infrapolitics in Thylstrup 2019
is clearly changing in the conversion of
bounded—and scarce—historical material into ubiquitous ephemeral data. In
addition to the technical aspects of digitization, mass digitization is also
changing the political territory of cultural memory objects. Global commercial
platforms are increasingly administering and operating their scanning
activities in favor of the digital content they reap from the national “data
tombs” of museums and libraries and the feedback loops these generate. This
integration of commercial platforms into the otherwise primarily public
institutional set-up of cultural memory has produced a reconfiguration of the
political landscape of cultural memory from the traditional symbolic politics
of scarcity, sovereignty, and cultural capital to the late-sovereign
infrapolitics of standardization and subversion.
The empirical outlook of the present book is predominantly Western. Yet, the
overarching dynamics that have been pursued are far from limited to any one
region or continent, nor limited solely to the field of cultural memory.
Digitization is a global phenomenon and its reliance on late-sovereign
politics and subpolitical governance forms are shared across the globe.
The central argument of this book is that mass digitization heralds a new kind
of politics in the regime of cultural memory. Mass digitization of cultural
memory is neither a neutral technical process nor a transposition of the
politics of analog cultural heritage to the digital realm on a 1:1 scale. The
limitations of using conventional cultural-political frameworks for
understanding mass d
merous political issues arising within the framework
of mass digitization. Rather, mass digitization should be approached as an
_infrapolitical_ process that brings together a multiplicity of interests
hitherto foreign to the realm of cultural memory.
The first part of the book, “framing,” outlines the theoretical arguments in
the book—that the political dynamics of mass digitization organize themselves
around the development of the technical infrastructures of mass digitization
in late-sovereign frameworks. Fusing infrastructure theory and theories on the
political dynamics of late sovereignty allows us to understand mass
digitization projects as cultural phenomena that are highly dependent on
standardization and globalization processes, while also recognizing that their
resultant infrapolitics can operate as forms of both control and subversion.
The second part of the book, “mapping,” offers an analysis of three different
mass digitization phenomena and how they relate to the late-sovereign politics
that gave rise to them. The part thus examines the historical foundation,
technical infrastructures, and (il)licit status and ideological underpinnings
of three variations of mass digitization projects: primarily corporate,
primarily public, and primarily private. While these variations may come
across as reproductions of more conventional societal structures, the chapters
in part two nevertheless also present us with a paradox: while the different
mass digitization projects that appear in this book—from Google’s privatized
endeavor to Europeana’s supranational politics to the unofficial initiatives
of shadow libraries—have different historical and cultural-political
trajectories and conventional regimes of governance, they also undermine these
conventional categories as they morph and merge into new infrastructures and
produce a new form of infrapolitics. The case studies featured in this book
are not to be taken as exhaustive examples, but rather as distinct, yet
nevertheless entangled, examples of how analog cultural memory is taken online
on a digital scale. They have been chosen with the aim of showing the
diversity of mass digitization, but also how it, as a phenomenon, ultimately
places the user in the dilemma of digital capitalism with its ethos of access,
speed, and participation (in varying degrees). The choices also have their
limitations, however. In their Western bias, which is partly rooted in this
author’s lack of language skills (specifically in Russian and Chinese), for
instance, they fail to capture the breadth and particularities of the
infrapolitics of mass digitization in other parts of the world. Much more
research is needed in this area.
The final part of the book, “diagnosing,” zooms in on the pathologies of mass
digitization in relation to affective questions of desire and uncertainty.
This part argues that instead of approaching mass digitization projects as
rationalized and instrumental projects, we should rather acknowledge them as
ambivalent spatio-temporal projects of desire and uncertainty. Indeed, as the
third part concludes, it is exactly uncertainty and desire that organizes the
new spatio-temporal infrastructures of cultural memory institutions, where
notions such as serendipity and the infrapolitics of platforms have taken
precedence over accuracy and sovereign institutional politics. The third part
thus calls into question arguments that imagine mass digitization as
instrumentalized projects that either undermine or produce values of
serendipity, as well as overarching narratives of how mass digitization
produces uncomplicated forms of individualized empowerment and freedom.
Instead, the chapter draws attention to the new cultural logics of platforms
that affect the cultural politics of mass digitization projects.
Crucially, then, this book seeks neither to condemn nor celebrate mass
digitization, but rather to unpack the phenomenon and anchor it in its
contemporary political reality. It offers a story of the ways in which mass
digitization produces new cultural memory institutions
them to
cohere. Bruno Latour writes, “Groups are not silent things, but rather the
provisional product of a constant uproar made by the millions of contradictory
voices about what is a group and who pertains to what.”63 It is the “taming
and constraining of this multivocality,” in particular by communities of
knowledge and everyday practices, that enables something like mass
digitization to cohere as an assemblage.64 This book is, among other things,
about those communities and practices, and the politics they produce and are
produced by. In particular, it addresses the politics of mass digitization as
an infrapolitical activity that retreats into, and emanates from, digital
infrastructures and the network effects they produce.
## Politics in Mass Digitization: Infrastructure and Infrapolitics
If the concept of “assemblage” allows us to see the relational set-up of mass
digitization, it also allows us to inquire into its political infrastructures.
In political terms, assemblage thinking is partly driven by dissatisfaction
with state-centric dominant ontologies, including reified units such as state,
society, or capitalism, and the unilinear focus on state-centric politics over
other forms of politics.65 The assemblage perspective is therefore especially
useful for understanding the politics of late-sovereign and late-capitalist
data projects such as mass digitization. As we will see in part 2, the
epistemic frame of sovereignty continues to offer an organizing frame for the
constitution and regulation of mass digitization and the virtues associated
with it (such as national
would escape this analytic matrix.67 Assemblage thinking, by contrast, allows
us to acknowledge the political mechanisms of mass digitization beyond
disciplinary regulatory models, in societies where “where forces … not
categories, clash.”68
As Ian Hacking and many others have noted, the capacious usage of the notion
of “politics” threatens to strip the word of meaning.69 But talk of a politics
of mass digitization is no conceptual gimmick, since what is taking place in
the construction and practice of mass digitization assemblages plainly is
political. The question, then, is how best to describe the politics at work in
mass digitization assemblages. The answer advanced by the present volume is to
think of the politics of mass digitization as “infrapolitics.”
The notion of infrapolitics has until now primarily and profoundly been
advanced as a concept of hidden dissent or contestation (Scott, 1990).70 This
volume suggests shifting the lens to focus on a different kind of
infrapolitics, however, one that not only takes the shape of resistance but
also of maintenance and conformity, since the story of mass digitization is
both the story of contestation _and_ the politics of mundane and standard-
seeking practices. 71 The infrapolitics of mass digitization is, then, a kind
of politics “premised not on a subject, but on the infra,” that is, the
“underlying rules of the world,” organized around glocal infrastructures.72
The infrapolitics of mass digitization is the building and living of
infrastructures, both as spaces of contestation and processes of
naturalization.
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have argued that the establishment of
standards, categories, and infrastructures “should be recognized as the
significant site of political and ethical work that they are.”73 This applies
not least in the construction and development of knowledge infrastructures
such as mass digitization assemblages, structures that are upheld by
increasingly complex sets of protocols and standards. Attaching “politics” to
“infrastructure” endows the term—and hence mass digitization under this
rubric—with a distinct organizational form that connects various stages and
levels of politics, as well as a distinct temporality th
media of polities and
politics, at times visible and at others barely legible or felt, and home both
to dissent as well as to standardizing measures. These include legal
infrastructures such as copyright, privacy, and trade law; material
infrastructures such as books, wires, scanners, screens, server parks, and
shelving systems; disciplinary infrastructures such as metadata, knowledge
organization, and standards; cultural infrastructures such as algorithms,
searching, reading, and downloading; societal infrastructures such as the
realms of the public and private, national and global. These infrastructures
are, depending, both the prerequisites for and the results of interactions
between the spatial, temporal, and social classes that take part in the
construction of mass digitization. The infrapolitics of mass digitization is
thus geared toward both interoperability and standardization, as well as
toward variation.78
Often when thinking of infrastructures, we conceive of them in terms of
durability and stability. Yet, while some infrastructures, such as railways
and Internet cables, are fairly solid and rigid constructions, others—such as
semantic links, time-limited contracts, and research projects—are more
contingent entities which operate not as “fully coherent, deliberately
engineered, end-to-end processes,” but rather as morphous contingent
assemblages, as “ecologies or complex adaptive systems” consisting of
“numerous systems, each with unique origins and goals, which are made to
interoperate by means of standards, socket layers, social practices, norms,
and individual behaviors that smooth out the connections among them.”79 This
contingency has direct implications for infrapolitics, which become equally
flexible and adaptive. These characteristics endow mass digitization
infrastructures with vulnerabilities but also with tremendous cultural power,
allowing them to distribute agency, and to create and facilitate new forms of
sociality and culture.
Building mass digitization infrastructures is a costly endeavor, and hence
mass digitization infrastructures are often backed by public-private
partnerships. Indeed infrastructures—and mass digitization infrastructures are
no exceptions—are often so costly that a certain mixture of political or
individual megalomania, state reach, and private capital is present in their
construction.80 This mixed foundation means that a lot of the political
decisions regarding mass digitization literally take place _beneath_ the radar
of “the representative institutions of the political system of nation-states,”
while also more or less aggressively filling out “gaps” in nation-state
systems, and even creating transnational zones with their own policies. 81
Hence the notion of “infra”: the infrapolitics of mass digitization hover at a
frequency that lies _below_ and beyond formal sovereign state apparatus,
organized, as they are, around glocal—and often private or privatized—material
and social infrastructures.
While distinct from the formalized sovereign political system, infrapolitical
assemblages nevertheless often perform as late-sovereign actors by engaging in
various forms of “sovereignty games.”82 Take Google, for instance, a private
corporation that often defines itself as at odds with state practice, yet also
often more or less informally meets with state leaders, engages in diplomatic
discussions, and enters into agreements with state agencies and local
political councils. The infrapolitical forces of Google in these sovereignty
games can on the one hand exert political pressure on states—for instance in
the name of civic freedom—but in Google’s embrace of politics, its
infrapolitical forces can on the other hand also squeeze the life out of
existing parliamentary ways, promoting instead various forms of apolitical or
libertarian modes of life. The infrapolitical apparatus thus stands apart from
more formalized politics, not only in terms of political arena, but also the
constraints that are placed upon them in the form, for instance, of public
accountability.83 What is described here can in general terms be called the
infrapolitics of neoliberalism, whose scenery consists of lobby rooms, policy-
making headquarters, financial zones, public-private spheres, and is populated
by lobbyists, bureaucrats, lawyers, and CEOs.
But the infrapolitical dynamics of mass digitization also operate in more
mundane and less obvious settings, such as software design offices and
standardization agencies, and are enacted by engineers, statisticians,
designers, and even users. Infrastructures are—increasingly—essential parts of
our everyday lives, not only in mass digitization contexts, but in all walks
of life, from file formats and software programs to converging transportation
systems, payment systems, and knowledge infrastructures. Yet, what is most
significant about the majority of infrapolitical institutions is that they are
so mundane; if we notice them at all, they appear to us as boring “lists of
numbers and technical specifications.”84 And their maintenance and
construction often occurs “behind the scenes.”85 There is a politics to these
naturalizing processes, since they influence and frame our moral, scientific,
and aesthetic choices. This is to say that these kinds of infrapolitical
activities often retire or withdraw into a kind of self-evidence in which the
values, choices, and influences of infrastructures are taken for granted and
accorded a kind of obviousness, which is universally accepted. It is therefore
all the more “politically and ethically crucial”86 to recognize the
infrapolitics of mass digitization, not only as contestation and privatized
power games, but also as a mode of existence that values professionalized
standardization measures and mundane routines, not least because these
infrapolitical modes of existence often outlast their material circumstances
(“software outlasts hardware” as John Durham Peters notes).87 In sum,
infrastructures and the infrapolitics they produce yield subtle but
significant world-making powers.
## Power in Mass Digitization
If mass digitization is a product of a particular social configuration and
political infrastructure, it is also, ultimately, a site and an instrument of
power. In a sense, mass digitization is an event that stages a fundamental
confrontation between state and corporate power, while pointing to the
reconfigurations of both as they become increasingly embedded in digital
infrastructures. For instance, such confrontation takes place at the
negotiating table, where cultural heritage directors face the seductive and
awe-inspiring riches of Silicon Valley, as well as its overwhelmingly
intricate contractual layouts and its intimidating entourage of lawyers.
Confrontation also takes place at the level o
s the effort to
steer readers away from thinking in terms of essences and stability toward
thinking about more complex and unstable structures. Indeed, the “assemblage”
seems to have become a prescriptive as much as a diagnostic tool (Galloway
2013b; Weizman 2006). 60. Deleuze 1997; Foucault 2009; Hardt and Negri 2007.
61. DeLanda 2006; Paul Rabinow, “Collaborations, Concepts, Assemblages,” in
Rabinow and Foucault 2011, 113–126, at 123. 62. Latour 2005, __ 28. 63. Ibid.,
35. 64. Tim Stevens, _Cyber Security and the Politics of Time_ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 33. 65. Abrahamsen and Williams 2011. 66.
Walker 2003. 67. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 116. 68. Parisi 2004, 37. 69.
Hacking 1995, 210. 70. Scott 2009. In James C. Scott’s formulation,
infrapolitics is a form of micropolitics, that is, the term refers to
political acts that evade the formal political apparatus. This understanding
was later taken up by Robin D. G. Kelley and Alberto Moreires, and more
recently by Stevphen Shukaitis and Angela Mitropolous. See Kelley 1994;
Shukaitis 2009; Mitropoulos 2012; Alterbo Moreiras, _Infrapolitics: the
Project and Its Politics. Allegory and Denarrativization. A Note on
Posthegemony_. eScholarship, University of California, 2015. 71. James C.
Scott also concedes as much when he briefly links his notion of infrapolitics
to infrastructure, as the “cultural and structural underpinning of the more
visible political action on which our attention has generally been focused”;
Scott 2009, 184. 72. Mitropoulos 2012, 115. 73. Bowker and Star 1999, 319. 74.
Centre National de Ressource Textuelle et Lexicales,
etymological examination, see also Batt 1984, 1–6. 76. This is on account of
their malleability and the uncanny way they are used to fit every
circumstance. For more on the potentials and problems of plastic words, see
Pörksen 1995. 77. Edwards 2003, 186–187. 78. Mitropoulos 2012, 117. 79.
Edwards et al. 2012. 80. Peters 2015, at 31. 81. Beck 1996, 1–32, at 18;
Easterling 2014. 82. Adler-Nissen and Gammeltoft-Hanse
not only of thoughts, ideals, and materials,
but also a series of cultural techniques that entwine temporality,
materiality, and even corporeality. This perspective on mass digitization
emphasizes the mixed nature of mass digitization assemblages: what at first
glance appears as a relatively straightforward story about new technical
inventions, at a closer look emerges as complex entanglements of human and
nonhuman actors, with implications not only for how we approach it as a legal-
technical entity but also an infrapolitical phenomenon. As the following
section shows, attending to the complex cultural techniques of mass
digitization (its “how”) enables us to see that its “minor” techniques are not
excluded from or irrelevant to, but rather are endemic to, larger questions of
the infrapolitics of digital capitalism. Thus, Google’s simple technique of
scaling scanning to make the digitization processes go faster becomes
entangled in the creation of new habits and techniques of acceleration and
rationalization that tie in with the politics of digital culture and digital
devices. The industrial scaling of mass digitization becomes a crucial part of
the industrial apparatus of big data, which provide new modes of inscription
for both individuals and digital industries that in turn can be capitalized on
via data-mining, just as it raises questions of digital labor and copyright.
Yet, what kinds of scaling techniques—and what kinds of investments—Google
would have to leverage to achieve its initial goals were still unclear to
Google in those early years. Larry Page and co-worke
onnection between Google and cultural memory institutions, where the roles of
giver and receiver, and the first giver and second giver/returner, were
difficult to decode. Indeed, the binding nature of the relationship between
Google Books and cultural memory institutions proved to be much more complex
than the simple physical exchange of books and digital files. As the next
section outlines, this complex system of cultural production was held together
by contractual arrangement—central joints, as it were, connecting data and
works, public and private, local and global, in increasingly complex ways. For
Google Books, these contractual relations appear as the connective tissues
that make these assemblages possible, and which are therefore fundamental to
their affective dimensions.
## The Infrapolitics of Contract
In common parlance a contract is a legal tool that formalizes a “mutual
agreement between two or more parties that something shall be done or forborne
by one or both,” often enforceable by law.39 Contractual systems emerged with
the medieval merchant regime, and later evolved with classical liberalism into
an ideological revolt against paternalist systems as nothing less than
freedom, a legal construct that could destroy the sentimental bonds of
personal dependence.40 As the classic liberal social scientist William Graham
Sumner argued, “[c]ontract … is rational … realistic, cold, and matter-of-
fact.” The rational nature of contracts also affected their temporality, since
a contract endures only “so long as the reason for it endures,” and their
spatiality, rel
rnal market, controlled by
the framework of competition law, time-limited contracts, and rules on state
aid.57 Moreover, mastering the rules of these new infrastructures is not
necessarily an easy feat for public institutions.58 Thus, while Google claims
to hold a core commitment regarding free digital access to information, and
while its financial apparatus could be construed as making Google an eligible
partner in accordance with the EU’s policy objectives toward furthering
public-private partnerships in Europe,59 it is nevertheless, as legal scholar
Maurizio Borghi notes, relevant to take into account Google’s previous
monopoly-building history.60
## The Politics of Google Books
A final aspect of Google Books relates to the universal aspiration of Google
Books’s collection, its infrapolitics, and what it empirically produces in
territorial terms. As this chapter’s previous sections have outlined, it was
an aspiration of Google Books to transcend the cultural and political
limitations of physical cultural memory collections by gathering the written
material of cultural memory institutions into one massive digitized
collection. Yet, while the collection spans millions of works in hundreds of
languages from hundreds of countries,61 it is also clear that even large-scale
mass digitization processes still entail procedures of selection on multiple
levels from libraries to works. These decisions produce a political reality
that in some respects reproduces and accentuates the existing politics of
cultural memory institutions in terms of territorial and class-based
representations,
ope, in the face of
Americanization, Barosso framed Europeana as an important economic element in
the construction of a knowledge economy.17
Europeana was thus still a competitive project, but it was now reframed as one
that would be much more easily aligned with, and integrated into, a global
market economy.18 One might see the difference in the French and the EU
responses as a question of infrastructural form and affordance. If French mass
digitization discourses were concerned with circumscribing the French cultural
heritage within the territory of the nation, the EC was in practice more
attuned to the networked aspects of the global economy and an accompanying
discourse of competition and potentiality. The infrastructural shift from
delineated sphere to globalized network changed the infrapolitics of cultural
memory from traditional nation-based issues such as identity politics
(including the formation of canons) to more globally aligned trade-related
themes such as copyright and public-private governance.
The shift from canon to copyright did not mean, however, that national
concerns dissipated. On the contrary, ministers from the European Union’s
member countries called for an investigation into the way Google Books handled
copyright in 2008.19 In reality, Google Books had very little to do with
Europe at that time, in the sense that Google Books was governed by US
copyright law. Yet the global reach of Google Books made it a European concern
nevertheless. Both German and French representatives emphasized the rift
between copyright legislation in the US and in EU member states.
ing involvement, such as turning the management of
Europeana over to the private sector.27 In a similar vein, a report authored
by a high-level reflection group (Comité des Sages) set down by the European
Commission opened the door for public-private partnerships and also set a time
frame for commercial exploitation.28 It was even suggested that Google could
play a role in the construction of Europeana. These considerations thus
contrasted the French resistance against Google with previous statements made
by the EC, which were concerned with preserving the public sector in the
administration of Europeana.
Did the European Commission’s networked politics signal a post-sovereign
future for Europeana? This chapter suggests no: despite the EC’s strategies,
it would be wrong to label the infrapolitics of Europeana as post-sovereign.
Rather, Europeana draws up a _late-sovereign_ 29 mass digitization landscape,
where claims to national sovereignty exist alongside networked
infrastructures.30 Why not post-sovereign? Because, as legal scholar Neil
Walker noted in 2003,31 the logic of sovereignty never waned even in the face
of globalized capitalism and legal pluralism. Instead, it fused with these
more globalized infrastructures to produce a form of politics that displayed
considerable continuity with the old sovereign order, yet also had distinctive
features such as globalized trade networks and constitutional pluralisms. In
this new system, seemingly traditional claims to sovereignty are carried out
irrespective of political practices, showing that globally networked
infrastructures and sovereign imaginaries are not necessarily mutually
exclusive; rather, territory and nation continue to remain powerful emotive
forces. Since Neil Walker’s theoretical corrective to theories on post-
sovereignty, the notion of late sovereignty seems to have only gained in
relevance as nationalist imaginaries increase in strength and power through
increasingly globalized networks.
As the following section shows, Europeana is a product of political processes
that are concerned with both the construction of bounded spheres and canons
_and_ networked infrastructures of connectivity, competition, and potentiality
operating beyond, below, and between national societal structures. Europeana’s
late-sovereign framework produces an infrapolitics in which the discursive
political juxtaposition between Europeana and Google Books exists alongside
increased cooperation between Google Books and Europeana, making it necessary
to qualify the comparative distinctions in mass digitization projects on a
much more detailed level than merely territorial delineations, without,
however, disposing of the notion of sovereignty. The simultaneous
contestations and connections between Europeana and Google Books thus make
visible the complex economic, intellectual, and technological infrastructures
at play in mass digitization.
What form did these infrastructures take? In a sense, the complex
infrastructural set-up of Europeana as it played out in the EU’s framework
ended up extending along two different axes: a vertical axis of national and
supra
rors of reality” but also “co-produced responses to
technoscientific and political uncertainty.”39 The European attempts to
harmonize copyright standards across national borders therefore pit not only
one technical standard against the other, but also “alternative political
cultures and their systems of public reasoning against one another”40
(Jasanoff, 133). Harmonization thus compresses, rather than eliminates,
national varieties within Europe.41 Hence, Barroso’s vision of Europeana as a
collective _European_ cultural memory is faced with the fragmented patterns of
national copyright regimes, producing if not overtly political borders in the
collections, then certainly infrapolitical manifestations of the cultural
barriers that still exist between European countries.
## The Infrapolitics of Interoperability
Copyright is not the only infrastructural regime that upholds borders in
Europeana’s collections; technical standards also pose great challenges for
the dream of an European connective cultural memory.42 The notion of
_interoperability_ 43 has therefore become a key concern for mass
digitization, as interoperability is what allows digitized cultural memory
institutions to exchange and share documents, queries, and services.44
The rise of interoperability as a key concept in mass digitization is a side-
effect of the increasing complexity of economic, political, and technological
networks. In the twentieth century, most European cultural memory institutions
existed primarily as small “sovereign” institutions, closed spheres governed
by internal logics and with li
g networks, this chapter has sought to
counter both ideas about post sovereignty and pure nationalization, viewing
mass digitization instead through the lens of late-sovereignty. As this
chapter shows, the notion of late-sovereignty allows us to conceptualize mass
digitization programs, such as Europeana, as globalized phenomena couched
within the language of (supra)national sovereignty. In the age where rampant
nationalist movements sweep through globalized communication networks, this
approach feels all the more urgent and applicable not only to mass
digitization programs, but also to reterritorializing communication phenomena
more broadly. Only if we take the ways in which the nationalist imaginary
works in the infrastructural reality of late capitalism, can we begin to
account for the infrapolitics of the highly mediated new territorial
imaginaries.
## Notes
1. Lefler 2007; Henry W., “Europe’s Digital Library versus Google,” Café
Babel, September 22, 2008,
digitization did not stand apart from the political and economic developments
in the rapidly globalizing world, digital theorists and activists soon gave
rise to the Internet as an inherent metaphor for this integrative development,
a sign of the inevitability of an ultimately borderless world, where as
Negroponte notes, time zones would “probably play a bigger role in our digital
future than trade zones” (Negroponte 1995, 228). 3. Goldsmith and Wu 2006. 4.
Rogers 2012. 5. Anderson 1991. 6. “Ja
existence of what this book terms shadow libraries raises difficult
questions, not only to your own moral compass but also to the field of mass
digitization. Political and popular discourses often reduce the complexity of
these questions to “right” and “wrong” and Hollywood narratives of pirates and
avengers. Yet, this chapter wishes to explore the deeper infrapolitical
implications of shadow libraries, setting out the argument that shadow
libraries offer us a productive framework for examining the highly complex
legal landscape of mass digitization. Rather than writing a chapter that
either supports or counters shadow libraries, the chapter seeks to chart the
complexity of the phenomenon and tease out its relevance for mass digitization
by framing it within what we might call an infrapolitics of parasitism.
In _The Parasite_ , a strange and fabulating book that brings together
information theory and cybernetics, physics, philosophy, economy, biology,
politics, and folk tales, French philosopher Michel Serres constructs an
argument about the conceptual figure of the parasite to explore the parasitic
nature of social relations. In a dizzying array of images and thought-
constructs, Serres argues against the idea of a balanced exchange of energy,
suggesting instead that our world is characterized by one parasite stealing
energy by feeding on another organism. For this purpose he reminds us of the
three meanings of parasite in the French language. In French, the term
parasite has three distinct, but related meanings. The first relates to one
organism feeding off another and giving
on of free access, and a political view on
existing copyright regulations as unjust and/or untimely. Some also express
their fascination with the new wonders of technology and their new
infrastructural possibilities. Others merely wish to practice forms of access
that their finances, political regime, or geography otherwise prohibit them
from doing. And all of them are important nodes in a new shadowy
infrastructural system that provides free access worldwide to books and
articles on a scale that collectively far surpasses both Google and Europeana.
Because of their illicit nature, most analyses of shadowy libraries have
centered on their legal transgressions. Yet, their cultural trajectories
contain nuances that far exceed legal binaries. Approaching shadow libraries
through the lens of infrapolitics is helpful for bringing forth these much
more complex cultural mass digitization systems. This chapter explores three
examples of shadow libraries, focusing in particular on their stories of
origin, their cultural economies, and their sociotechnical infrastructures.
Not all shadow libraries fit perfectly into the category of mass digitization.
Some of them are smaller in size, more selective, and less industrial.
Nevertheless, I include them because their open access strategies allow for
unlimited downloads. Thus, shadow libraries, while perhaps selective in size
themselves, offer the opportunity to reproduce works at a massive and
distributed scale. As such, they are the perfect example of a mass
digitization assemblage.
The first case centers on lib.ru, an early Russia-based file-sharin
he use of the Twitter hashtag #ICanHazPDF to help
pirate scientific papers.
Today, shadow libraries exist as timely reminders of the infrapolitical nature
of mass digitization. They appear as hypertrophied versions of the access
provided by Google Books and Europeana. More fundamentally, they also exist as
political symptoms of the ideologies of the digital, characterized by ideals
of velocity and connectivity. As such, we might say that although shadow
libraries often position themselves as subversives, in many ways they also
belong to the same storyline as other mass digitization projects such as
Google Books and Europeana. Significantly, then, shadow libraries are
infrapolitical in two senses: first, they have become central infrastructural
elements in what James C. Scott calls the “infrapolitics of subordinate
groups,” providing everyday resistance by creating entrance points to
hitherto-excluded knowledge zones.7 Second, they represent and produce the
infrapolitics of the digital _tout court_ with their ideals of real-time,
globalized, and unhindered access.
## Lib.ru
Lib.ru is one of the earliest known digital shadow libraries. It was
established by the Russian computer science professor Maxim Moshkov, who
complemented his academic practice of programming with a personal hobby of
file-sharing on the so-called RuNet, the Russian-language segment of the
Internet.8 Moshkov’s collection had begun as an e-book swapping practice in
1990, but in 1994 he uploaded the material to his institute’s web server where
he then divided the site into several section such as “my hobbies,” “my work,”
and “my library.”9 If lib.ru began as a private project, however, the role of
Moshkov’s library soon changed as it quickly became Russia’s preferred
izing the technical
equipment for the shadow library, including upgrading servers and performing
OCR scanning on select texts.21 Yet, despite the widespread support, Moshkov
lost the copyright case to KM on May 31, 2005. The defeat was limited,
however. Indeed, one might even read the verdict as a symbolic victory for
Moshkov, as the court fined Moshkov only 30,000 rubles, a fragment of what KM
had originally sued for. The verdict did have significant consequences for how
Moshkov manages lib.ru, however. After the trial, Moshkov began extending his
classical literature section and stopped uploading books sent by readers into
his collection, unless they were from authors who submitted them because they
wished to publish in digital form.
What can we glean from the story of lib.ru about the infrapolitics of mass
digitization? First, the story of lib.ru illustrates the complex and
contingent historical trajectory of shadow libraries. Second, as the next
section shows, it offers us the possibility of approaching shadow libraries
from an infrastructural perspective, and exploring the infrapolitical
dimensions of shadow libraries in the area of tension between resistance and
standardization.
### The Infrapolitics of Lib.ru: Infrastructures of Culture and Dissent
While global in reach, lib.ru is first and foremost a profoundly
territorialized project. It was born out of a set of political, economic, and
aesthetic conditions specific to Russia and carries the characteristics of its
cultural trajectory. First, the private governance of lib.ru, initially
embodied by Moshkov, echoes the general development of the Internet in Russia
from 1991 to 1998, which was constructed mainly by private economic and
cultural initiatives at a time when the state was in a period of heavy
transition. Lib.ru’s minimalist programming style also made it a cultural
symbol of the early RuNet, acting as a marker of cultural identity for Russian
Internet users at home and abroad.22
The infrapolitics of lib.ru also carry the traits of the media politics of
Russia, which has historically been split into two: a political and visible
level of access to cultural works (through propaganda), and an infrapolitical
invisible level of contestation and resistance, enabling Russian media
consumers to act independently from official institutionalized media channels.
Indeed, some scholars tie the practice of shadow libraries to the Soviet
Union’s analog shadow activities, which are often termed _samizdat_ , that is,
illegal cultural distribution, including illegally listening to Western radio,
illegally trafficking Western music, and illegally watching Western films.23
Despite often circulating Western pop culture, the late-Soviet era samizdat
practices were often framed as noncapitalist practice
overthrow the Soviet regime, samizdat was rather a
mode of dissent that evaded centralized ideological control. Indeed, as
Aleksei Yurchak notes, samizdat practices could even be read as a mode of
“suspending the political,” thus “avoiding the political concerns that had a
binary logic determined by the sovereign state” to demonstrate “to themselves
and to others that there were subjects, collectivities, forms of life, and
physical and symbolic spaces in the Soviet context that, without being overtly
oppositional or even political, exceeded that state’s abilities to define,
control, and understand them.”25 Yurchak thus reminds us that even though
samizdat was practiced as a form of nonpolitical practice, it nevertheless
inherently had significant political implications.
The infrapolitics of samizdat not only referred to a specific social practice
but were also, as Ann Komaromi reminds us, a particular discourse network
rooted in the technology of the typewriter: “Because so many people had their
own typewriters, the production of samizdat was more individual and typically
less linked to ideology and organized political structures. … The circulation
of Samizdat was more rhizomatic and spontaneous than the underground
press—samizdat was like mushroom ‘spores.’”26 The technopolitical
infrastructure of samizdat changed, however, with the fall of the Berlin Wall
in 1989, the further decentralization of the Russian media landscape, and the
emergence of digitization. Now, new nodes emerged in the Russian information
landscape, and there was no centralized authority to regulate them. Moreover,
the transmission of the Western capitalist system gave rise to new types of
shadow activity that produced items instead of just sharing items, adding a
new consumerist dimension to shadow libraries. Indeed, as Kuznetsov notes, the
late-Soviet samizdat created a dynamic textual space that aligned with more
general tendencies in mass digitization where users were “both readers and
librarians, in contrast to a traditional library with its order, selection,
and strict catalogisation.”27
If many of the new shadow libraries that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s were
inspired by the infrapolitics of samizdat, then, they also became embedded in
an infrastructural apparatus that was deeply nested within a market economy.
Indeed, new digital libraries emerged under such names as Aldebaran,
Fictionbook, Litportal, Bookz.ru, and Fanzin, which developed new platforms
for the distribution of electronic books under the label “Liters,” offering
texts to be read free of charge on a computer screen or downloaded at a
cost.28 In both cases, the authors receive a fee, either from the price of the
book or from the site’s advertising income. Accompanying these new commercial
initiatives, a concomitant movement rallied together in the form of Librusek,
a platform hosted on a server in Ecuador that offered its users the
possibility of uploading works on a distributed basis.29 In contrast to
Moshkov’s centralized control, then, the library’s operator Ilya Larin adhered
to the international piracy movement, calling his site a pirate library and
gracing Librusek’s website with a small animated pirate, complete with sabre
and parrot.
The integration and proliferation of samizdat practices into a complex
capitalist framework produced new global readings of the infrapolitics of
shadow libraries. Rather than reading shadow libraries as examples of late-
socialist infrapolitics, scholars also framed them as capitalist symptoms of
“market failure,” that is, the failure of the market to meet consumer
demands.30 One prominent example of such a reading was the influential Social
Science Research Council report edited by Joe Karaganis in 2006, titled “Media
Piracy in Emerging Economies,” which noted that cultural piracy appears most
notably as “a failure to provide affordable access to media in legal markets”
and concluded that within the context of developing countries “the pirate
market cannot be said to compete with legal sales or generate losses for
industry. At the low end of the socioeconomic ladder where such distribution
gaps are common, piracy often simply is the market.”31
In the Western world, Karaganis’s reading was a progressive response to the
otherwise traditional approach to media piracy as a legal failure, which
argued that tougher laws and increased enforcement are needed to stem
infringing activity. Yet, this book argues that Karaganis’s report, and the
approach it represents, also frames the infrapolitics of shadow libraries
within a consumerist framework that excises the noncommercial infrapolitics of
samizdat from the picture. The increasing integration of Russian media
infrapolitics into Western apparatuses, and the reframing of shadow libraries
from samizdat practices of political dissent to market failure, situates the
infrapolitics of shadow libraries within a consumerist dispositive and the
individual participants as consumers. As some critical voices suggest, this
has an impact on the political potential of shadow libraries because they—in
contrast to samizdat—actually correspond “perfectly to the industrial
production proper to the legal cultural market production.”32 Yet, as the
final section in this chapter shows, one also risks missing the rich nuances
of infrapolitics by conflating consumerist infrastructures with consumerist
practice.33
The political stakes of shadow libraries such as lib.ru illustrate the
difficulties in labeling shadow libraries in political terms, since they are
driven neither by pure globalized dissent nor by pure globalized and
commodified infrastructures. Rather, they straddle these binaries as
infrapolitical entities, the political dynamics of which align both with
standardization and dissent. Revisiting once more the theoretical debate, the
case of lib.ru shows that shadow libraries may certainly be global phenomena,
yet one should be careful with disregarding the specific cultural-political
trajectories that shape each individual shadow library. Lib.ru demonstrates
how the infrapolitics of shadow libraries emerge as infrastructural
expressions of the convergence between historical sovereign trajectories,
global information infrastructures, and public-private governance structures.
Shadow libraries are not just globalized projects that exist in parallel to
sovereign state structures and global economic flows. Instead, they are
entangled in territorial public-private governance practices that produce
their own late-sovereign infrapolitics, which, paradoxically, are embedded in
larger mass digitization problematics, both on their own territory and on the
global scene.
## Monoskop
In contrast to the broad and distributed infrastructure of lib.ru, other
shadow libraries have emerged as specialized platforms that cater to a
specific community and encourage a specific practice. Monoskop is one such
shadow library. Like lib.ru, Monoskop started as a one-man project and in many
respects still reflects its creator, Dušan Barok, who is an artist, writer,
and cultural activist involved in critical practices in the fields of
software, art, and theory. Prior to Monoskop, his activities were mainly
focused on the Bratislava cultural media scene, and Monoskop was among other
things set up as an infrastructural project, one that would
ct the user to avant-garde magazines, art exhibitions and events, art and
design schools, artistic and cultural themes, and cultural theorists.
Importantly, shadow libraries such as Monoskop do not just host works
unbeknownst to the authors—authors also leak their own works. Thus, some
authors publishing with brand name, for-profit, all-rights-reserving, print-
on-paper-only publishing houses will also circulate a copy of their work on a
free text-sharing network such as Monoskop. 38
How might we understand Monoskop’s legal situation and maneuverings in
infrapolitical terms? Shadow libraries such as Monoskop draw their
infrapolitical strength not only from the content they offer but also from
their mode of engagement with the gray zones of new information
infrastructures. Indeed, the infrapolitics of shadow libraries such as
Monoskop can perhaps best be characterized as a stratagematic form of
infrapolitics. Monoskop neither inhabits the passive perspective of the
digital spectator nor deploys a form of tactics that aims to be failure free.
Rather, it exists as a body of informal practices and knowledges, as cunning
and dexterous networks that actively embed themselves in today’s
sociotechnical infrastructures. It operates with high sociotechnical
sensibilities, living off of the social relations that bring it into being and
stabilize it. Most significantly, Monoskop skillfully exploits the cracks in
the infrastructures it inhabits, interchangeably operating, evading, and
accompanying them. As Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey point out in their
meditation on stratagems in digital
up gray zones through spectacle and legal power
plays, and Europeana shuns gray zones in favor of the law, Monoskop literally
embraces its shadowy existence in the gray zones of the law. By working in the
shadows, Monoskop and likeminded operations highlight the ways in which the
objects they circulate (including the digital artifacts, their knowledge
management, and their software) can be manipulated and experimented upon to
produce new forms of power dynamics.41 Their ethics lie more in the ways in
which they operate as shadowy infrastructures than in intellectual reflections
upon the infrastructures they counter, without, however, creating an
opposition between thinking and doing. Indeed, as its history shows, Monoskop
grew out of a desire to create a space for critical reflection. The
infrapolitics of Monoskop is thus an infrapolitics of grayness that marks the
breakdown of clearly defined contrasts between legal and illegal, licit and
illicit, desire and control, instead providing a space for activities that are
ethically ambiguous and in which “everyone is sullied.”42
### Monoskop as a Territorializing Assemblage
While Monoskop’s stratagems play on the infrapolitics of the gray zones of
globalized digital networks, the shadow library also emerges as a late-
sovereign infrastructure. As already noted, Monoskop was from the outset
focused on surfacing and connecting art and media objects and theory from
Central and Eastern Europe. Often, this territorial dimension recedes into the
background, with discussions centering more on the site’s specialized catalog
and legal maneuvers. Yet Monoskop was initially launched partly as a response
to criticisms on new media scenes in the Slovak and Czech Republics as
“incomprehensible avant-garde.”43 It began as a simple invite-only instance of
wiki in August 2004, urging participants to collaboratively research the
history of media art. It was from the beginning conceived more as a
collaborative social practic
the ephemerality of UbuWeb is a shared condition of most shadow
libraries, most of which exist only as ghostly reminders with nonfunctional
download links or simply as 404 pages, once they pull the plug. Rather than
lamenting this volatile existence, however, Goldsmith embraces it as an
infrapolitical stance. As Cornelia Solfrank points out, UbuWeb was—and still
is—as much an “archival critical practice that highlights the legal and social
ramifications of its self-created distribution and archiving system as it is
about the content hosted on the site.”52 UbuWeb is thus not so much about
authenticity as it is about archival defiance, appropriation, and self-
reflection. Such broader and deeper understandings of archival theory and
practice allow us to conceive of it as the kind of infrapolitics that,
according to James C. Scott, “provides much of the cultural and structural
underpinning of the more visible political attention on which our attention
has generally been focused.”53 The infrapolitics of UbuWeb is devoted to
hatching new forms of organization, creating new enclaves of freedom in the
midst of orthodox ways of life, and inventing new structures of production and
dissemination that reveal not only the content of their material but also
their marginalized infrastructural conditions and the constellation of social
forces that lead to their online circulation.54
The infrapolitics of UbuWeb is testament not only to avant-garde cultures, but
also to what Hito Steyerl in her _Defense of Poor Images_ refers to as the
“neoliberal radicalization of the culture as commodity” and the “restructuring
of global media industries.” 55 These materials “circulate partly in the void
left by state organizations” that find it too difficult to maintain digital
distribution infrastructures and the art world’s commercial ecosystems, which
offer the cultural materials hosted on UbuWeb only a liminal existence. Thus,
while UbuWeb on the one hand “reveals the decline and marginalization of
certain cultural materials” whose production were often “considered a task of
the state,”56 on the other hand it shows how intellectual content is
increasingly privatized, not only in corporate terms but also through
individuals, which in UbuWeb’s case is expressed in Kenneth Goldsmith, who
acts as the sole archival gatekeeper.57
## The Infrapolitics of Shadow Libraries
If the complexity of shadow libraries cannot be reduced to the contrastive
codes of “right” and “wrong” and global-local binaries, the question remains
how to theorize the cultural politics of shadow libraries. This final section
outlines three central infrapolitical aspects of shadow libraries: access,
speed, and gift.
Mass digitization poses two important questions to knowledge infrastructures:
a logistical question of access and a strategic question of to whom to
allocate that access. Copyright poses a significant logistical barrier between
users and works as a point of control in the ideal free flow of information.
In mass digitization, increased access to information stimulates projects,
whereas in publishing industries with monopoly possibilities, the drive is
toward restriction and control. The uneasy fit between copyright regulations
and mass digitization projects has, as already shown, given rise to several
conflicts, either as legal battles or as copyright reform initiatives arguing
that current copyright frameworks cast doubt upon the political ideal of total
access. As with Europeana and Google Books, the question of _access_ often
stands at the core of the infrapolitics of shadow libraries. Yet, the
strategic responses to the problem of copyright vary significantly: if
Europeana moves within the established realm of legality to reform copyright
regulations and Google Books produces claims to new cultural-legal categories
such as “nonconsumptive reading,” shadow libraries offer a third
infrastructural maneuver—bypassing copyright infrastructures altogether
through practices of illicit file distribution.
Shadow libraries elicit a range of responses and discourses that place
themselves on a spectrum between condemnation and celebration. The most
straightforward response comes, unsurprisingly, from the publishing industry,
highlighting the fundamentally violent breaches of the legal order that
underpins the media industry. Such responses include legal action, policy
initiatives, and public campaigns against piracy, often staging—in more or
less explicit terms—the “pirate” as a common enemy of mankind, beyond legal
protection and to be fought by whatever means necessary.
The second response comes from the open source movement, represented among
others by the pro-reform copyright movement Creative Commons (CC), whose
flexible copyright framework has been adopted by both Europeana and Google
Books.58 While the open source movement has become a voice on behalf of the
telos of the Internet and its possibilities of offering free and unhindered
access, its response to shadow libraries has revealed the complex
infrapolitics of access as a postcolonial problematic. As Kavita Philip
argues, CC’s founder Lawrence Lessig maintains the image of the “good” Western
creative vis-à-vis the “bad” Asian pirate, citing for instance his statement
in his influential book _Free Culture_ that “All across the world, but
especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, there are businesses that do nothing
but take other people’s copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it. … This is
piracy plain and simple, … This piracy is wrong.” 59 Such statements, Kavita
Philip argues, frames the Asian pirate as external to order, whether it be the
order of Western law or neoliberalism.60
The postcolonial critique of CC’s Western normative discourse has instead
sought to conceptualize piracy, not as deviatory behavior in information
economies, but rather as an integral infrastructure endemic to globalized
information economies.61 This theoretical development offers valuable insights
for understanding the infrapolitics of shadow libraries. First of all, it
allows us to go beyond moral discussions of shadow libraries, and to pay
attention instead to the ways in which their infrastructures are built, how
they operate, and how they connect to other infrastructures. As Lawrence Liang
points out, if infrastructures traditionally belong to the domain of the
state, often in cooperation with private business, pirate infrastructures
operate in the gray zones of this set-up, in much the same way as slums exist
as shadow cities and copies are regarded as shadows of the original.62
Moreover, and relatedly, it reminds us of the inherently unstable form of
shadow libraries as a cultural construct, and the ways in which what gets
termed piracy differs across cultures. As Brian Larkin notes, piracy is best
seen as emerg
malized research libraries.68
Other studies indicate, however, that many downloads occur because the users
have (perceived) lack of full-text access to the desired texts.69
Finally, as indicated in the introduction to this chapter, shadow libraries
produce what we might call a cultural politics of parasitism. In the normative
model of shadow libraries, discourse often centers upon piracy as a theft
economy. Other discourses, drawing upon anthropological sources, have pointed
out that peer-to-peer file-sharing sites in reality organize around a gift
economy, that is, “a system of social solidarity based on a structured set of
gift exchange and social relationships among consumers.”70 This chapter,
however, ends with a third proposal: that shadow libraries produce a
parasitical form of infrapolitics. In _The Parasite_ , philosopher Michel
Serres speculates a way of thinking about relations of transfer—in social,
biological, and informational contexts—as fundamentally parasitic, that is, a
subtractive form of “taking without giving.” Serres contrasts the parasitic
model with established models of society based on notions such as exchange and
gift giving.71 Shadow libraries produce an infrapolitics that denies the
distinction between producers and subtractors of value, allowing us instead to
focus on the social roles infrastructural agents perform. Restoring a sense of
the wider context of parasitism to shadow libraries does not provide a clear-
cut solution as to when and where shadow libraries should be condemned and
when and where they should be tolerated. But it does help us ask questions in
a different way. And it certainly prevents the regarding of shadow libraries
as the “other” in the landscape of mass digitization. Shadow libraries
instigate new creative relations, the dynamics of which are infrastructurally
premised upon the medium they use. Just as typewriters were an important
component of samizdat practices in the Soviet Union, digital infrastructures
are central com
ation of his end.”44 In 2012,
Evgeny Morozov in similar terms declared the death of the cyberflaneur.
Linking the commodification of urban spaces in nineteenth-century Paris to the
commodification of the Internet, Morozov noted that “it’s no longer a place
for strolling—it’s a place for getting things done” and that “Everything that
makes cyberflânerie possible—solitude and individuality, anonymity and
opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking—is under
assault.”45 These two death sentences, separated by a century, link the
environment of the flaneur to significant questions about the commodification
of space and its infrapolitical implications.
Exploring the implications of this topography, the following section suggests,
will help us understand the infrapolitics of the spatial imaginaries of mass
digitization, not only in relation to questions of globalization and late
sovereignty, but also to cultural imaginaries of knowledge infrastructures.
Indeed, these two dimensions are far from mutually exclusive, but rather
belong to the same overarching tale of the politics of mass digitization.
Thus, while the material spatial infrastructures of mass digitization projects
may help us appreciate certain important political dynamics of Europeana,
Google Books, and shadow libraries (such as their territorializing features or
copyright contestations in relation to knowledge production), only an
inclusion of the infrastructural imaginaries of knowledge production will help
us understand the complex politics of mass digitization as it metamorphoses
from analog
d it is out
of copyright). The anxiety experienced by knowledge professionals in the new
cultural memory ecosystem can of course be explained by a rationalized fear of
job insecurity and territorial concerns. Yet, the fear of knowledge
infrastructures without a center may also run deeper. As Penelope Doob reminds
us, the center of the labyrinth historically played a central moral and
epistemological role in the labyrinthine topos, as the site that held the
epiphanous key to unravel whatever evils or secrets the labyrinth contained.
With no center, there is no key, no epiphany.61 From this perspective, then,
it is not only a job that is lost. It is also the meaning of knowledge
itself.62
What, then, can we take from these labyrinthine wanderings as we pursue a
greater understanding of the infrapolitics of mass digitization? Certainly, as
this section shows, the politics of mass digitization is entangled in
spatialized imaginaries that have a long and complex cultural and affective
trajectory interlinked with ontological and epistemological questions about
the very nature of knowledge. Cladding the walls of these trajectories are, of
course, the ever-present political questions of authority and territory, but
also deeper cultural and affective questions about the nature and meaning of
knowledge as it bandies about in our cultural imaginaries, between discoveries
and dead-ends, between freedom and control.
As the next section will show, one concept has in particular come to
encapsulate these concerns: the notion of serendipity. While the notion of
serendipity has a long history, it has ga
ries have their own forms of ‘serendipity engineering,’ from
storefront staff picks to behind-the-scenes cataloguing and shelving methods
that make for happy accidents.”86 Yet there is no doubt that the discourse of
serendipity has been infused with new life that sometimes veers toward a
“spectacle of serendipity.”87
Over the past decade, the digital infrastructures that organize our cultural
memory have become increasingly integrated in a digital economy that valuates
“experience” as a cultural currency that can be exchanged to profit, and our
affective meanderings as a form of industrial production. This digital economy
affects the architecture and infrastructure of digital archives. The archival
discourse on digital serendipity is thus now embroiled in a more deep-seated
infrapolitics of workspace architecture, influenced by Silicon Valley’s
obsession with networks, process, and connectivity.88 Think only of the
increasing importance of Google and Facebook to mass digitization projects:
most of these projects have a Facebook page on which they showcase their
material, just as they take pains to make themselves “algorithmically
recognizable”89 to Google and other search engines in the hope of reaching an
audience beyond the echo chamber of archives and to distribute their archival
material on leisurely tidbit platforms such as Pinterest and Twitter.90 If
serendipity is increasingly thought of as a platform problem, the final
question we might pose is what kind of infrapolitics this platform economy
generates and how it affects mass digitization projects.
## The Infrapolitics of Platform Power
As the previous sections show, mass digitization projects rely upon spatial
metaphors to convey ideas about, and ideals of, cultural memory
infrastructures, their knowledge production, and their serendipitous
potential. Thus, for mass digitization projects, the ideal scenario is that
the labyrinthine errings of the user result in serendipitous finds that in
turn bring about new forms of cultural value. From the point of the user,
however, being caught up in the labyrinth might just as easily give rise to an
experience of being confronted with a sense of lack of oversight and
alienation in the alleyways of commodified infrastructures. These two
scenarios co-exist because of what Penelope Doob (as noted in the section on
labyrinthine imaginaries) refers to as the dual potentiality of the labyrinth,
which when experienced from within can be become a sign of confusion, and when
viewed from above becomes a sign of complex order.91
In this final section, I will turn to a new spatial metaphor, which appears to
have resolved this dual potentiality of the spatial perspective of mass
digitization projects: the platform. The platform has recently emerged as a
new buzzword in the digital economy, connoting simultaneously a perspective, a
business strategy, and a political ideology. Ideally the platform provides a
different perspective than the labyrinth, offering the user the possibility of
simultaneously constructing the labyrinth and viewing it from above. This
final section therefore explores how we might understand the infrapolitics of
the platform, and its role in the digital economy.
In its recent business strategy, Europeana claimed that it was moving from
operating as a “portal” to operating as a “platform.”92 The announcement was
part of a broader infrastructural transition in the field of cultural memory,
undergirded by a process of opening up and connecting the cultural memory
sector to wider knowledge ecosystems.93 Indeed, Europeana’s move is part of a
much larger discursive and material reality of a more fundamental process of
“platformization” of the web.94 The notion of the platform has thus recently
become an important heuristic for understanding the cultural development of
the web and its economy, fusing the computational understanding of the
platform as an environment in which a code is executed95 and the political and
social understanding of a platform as a site of politics.96
While the infrapolitics of the platformization of the web has become a central
discussion in software and communication studies, little interest has been
paid to the implications of platforms for the politics of cultural memory.
Yet, Europeana’s business strategy illustrates the significant infrapolitical
role that platforms are given in mass digitization literature. Citing digital
historian Tim Sherratt’s claim that “portals are for visiting, platforms for
building on,”97 Europeana’s strategy argues that if cultural memory sites free
themselves and their content from the “prison of portals” in favor of more
openness and flexibility, this will in turn empower users to created their own
“pathways” through the digital cultural memory, instead of being forced to
follow predetermined “narrative journeys.”98 The business plan’s reliance on
Sherratt’s theory of platforms shows that although the platform has a
technical meaning in computation, Europeana’s discourse goes beyond mere
computational logic. It instead signifies an infrapolitics that carries with
it an assumption about the political dynamics of software, standing in for the
freedom to act in the labyrinthine infrastructures of digital collections.
Yet, what is a platform, and how might we understand its infrapolitics? As
Tarleton Gillespie points out, the oldest definition of platform is
architectural, as a level or near-level surface, often elevated.99 As such,
there is something inherently simple about platforms. As architect Sverre Fehn
notes, “the simplest form of architecture is to cultivate the surface of the
earth, to make a platform.”100 Fehn’s statement conceals a more fundamental
insight about platforms, however: in the establishment of a low horizontal
platform, one also establishes a social infrastructure. Platforms are thus not
only material constructions, they also harbor infrapolitical affordances. The
etymology of the notion of “platform” evidences this infrapolitical dimension.
Originally a spatial concept, the notion of platform appeared in
architectural, figurative, and mil
visional constructions.”106 Deleuze and Guattari’s
ontology became widely influential in theorizing the web _in toto_ ; as Rem
Koolhaas once noted, the “language of architecture—platform, blueprint,
structure—became almost the preferred language for indicating a lot of
phenomenon that we’re facing from Silicon Valley.”107 From the singular
platforms of military and party politics, emerged, then, the thousand
platforms of the digital, where “nearly every surge of research and investment
pursued by the digital industry—e-commerce, web services, online advertising,
mobile devices and digital media sales—has seen the term migrate to it.”108
What infrapolitical logic can we glean from Silicon Valley’s adoption of the
vernacular notion of the platform? Firstly, it is an infrapolitics of
temporality. As Tarleton Gillespie points out, the semantic aspects of
platforms “point to a common set of connotations: a ‘raised level surface’
designed to facilitate some activity that will subsequently take place. It is
anticipatory, but not causal.”109 The inscription of platforms into the
material infrastructures of the Internet thus assume a value-producing
futurity. If serendipity is what is craved, then platforms are the site in
which this is thought to take place.
Despite its inclusion in the entrepreneurial discourse of Silicon Valley, the
notion of the platform is also used to signal an infrapolitics of
collaboration, even subversion. Olga Gurionova, for instance, explores the
subversive dynamics of critical artistic platforms,110 and Trebor Sholtz
promotes the term “platform cooperativism” to advance worker-based
cooperatives that would “design their own apps-based platforms, fostering
truly peer-to-peer ways of providing services and things, and speak truth to
the new platform capitalists.”111 Shadow libraries such as Monoskop appear as
perfect examples of such subversive platforms and evidence of Srnicek’s
reminder that not _all_ social interactions are co-opted into systems of
profit generation. 112 Yet, as the territorial, legal, and social
infrastructures of mass digitization become increasingly labyrinthine, it
takes a lot of critical consciousness to properly interpre
such as social media sites like Facebook, Google+,
Pinterest, and Twitter, as well as mobile devices such as Android, gaining an
overview of who collects one’s data and how becomes more nebulous.
Europeana’s reminder illustrates the assemblatic infrastructural set-up of
mass digitization projects and how they operate with multiple entry points,
each of which may attach its own infrapolitical dynamics. It also illustrates
the labyrinthine infrastructures of privacy settings, over which a mapping is
increasingly difficult to attain because of constant changes and
reconfigurations. It furthermore illustrates the changing legal order from the
relatively stable sovereign order of human rights obligations to the
modulating landscape of privacy policies.
How then might we characterize the infrapolitics of the spatial imaginaries of
mass digitization? As this chapter has sought to convey, writings about mass
digitization projects are shot through with spatialized metaphors, from the
flaneur to the labyrinth and the platform, either in literal terms or in the
imaginaries they draw on. While this section has analyzed these imaginaries in
a somewhat chronological fashion, with the interactivity of the platform
increasingly replacing the more passive gaze of the spectator, they coexist in
that larger complex of spatial digital thinking. While often used to elicit
uncomplicated visions of empowerment, desire, curiosity, and productivity,
these infrapolitical imaginaries in fact show the complexity of mass
digitization projects in their reinscription of users and cultural memory
institutions in
enon. If the former
denotes a technical way of duplicating analog material in digital form, mass
digitization as a cultural practice is a much more complex apparatus. On the
one hand, it offers the simple promise of heightened public and private access
to—and better preservation of—the past; one the other, it raises significant
political questions about ethics, politics, power, and care in the digital
sphere. I locate the emergence of these questions within the infrastructures
of mass digitization and the ways in which they not only offer new ways of
reading, viewing, and structuring cultural material, but also new models of
value and its extraction, and new infrastructures of control. The political
dynamic of this restructuring, I suggest, may meaningfully be referred to as a
form of infrapolitics, insofar as the political work of mass digitization
often happens at the level of infrastructure, in the form of standardization,
dissent, or both. While mass digitization entwines the cultural politics of
analog artifacts and institutions with the infrapolitical logics of the new
digital economies and technologies, there is no clear-cut distinction between
between the analog and digital realms in this process. Rather, paraphrasing N.
Katherine Hayles, I suggest that mass digitization, like a Janus-figure,
“looks to past and future, simultaneously reinforcing and undermining both.”1
A persistent challenge in the study of mass digitization is the mutability of
the analytical object. The unstable nature of cultural memory archives is not
a new phenomenon. As Derrida points out, they hav
ped, its legacy lives on
and is still put to active use.5
In the present context, the important point to make is that a quiet life does
not necessarily equal death. Indeed, this is the lesson we learn from
attending to the subtle workings of infrastructure: the politics of
infrastructure is the politics of what goes on behind the curtains, not only
what is launched to the front page. Thus, as one engineer notes when
confronted with the fate of Google Books, “We’re not focused on shiny features
and things that are very visible to users. … It’s more like behind-the-scenes
work and perfecting the technology—acquiring content, processing it properly
so that we can view the entire book online, and adjusting the search
algorithm.”6 This is a timely reminder that any analysis of the infrapolitics
of mass digitization has to tend not only to the visible and loud politics of
construction, but also the quiet and ongoing politics of infrastructure
maintenance. It makes no sense to write an obituary for Google Books if the
infrastructure is still at work. Moreover, the assemblatic nature of mass
digitization also demands that we do not stop at the immediate borders of a
project when making analytical claims about their infrapolitics. Thus, while
Google Books may have stopped in its tracks, other trains of mass digitization
have pulled up instead, carrying the project of mass digitization forward
toward new, divergent, and experimental sites. Google’s different engagements
with cultural digitization shows that an analysis of the politics of Google’s
memory work needs to operate with an assemblatic method, rather than a
delineating approach.7 Europeana and DPLA also are mutable analytical objects,
both in economic and cultural form. Therefore, Europeana leads a precarious
life from one EU budget framework to the next, and its cultural identity and
software instantiations have transformed from a digital library, to a portal,
to a platform over the course of only a few decades. Last, but not least,
shadow libraries ar
ling ourselves of its networked virtual bookshelves to collect and display
our readerliness in a postprint age, we have become objects to be collected.”9
Thus, as we gather vintage images on Pinterest, collect books in Google Books,
and retweet sounds files from Europeana, we do best not only to question the
cultural logic and ethics of these actions but also to remember that as we
collect and connect, we are also ourselves collected and connected.
If the power of mass digitization happens at the level of infrastructure,
political resistance will have to take the form of infrastructural
intervention. We play a role in the formulation of the ethics of such
interventions, and as such we have to be willing to abandon the predominant
tropes of scale, access, and acceleration in favor of an infrapolitics of
care—a politics that offers opportunities for mindful, slow, and focused
encounters.
## Notes
1. Hayles 1999, 17. 2. Chun. 2008; Chun 2017. 3. Murrell 2017. 4. James
Somers, “Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria,” _The Atlantic_ ,
April 20, 2017. 5. Jennifer Howard, “What Happened to Google’s Effort to Scan
Millions of University Library Books?,” _EdSurge_ , August 10, 2017,
Books Got Lost,” _Wired_ , November 4, 2017,
trend of employing Google’s neural networks to find one’s museum do
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