self-education in Sekulic 2018
Sekulic
On Knowledge and Stealing
2018
# Dubravka Sekulic: On Knowledge and 'Stealing'
This text was originally published in [The
Funambulist](https://thefunambulist.net/) - Issue 17, May-June 2018
"Weaponized Infrastructure".
__
In 2003 artist Jackie Summell started a correspondence with Herman Wallace,
who at the time was serving a life sentence in solitary confinement in the
Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, by asking him “What kind of a house
does a man who has lived in a 6′ x 9′ cell for over thirty years dream of?”
(1) The Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum-security prison in
the US, besides inmate quarters and among other facilities includes a prison
plantation, Prison View Golf Course, and Angola Airstrip. The nickname Angola
comes from the former slave plantation purchased for a prison after the end of
the Civil War – and where Herman Wallace became a prisoner in 1971 upon
charges of armed robbery. He became politically active in the prison's chapter
of the Black Panther and campaigned for better conditions in Angola,
organizing petitions and hunger strikes against segregation, rape, and
violence. In 1973, together with Albert Woodfox, he was convicted of murder of
a prison guard and both were put in solitary confinement. Together with Robert
King, Wallace and Woodfox would become known as the Angola 3, the three prison
inmates who served the longest period in solitary confinement – 29, 41, and 43
years respectively. The House that Herman Built, Herman's virtual and
eventually physical dream house in his birth city of New Orleans grew from the
correspondence between Jackie and Herman. At one point, Jackie asked Herman to
make a list of the books he would have on the book shelf in his dream house,
the books which influenced his political awakening. At the time Jackie was a
fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, which supported acquisition
of the books and became the foundation of Herman's physical library on its
premises, waiting for his dream home to be built to relocate.
In 2013 the conviction against Herman Wallace was thrown out and he was
released from jail. Three days later he passed away. He never saw his dream
house built, nor took a book from a shelf in his library in Solitude, which
remained accessible to fellows and visitors until 2014. In 2014 Public
Library/Memory of the World (2) digitized Herman's library to place it online
thus making it permanently accessible to everyone with an Internet
connection(3). The spirit of Herman Wallace continued to live through the
collection shaping him – works by Marxists, revolutionaries, anarchists,
abolitionists, and civil rights activists, some of whom were also prisoners
during their lifetime. Many books from Herman's library would not be
accessible to those serving time, as access to knowledge for the inmate
population in the US is increasingly being regulated. A peak into the list of
banned books, which at one point included Michelle Alexander's The New Jim
Crow (The New Press, 2010), reveals the incentive of the ban was to prevent
access to knowledge that would allow inmates to understand their position in
society and the workings of the prison-industrial complex. It is becoming
increasingly difficult for inmates to have chance encounters with a book that
could change their lives; given access to knowledge they could see their
position in life from another perspective; they could have a moment of
revelation like the one Cle Sloan had. Sloan, a member of the Los Angeles gang
Bloods encountered his neighborhood Athens Park on a 1972 Los Angeles Police
Department 'Gang Territories' map in Mike Davis' book City of Quartz, which
made him understand gang violence in L.A. was a product of institutional
violence, structural racism, and systemic dispersal of community support
networks put in place by the Black Panther Party.
The books in Herman's library can be seen as a toolbox of “really useful
knowledge” for someone who has to conceive the notion of freedom. The term
“really useful knowledge” originated with workers' awareness of the need for
self-education in the early-19th century, describing a body of 'unpractical'
knowledge such as politics, economics, and philosophy, workers needed to
understand and change their position in society, and opposed 'useful
knowledge' – knowledge of 'practical' skills which would make them useful to
the employer. Like in the 19th century, sustaining the system relies on
continued exploitation of a population prevented from accessing, producing and
sharing knowledges needed to start to understand the system that is made to
oppress and to articulate a position from which they can act. Who controls the
networks of production and distribution to knowledge is an important issue, as
it determines which books are made accessible. Self-help and coloring books
are allowed and accessible to inmates so as to continue oppression and pacify
resistance. The crisis of access persists outside the prison walls with a
continuous decline in the number of public libraries and the books they offer
due to the double assault of austerity measures and a growing monopoly of the
corporate publishing industry.
Digital networks have incredible power to widely distribute content, and once
the (digital) content is out there it is relatively easy to share and access.
Digital networks can provide a solution for enclosure of knowledge and for the
oppressed, easier access to channels of distribution. At least that was the
promise – the Internet would enable a democratization of access. However,
digital networks have a significant capacity to centralize and control within
the realm of knowledge distribution, one look at the oligopoly of academic
publishing and its impact on access and independent production shows its
contrary.
In June 2015 Elsiver won an injunction against Library Genesis and its
subsidiary platform sci-hub.org, making it inaccessible in some countries and
via some commercial internet providers. Run by anonymous scientists mostly
from Eastern Europe, these voluntary and non-commercial projects are the
largest illegal repository of electronic books, journals, and articles on the
web (4). Most of the scientific articles collected in the repository bypassed
the paywalls of academic publishers using the solidary network of access
provided by those associated with universities rich enough to pay the
exuberant subscription fees. The only person named in the court case was
Alexandra Elbakyan, who revealed her identity as the creator of sci-hub.org,
and explained she was motivated by the lack of access: “When I was working on
my research project, I found out that all research papers I needed for work
were paywalled. I was a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university
was not subscribed to anything.”(5) The creation of sci-hub.org made
scientific knowledge accessible to anyone, not just to members of wealthy
academic institutions. The act of acknowledging responsibility for sci-hub
transformed what was seen as the act of illegality (piracy) into the act of
civil disobedience. In the context of sci-hub and Library Genesis, both
projects from the periphery of knowledge production, “copyright infringement
opens on to larger questions about the legitimacy of the historic compromise –
if indeed there ever even was one – between the labor that produces culture
and knowledge and its commodification as codified in existing copyright
regulations.”(6) Here, disobedience and piracy have an equalizing effect on
the asymmetries of access to knowledge.
In 2008, programmer and hacktivist Aaron Swartz published Guerilla Open
Access Manifesto triggered by the enclosure of scientific knowledge production
of the past, often already part of public domain, via digitization. “The
world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in
books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful
private corporations […] We need to download scientific journals and upload
them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.”(7)
On January 6, 2011, the MIT police and the US Secret Service arrested Aaron
Swartz on charges of having downloaded a large number of scientific articles
from one of the most used and paywalled database. The federal prosecution
decided to show the increasingly nervous publishing industry the lengths they
are willing to go to protect them by indicting Swartz on 13 criminal counts.
With a threat of 50 years in prison and US$1 million fine, Aaron committed
suicide on January 11, 2013. But he left us with an assignment – if you have
access, you have a responsibility to share with those who do not; “with enough
of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join
us?” (8) He pointed to an important issue – every new cycle of technological
development (in this case the move from paper to digital) brings a new threat
of enclosure of the knowledge in the public domain.
While “the core and the periphery adopt different strategies of opposition to
the inequalities and exclusions [digital] technologies start to reproduce”
some technologies used by corporations to enclose can be used to liberate
knowledge and make it accessible. The existence of projects such as Library
Genesis, sci-hub, Public Library/Memory of the World, aaaarg.org, monoskop,
and ubuweb, commonly known as shadow libraries, show how building
infrastructure for storing, indexing, and access, as well as supporting
digitization, can not only be put to use by the periphery, but used as a
challenge to the normalization of enclosure offered by the core. The people
building alternative networks of distribution also build networks of support
and solidarity. Those on the peripheries need to 'steal' the knowledge behind
paywalls in order to fight the asymmetries paywalls enforce – peripheries
“steal” in order to advance. Depending on the vantage point, digitization of a
book can be stealing, or liberating it to return the knowledge (from the dusty
library closed stacks) back into circulation. “Old” knowledge can teach new
tricksters a handful of tricks.
In 2015 I realized none of the architecture students of the major European
architecture schools can have a chance encounter with Architecture and
Feminisms or Sexuality and Space, nor with many books on similar topics
because they were typically located in the library’s closed stacks. Both books
were formative and in 2005, as a student I went to great lengths to gain
access to them. The library at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade, was
starved of books due to permanent financial crisis, and even bestsellers such
as Rem Koolhaas' S, M, L, XL were not available, let alone books that were
focused on feminism and architecture. At the time, the Internet could inform
that edited volumes such as Architecture and Feminism and Sexuality and Space
existed but nothing more. To satisfy my curiosity, and help me write a paper,
a friend sent – via another friend – her copies from London to Belgrade, which
I photocopied, and returned. With time, I graduated to buying my own second
hand copies of both books, which I digitized upon realizing access to them
still relied on access to a well-stocked specialist library. They became the
basis for my growing collection on feminism/gender/space I maintain as an
amateur librarian, tactically digitizing books to contribute to the growing
struggle to make architecture more equitable as both a profession and an
effect in space.
At the end, a confession, and an anecdote – since 2015, I have tried to
digitize a book a week and every year, I manage to digitize around 20 books,
so one can say I am not particularly good at meeting my goals. The books I do
digitize are related to feminism, space, race, urban riots, and struggle, and
I choose them for their (un)availability and urgency. Most of them are
published in the 1970s and 1980s, though some were published in the 1960s and
1990s. Some I bought as former library books, digitized on a DIY book scanner,
and uploaded to the usual digital repositories. It takes two to four hours to
make a neat and searchable PDF scan of a book. As a PDF, knowledge production
usually under the radar or long out of print becomes more accessible. One of
the first books I digitized was Robert Goodman's After the Planners, a
critique of urban planning and the limits of alternate initiatives in cities
written in the late 1960s. A few years after I scanned it, online photos from
a conference drew my attention –the important, white male professor was
showing the front page of After the Planners on his slide. I realized fast the
image had a light signature of the scanner I had used. While I do not know if
this act of digitization made a dent or was co-opted, seeing the image was a
small proof that digitization can bring books back into circulation and access
to them might make a difference – or that access to knowledge can be a weapon.
[Dubravka Sekulic](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/sekulic/) writes
about the production of space. She is an amateur-librarian at Public
Library/Memory of the World, where she maintains feminist, and space/race
collections. During Making Futures School, Dubravka will be figuring out the
future of education (on all things spatial) together with [Elise
Hunchuck](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/hunchuck/), [Jonathan
Solomon](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/solomon/) and [Valentina
Karga](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/karga/).
__
This text was originally published in The Funambulist - Issue 17, May-June
2018 "Weaponized Infrastrucuture". [A pdf version of it can be downloaded
here.](https://www.making-futures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05
/Dubravka_Sekulic-On_Knowledge_and_Stealing.pdf)
__
Notes:
(1) For more on the project Herman’s House. Accessed 6 April 2018.
(2) Public Library is a project which has been since 2012 developing and
publicly supporting scenarios for massive disobedience against the current
regulation of production and circulation of knowlde and culture in the digital
realm. See: ‘Memory of the World’. Accessed 7 April 2018.
(3) Herman's library can be accessed at[
http://herman.memoryoftheworld.org/](http://herman.memoryoftheworld.org/) More
on the context of digitization see: ‘Herman’s Library’. Memory of the World
(blog), 28 October 2014.
Knowledge Production’. Memory of the World (blog), 30 October 2014.
(4) For more on shadow libraries and library genesis see: Bodo, Balazs.
‘Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era’. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY:
Social Science Research Network, 10 June 2015.
(5) ‘Sci-Hub Tears Down Academia’s “Illegal” Copyright Paywalls’. TorrentFreak
(blog), 27 June 2015.
(6) For the schizophrenia of the current model of the corporate enclosure of
the scientific knowledge see: Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak, The System of
a Takedown, forthcoming, 2018
(7) Aaron Swartz. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. Accessed 7 April 2018.[
http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto.](http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto.)
(8) Ibid.
(9) Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak, The System of a Takedown, forthcoming,
2018.
(10) See ‘In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub’.
http://custodians.online. Accessed 7 April 2018.
self-education in Mars, Medak & Sekulic 2016
Mars, Medak & Sekulic
Taken Literally
2016
Taken literally
Marcell Mars
Tomislav Medak
Dubravka Sekulic
Free people united in building a society of
equals, embracing those whom previous
efforts have failed to recognize, are the historical foundation of the struggle against
enslavement, exploitation, discrimination
and cynicism. Building a society has never
been an easy-going pastime.
During the turbulent 20th century,
different trajectories of social transformation moved within the horizon set by
the revolutions of the 18th and 19th century: equality, brotherhood and liberty
– and class struggle. The 20th century experimented with various combinations
of economic and social rationales in the
arrangement of social reproduction. The
processes of struggle, negotiation, empowerment and inclusion of discriminated social groups constantly complexified and
dynamised the basic concepts regulating
social relations. However, after the process
of intensive socialisation in the form of either welfare state or socialism that dominated a good part of the 20th century, the
end of the century was marked by a return
in the regulation of social relations back
to the model of market domination and
private appropriation. Such simplification
and fall from complexity into a formulaic
state of affairs is not merely a symptom
of overall exhaustion, loss of imagination
and lacking perspective on further social
development, but rather indicates a cynical
abandonment of the effort to build society,
its idea, its vision – and, as some would
want, of society altogether.
In this article, we wish to revisit the
evolution of regulation of ownership in the
field of intellectual production and housing
as two examples of the historical dead-end
in which we find ourselves.
T H E C A P I TA L I S T M O D E
O F P RO D U C T I O N
According to the text-book definition, the
capitalist mode of production is the first
historical organisation of socio-economic relations in which appropriation of the
surplus from producers does not depend
on force, but rather on neutral laws of economic processes on the basis of which the
capitalist and the worker enter voluntarily
into a relation of production. While under
feudalism it was the aristocratic oligopoly
on violence that secured a hereditary hierarchy of appropriation, under capitalism the
neutral logic of appropriation was secured
by the state monopoly on violence. However, given that the early capitalist relations
in the English country-side did not emerge
outside the existing feudal inequalities, and
that the process of generalisation of capitalist relations, particularly after the rise of industrialisation, resulted in even greater and
even more hardened stratification, the state
monopoly on violence securing the neutral
logic of appropriation ended up mostly securing the hereditary hierarchy of appropriation. Although in the new social formation
neither the capitalist nor the worker was born
capitalist or born worker, the capitalist would
rarely become a worker and the worker a capitalist even rarer. However, under conditions
where the state monopoly on violence could
no longer coerce workers to voluntarily sell
their labour and where their resistance to
accept existing class relations could be
229
expressed in the withdrawal of their labour
power from the production process, their
consent would become a problem for the existing social model. That problem found its
resolution through a series of conflicts that
have resulted in historical concessions and
gains of class struggle ranging from guaranteed labor rights, through institutions of the
welfare state, to socialism.
The fundamental property relation
in the capitalist mode of production is that
the worker has an exclusive ownership over
his/her own labour power, while the capitalist has ownership over the means of production. By purchasing the worker's labour
power, the capitalist obtains the exclusive
right to appropriate the entire product of
worker's labour. However, as the regulation
of property in such unconditional formulaic
form quickly results in deep inequalities, it
could not be maintained beyond the early
days of capitalism. Resulting class struggles
and compromises would achieve a series of
conditions that would successively complexify the property relations.
Therefore, the issue of private property – which goods do we have the right to
call our own to the exclusion of others: our
clothes, the flat in which we live, means of
production, profit from the production process, the beach upon which we wish to enjoy
ourselves alone or to utilise by renting it out,
unused land in our neighbourhood – is not
merely a question of the optimal economic
allocation of goods, but also a question of
social rights and emancipatory opportunities that are required in order secure the
continuous consent of society's members to
its organisational arrangements.
230
Taken literally
OW NER S H I P R EG I M ES
Both the concept of private property over
land and the concept of copyright and
intellectual property have their shared
evolutionary beginnings during the early capitalism in England, at a time when
the newly emerging capitalist class was
building up its position in relation to the
aristocracy and the Church. In both cases, new actors entered into the processes
of political articulation, decision-making
and redistribution of power. However, the
basic process of ( re )defining relations has
remained ( until today ) a spatial demarcation: the question of who is excluded or
remains outside and how.
① In the early period of trade in books, after
the invention of the printing press in the 15th
century, the exclusive rights to commercial
exploitation of written works were obtained
through special permits from the Royal Censors, issued solely to politically loyal printers.
The copyright itself was constituted only in
the 17th century. It's economic function is to
unambiguously establish the ownership title
over the products of intellectual labour. Once
that title is established, there is a person with
whose consent the publisher can proceed in
commodifying and distributing the work to
the exclusion of others from its exploitation.
And while that right to economic benefit was
exclusively that of the publishers at the outset, as authors became increasingl aware that
the income from books guaranteed then an
autonomy from the sponsorship of the King
and the aristocracy, in the 19th century copyright gradually transformed into a legal right
that protected both the author and the publisher in equal measure. The patent rights underwent a similar development. They were
standardised in the 17th century as a precondition for industrial development, and were
soon established as a balance between the
rights of the individual-inventor and the
commercial interest of the manufacturer.
However, the balance of interests between the productive creative individuals
and corporations handling production and
distribution did not last long and, with
time, that balance started to lean further
towards protecting the interests of the corporations. With the growing complexity of
companies and their growing dependence
on intellectual property rights as instruments in 20th century competitive struggles, the economic aspect of intellectual
property increasingly passed to the corporation, while the author/inventor was
left only with the moral and reputational
element. The growing importance of intellectual property rights for the capitalist
economy has been evident over the last
three decades in the regular expansions of
the subject matter and duration of protection, but, most important of all – within
the larger process of integration of the capitalist world-system – in the global harmonisation and enforcement of rights protection. Despite the fact that the interests of
authors and the interests of corporations,
of the global south and the global north, of
the public interest and the corporate interest do not fall together, we are being given
a global and uniform – formulaic – rule of
the abstract logic of ownership, notwithstanding the diverging circumstances and
interests of different societies in the context of uneven development.
No-one is surprised today that, in
spite of their initial promises, the technological advances brought by the Internet,
once saddled with the existing copyright
regulation, did not enhance and expand
access to knowledge. But that dysfunction
is nowhere more evident than in academic publishing. This is a global industry of
the size of music recording industry dominated by an oligopoly of five major commercial publishers: Reed Elsevier, Taylor
& Francis, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and
Sage. While scientists write their papers,
do peer-reviews and edit journals for free,
these publishers have over past decades
taken advantage of their oligopolistic position to raise the rates of subscriptions they
sell mostly to publicly financed libraries at
academic institutions, so that the majority of libraries, even in the rich centres of
the global north, are unable to afford access to many journals. The fantastic profit
margins of over 30% that these publishers
reap from year to year are premised on denying access to scientific publications and
the latest developments in science not only
to the general public, but also students and
scholars around the world. Although that
oligopoly rests largely on the rights of the
authors, the authors receive no benefit
from that copyright. An even greater irony is, if they want to make their work open
access to others, the authors themselves or
the institutions that have financed the underlying research through the proxy of the
author are obliged to pay additionally to
the publishers for that ‘service’. ×
231
② With proliferation of enclosures and
signposts prohibiting access, picturesque
rural arcadias became landscapes of capitalistic exploitation. Those evicted by the
process of enclosure moved to the cities
and became wage workers. Far away from
the parts of the cities around the factories,
where working families lived squeezed
into one room with no natural light and
ventilation, areas of the city sprang up in
which the capitalists built their mansions.
At that time, the very possibility of participation in political life was conditioned
on private property, thus excluding and
discriminating by legal means entire social
groups. Women had neither the right to
property ownership nor inheritance rights.
Engels' description of the humiliating
living conditions of Manchester workers in
the 19th century pointed to the catastrophic
effects of industrialisation on the situation
of working class ( e.g. lower pay than during
the pre-industrial era ) and indicated that
the housing problem was not a direct consequence of exploitation but rather a problem
arising from inequitable redistribution of
assets. The idea that living quarters for the
workers could be pleasant, healthy and safe
places in which privacy was possible and
that that was not the exclusive right of the
rich, became an integral part of the struggle
for labor rights, and part of the consciousness of progressive, socially-minded architects and all others dedicated to solving the
housing problem.
Just as joining forces was as the
foundation of their struggle for labor and
political rights, joining forces was and has
remained the mechanism for addressing the
232
Taken literally
inadequate housing conditions. As early as
during the 19th century, Dutch working class
and impoverished bourgeoisie joined forces
in forming housing co-operatives and housing societies, squatting and building without permits on the edges of the cities. The
workers' struggle, enlightened bourgeoisie,
continued industrial development, as well
as the phenomenon of Utopian socialist-capitalists like Jean-Baptiste André Godin, who, for example, under the influence
of Charles Fourier's ideas, built a palace for
workers – the Familistery, all these exerted
pressure on the system and contributed to
the improvement of housing conditions for
workers. Still, the dominant model continued to replicate the rentier system in which
even those with inadequate housing found
someone to whom they could rent out a segment of their housing unit.
The general social collapse after
World War I, the Socialist Revolution and
the coming to power in certain European
cities of the social-democrats brought new
urban strategies. In ‘red’ Vienna, initially
under the urban planning leadership of
Otto Neurath, socially just housing policy
and provision of adequate housing was regarded as the city's responsibility. The city
considered the workers who were impoverished by the war and who sought a way out
of their homelessness by building housing
themselves and tilling gardens as a phenomenon that should be integrated, and
not as an error that needed to be rectified.
Sweden throughout the 1930s continued
with its right to housing policy and served
as an example right up until the mid-1970s
both to the socialist and ( capitalist ) wel-
fare states. The idea of ( private ) ownership became complexified with the idea
of social ownership ( in Yugoslavia ) and
public/social housing elsewhere, but since
the bureaucratic-technological system responsible for implementation was almost
exclusively linked with the State, housing
ended up in unwieldy complicated systems
in which there was under-investment in
maintenance. That crisis was exploited as
an excuse to impose as necessary paradigmatic changes that we today regard as the
beginning of neo-liberal policies.
At the beginning of the 1980s in
Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher created an atmosphere of a state of emergency
around the issue of housing ownership
and, with the passing of the Housing Act
in 1980, reform was set in motion that
would deeply transform the lives of the
Brits. The promises of a better life merely
based on the opportunity to buy and become a ( private ) owner never materialised.
The transition from the ‘right to housing’ and the ‘right to ( participation in the
market through ) purchase’ left housing
to the market. There the prices first fell
drastically at the beginning of the 1990s.
That was followed by a financialisation
and speculation on the property market
making housing space in cities like London primarily an avenue of investment, a
currency, a tax haven and a mechanism
by which the rich could store their wealth.
In today's generation, working and lower
classes, even sometimes the upper middle
class can no longer even dream of buying
a flat in London. ×
P L AT F O R M I SAT I O N
Social ownership and housing – understood both literally as living space, but
also as the articulation of the right to decent life for all members of society – which
was already under attack for decades prior,
would be caught completely unprepared
for the information revolution and its
zero marginal cost economy. Take for
example the internet innovation: after a
brief period of comradely couch-surfing,
the company AirBnB in an even shorter period transformed from the service
allowing small enterprising home owners to rent out their vacant rooms into a
catalyst for amassing the ownership over
housing stock with the sole purpose of
renting it out through AirBnb. In the
last phase of that transformation, new
start-ups appeared that offered to the
newly consolidated feudal lords the service of easier management of their housing ‘fleet’, where the innovative approach
boils down to the summoning of service
workers who, just like Uber drivers, seek
out blue dots on their smart-phone maps
desperately rushing – in fear of bad rating,
for a minimal fee and no taxes paid – to
turn up there before their equally precarious competition does. With these innovations, the residents end up being offered
shorter and shorter but increasingly more
expensive contracts on rental, while in a
worse case the flats are left unoccupied
because the rich owner-investors have
realised that an unoccupied flat is a more
profitable deal than a risky investment in
a market in crisis.
233
The information revolution stepped out
onto the historical stage with the promise
of radical democratisation of communication, culture and politics. Anyone could
become the media and address the global
public, emancipate from the constrictive
space of identity, and obtain access to entire
knowledge of the world. However, instead
of resulting in democratising and emancipatory processes, with the handing over of
Internet and technological innovation to the
market in 1990s it resulted in the gradual
disruption of previous social arrangements
in the allocation of goods and in the intensification of the commodification process.
That trajectory reached its full-blown development in the form of Internet platforms
that simultaneously enabled old owners of
goods to control more closely their accessibility and permited new owners to seek out
new forms of commercial exploitation. Take
for example Google Books, where the process of digitization of the entire printed culture of the world resulted in no more than
ad and retail space where only few books
can be accessed for free. Or Amazon Kinde,
where the owner of the platform has such
dramatic control over books that on behest
of copyright holders it can remotely delete
a purchased copy of a book, as quite indicatively happened in 2009 with Orwell's 1984.
The promised technological innovation that
would bring a new turn of the complexity in
the social allocation of goods resulted in a
simplification and reduction of everything
into private property.
The history of resistance to such extreme forms of enclosure of culture and
knowledge is only a bit younger than the
234
Taken literally
processes of commodification themselves
that had begun with the rise of trade in
books. As early as the French Revolution,
the confiscation of books from the libraries
of clergy and aristocracy and their transfer
into national and provincial libraries signalled that the right of access to knowledge
was a pre-condition for full participation
in society. For its part, the British labor
movement of the mid-19th century had to
resort to opening workers' reading-rooms,
projects of proletarian self-education and
the class struggle in order to achieve the
establishment of the institution of public
libraries financed by taxes, and the right
thereby for access to knowledge and culture for all members of society.
SHAD OW P U B L I C L I B R A R I ES
Public library as a space of exemption from
commodification of knowledge and culture
is an institution that complexifies the unconditional and formulaic application of
intellectual property rights, making them
conditional on the public interest that all
members of the society have the right of
access to knowledge. However, with the
transition to the digital, public libraries
have been radically limited in acquiring
anything they could later provide a decommodified access to. Publishers do not
wish to sell electronic books to libraries,
and when they do decide to give them a
lending licence, that licence runs out after 26 lendings. Closed platforms for electronic publications where the publishers
technologically control both the medium
and the ways the work can be used take us
back to the original and not very well-conceived metaphor of ownership – anyone
who owns the land can literally control
everything that happens on that land –
even if that land is the collective process
of writing and reading. Such limited space
for the activity of public libraries is in radical contrast to the potentials for universal
access to all of culture and knowledge that
digital distribution could make possible
at a very low cost, but with considerable
change in the regulation of intellectual production in society.
Since such change would not be in the
interest of formulaic application of intellectual property, acts of civil disobedience to
that regime have over the last twenty years
created a number of 'shadow public libraries'
that provide universal access to knowledge
and culture in the digital domain in the way
that the public libraries are not allowed to:
Library Genesis, Science Hub, Aaaaarg,
Monoskop, Memory of the World or Ubuweb. They all have a simple objective – to
provide access to books, journals and digitised knowledge to all who find themselves
outside the rich academic institutions of the
West and who do not have the privilege of
institutional access.
These shadow public libraries bravely remind society of all the watershed moments in the struggles and negotiations
that have resulted in the establishment
of social institutions, so as to first enable
the transition from what was an unjust,
discriminating and exploitative to a better society, and later guarantee that these
gains would not be dismantled or rescinded. That reminder is, however, more than a
mere hacker pastime, just as the reactions
of the corporations are not easy-going at
all: in mid-2015, Reed Elsevier initiated
a court case against Library Genesis and
Science Hub and by the end of 2015 the
court in New York issued a preliminary
injunction ordering the shut-down of
their domains and access to the servers. At
the same time, a court case was brought
against Aaaaarg in Quebec.
Shadow public libraries are also a
reminder of how technological complexity does not have to be harnessed only in
the conversion of socialised resources back
into the simplified formulaic logic of private property, how we can take technology
in our hands, in the hands of society that is
not dismantling its own foundations, but
rather taking care of and preserving what
is worthwhile and already built – and thus
building itself further. But, most powerfully shadow public libraries are a reminder to us of how the focus and objective of
our efforts should not be a world that can
be readily managed algorithmically, but a
world in which our much greater achievement is the right guaranteed by institutions – envisioned, demanded, struggled
for and negotiated – a society. Platformisation, corporate concentration, financialisation and speculation, although complex
in themselves, are in the function of the
process of de-socialisation. Only by the
re-introduction of the complexity of socialised management and collective re-appropriation of resources can technological
complexity in a world of escalating expropriation be given the perspective of universal sisterhood, equality and liberation.
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