence, the war was fought between Croatian forces and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army from 1991 to
1995.
“There is something political in the city air”
295
celebrations of the anniversary, which glorified militarism and proclaimed
the ethical purity of the victory (resulting in the desired ethnic purity of the
nation).
As both symbolic intervention and real-life action, then, the exhibition
Written-off took place against a background of suppressed issues relating
to Operation Storm – ethno-nationalism as the flip side of neoliberalism,
justice and the present status of the victims and refugees, and the overall character of the war known officially as the Homeland War, in which
discussions about its prominent traits as a civil war are actively silenced
and increasingly prosecuted. In protest against the official celebrations
and military parades, the exhibition marked the anniversary of Operation
Storm with a collective action that evokes books as symbolic of a “knowledge society” in which knowledge becomes the location of conflictual engagement. It pointed toward the struggle over collective symbolic capital
and collective memory, in which culture as a form of the commons has a
direct bearing on the kind of place we live in. The Public Library project,
however, is engaged not so much with cultural memory and remembrance
as a form of recollection or testimony that might lend political legitimation
to artistic gestures; rather, it engages with history as a construction and
speculative proposition about the future, as Peter Osborne argues in his
polemical hypotheses on the notion of contemporary art that distinguishes
between “contemporary” and “present-day” art: “History is not just a relationship between the present and the past – it is equally about the future.
It is this speculative futural moment that definitively separates the concept
of history from memory.”20 For Public Library, the future that participates
in the construction of history does not yet exist, but it is defined as more
than just a project against the present as reflected in the exclusionary, parochially nationalistic, revisionist and increasingly fascist discursive practices of the Croatian political elites. Rather, the future comes into being as
an active and collective construction based on the emancipatory aspects of
historical experiences as future possibilities.
Although defined as an action, the project is not exultantly enthusiastic
about collectivity or the immediacy and affective affinities of its participants, but rather it transcends its local and transient character by taking
up the broader counter-hegemonic struggle for the mutual management
of joint resources. Its endeavour is not limited to the realm of the political
and ideological but is rooted in the repurposing of technological potentials
from the restrictive capitalist game and the reutilization of the existing infrastructure to build a qualitatively different one. While the culture industry adapts itself to the limited success of measures that are geared toward
preventing the free circulation of information by creating new strategies
for pushing information into a form of property and expropriating value
20
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London
and New York, 2013, p. 194.
296
What, How & for Whom / WHW
fig. 1
Marcell Mars, Art as Infrastructure: Public Library, installation
view, Really Useful Knowledge, curated by WHW, Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2014.
Photo by Joaquin Cortes and Roman Lores / MNCARS.
fig. 2
Public Library, exhibition view, Gallery Nova, Zagreb, 2015.
Photo by Ivan Kuharic.
fig. 3
Written-off: On the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Operation
Storm, exhibition detail, Gallery Nova, Zagreb, 2015.
Photo by Ivan Kuharic.
fig. 4
Written-off: On the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Operation
Storm, exhibition detail, Gallery Nova, Zagreb, 2015.
Photo by Ivan Kuharic.
fig. 5
Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum, Autonomy Cube,
installation view, Really Useful Knowledge, curated by WHW,
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2014.
Photo by Joaquín Cortés and Román Lores / MNCARS.
through the control of metadata (information about information),21 Public Library shifts the focus away from aesthetic intention – from unique,
closed, and discrete works – to a database of works and the metabolism
of the database. It creates values through indexing and connectivity, imagined communities and imaginative dialecticization. The web of interpenetration and determination activated by Public Library creates a pedagogical endeavour that also includes a propagandist thrust, if the notion of
propaganda can be recast in its original meaning as “things that must be
disseminated”.
A similar didactic impetus and constructivist praxis is present in the work
Autonomy Cube, which was developed through the combined expertise of
artist and geographer Trevor Paglen and internet security researcher, activist and hacker Jacob Appelbaum. This work, too, we presented in the
Reina Sofia exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, along with Public Library
and other projects that offered a range of strategies and methodologies
through which the artists attempted to think through the disjunction between concrete experience and the abstraction of capital, enlisting pedagogy as a crucial element in organized collective struggles. Autonomy Cube
offers a free, open-access, encrypted internet hotspot that routes internet
traffic over TOR, a volunteer-run global network of servers, relays, and services, which provides anonymous and unsurveilled communication. The
importance of the privacy of the anonymized information that Autonomy
Cube enables and protects is that it prevents so-called traffic analysis – the
tracking, analysis, and theft of metadata for the purpose of anticipating
people’s behaviour and relationships. In the hands of the surveillance
state this data becomes not only a means of steering our tastes, modes of
consumption, and behaviours for the sake of making profit but also, and
more crucially, an effective method and weapon of political control that
can affect political organizing in often still-unforeseeable ways that offer
few reasons for optimism. Visually, Autonomy Cube references minimalist
sculpture (fig. 5) (specifically, Hans Haacke’s seminal piece Condensation
Cube, 1963–1965), but its main creative drive lies in the affirmative salvaging of technologies, infrastructures, and networks that form both the leading organizing principle and the pervasive condition of complex societies,
with the aim of supporting the potentially liberated accumulation of collective knowledge and action. Aesthetic and art-historical references serve
as camouflage or tools for a strategic infiltration that enables expansion of
the movement’s field of influence and the projection of a different (contingent) future. Engagement with historical forms of challenging institutions
becomes the starting point of a poetic praxis that materializes the object of
its striving in the here and now.
Both Public Library and Autonomy Cube build their autonomy on the dedi21
McKenzie Wark, “Metadata Punk”, in Public Library, pp. 113–117 (see n. 9).
“There is something political in the city air”
305
cation and effort of the collective body, without which they would not
exist, rendering this interdependence not as some consensual idyll of cooperation but as conflicting fields that create further information and experiences. By doing so, they question the traditional edifice of art in a way
that supports Peter Osborne’s claim that art is defined not by its aesthetic
or medium-based status, but by its poetics: “Postconceptual art articulates a post-aesthetic poetics.”22 This means going beyond criticality and
bringing into the world something defined not by its opposition to the real,
but by its creation of the fiction of a shared present, which, for Osborne,
is what makes art truly contemporary. And if projects like these become a
kind of political trophy for art institutions, the side the institutions choose
nevertheless affects the common sense of our future.