197 2df84d7b-bc4c-464f-ad1c-69c45d0bee2c Guerrilla Open Access Memory of the World Balázs Bodó Christopher Kelty Laurie Allen calibre (4.11.1) [https://calibre-ebook.com] 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 <div><div><font face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif" size="1">"In the 1990s, the Internet offered a horizon from which to imagine what society could become, promising autonomy and self-organization next to redistribution of wealth and collectivized means of production. While the former was in line with the dominant ideology of freedom, the latter ran contrary to the expanding enclosures in capitalist globalization. This antagonism has led to epochal copyfights, where free software and piracy kept the promise of radical commoning alive.</font></div><div><font face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif" size="1"><br></font></div><div><font face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif" size="1">Free software, as Christopher Kelty writes in this pamphlet, provided a model ‘of a shared, collective, process of making software, hardware and infrastructures that cannot be appropriated by others’. Well into the 2000s, it served as an inspiration for global free culture and open access movements who were speculating that distributed infrastructures of knowledge production could be built, as the Internet was, on top of free software.</font></div><div><font face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif" size="1"><br></font></div><div><font face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif" size="1">For a moment, the hybrid world of ad-financed Internet giants—sharing code, advocating open standards and interoperability—and users empowered by these services, convinced almost everyone that a new reading/writing culture was possible. Not long after the crash of 2008, these disruptors, now wary monopolists, began to ingest smaller disruptors and close off their platforms. There was still free software somewhere underneath, but without the ‘original sense of shared, collective, process’. So, as Kelty suggests, it was hard to imagine that for-profit academic publishers wouldn't try the same with open access.</font></div><div><font face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif" size="1"><br></font></div><div><font face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif" size="1">Heeding Aaron Swartz’s call to civil disobedience, Guerrilla Open Access has emerged out of the outrage over digitally-enabled enclosure of knowledge that has allowed these for-profit academic publishers to appropriate extreme profits that stand in stark contrast to the cuts, precarity, student debt and asymmetries of access in education. Shadow libraries stood in for the access denied to public libraries, drastically reducing global asymmetries in the process.</font></div><div><font face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif" size="1"><br></font></div><div><font face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif" size="1">This radicalization of access has changed how publications travel across time and space. Digital archiving, cataloging and sharing is transforming what we once considered as private libraries. Amateur librarianship is becoming public shadow librarianship. Hybrid use, as poetically unpacked in Balázs Bodó's reflection on his own personal library, is now entangling print and digital in novel ways. And, as he warns, the terrain of antagonism is shifting. While for-profit publishers are seemingly conceding to Guerrilla Open Access, they are opening new territories: platforms centralizing data, metrics and workflows, subsuming academic autonomy into new processes of value extraction.</font></div><div style="font-family: 'DejaVu Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 10px;"><br></div><div><div><font face="DejaVu Sans, sans-serif" size="1">The 2010s brought us hope and then realization how little digital networks could help revolutionary movements. The redistribution toward the wealthy, assisted by digitization, has eroded institutions of solidarity. The embrace of privilege— marked by misogyny, racism and xenophobia—this has catalyzed is nowhere more evident than in the climate denialism of the Trump administration. Guerrilla archiving of US government climate change datasets, as recounted by Laurie Allen, indicates that more technological innovation simply won't do away with the 'post-truth' and that our institutions might be in need of revision, replacement and repair." - <i>Memory of the World</i></font></div></div></div> Post Office Press eng politicisingpiracy