repair in Mars & Medak 2019


Mars & Medak
Against Innovation
2019


Against Innovation: Compromised institutional agency and acts of custodianship
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

abstract
In this essay we reflect on the historic crisis of the university and the public library as two
modern institutions tasked with providing universal access to knowledge and education.
This crisis, precipitated by pushes to marketization, technological innovation and
financialization in universities and libraries, has prompted the emergence of shadow
libraries as collective disobedient practices of maintenance and custodianship. In their
illegal acts of reversing property into commons, commodification into care, we detect a
radical gesture comparable to that of the historical avant-garde. To better understand how
the university and the public library ended up in this crisis, we re-trace their development
starting with the capitalist modernization around the turn of the 20th century, a period of
accelerated technological innovation that also birthed historical avant-garde. Drawing on
Perry Anderson’s ‘Modernity and Revolution’, we interpret that uniquely creative period
as a period of ambivalence toward an ‘unpredictable political future’ that was open to
diverging routes of social development. We situate the later re-emergence of avant-garde
practices in the 1960s as an attempt to subvert the separations that a mature capitalism
imposes on social reality. In the present, we claim, the radicality equivalent to the avantgarde is to divest from the disruptive dynamic of innovation and focus on the repair,
maintenance and care of the broken social world left in techno-capitalism’s wake.
Comparably, the university and the public library should be able to claim the radical
those gesture of slowdown and custodianship too, against the imperative of innovation
imposed on them by policymakers and managers.

Custodians.online, the first letter
On 30 November, 2015 a number of us shadow librarians who advocate, build
and maintain ‘shadow libraries’, i.e. online infrastructures allowing users to
digitise, share and debate digital texts and collections, published a letter
article | 345

ephemera: theory & politics in organization


(Custodians.online, 2015) in support of two of the largest user-created
repositories of pirated textbooks and articles on the Internet – Library Genesis
and Science Hub. Library Genesis and Science Hub’s web domain names were
taken down after a New York court issued an injunction following a copyright
infringement suit filed by the largest commercial academic publisher in the
world – Reed Elsevier. It is a familiar trajectory that a shared digital resource,
once it grows in relevance and size, gets taken down after a court decision.
Shadow libraries are no exception.
The world of higher education and science is structured by uneven development.
The world’s top-ranked universities are concentrated in a dozen rich countries
(Times Higher Education, 2017), commanding most of the global investment
into higher education and research. The oligopoly of commercial academic
publishers is headquartered in no more than half of those. The excessive rise of
subscription fees has made it prohibitively expensive even for the richest
university libraries of the Global North to provide access to all the journals they
would need to (Sample, 2012), drawing protest from academics all over the world
against the outrageously high price tag that Reed Elsevier puts on their work
(‘The Cost of Knowledge’, 2012). Against this concentration of economic might
and exclusivity to access, stands the fact that the rest of the world has little access
to the top-ranked research universities (Baty, 2017; Henning, 2017) and that the
poor universities are left with no option but to tacitly encourage their students to
use shadow libraries (Liang, 2012). The editorial director of global rankings at the
Times Higher Education Phil Baty minces no words when he bluntly states ‘that
money talks in global higher education seems … to be self-evident’ (Baty, 2017).
Uneven economic development reinforces global uneven development in higher
education and science – and vice versa. It is in the face of this combined
economic and educational unevenness, that Library Genesis and Science Hub,
two repositories for a decommodified access to otherwise paywalled resources,
attain a particular import for students, academics and researchers worldwide.
And it is in the face of combined economic and educational unevenness, that
Library Genesis and Science Hub continue to brave the court decisions,
continuously changing their domain names, securing ways of access beyond the
World Wide Web and ensuring robust redundancy of the materials in their
repositories.
The Custodians.online letter highlights two circumstances in this antagonism
that cut to the core of the contradictions of reproduction within academia in the
present. The first is the contrast between the extraction of extreme profits from
academia through inflated subscription prices and the increasingly precarious
conditions of studying, teaching and researching:

346 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

Consider Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher, whose 37% profit margin stands
in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level
wages for adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest databases of academic
material, which are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the
richest university of the global north, has complained that it cannot afford them
any longer. (Custodians.online, 2015: n.p.)

The enormous profits accruing to an oligopoly of academic publishers are a
result of a business model premised on harvesting and enclosing the scholarly
writing, peer reviewing and editing is done mostly for free by academics who are
often-times struggling to make their ends meet in the higher education
environment (Larivière et al., 2015).
The second circumstance is that shadow libraries invert the property relation of
copyright that allows publishers to exclude all those students, teachers and
researchers who don’t have institutional access to scholarly writing and yet need
that access for their education and research, their work and their livelihood in
conditions of heightened precarity:
This is the other side of 37% profit margins: our knowledge commons grows in
the fault lines of a broken system. We are all custodians of knowledge, custodians
of the same infrastructures that we depend on for producing knowledge,
custodians of our fertile but fragile commons. To be a custodian is, de facto, to
download, to share, to read, to write, to review, to edit, to digitize, to archive, to
maintain libraries, to make them accessible. It is to be of use to, not to make
property of, our knowledge commons.) (Custodians.online, 2015)

Shadow libraries thus perform an inversion that replaces the ability of ownership
to exclude, with the practice of custodianship (notion implying both the labor of
preservation of cultural artifacts and the most menial and invisible labor of daily
maintenance and cleaning of physical structures) that makes one useful to a
resource held in common and the infrastructures that sustain it.
These two circumstances – antagonism between value extraction and precarity
and antagonism between exclusive property and collective custodianship – signal
a deeper-running crisis of two institutions of higher education and research that
are caught in a joint predicament: the university and the library. This crisis is a
reflection of the impossible challenges placed on them by the capitalist
development, with its global division of labor and its looming threat of massive
technological unemployment, and the response of national policymakers to those
challenges: Are they able to create a labor force that will be able to position itself
in the global labor market with ever fewer jobs to go around? Can they do it with
less money? Can they shift the cost, risk and responsibility for social challenges
to individual students and patrons, who are now facing the prospect of their
investment in education never working out? Under these circumstances, the
article | 347



imperative is that these institutions have to re-invent themselves, that they have
to innovate in order to keep up with the disruptive course and accelerated the
pace of change.

Custodianship and repair
In what follows we will argue against submitting to this imperative of innovation.
Starting from the conditions from which shadow libraries emerge, as laid out in
the first Custodians.online letter, we claim that the historical trajectory of the
university and the library demands that they now embrace a position of
disobedience. They need to go back to their universalizing mission of providing
access to knowledge and education unconditionally to all members of society.
That universalism is a powerful political gesture. An infinite demand (Critchley,
2007) whereby they seek to abolish exclusions and affirm the legacy of the radical
equality they have built as part of the history of emancipatory struggles and
advances since the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. At the core of this legacy is a
promise that the capacity of members of society to collectively contest and claim
rights so as to become free, equal and solidaric is underwritten by a capacity to
have informed opinion, attain knowledge and produce a pedagogy of their own.
The library and the university stand in a historical trajectory of revolutions, a
series of historical discontinuities. The French Revolution seized the holdings of
the aristocracy and the Church, and brought a deluge of books to the Blibliotèque
Nationale and the municipal libraries across France (Harris, 1999). The Chartism
might have failed in its political campaign in 1848, but was successful in setting
up the reading rooms and emancipating the working class education from moral
inculcation imposed on them by the ruling classes (Johnson, 2014). The tension
between continuity and discontinuity that comes with disruptive changes was
written into their history long before the present imperative of innovation. And
yet, if these institutions are social infrastructures that have ever since sustained
the production of knowledge and pedagogy by re-producing the organizational
and material conditions of their production, they warn us against taking that
imperative of innovation at face value.
The entrepreneurial language of innovation is the vernacular of global technocapitalism in the present. Radical disruption is celebrated for its ability to depose
old monopolies and birth new ones, to create new markets and its first movers to
replace old ones (Bower and Christensen, 1996). It is a formalization reducing
the complexity of the world to the capital’s dynamic of creative destruction
(Schumpeter, 2013), a variant of an old and still hegemonic productivism that
understands social development as primarily a function of radical advances in
348 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

technological productivity (Mumford, 1967). According to this view, what counts
is that spurts of technological innovation are driven by cycles of financial capital
facing slumping profits in production (Perez, 2011).
However, once the effect of gains from new technologies starts to slump, once
the technologist’s dream of improving the world hits the hard place of venture
capital monetization and capitalist competition, once the fog of hyped-up
technological boom clears, that which is supposedly left behind comes the fore.
There’s then the sunken fixed capital that is no longer productive enough.
There’s then technical infrastructures and social institutions that were there
before the innovation and still remain there once its effect tapers off, removed
from view in the productivist mindset, and yet invisibly sustaining that activity of
innovation and any other activity in the social world we inhabit (Hughes, 1993).
What remains then is the maintenance of stagnant infrastructures, the work of
repair to broken structures and of care for resources that we collectively depend
on.
As a number of scholars who have turned their attention to the matters of repair,
maintenance and care suggest, it is the sedimented material infrastructures of
the everyday and their breakdown that in fact condition and drive much of the
innovation process (Graham and Thrift, 2007; Jackson, 2014). As the renowned
historian of technology Thomas Hughes suggested (Hughes, 1993),
technological changes largely address the critical problems of existing
technologies. Earlier still, in the 1980s, David Noble convincingly argued that the
development of forces of production is a function of the class conflict (Noble,
2011). This turns the temporal logic of innovation on its head. Not the creative
destruction of a techno-optimist kind, but the malfunctioning of technological
infrastructures and the antagonisms of social structures are the elementary
pattern of learning and change in our increasingly technological world. As
Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift argued (2007), once the smooth running
production, consumption and communication patterns in the contemporary
capitalist technosphere start to collapse, the collective coping strategies have to
rise to the challenge. Industrial disasters, breakdowns of infrastructures and
natural catastrophes have taught us that much.
In an age where a global division of labor is producing a growing precarity for
ever larger segments of the world’s working population and the planetary
systems are about to tip into non-linear changes, a truly radical gesture is that
which takes as its focus the repair of the effects of productivism. Approaching the
library and the university through the optic of social infrastructure allows us to
glimpse a radicality that their supposed inertia, complexity and stability make

article | 349



possible. This slowdown enables the processes of learning and the construction
of collective responses to the double crisis of growth and the environment.
In a social world in which precarity is differently experienced between different
groups, these institutions can accommodate that heterogeneity and diminish
their insecurities, helping the society effectively support structural change. They
are a commons in the non-substantive sense that Lauren Berlant (2016)
proposes, a ‘transitional form’ that doesn’t elide social antagonisms and that lets
different social positions loosely converge, in order to become ‘a powerful vehicle
for troubling troubled times’ (Berlant, 2016: 394-395).
The trajectory of radical gestures, discontinuities by re-invention, and creative
destruction of the old have been historically a hallmark of the avant-gardes. In
what follows, we will revisit the history of the avant-gardes, claiming that,
throughout their periodic iterations, the avant-gardes returned and mutated
always in response to the dominant processes and crises of the capitalist
development of their time. While primarily an artistic and intellectual
phenomenon, the avant-gardes emerged from both an adversarial and a coconstitutive relation to the institutions of higher education and knowledge
production. By revisiting three epochal moments along the trajectory of the
avant-gardes – 1917, 1967 and 2017 – we now wish to establish how the
structural context for radical disruption and radical transformation were
historically changing, bringing us to the present conjuncture where the library
and the university can reclaim the legacy of the avant-gardes by seemingly doing
its exact opposite: refusing innovation.

1917 – Industrial modernization,
revolutionary subjectivity

accelerated

temporality

and

In his text on ‘Modernity and Revolution’ Perry Anderson (1984) provides an
unexpected, yet the cogent explanation of the immense explosion of artistic
creativity in the short span of time between the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century that is commonly periodized as modernism (or avant-garde,
which he uses sparsely yet interchangeably). Rather than collapsing these wildly
diverging movements and geographic variations of artistic practices into a
monolithic formation, he defines modernism as a broad field of singular
responses resulting from the larger socio-political conjuncture of industrial
modernity. The very different and sometimes antithetical currents of symbolism,
constructivism, futurism, expressionism or suprematism that emerge in
modernism’s fold were defined by three coordinates: 1) an opposition to the
academicism in the art of the ancien régime, which modernist art tendencies both
350 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

draw from and position themselves against, 2) a transformative use of
technologies and means of communication that were still in their promising
infancy and not fully integrated into the exigencies of capitalist accumulation and
3) a fundamental ambivalence vis-à-vis the future social formation – capitalism or
socialism, state or soviet – that the process of modernization would eventually
lead to. As Anderson summarizes:
European modernism in the first years of this century thus flowered in the space
between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a
still unpredictable political future. Or, put another way, it arose at the intersection
between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy,
and a semi-emergent, or -insurgent, labour movement. (Anderson, 1984: 150)

Thus these different modernisms emerged operating within the coordinates of
their historical present, – committed to a substantive subversion of tradition or to
an acceleration of social development. In his influential theory of the avant-garde,
Peter Bürger (1984) roots its development in the critique of autonomy the art
seemingly achieved with the rise of capitalist modernity between the eighteenth
and late nineteenth century. The emergence of bourgeois society allowed artists
to attain autonomy in a triple sense: art was no longer bounded to the
representational hierarchies of the feudal system; it was now produced
individually and by individual fiat of the artist; and it was produced for individual
appreciation, universally, by all members of society. Starting from the ideal of
aesthetic autonomy enshrined in the works of Kant and Schiller, art eventually
severed its links from the boundedness of social reality and made this freedom
into its subject matter. As the markets for literary and fine artworks were
emerging, artists were gaining material independence from feudal patronage, the
institutions of bourgeois art were being established, and ‘[a]estheticism had made
the distance from the praxis of life the content of works’ (Bürger, 1984: 49)
While capitalism was becoming the dominant reality, the freedom of art was
working to suppress the incursion of that reality in art. It was that distance,
between art and life, that historical avant-gardes would undertake to eliminate
when they took aim at bourgeois art. With the ‘pathos of historical
progressiveness on their side’ (Bürger, 1984: 50), the early avant-gardes were
thus out to relate and transform art and life in one go.
Early industrial capitalism unleashed an enormous social transformation
through the formalization and rationalization of processes, the coordination and
homogenization of everyday life, and the introduction of permanent innovation.
Thus emerged modern bureaucracy, mass society and technological revolutions.
Progress became the telos of social development. Productive forces and global
expansion of capitalist relations made the humanity and the world into a new

article | 351



horizon of both charitable and profitable endeavors, emancipatory and imperial.
The world became a project (Krajewski, 2014).
The avant-gardes around the turn of the 20th century integrated and critically
inflected these transformations. In the spirit of the October Revolution, its
revolutionary subjectivity approached social reality as eminently transformable.
And yet, a recurrent concern of artists was with the practical challenges and
innovations of accelerated modernization: how to control, coordinate and socially
integrate the immense expansionary forces of early industrialization. This was an
invitation to insert one’s own radical visions into life and create new forms of
standardization and rationality that would bring society out of its pre-industrial
backwardness. Central to the avant-garde was abolishing the old and creating the
new, while overcoming the separation of art and social practice. Unleashing
imaginary and constructive forces in a reality that has become rational, collective
and universal: that was its utopian promise; that was its radical innovation. Yet,
paradoxically, it is only once there is the new that the previously existing social
world can be formalized and totalized as the old and the traditional. As Boris
Groys (2014) insisted, the new can be only established once it stands in a relation
to the archive and the museum. This tendency was probably nowhere more in
evidence than, as Sven Spieker documents in his book ‘The big archive – Art
from bureaucracy’ (2008), in the obsession of Soviet constructivists and
suprematists with the archival ordering of the flood of information that the
emergent bureaucratic administration and industrial management were creating
on an unprecedented scale.
The libraries and the universities followed a similar path. As the world became a
project, the aggregation and organization of all knowledge about the world
became a new frontier. The pioneers of library science, Paul Otlet and Melvil
Dewey, consummating the work of centuries of librarianship, assembled index
card catalogs of everything and devised classificatory systems that were powerful
formalizations of the increasingly complex world. These index card catalogs were
a ‘precursor of computing: universal paper machine’, (Krajewski, 2011), predating the ‘universal Turing machine’ and its hardware implementations by
Konrad Zuse and John von Neumann by almost half a century. Knowledge thus
became universal and universalizable: while libraries were transforming into
universal information infrastructures, they were also transforming into places of
popular reading culture and popular pedagogy. Libraries thus were gaining
centrality in the dissemination of knowledge and culture, as the reading culture
was becoming a massive and general phenomenon. Moreover, during the second
part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century, the working
class would struggle to transform not only libraries, but also universities, into
public institutions providing free access to culture and really useful knowledge
352 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

necessary for the self-development and self-organization of the masses (Johnson,
2014).
While universities across the modernizing Europe, US and USSR would see their
opening to the masses only in the coming decades later, they shyly started to
welcome the working class and women. And yet, universities and schools were
intense places of experimentation and advancement. The Moscow design school
VKhUTEMAS, for instance, carried over the constructivists concerns into the
practicalities of the everyday, constructing socialist objects for a new collective
life, novyi byt, in the spirit of ‘Imagine no possessions’ (2005), as Christina Kiaer
has punned in the title of her book. But more importantly, the activities of
universities were driven by the promise that there are no limits to scientific
discovery and that a Leibnitzian dream of universal formalization of language
can be achieved through advances in mathematics and logic.

1967 – Mature capitalism, spectacle, resistant subjectivity
In this periodization, the central contention is that the radical gesture of
destruction of the old and creation of the new that was characteristic of the avantgarde has mutated as the historic coordinates of its emergence have mutated too.
Over the last century the avant-garde has divested from the radical gestures and
has assumed a relation to the transformation of social reality that is much more
complicated than its erstwhile cohort in disruptive change – technological
innovation – continues to offer. If technological modernization and the avantgarde were traveling companions at the turn of the twentieth century, after the
WWII they gradually parted their ways. While the avant-garde rather critically
inflects what capitalist modernity is doing at a particular moment of its
development, technological innovation remained in the same productivist pattern
of disruption and expansion. That technological innovation would remain
beholden to the cyclical nature of capitalist accumulation is, however, no mere
ideological blind-spot. Machinery and technology, as Karl Marx insists in The
Grundrisse, is after all ‘the most adequate form of capital’ (1857) and thus vital to
its dynamic. Hence it comes as no surprise that the trajectory of the avant-garde
is not only a continued substantive subversion of the ever new separations that
capitalist system produces in the social reality, but also a growing critical distance
to technology’s operation within its development.
Thus we skip forward half a century. The year is 1967. Industrial development is
at its apex. The despotism of mass production and its attendant consumerist
culture rules over the social landscape. After the WWII, the working class has
achieved great advances in welfare. The ‘control crisis’ (Beniger, 1989), resulting
article | 353



from an enormous expansion of production, distribution and communication in
the 19th century, and necessitating the emergence of the capacity for
coordination of complex processes in the form of modern bureaucracy and
information technology, persists. As the post-WWII golden period of gains in
productivity, prosperity and growth draws to a close, automation and
computerization start to make their way from the war room to the shop floor.
Growing labor power at home and decolonization abroad make the leading
capitalist economies increasingly struggle to keep profits rates at levels of the
previous two decades. Socialist economies struggle to overcome the initial
disadvantages of belated modernization and instill the discipline over labor in
order to compete in the dual world-system. It is still a couple of years before the
first oil crisis will break out and the neo-liberal retrenchment begin.
The revolutionary subjectivity of 1917 is now replaced by resistant militancy.
Facing the monotony of continuous-flow production and the prospect of bullshit
jobs in service industries that start to expand through the surplus of labor time
created by technological advances (Graeber, 2013), the workers perfect the
ingenuity in shirking the intensity and dullness of work. The consumerist culture
instills boredom (Vaneigem, 2012), the social division of labor produces
gendered exploitation at home (James, 2012), the paternalistic welfare provision
results in loss of autonomy (Oliver, 1990).
Sensibility is shaped by mass media whose form and content are structured by
the necessity of creating aggregate demand for the ever greater mass of
commodities and thus the commodity spectacle comes to mediate social
relations. In 1967 Guy Debord’s ‘The society of the spectacle’ is published. The
book analyses the totalizing capture of Western capitalist society by commodity
fetishism, which appears as objectively given. Commodities and their mediatized
simulacra become the unifying medium of social integration that obscures
separations within the society. So, as the crisis of 1970s approaches, the avantgarde makes its return. It operates now within the coordinates of the mature
capitalist conjuncture. Thus re-semantization, détournement and manipulation
become the representational equivalent of simulating busyness at work, playing
the game of hide-and-seek with the capitalist spectacle and turning the spectacle
onto itself. While the capitalist development avails itself of media and computers
to transform the reality into the simulated and the virtual, the avant-garde’s
subversive twist becomes to take the simulated and the virtual as reality and reappropriate them for playful transformations. Critical distance is no longer
possible under the centripetal impact of images (Foster, 1996), there’s no
revolutionary outside from which to assail the system, just one to escape from.

354 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

Thus, the exodus and autonomy from the dominant trajectory of social
development rather than the revolutionary transformation of the social totality
become the prevailing mode of emancipatory agency. Autonomy through forms
of communitarian experimentation attempts to overcome the separation of life
and work, home and workplace, reproduction and production and their
concealment in the spectacle by means of micro-political experiments.
The university – in the meanwhile transformed into an institution of mass
education, accessible to all social strata – suddenly catapults itself center-stage,
placing the entire post-WWII political edifice with its authoritarian, repressive
and neo-imperial structure into question, as students make radical demands of
solidarity and liberation. The waves of radical political movements in which
students play a central role spread across the world: the US, Czechoslovakia,
France, Western Germany, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, and so on. The institution
becomes a site from which and against which mass civil rights, anti-imperial,
anti-nuclear, environmental, feminist and various other new left movements
emerge.
It is in the context of exodus and autonomy that new formalizations and
paradigms of organizing knowledge emerge. Distributed, yet connected. Built
from bottom up, yet powerful enough to map, reduce and abstract all prior
formalizations. Take, for instance, Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu that introduced
to the world the notion of hypertext and hyperlinking. Pre-dating the World Wide
Web by a good 25 years, Xanadu implemented the idea that a body of written
texts can be understood as a network of two-way references. With the advent of
computer networks, whose early adopters were academic communities, that
formalization materialized in real infrastructure, paving the way for a new
instantiation of the idea that the entire world of knowledge can be aggregated,
linked and made accessible to the entire world. As Fred Turner documents in
‘From counterculture to cyberculture’ (2010), the links between autonomyseeking dropouts and early cyberculture in the US were intimate.
Countercultural ideals of personal liberation at a distance from the society
converged with the developments of personal computers and computer networks
to pave the way for early Internet communities and Silicon Valley
entrepreneurialism.
No less characteristic of the period were new formalizations and paradigms of
technologically-mediated subjectivity. The tension between the virtual and the
real, autonomy and simulation of autonomy, was not only present in the avantgarde’s playful takes on mass media. By the end of the 1950s, the development of
computer hardware reached a stage where it was running fast enough to cheat
human perception in the same way moving images on film and television did. In
article | 355



the computer world, that illusion was time-sharing. Before the illusion could
work, the concept of an individual computer user had to be introduced (Hu,
2015). The mainframe computer systems such as IBM 360/370 were fast enough
to run a software-simulated (‘virtual’) clone of the system for every user (Pugh et
al., 1991). This allowed users to access the mainframe not sequentially one after
the other, but at the same time – sharing the process-cycles among themselves.
Every user was made to feel as if they were running their own separate (‘real’)
computer. The computer experience thus became personal and subjectivities
individuated. This interplay of simulation and reality became common in the late
1960s. Fifty years later this interplay would become essential for the massive
deployment of cloud computing, where all computer users leave traces of their
activity in the cloud, but only few can tell what is virtual (i.e. simulated) and what
is real (i.e. ‘bare machine’).
The libraries followed the same double trajectory of universities. In the 1960s,
the library field started to call into question the merit of objectivity and neutrality
that librarianship embraced in the 1920s with its induction into the status of
science. In the context of social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, librarians
started to question ‘The Myth of Library Neutrality’ (Branum, 2008). With the
transition to a knowledge economy and transformation of the information into a
commodity, librarians could no longer ignore that the neutrality had the effect of
perpetuating the implicit structural exclusions of class, gender and race and that
they were the gatekeepers of epistemic and material privilege (Jansen, 1989;
Iverson 1999). The egalitarian politics written into the de-commodification and
enabling the social mission of public libraries started to trump neutrality. Thus
libraries came to acknowledge their commitment to the marginalized, their
pedagogies and their struggles.
At the same time, library science expanded and became enmeshed with
information science. The capacity to aggregate, organize and classify huge bodies
of information, to view it as an interlinked network of references indexed in a
card catalog, sat well with the developments in the computer world. In return, the
expansion of access to knowledge that the new computer networks promised fell
in line with the promise of public libraries.

2017 – Crisis in the present, financialization, compromised subjectivity
We arrive in the present. The effects of neo-liberal restructuring, the global
division of labor and supply-chain economy are petering out. Global capitalism
struggles to maintain growth, while at the same time failing to slow down
accelerating consumption of energy and matter. It thus arrives at a double crisis
356 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

– a crisis of growth and a crisis of planetary boundaries. Against the profit
squeeze of 1970s, fixes were applied in the form of the relocation of production,
the breaking-up of organized labor and the integration of free markets across the
world. Yet those fixes have not stopped the long downturn of the capitalist system
that pinnacled in the crisis of 2008 (Brenner, 2006). Currently capital prefers to
sit on US$ 13.4 trillion of negative yielding bonds rather than risk investing into
production (Wigglesworth and Platt, 2016). Financialization is driving the efforts
to quickly boost and capture value where long-term investment makes little
sense. The finance capital privileges the short-term value maximization through
economic rents over long-term investment into growth. Its logic dominates all
aspects of the economy and the everyday (Brown, 2015). When it is betting on
long-term changes in production, capital is rather picky and chooses to bet on
technologies that are the harbingers of future automation. Those technologies
might be the death knell of the social expectation of full employment, creating a
reserve army of labor that will be pushed to various forms of casualized work,
work on demand and workfare. The brave new world of the gig-economy awaits.
The accelerated transformation of the labor market has made adaptation through
education and re-skilling difficult. Stable employment is mostly available in
sectors where highly specialized technological skills are required. Yet those
sectors need far less workers than the mass-manufacture required. Re-skilling is
only made more difficult by the fact that austerity policies are reducing the
universal provision of social support needed to allow workers to adapt to these
changes: workfare, the housing crisis, cuts in education and arts have converged
to make it so. The growing precarity of employment is doing away with the
separation between working time and free time. The temporal decomposition is
accompanied by the decomposition of workplace and living space. Fewer and
fewer jobs have a defined time and place in which they are performed (Huws,
2016) and while these processes are general, the conditions of precarity diverge
greatly from profession to profession, from individual to individual.
At the same time, we are living through record global warming, the seventh great
extinction and the destabilization of Earth’s biophysical systems. Globally, we’re
overshooting Earth’s regenerative capacities by a factor of 1.6 (Latouche, 2009),
some countries such as the US and the Gulf by a factor of 5 (Global Footprint
Network, 2013). And the environmental inequalities within countries are greater
than those between the countries (Piketty and Chancel, 2015). Unless by some
wonder almost non-existent negative emissions technologies do materialize
(Anderson and Peters, 2016), we are on a path of global destabilization of socioenvironmental metabolisms that no rate of technological change can realistically
mitigate (Loftus et al., 2015). Betting on settling on Mars is equally plausible.

article | 357



So, if the avant-garde has at the beginning of the 20th century responded to the
mutations of early modernization, in the 1960s to the integrated spectacle of the
mature capitalism, where is the avant-garde in the present?
Before we try to address the question, we need to return to our two public
institutions of mass education and research – the university and the library.
Where is their equalizing capacity in a historical conjuncture marked by the
rising levels of inequality? In the accelerating ‘race against the machine’
(Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2012), with the advances in big data, AI and
robotization threatening to obliterate almost half of the jobs in advanced
economies (Frey and Osborne, 2013; McKinsey Global Institute, 2018), the
university is no longer able to fulfill the promise that it can provide both the
breadth and the specialization that are required to stave off the effect of a
runaway technological unemployment. It is no surprise that it can’t, because this
is ultimately a political question of changing the present direction of
technological and social development, and not a question of institutional
adaptation.
Yet while the university’s performance becomes increasingly scrutinized on the
basis of what its work is contributing to the stalling economy and challenges of
the labor market, on the inside it continues to be entrenched in defending
hierarchies. The uncertainty created by assessment-tied funding puts academics
on the defensive and wary of experimentation and resistance. Imperatives of
obsessive administrative reporting, performance metrics and short-term
competition for grant-based funding have, in Stefan Collini’s words, led to a ‘a
cumulative reduction in the autonomy, status and influence of academics’, where
‘[s]ystemic underfunding plus competition and punitive performancemanagement is seen as lean efficiency and proper accountability’ (Collini, 2017:
ch.2). Assessment-tied activities produce a false semblance of academic progress
by creating impact indicators that are frequently incidental to the research, while
at the same time demanding enormous amount of wasted effort that goes into
unsuccessful application proposals (Collini, 2017). Rankings based on
comparative performance metrics then allow university managers in the
monetized higher education systems such as UK to pitch to prospective students
how best to invest the debt they will incur in the future, in order to pay for the
growing tuition fees and cost of study, making the prospect of higher education
altogether less plausible for the majority in the long run (Bailey and Freedman,
2011).
Given that universities are not able to easily provide evidence that they are
contributing to the stalling economy, they are asked by the funders to innovate
instead. To paraphrase Marx, ‘innovate innovate that is their Moses and the
358 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

prophets’. Innovation, a popular catch-all word with the government and
institutional administrators, gleaned from the entrepreneurial language of
techno-capitalism, to denote interventions, measures and adaptations in the
functioning of all kind of processes that promise to bring disruptive, almost
punitive radical changes to the failures to respond to the disruptive challenges
unleashed by that very same techno-capitalism.
For instance, higher education policy makers such as former UK universities
minister David Willets, advocate that the universities themselves should use their
competitive advantage, embrace the entrepreneurial opportunity in the global
academic marketplace and transform themselves into startups. Universities have
to become the ‘equivalent of higher education Google or Amazon’ (Gill, 2015). As
Gary Hall reports in his ‘Uberfication of the university’ (2016), a survey UK vicechancellors has detected a number of areas where universities under their
command should become more disruptively innovative:
Among them are “uses of student data analytics for personalized services” (the
number one innovation priority for 90 percent of vice-chancellors); “uses of
technology to transform learning experiences” (massive open online courses
[MOOCs]; mobile virtual learning environments [VLEs]; “anytime-anywhere
learning” (leading to the demise of lectures and timetables); and “student-driven
flexible study modes” (“multiple entry points” into programs, bringing about an
end to the traditional academic year). (Hall, 2016: n.p.)

Universities in the UK are thus pushed to constantly create trendy programs,
‘publish or perish’, perform and assess, hire and fire, find new sources of
funders, find students, find interest of parents, vie for public attention, produce
evidence of immediate impact. All we can expect from such attempts to
transform universities into Googles and Amazons, is that we will end up with an
oligopoly of a few prestige brands franchised all around the world – if the
strategy proves ‘successful’, or – if not – just with a world in which universities
go on faking disruptive innovations while waiting for some miracle to happen
and redeem them in the eyes of neoliberal policy makers.
These are all short-term strategies modeled on the quick extraction of value that
Wendy Brown calls the ‘financialization of everything’ (Brown, 2015: 70).
However, the best in the game of such quick rent-seeking are, as always, those
universities that carry the most prestige, have the most assets and need to be
least afraid for their future, whereas the rest are simply struggling in the prospect
of reduced funding.
Those universities in ‘peripheral’ countries, which rarely show up anywhere near
the top of the global rankings, are in a particularly disadvantaged situation. As
Danijela Dolenec has calculated:
article | 359



[T]he whole region [of Western Balkans] invests approximately EUR 495 million in
research and development per year, which is equivalent of one (second-largest) US
university. Current levels of investment cannot have a meaningful impact on the
current model of economic development ... (Dolenec, 2016: 34)

So, these universities don’t have much capacity to capture value in the global
marketplace. In fact, their work in educating masses matters less to their
economies, as these economies are largely based on selling cheap low-skilled
labor. So, their public funders leave them in their underfunded torpor to
improvise their way through education and research processes. It is these
institutions that depend the most on the Library Genesis and Science Hubs of
this world. If we look at the download data of Library Genesis, as has Balasz Bodó
(2015), we can discern a clear pattern that the users in the rich economies use
these shadow libraries to find publications that are not available in the digital
form or are pay-walled, while the users in the developing economies use them to
find publications they don’t have access to in print to start with.
As for libraries, in the shift to the digital they were denied the right to provide
access that has now radically expanded (Sullivan, 2012), so they are losing their
central position in the dissemination and access to knowledge. The decades of
retrenchment in social security, unemployment support, social housing, arts and
education have made libraries, with their resources open to broad communities,
into a stand-in for failing welfare institutions (Mattern, 2014). But with the onset
of 2008 crisis, libraries have been subjected to brutal cuts, affecting their ability
to stay open, service their communities and in particular the marginalized
groups and children (Kean, 2017). Just as universities, libraries have thus seen
their capacity to address structural exclusions of marginalized groups and
provide support to those affected by precarity compromised.
Libraries thus find themselves struggling to provide legitimation for the support
they receive. So they re-invent and re-brand themselves as ‘third places’ of
socialization for the elderly and the youth (Engel-Johnson, 2017), spaces where
the unemployed can find assistance with their job applications and the socially
marginalized a public location with no economic pressures. All these functions,
however, are not something that public libraries didn’t do before, along with
what was their primary function – providing universal access to all written
knowledge, in which they are however nowadays – in the digital economy –
severely limited.
All that innovation that universities and libraries are undertaking seems to be
little innovation at all. It is rather a game of hide and seek, behind which these
institutions are struggling to maintain their substantive mission and operation.
So, what are we to make of this position of compromised institutional agency? In
360 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

a situation where progressive social agency no longer seems to be within the
remit of these institutions? The fact is that with the growing crisis of precarity
and social reproduction, where fewer and fewer have time from casualized work
to study, convenience to do so at home and financial prospects to incur a debt by
enrolling in a university, these institutions should, could and sometimes do
provide sustaining social arrangements and resources – not only to academics,
students and patrons, but also to a general public – that can reduce economic
imperatives and diminish insecurities. While doing this they also create
institutional preconditions that, unlike business-cycle driven institutions, can
support the structural repair that the present double crisis demands.
If the historical avant-garde was birthing of the new, nowadays repeating its
radicalism would seem to imply cutting through the fog of innovation. Its
radicalism would be to inhabit the non-new. The non-new that persists and in the
background sustains the broken social and technological world that the technocapitalist innovation wants to disrupt and transcend. Bullshit jobs and simulating
busyness at work are correlative of the fact that free time and the abundance of
social wealth created by growing productivity have paradoxically resulted in
underemployment and inequality. We’re at a juncture: accelerated crisis of
capitalism, accelerated climate change, accelerated erosion of political systems
are trajectories that leave little space for repair. The full surrender of
technological development into the hands of the market forces leaves even less.
The avant-garde radicalism nowadays is standing with the social institutions that
permit, speaking with Lauren Berlant, the ‘loose convergence’ of social
heterogeneity needed to construct ‘transitional form[s]’ (2016: 394). Unlike the
solutionism of techno-communities (Morozov, 2013) that tend to reduce
uncertainty of situations and conflict of values, social institutions permit
negotiating conflict and complexity in the situations of crisis that Gary Ravetz
calls postnormal – situations ‘where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes
high and decisions urgent’ (Ravetz, 2003: 75). On that view, libraries and
universities as social infrastructures, provide a chance for retardation and
slowdown, and a capacity for collective disobedience. Against the radicalizing
exclusions of property and labor market, they can lower insecurities and
disobediently demand universal access to knowledge and education, a mass
intellectuality and autonomous critical pedagogy that increasingly seems a thing
of the past. Against the imposition to translate quality into metrics and capture
short-term values through assessment, they can resist the game of simulation.
While the playful simulation of reality was a thing in 1967, in 2017 it is no
longer. Libraries and universities can stop faking ‘innovativity’, ‘efficiency’ and
‘utility’.

article | 361



Custodians.online, the second letter
On 30 November, 2016 a second missive was published by Custodians.online
(2016). On the twentieth anniversary of UbuWeb, ‘the single-most important
archive of avant-garde and outsider art’ on the Internet, the drafters of the letter
followed up on their initial call to acts of care for the infrastructure of our shared
knowledge commons that the first letter ended with. The second letter was a gift
card to Ubu, announcing that it had received two mirrors, i.e. exact copies of the
Ubu website accessible from servers in two different locations – one in Iceland,
supported by a cultural activist community, and another one in Switzerland,
supported by a major art school – whose maintenance should ensure that Ubu
remains accessible even if its primary server is taken down.
McKenzie Wark in their text on UbuWeb poignantly observes that shadow
libraries are:
tactics for intervening in three kinds of practices, those of the art-world, of
publishing and of scholarship. They respond to the current institutional, technical
and political-economic constraints of all three. As it says in the Communist
Manifesto, the forces for social change are those that ask the property question.
While détournement was a sufficient answer to that question in the era of the
culture industries, they try to formulate, in their modest way, a suitable tactic for
answering the property question in the era of the vulture industries. (Wark, 2015:
116)

As we claimed, the avant-garde radicalism can be recuperated for the present
through the gestures of disobedience, deceleration and demands for
inclusiveness. Ubu already hints toward such recuperation on three coordinates:
1) practiced opposition to the regime of intellectual property, 2) transformative
use of old technologies, and 3) a promise of universal access to knowledge and
education, helping to foster mass intellectuality and critical pedagogy.
The first Custodians.online letter was drafted to voice the need for a collective
disobedience. Standing up openly in public for the illegal acts of piracy, which
are, however, made legitimate by the fact that students, academics and
researchers across the world massively contribute and resort to pirate repositories
of scholarly texts, holds the potential to overturn the noxious pattern of court
cases that have consistently lead to such resources being shut down.
However, the acts of disobedience need not be made explicit in the language of
radicalism. For a public institution, disobedience can also be doing what should
not be done: long-term commitment to maintenance – for instance, of a mirror –
while dealing institutionally with all the conflicts and challenges that doing this
publicly entails.
362 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

The second Custodians.online letter was drafted to suggest that opportunity:
In a world of money-crazed start-ups and surveillance capitalism, copyright
madness and abuse, Ubu represents an island of culture. It shows what a single
person, with dedication and focus, can achieve. There are lessons to be drawn
from this:

1) Keep it simple and avoid constant technology updates. Ubu is plain
HTML, written in a text-editor.
2) Even a website should function offline. One should be able to take the
hard disk and run. Avoid the cloud – computers of people you don’t
know and who don’t care about you.
3) Don’t ask for permission. You would have to wait forever, turning
yourself into an accountant and a lawyer.
4) Don’t promise anything. Do it the way you like it.
5) You don’t need search engines. Rely on word-of-mouth and direct
linking to slowly build your public. You don’t need complicated
protocols, digital currencies or other proxies. You need people who
care.
6) Everything is temporary, even after 20 years. Servers crash, disks die,
life changes and shit happens. Care and redundancy is the only path to
longevity. Care and redundancy is the reason why we decided to run
mirrors. We care and we want this resource to exist… should shit
happen, this multiplicity of locations and institutions might come in
handy. We will see. Find your Ubu. It’s time to mirror each other in
solidarity. (Custodians.online, 2016)

references
Anderson, K. and G. Peters (2016) ‘The trouble with negative emissions’, Science,
354 (6309): 182– 183.
Anderson, P. (1984) ‘Modernity and revolution’, New Left Review, (144): 96– 113.
Bailey, M. and D. Freedman (2011) The assault on universities: A manifesto for
resistance. London: Pluto Press.
Baty, P. (2017) ‘These maps could change how we understand the role of the
world’s top universities’, Times Higher Education online, May 27. [https://www

article | 363



.timeshighereducation.com/blog/these-maps-could-change-how-we-understa
nd-role-worlds-top-universities]
Beniger, J. (1989) The control revolution: Technological and economic origins of the
information society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Berlant, L. (2016) ‘The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34 (3): 393– 419.
Bodó, B. (2015) ‘Libraries in the post-scarcity era’, in H. Porsdam (ed.)
Copyrighting creativity: Creative values, cultural heritage institutions and systems
of intellectual property. London: Routledge.
Bower, J.L. and C.M. Christensen. (1996) ‘Disruptive technologies: Catching the
wave’, The Journal of Product Innovation Management, 1(13): 75– 76.
Branum, C. (2008) ‘The myth of library neutrality’. [https://candisebranum.word
press.com 2014/05/15/the-myth-of-library-neutrality/]
Brenner, R. (2006) The economics of global turbulence: The advanced capitalist
economies from long boom to long downturn, 1945-2005. London: Verso.
Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Brynjolfsson, E. and A. McAfee (2012) Race against the machine: How the digital
revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly
transforming employment and the economy. Lexington: Digital Frontier Press.
Bürger, P. (1984) Theory of the avant-garde. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Collini, S. (2017) Speaking of universities. London: Verso.
Critchley, S. (2007) Infinitely demanding: Ethics of commitment, politics of
resistance. London: Verso.
Custodians.online (2015) ‘In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub’. [http:/
/custodians.online]
Custodians.online
.online/ubu]

(2016)

‘Happy

birthday,

Ubu.com’.

[http://custodians

Dolenec, D. (2016) ‘The implausible knowledge triangle of the Western Balkans’,
in S. Gupta, J. Habjan and H. Tutek (eds.) Academic labour, unemployment and
global higher education: Neoliberal policies of funding and management. New
York: Springer.

364 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

Engel-Johnson, E. (2017) ‘Reimagining the library as an anti-café’, Discover
Society. [http://discoversociety.org/2017/04/05/reimagining-the-library-as-ananti-cafe/]
Foster, H. (1996) The return of the real: The avant-garde at the end of the century.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Frey, C.B. and M. Osborne, (2013) The future of employment: How susceptible are
jobs
to
computerisation?
Oxford:
Oxford
Martin
School.
[http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/view/1314]
Gill, J. (2015) ‘Losing Our Place in the Vanguard?’ Times Higher Education, 18
.
June. [https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/losing-our-place-van
guard]
Global Footprint Network (2013) Ecological wealth of nations. [http://www.
footprintnetwork.org/ecological_footprint_nations/]
Graeber, D. (2013) ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’, STRIKE! Magazine.
[https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/]
Graham, S. and N. Thrift, (2007) ‘Out of order: Understanding repair and
maintenance’, Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3): 1– 25.
Groys, B. (2014) On the new. London:Verso.
Hall, G. (2016) The uberfication of the university. Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press.
Harris, M.H. (1999) History of libraries of the western world. London: Scarecrow
Press.
Henning, B. (2017) ‘Unequal elite: World university rankings 2016/17’, Views of
the World. [http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/?p=5423]
Hu, T.-H. (2015) A prehistory of the cloud. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hughes, T.P. (1993) Networks of power: Electrification in Western society, 1880-1930.
Baltimore: JHU Press.
Huws, U. (2016) ‘Logged labour: A new paradigm of work organisation?’, Work
Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, 10(1): 7– 26.
Iverson, S. (1999) ‘Librarianship and resistance’, Progressive Librarian, 15, 14-19.
Jackson, S.J. (2014) ‘Rethinking repair’, in T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski and K.A.
Foot (eds.), Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and
society. Cambridge: MIT Press.
James, S. (2012) ‘A woman’s place’, in S. James, Sex, race and class, the perspective
of winning: A selection of writings 1952-2011. Oakland: PM Press.
article | 365



Jansen, S.C. (1989) ‘Gender and the information society: A socially structured
silence’. Journal of Communication, 39(3): 196– 215.
Johnson, R. (2014) ‘Really useful knowledge’, in A. Gray, J. Campbell, M.
Erickson, S. Hanson and H. Wood (eds.) CCCS selected working papers: Volume
1. London: Routledge.
Kean, D. (2017) ‘Library cuts harm young people’s mental health services, warns
lobby’. The Guardian, 13 January. [http://www.theguardian.com/books
/2017/jan/13/library-cuts-harm-young-peoples-mental-health-services-warnslobby]
Kiaer, C. (2005) Imagine no possessions: The socialist objects of Russian
Constructivism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Krajewski, M. (2014) World projects: Global information before World War I.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Krajewski, M. (2011) Paper machines: About cards & catalogs, 1548-1929.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Larivière, V., S. Haustein and P. Mongeon (2015) ‘The oligopoly of academic
publishers in the digital era’. PLoS ONE 10(6). [http://dx.doi.org/
10.1371/journal.pone.0127502]
Latouche, S. (2009) Farewell to growth. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Liang, L. (2012) ‘Shadow Libraries’. e-flux (37). [http://www.e-flux.com/journal
/37/61228/shadow-libraries/]
Loftus, P.J., A.M. Cohen, J.C.S. Long and J.D. Jenkins (2015) ‘A critical review of
global decarbonization scenarios: What do they tell us about feasibility?’ Wiley
Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 6(1): 93– 112.
Marx, K. (1973 [1857]) The grundrisse. London: Penguin Books in association with
New Left Review. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/gru
ndrisse/ch13.htm]
Mattern, S. (2014) ‘Library as infrastructure’, Places Journal. [https://placesjo
urnal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/]
McKinsey Global Institute (2018) Harnessing automation for a future that works.
[https://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/digital-disruption/harnessing-au
tomation-for-a-future-that-works]
Morozov, E. (2013) To save everything, click here: The folly of technological
solutionism. New York: PublicAffairs.
Mumford, L. (1967) The myth of the machine: Technics and human development.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
366 | article

Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

Noble, D.F. (2011) Forces of production. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Oliver, M. (1990) The politics of disablement. London: Macmillan Education.
Perez, C. (2011) ‘Finance and technical change: A long-term view’, African
Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, 3(1): 10-35.
Piketty, T. and L. Chancel (2015) Carbon and inequality: From Kyoto to Paris –
Trends in the global inequality of carbon emissions (1998-2013) and prospects for
an equitable adaptation fund. Paris: Paris School of Economics.
[http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ChancelPiketty2015.pdf]
Pugh, E.W., L.R. Johnson and J.H. Palmer (1991) IBM’s 360 and early 370 systems.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ravetz, J. (2003) ‘Models as metaphor’, in B. Kasemir, J. Jaeger, C.C. Jaeger and
M.T. Gardner (eds.) Public participation in sustainability science: A handbook,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sample, I. (2012) ‘Harvard university says it can’t afford journal publishers’
prices’, The Guardian, 24 April. [https://www.theguardian.com/science
/2012/apr/24/harvard-univer sity-journal-publishers-prices]
Schumpeter, J.A. (2013 [1942]) Capitalism, socialism and democracy. London:
Routledge.
Spieker, S. (2008) The big archive: Art from bureaucracy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Sullivan, M (2012) ‘An open letter to America’s publishers from ALA President
Maureen Sullivan’, American Library Association, 28 September.
[http://www.ala.org/news/2012/09/open-letter-america%E2%80%99s-publ
ishers-ala-president-maureen-sullivan].
‘The Cost of Knowledge’ (2012). [http://thecostofknowledge.com/]
Times
Higher
Education
(2017)
‘World
university
rankings’.
[https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2018/
world-ranking]
Turner, F. (2010) From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole
Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Vaneigem, R. (2012) The revolution of everyday life. Oakland: PM Press.
Wark, M. (2015) ‘Metadata punk’, in T. Medak and M. Mars (eds.) Public library.
Zagreb: What, How; for Whom/WHW & Multimedia Institute.

article | 367



Wigglesworth, R. and E. Platt (2016) ‘Value of negative-yielding bonds hits
$13.4tn’, Financial Times, 12 August. [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/973b606060ce-11e6-ae3f-77baadeb1c93.html]

the authors
Marcell Mars is a research associate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry
University (UK). Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb.
His research ‘Ruling Class Studies’, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011),
examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by
corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. He is a doctoral student at
Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, writing a thesis on ‘Foreshadowed
Libraries’. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public
Library, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.
Email: ki.be@rkom.uni.st
Tomislav Medak is a doctoral student at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry
University. Medak is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia
Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, as well as an amateur librarian for the Memory of the
World/Public Library project. His research focuses on technologies, capitalist
development, and postcapitalist transition, particularly on economies of intellectual
property and unevenness of technoscience. He authored two short volumes: ‘The Hard
Matter of Abstraction—A Guidebook to Domination by Abstraction’ and ‘Shit Tech for A
Shitty World’. Together with Marcell Mars he co-edited ‘Public Library’ and ‘Guerrilla
Open Access’.
Email: tom@mi2.hr


 

Display 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 ALL characters around the word.