disseminate

create

Christopher P. Long.

ABOUT

This website and the accompanying posters have been designed by Nabaa Baqir, Mila Spasova and Serhan Curti, 2nd year design students at Coventry University, as part of a project on performative publications run by Janneke Adema. They offer a different take on the article 'The political nature of the book. On artists' books and radical open access', written by Janneke Adema and Gary Hall and originally published in the journal New Formations.

A performative publication wants to explore how we can bring together and align more closely the material form of a publication with its content.

A performative publication wants to explore how we can bring together and align more closely the material form of a publication with its content.

the materiality of our (textual) scholarship and its material modes of production, is and should not in any way be separate from a discussion on the content of our work.

In this respect this project wants to emphasise that we should have more in depth discussions about the way we do research.

technotext

the open access book should for the most part still find itself presented as having definite limits and a clear, distinct materiality

If we miss this opportunity, might we not find ourselves in a similar situation to that many book artists and publishers have been in since the 1970s, namely, that of merely reiterating and reinforcing established structures and practices?

should open access advocates on occasion not

In an era when communication is the indisputable maxim, in which ev-erything is justifi able by its communicable usefulness, research militancyrefers to experimentation: not to thoughts, but to the power to think; not tothe circumstances, but to the possibility of experience; not to this or thatconcept, but to experiences in which such notions acquire power (potenciaconcept, but to experiences in which such notions acquire power (potenciaconcept, but to experiences in which such notions acquire power ( );not to identities but to a different becoming; in one word: intensity does notlie so much in that which is produced (that which is communicable) as inthe process of production itself (that which is lost in communication). Howto say something, then, about all this and not merely exhibit the results ofsuch a process?

Research militancy is a composition of wills, an attempt to cre-ate what Spinoza called joyful passions, which starts from and increases thepower (potenciapower (potenciapower ( ) of everyone involved. Such a perspective is only possibleby admitting from the beginning that one does not have answers, and, bydoing so, abandoning the desire to lead others or to be seen as an expert.

Even though there ispotencia, for instance, in the activism that carries out grassroots communi-cation experiments, the potencia in the situation cannot be communicated

Here, Colectivo Situaciones moves away from a certain truism per-vasive in much of contemporary activist culture, both in Argentina and inNorth America: the idea that a certain type of communication (be it the useof the Internet, grassroots filmmaking, or any other medium) has an inher-ent emancipatory effect on people. Communication produces abstractionsof experience. The experience itself can only be lived.

The word experienciaconnotes both experience, in the sense of accumulation of knowledges ofresistance; and experiment, understood as a practice. In this article, whenthe word experiencia displays this double connotation we translate it as ex-perience/experiment

Research militancy is a form of intervention, a practice that accompa-nies other practices, or experiencias.

“We are not autonomists, situationists, or anything ending with -ist,” theyonce told us. Identities have normalizing effects: they establish models, theyplace multiplicity under control, they reduce the multiple dimensions of lifeto the single dimension of an idealization.

“Footnotes” refers, literally, to a second level of writing of this article, inwhich the notes do not constitute a complementary set of references, but rath-er a fundamental articulation with the central body of the text

“We think of our practice as a doublemovement: to create ways of being militants that escape the political cer-tainties established a priori and embrace politics as research (in this case,it would be ‘research militancy’), and, at the same time, to invent forms ofthinking and producing concepts that reject academic procedures, breakingaway from the image of an object to be known and putting at the centre sub-jective experience (in this case, it would be ‘militant research’).”

Again, what is important to us is not necessarily to draw out all the dif-ferent and multiple connections that exist, as interesting as that might be.What we want to do here is draw from these histories, experiences, and mo-ments to ask questions about methods through which social research createsnew possibilities for political action. That also means we wish to explorethe ways in which militant praxis and organizing are themselves modes ofunderstanding, of interpreting the world, and expressing modes of socialbeing.

One striking example of this can be seen with the Wages for Houseworkcampaigns that began in the early ’70s. In 1972, Mariarosa Dalla Costa(who was involved in Potere Operaio and help to found Lotta Continua)and Selma James (who was involved with the struggles for independence inthe West Indies and feminist organizing in the UK) published a book calledThe Power of Women and the Subversion of Community.

The university does nothave any kind of monopoly over insight or theoretical sophistication

What follows is a little experiment using the online academicsearch engine Jstor (jstor.org),

The result is two different streams of literature.Activists do draw from the academic stream to a certain degree, but theacademics almost never read the other one.

Universities were foundedas places for the celebration of art and culture; they still like to representthemselves that way in brochures and promotional literature. Over the lasttwo hundred years, however, they have become ever more focused on eco-nomics and administration

This has not changed as much as we’d like to think. Graduate school isnot on the whole meant to foster creativity or encourage students to producenew ideas. For the most part, it’s designed to break students down, to fosterinsecurity and fear as a way of life, and ultimately to crush that sense ofjoy in learning and playing with ideas that moved most students to dedicatetheir lives to the academy to begin with.

On the other hand one could just as well ask: why is it we assume thatcreative and relevant ideas should be coming out of universities in the firstplace?

Theories that are in effect calls to politicalaction beyond the academy pass by as if they never were.

What we want to draw attention to is that this debate was carried outalmost completely amongst activists. Holloway himself was a bit surprisedon discovering teenage anarchists were taking his book with them whilehopping trains or attending mass mobilizations. “It’s a very difficult book,”he admitted to a journalist who interviewed him in 2002, adding he was“surprised and gratified” that so many young people had taken an interestin it.2 Meanwhile, in the academy, it was as if all this had never happened.Holloway’s book was not widely assigned in courses or read in graduateseminars. In fact, most Marxist scholars seemed unaware that John Hollowayeven existed. Mention his name and one would almost invariably be greetedby blank stares. It was as if the debate was happening in another universe.In some ways, perhaps it was

True revolutionary knowledge would have to be different.It would have to be a pragmatic form of knowledge that lays bare all suchpretensions; a form of knowledge deeply embedded in the logic of transfor-mational practice

This is not a book that has been designed to sit on a shelf; its primarypurpose is not to be used as a citation or reference in important soundingjournals that no one reads. It is a text intended for use as a tool to gatherexperiences, examples, and materials that can further the development ofthe constituent power of lived imagination that will transform the worldaround us

ii. Mosire

While there is a longer tradition of research and writing on utopian collectives, this kind ofpolitical organization has so far remained confined to small, self-sufficient communes or movements,like the Zapatistas. As Mann and Wainwright acknowledge, we needn’t paint too rosy a picture of whatthe future in which these forms of self-organization would become more numerous would look like.After all, most present-day self-sustaining communities exist at the ‘edges’ of capitalism, rather thancompletely outside of it (Grubacic & O’Hearn, 2016; see also Kallis et al., 2020). In this sense, we do notreally know in what form they would continue to exist if it ended – and how, of course.4 This presents aparticular problem for thinking about knowledge production in post-carbon futures.GLOBALIZATIONS 5

he symbiosis of fast scienceand industry has privileged disembedded knowledgeand disembedding strategies abstracted from the messycomplications of this world. But in ignoring messiness,and dreaming of its eradication, we discover that wehave messed up our world. So I would characterise slowscience as the demanding operation that would reclaimthe art of dealing with, and learning from, what sci-entists too often consider messy, that is, what escapesgeneral, so-called objective, categories.

This may be the challenge that slow science shouldanswer, enabling scientists to accept that what is messyis not defective but simply that which we have to learnto live in and think with.

he eggs leavetheir native environmen

She insists that her only loyalty is, and must be, tothe advancement of knowledge, and thus, as Whiteheadwrote, she is entitled to treat the remainder ‘superfi-cially, with the imperfect categories of thought derivedfrom [her] profession’.

hose academics who justask for time to think – who do not name those puttingpressure on them, preferring to address ‘society’ andask for protection – do not feel there is an option at all.They just dream of a past where they, and the so-calleddisinterested knowledge they produced, were respected.The ‘exposing oneself to sniggers’ option requires usto accept that we academics are, among many others,called upon by our role in the creation of the future.We cannot evade that call by pleading that we do notdeserve to play such a role.

My intervention takes ‘slow science’ as a name for thechallenge that is addressed to us as academics. A namewhich also includes a trap we have to resist; namely, thecall for an agreement to go ‘back to the past’

We now have to tell our studentsto choose subjects that will lead to fast publication inhigh-ranking journals specialising in professionally rec-ognised issues – issues which, in general, are of interestto nobody except other fast-publishing colleagues.

Open Book Publishers does not engage in this kind of practice: it neitherpublishes a printed catalogue nor sends its representatives to book fairsthroughout the world, having a strict no flight policy. Most publishershave not engaged in such low-energy practices; in these cases, additionallayers have to be added to the calculation.

Much of the impact related to the production of this book has todo not so much with the production itself, but with the next step: itsdissemination to an audience

it would have been much easier to explain thecomplexity of the di ̇erent layers of representation involved in digitalapproaches to text with the help of a few illustrations.

When it comesto environmental questions, my training has been much less systematic— this chapter bears obvious marks of this di ̇erence in training quality,especially in the references that frame it.

This approach was greatly facilitated by the publishing house, OpenBook Publishers, who contributed essential information to the followingpages.2

While sharedinfrastructures o ̇er the best guarantee for sustainable preservation, theyshould ideally rely more on distributed community-based needs andsolutions, and not unilateral benefit resulting from top-down instructions.

Duplicationmeans that datasets are being archived in at least two di ̇erent locationsthat mirror one another. If one of the locations ceases to work, or burnsdown, or if its hard drive content gets erased or crashes, the other iterationcan provide backup. Relying on one single copy of digital files is a riskybusiness. But the environmental cost of multiplying by two — if noteven by three for a backup of the backup, as is often done — comesdown to asking the canon question anew

This would mean thatarchives, libraries, publishers, and scholars all somehow work with asimilar, standardised, economical workflow.25

mentation of this standardised, stable, economic way to provide textualand meta-textual information can also be standardised in terms of theworkflows it is integrated into.

n others, we will have to make choices. Itwill not be possible to archive everything (not that it was possible before,but digitisation might have given the illusion that it did), and it willnot be possible to archive in as inflationary a manner as we have doneover the past decades.

Reducing the time dedicated to an impactfulproductive output has an added advantage of making more time avail-able for activities like gardening, barter, craft, and other socio-culturalactivities that can be recentred at a more local level, and contribute tolowering overall impact.

For archivists, librarians, publishers, and editors toconceive their activity in such a way that it does as little natural harmas possible, for the largest possible cultural good, it means paying closeattention to at least three elements: natural resources, human activity,and energy consumption.

Borrowing a book from a friend or alibrary, or sharing a downloaded digital resource locally are all gesturesof reuse that minimise the individual environmental cost for using theconcerned item. The production, use, and end-of-life impact can be splitamong all those who benefit from it, and the part each individual has toaccount for is reduced

It adds an-other source of pollution to the whole process, and questions yet anothertraditional academic habit.17

On the one hand,someone who has studied extensively comes at a high societal cost sincethey received an education over a lengthy period; however, because theystudied for a long time, one could assume that they will be more eÿcientat working once they have completed their studies than someone whohas not received as much training.

This means having to produce more e-readers, and more access to virtualstorage that will be solicited by more people

The technologies I had been using relied on the idea that it wasperfectly sensible to use resources (in some respects, a lot of them) inorder to make what I considered a better text available. In a way, myuse of digital solutions led me to push the boundaries, perhaps even toignore to some extent the unavoidable tension of having to make choices,of having to define limits to preservation, of accepting that resources,room, and time are finite.

In the bigger picture, it leads or will eventually lead to restrictionson their side — electricity shortages, degradation of infrastructures, andmore

Tal vez la pista para perseguir la traza de esa sabiduría es acaso la tendencia. ¿Hacia dónde tiende, hacia dónde va la búsqueda, la insistencia de la vida en las plantas? ¿Cómo se comportan interpretando su entorno para poder crecer y vivir?

1. I would like to thank Ned Rossiter, David Berry, Patriciade Vries, Nadine Roestenburg, Niels ten Oever, ChloëArkenbout and Sabine Niederer for their valuable edits andcomments

This makes it all the morenecessary to draw up road maps with concrete stepson how the internet can be reclaimed.

Extinction Internet is about degrowth, putting an end todata extraction and, yes, about moments when screensfall black and doomscrolling comes to an abrupt halt.

we have already ran out of time to do fundamentalresearch but the least we can do is facilitate artists—and listen carefully to their cosmotechnic ‘cli-fi’imagination.

Bernard Stiegler.

the dark states of the young minds, gluedto their devices.

the fatigue that we feel in

In my reading of The ThirdUnconscious, media technologies have entered thebody in such a way that the body and soul can nolonger be separated from the semiotic infosphere.

The human mind has reached a stateof saturation.

First diagnosis, then restorative care.

Deception techniques I: Anti-bot honeypots

aucuses provide spaces for people towork within their own racial/ethnic groups.

https://planplanner.com/de/events/internet-tourFrontality

Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imagi-nary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and modelsof action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the art-ist.” 80

Amazon bought the Amazon Noir software, and the twoparties settled out of court with a nondisclosure agreement.

tactical giz-mology

“Tactical Media are what happens when cheap ‘do it yourself ’ mediamade possible by the revolution in consumer electronics are exploitedby those who are outside of the normal hierarchies of power and knowl-edge.”

It istherefore not simply critical license that allows me to see beyond theera of tactical gizmology and to discover a range of new media art prac-

but they do recast it such that “us” and “them” are nolonger permanently situated.

no proffered fantasies of radical systemic change: it exists as apossibility within the realm of the imagination—another technology ofsimulation—but it requires collective action, a “ton of protesters.”

A charming but dated and even fu-tile endeavor, perhaps, hopelessly removed from the real politics and ac-tivities of social transformation? Irredeemably caught up in the kind ofirony that disguises a co- optation by the very system with which oneputatively interacts anew? In what terms can we speak of the efficacy ofcybersquatting?

to provoke and to reveal, to defamiliarize andto critique.

on-the-fly critical intervention: statements, performances, and actions thatmust continually be altered in response to their object, “constantly re-configured to meet social demands.” 9

the temporary creation of a situation in whichsigns, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinkingbecomes possible. Tactical media operates in the field of the symbolic,the site of power in the postindustrial society.

disruption

disturbance

My study will not collapse the material distinctions among thesedifferent media projects, but it will articulate them all as instances oftactical media. This is to say that they are all forms of critical interven-tion, dissent, and resistance.

persuasive games

new media artist-activists

Josh On and Futurefarmers’ They Rule (2001/2004) affords us an ex-ample of a new media work that is at once aesthetic design, intellectualinvestigation, and political activism. 1 A work of tactical cartography,They Rule affords users the ability to visualize the myriad and intricateconnections among Fortune 100 corporations and directors. Users canchoose from a list of institutions, people, and companies and build theirown maps from the data the artists have compiled from SEC filings andpublic Web sites. Or they can view the archived maps that powerfullydocument the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of “the tenrichest people” and “the magnificent seven.”

nisi

urveillance publishing?

This article lingers on a prediction too: Clarivate’s business model is coming forscholarly publishing.

Asan act of resistance to the centralization ofdata, I refuse to include the DOI number inthis citation. A copy of “Excellence R Us”has been inscribed on a cuneiform tabletand has been moved to an undisclosedlocation in case of emerge

To quote one of the researchers in the study, “whilethey [Thomson Reuters] agreed to essentially all the key points we made, they didnot want to change anything that would collapse journal rankings, as they see thisas their key business asset” (Bohannon 2016)

I have previously argued that by invoking the status of the impact factor without itssubstance, such organizations reveal the journal impact factor for precisely what it is:a fetishized and vacuous number (Bell 2015

If it includes a set ofjournals that cite each other, those journals and those scholars by definition become‘significant.’ If it excludes a community of journals and scholars, they thereby remaininsignificant.” In essence, inclusion in the index actively produces the impact it claimsto measure.

which only the journals it indexes can achieve.In effect, WoS operates as a Möbius strip, with no orienting point beyond itsel

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A greatdeal of hope exists concerning the attitudes and habits of researchers, giventhe long tradition of connecting science and society through science shopsin the Netherlands.

The conference envisaged a renewal in three areas:– Differentiation of career pathways: Universities and University Medical Cen-tres want to provide academic staff with a choice for specific focus areas –teaching, research, knowledge transfer and/or leadership.– Renewal of research assessment methodologies: New approaches to evalu-ating research quality and impact are emerging. The promotion of open sci-ence is integral to this development.– Team science: Alongside recognition and reward for individual accomplish-ments, there is a push to award the collaborative efforts and accomplish-ments of teams with the consideration that they deserve.

The major Dutch research funder, NWO,6 is going toimplement a policy of evaluating research based on the quality of publishedarticles, not on where these are published. The number of articles published isalso less relevant than the importance of the individual articles

On the one hand, most of the governments inLatin American countries invest resources, directly or indirectly, in creatingand improving peer reviewed journals, according to internationally recognisedquality standards. But, on the other, these publications fail to receive recogni-tion of being as valuable as mainstream journals in the research evaluationsystem. This is illustrated in the case of disciplines such as natural sciences ormedicine, where national policies of evaluation of research explicitly requireauthors to publish in journals indexed in Science Citation Index (SCI). LatinAmerican journals continue to be underrepresented in these domains.

Most of the journals’ editors-in-chief and editorial board members are facultymembers of universities who do the editorial work ad honorem

In this environment, a Francophone African platform of open access jour-nals has just been created. The Grenier des savoirs3 is a platform that bringstogether 15 mult

The idea that service to the community should be included as a criterion forpromotion of academics could be a starting point for the creation of an effec-tive knowledge democracy in this part of the world.

This document clearly outlines the importance of publishingin “international” journals or “outside the applicant’s university and country ofpractice”, but does not explicitly mention the impact factor of these journals.

o do so, he suggests academics need to document the failures of market-based reforms, show the public their inadequacies, form alliances to debate, refashion,abandon or derail market policies, and come up with new collective imaginaries for thefuture for HE.

Forms of resistance may be possible, such as refusal at departmental or faculty level toengage with data analytics demands or institutional dashboard rollout.

The competition aim is to buildsoftware platforms ‘to ensure prospective students have access to data about theoutcomes of subjects and Higher Education providers’ in order ‘to help them makeinformed decisions about where and what to study’

The software platforms produced to enact Data Futures will encode governmentobjectives into the core operating system of HE.

comparative, and predictive data, using ‘lead indicators’, ‘reportable events’, ‘earlywarning systems’ and other ‘intelligence’ for ‘close-to-real-time’ performancemonitoring.

Data Futures is due for national rollout to all UK HE institutions in2019–2020, requiring universities to carry out ‘in-year’ reporting of student data usinga bespoke data platform

data are being ‘made’ toperform the political work of making the sector more market-focused

The move from mapping to indicating also enables us to move beyond an appreciation ofscientometrics in terms of its relational approach to data exploration, which we ourselves in-voked above. Rather than celebrating the methodological contribution of relational methodssuch as keyword co-occurences and citation analysis in terms of the emergent entities thesemethods render traceable, to move to indicating is to welcome the task of actively configuringthe context of evaluation, and the community of interpretation, that we produce our mappingfor (Marres, 2017). This could include identifying prevalent themes and ambitions in AI re-search and innovation, their operationalization, the people and resources that are mobilized,and the outputs this generates. In emphasizing process and engagement in indicating interdis-ciplinarity in AI, indicators may play a role in characterizing forms of interdisciplinarity still information. They may be scripted to enable the negotiation of interdisciplinarity among diverseparticipants, data sources, and methodologies, and amidst multiple epistemic commitments,which are not already congealed into a research community; for example, when interdisciplin-arity involves the creation of new combinations and connections between sciences and hu-manities. To explore different ways in which indicators can be used to enable negotiation, itmay be helpful to start with more open-ended spaces of exploration, such as network visual-izations and forms of relational mapping. Thus, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, if our wideraim is to move from indicators to indicating, it is good to start with mapping. In doing so, newways of indicating interdisciplinarity in AI research and innovation might emerge, which sup-port and highlight exchanges across boundaries rather than suppress them

One important implication of the participatory approach to mapping interdisciplinarity is thatit entails a move away from the classic opposition between maps and indicators in the soci-ology of science and innovation.

MAPPING AS A PATH TOWARDS INDICATING

the impor-tance of digital mapping—or data cartography—as the methodological framework for indi-cating interdisciplinarity in this area, one that can enable the exploration of transformativeinterdisciplinarity

engaged experts, who take part in formulating the broader projects of ensuring accountabilityand autonomy with which an evaluation is always intertwined

This could be taken as a weakness of indicator-based methodologies, but it is also possibleto turn this assessment around: The measurement of interdisciplinarity provides interesting op-portunities to redefine, reconstruct, or reinvent the use of indicators in the evaluation of re-search and innovation

They point out that metrics such as the Klout score—a popular, aggre-gate measure of influence across different online platforms such as Twitter and Facebook—may operate simultaneously in two registers: On the one hand, they perform an epistemicoperation by ordering relations between social media users through mathematical operationsof quantification (producing, among other things, influence rankings). On the other hand, theyenable participation as they assemble users into a dynamic collective, by enabling these users,as well as third parties, to compare, contrast, and relate to one another by way of Klout scores

Rather than deploying scientometric measures to close down the de-bate, the objective then becomes to deploy indicators so as to facilitate exploration ofknowledge in (trans-)formation

pointing precisely beyond the preoccupation with the unification of scientific fields.

Scientometrics can help to render visible, and explorable, interdis-ciplinarity as a dynamic space, a space of possible transformation of the relations betweendisciplines, and between concepts, methods, and data. Furthermore, such an analysis of trans-formative interdisciplinarity opens up distinctive methodological opportunities for the evalua-tion of interdisciplinarity.

ctors located at the margins of or in-between fields

From this perspective, the key advantage of scientometricsis that one does not have to assume a fixed ontology at the outset of research—say assuming“disciplines”as already constituted ex ante. One can recognize that ontologies are dynamic,so that one cannot only treat as an empirical question what the relevant entities are, whichtheir relations are, and what their attributes are but also recognize that these very categoriesare in question in the empirical realities under study

arry et al. note that interdisciplinarity is best treated as an agonisticcategory. That is, they conceive of interdisciplinarity—and disciplinarity—not just as a givenattribute of existing fields of knowledge but as a contested category: the forms that interdisci-plinary research will take—the division of labor between fields; where key concepts are de-rived from; the relations between data and method—are the focus of disagreement and powerstruggle

the design and deployment of indicators has been identified as apotential site for methodological innovation: Developing indicators of interdisciplinarity couldbe an effective way to counter the devaluation of interdisciplinary research and enable thearticulation and valuation of interdisciplinary research agendas

the metricization of research culture (De Rijcke, Holtrop,et al., 2019): The de facto reliance on indicators such as the impact factor in evaluation pro-cesses creates a situation in which scientists, assessors, and policy-makers are encouraged, andbecome more inclined, to value research in terms of quantifiable markers of recognition andsignificance (citation, impact), rather than in substantive terms.

cation, extraction, and devastation. It would take another book to run with the consequences of such views But I'll offer what I can imagine here. For one thing, truly answering ques- tions about the communality of a text will avoid mete authorial intellec- tual biography (the books read by the author, the universities or gatherings she attended, the music she considered most influential, the names of her ‘most distinguished friends) and focus instead on the material practices that linked the making of an author’ life to the text. Ricardo Piglia once drily suggested that the true history of literature was not to be found in books, but in the history of jobs held by writers as they wrote them. ‘This alterna- Live history of literature, which isthe history of writing, would have to pose questions about the making ofa life, the writers “livelihood” —the “how-to” ‘of her everyday work—and link these answers to the personal system of aesthetic and political decisions that allowed her to create this book instead of a different one, this cultural artifact instead of another. | imagine that the questions won't always seek to illustrate the specific relationships of the ‘writer's material body in her being-with-others—the identity-focused data ‘on lass and race and gender and age, among other things—but will go far- ther: they'll reach into the depths of where their communal brew is con ccocted. The first such questions will have to address the communal labor (mandatory, in-service-of, through language-in-common) that structures and gives life to the text beyond itself, is will involve a history of reading, indeed—but we're actually already talking about something else, as Volodine would say. If reading, as is so ‘often said, is not an act of passive consumption, but rather a practice of ‘mutual “shareng.” a miniscule act of collective production, then what’ at stake here arent just the books people read. So too, and most importantly, are the books people interpret, reactivate, and bring back to life: the books rewritten by others, whether in their own imagination or in conversations (which also constitute, of course, a practice of our collective imagination). ‘What has become clearer and clearer over time is that book-writing in ‘communality will have to welcome the challenge and explicitly address— and embody—the staging of plural authorship. Will the figures of the nar- rator, point of view, and narrative arc remain the same when bearing wit- ness to the generative presence of others in the very existence of writing? Which platform will best adapt to the continual evolution of the palimp: sest and the juxtaposition intrinsic to every writing process produced in ‘communality? What sort of so-called critical apparatus will we use when every sentence, even every word, would have to be accounted for? “Maybe it isnt outrageous to start imagining books solely or mostly made ‘of acknowledgments pages—the place heretofore designed for recognizing ‘other people's participation in the making of a book

Rather, the difference often lies in the artistic contract between the portrayer and portrayed;

wake work

metadata

furnish

The paranoid trust in exposure seemingly depends, in addition, onan infinite reservoir of naIvete in those who make up the audience forthese unveilings. What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise ordisturb-never mind motivate-anyone to learn that a given social mani-festation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic, or evenviolent?

nowledge in the form of exposure.

In this case, as alsofrequently in the case of the tautologies of "sexual difference," the verybreadth of reach that makes the theory strong also offers the space-ofwhich this book takes every advantage-for a wealth oftonal nuance, atti-tude, worldly observation, performative paradox, aggression, tenderness,wit, inventive reading, obiter dicta, and writerly panache.

strong theory

. Yet, putting all our ethical focus on the training of technicians to abide by regulations will always fall short, because technical systems have unpredictable results and because technicians view the systems they build from a particular standpoint.

focus attention on emerging complexity

These approaches moreover treat ethics as a series mandates from the top, to be developed by CEOs and applied by designers. A robust techno-ethics requires that these top-down trends be reversed.

As a result, in these ‘sneaky moments’ tech activist communities and social justice activist communities, ideally a natural match, come to oppose each other.

sneaky momen

This is a significant step away from the culture of secure communications. Practitioners participating in what can be called security design collectives will agree that ‘it takes a village to keep a tool secure’ and that security is a continuous ‘cat and mouse game.’ But this culture is lost on the campaign sites.

co-designing alternative infrastructures

fibreculturejournal.org FCJ-196 217 Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Jara Rocha and Femke SneltingWhen our cultural-political ecosystems intensify or enter moments of agitation, then our relation to tools tends to fall into the paradigm of affordances. It does not matter how radical the political struggle is, people may succumb easily to work with the available. Dependency on the available plot of technological design is precisely what produces the conditions for a sneaky moment, at the risk of discarding very basic political, ethical, and aesthetic sensibilities. To make these residues of our sneaky moment more tangible, we turn to exploring the secure communication campaign sites.Designing the Divide Between Providers and UsersThe three campaign sites we have chosen are intended to mediate between the worlds of tech activists and social justice activists. We are interested in how they use language, design and tool-selection to bridge distances in knowledge, trust, and geography. If these projects are explicitly developed to communicate between agents that are not physically in the same space, how is a relationship of trust established? What do tech activists do to convince activists for social justice that they are on their side, and that the information and technologies provided are worth their trouble? And in the course of these relevant bridging and translation attempts, how do activists for social change find out if the provided tools are appropriate and safe for their situation? The three projects show similarities and also differences in their approach of how ‘us’ and ‘you’ are imagined.

To make these residues of our sneaky moment more tangible, we turn to exploring the secure communication campaign sites.

The three campaign websites we survey are cultural artefacts, but they are also convivial spaces where various agencies co-habit with tools, discourses, and languages

When it comes to gender, race, age, class and geography diversity among individual tech activists is less noticeable. This lack of diversity has been criticised from within and outside of the community.

These overlapping identities and positions often shift or are part of parallel lives; in other words, some respondents in our respective research cases consciously divide between their techno-engagements for which they get paid and their other political work that they do for activist or ideological reasons and requires technological expertise.

It is at this juncture that the necessity and desire for a convergence between those ‘groups that wish to use the media instrumentally to draw attention to their political efforts versus those who wish to change the media system itself’ (Carroll and Hackett, 2006) became a matter of urgency. In response, a number of secure and private communication campaigns were launched or revamped, which also served to re-shape the delegation relationship between activists and this select group of technologists.

We propose that the divide between those engaged in politics of technology and those participating in struggles of social justice are being reshaped during those ‘sneaky moments’ and we argue that this reconfiguration requires reflection.

It builds relation and community, that is: possibility

what is masked in the ‘ “convention” of publishing wherebyacademics put their own names to works’ is the extent to which it is ‘theproduct of a wider collectivity’

Engaging with inherited worlds by adding layersrather than by analytical disarticulation translates in an effort to ‘redescribesomething so that it becomes thicker than it first seems’

with a view to exploring the wider range ofOA models and infrastructures.

of a model so heavily influ-enced by the corporate interests OA sought to circumvent.

and by others as rein-forcing the Northern-dominated publishing ecosystem of clicks and impactfactors by illicitly widening its market.

Diamond OA may represent a wayfor societies to mark out a unique path to success in a way that a commercialenterprise that needs to satisfy shareholder value would be unable to match.Perhaps this is part of the future for society publishers’. Greater attentionto the ecosystems of scholarly associations and society journals, with theirnon-profit, cooperative commitment to the service of the scholarly commu-nity, may reveal natural allies for the OA movement within the ranks ofsubscription journals.

OA activists also tend to lumpsubscription journals together with profiteering publishers, collectively re-garded as enemies of OA.

Many hard-line OA activists have put their shoul-der behind the gold OA initiatives driven by liberalizing governments, re-search funders and corporate publishers

The result has been apolicy paradox in which efforts to liberate scholarly publishing from the gripof corporate publishers has put corporate publishers at the centre of policydecisions about the design of OA

The detachment of OA initiatives such as Plan S from Africanresearch realities is reflected in the willingness of research funders to financeAPCs for African researchers, but not the computer hardware, membershipfees or wifi connections that would allow them to participate in the digitalresearch fora their articles would feed into (Bezuidenhout et al., 2017: 45).

This special collection draws attention to the exis-tence of these alternative scholarly OA infrastructures, which often emanatefrom the global South and are geared to meet the varied needs and inter-ests of scholars in diverse and often low-resource environments.

Digital ecosystems for managing OA publishing tend to restrict partici-pation to those who can meet stringent technical conditions, ignoring localconstraints with regard to resources, capacity, infrastructure, or familiaritywith technical requirements.

for-profit and non-profit

(Sagonowsky,2020; Sherkow et al., 2020; Wolitz, 2019; Wu, 2020)

As Mirowski (2018: 178) notes,OA advocates insist that publicly funded academic research should be madeavailable for free, yet they raise no issue when publicly funded research isprivatized by corporations, and sold back to the public for substantial profits.

Thisallows ‘better resourced researchers in the [global] North who have superiorcomputing facilities to mine and analyse data’ of Southern scholars, and topublish the results themselves, as well as to translate or republish an articlefor sale in any context without the author’s permission or oversight

and in scholarly and editorial infrastructure,drive developing-country scholars disproportionately into the arms of blackOA, as indicated in the contributions by Berger and by Sagemüller et al. inthis collection.

others argue that black OAexploits the epistemic exclusion of Southern scholars.

Black OA refers to the OA un-derworld of predatory journals and pirate OA platforms like SciHub

he unsavoury model

Con-versely, gold OA relies on APCs, effectively shifting journals from a pay-to-read to a pay-to-publish model

Yet, this distinctform of OA existed long before gold OA, and remains the model used by themajority of OA journals (Morrison and Rahman, 2020: 10). In 2013, only32 per cent of OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals(DOAJ) charged APCs (Fuchs and Sandoval, 2013). Despite widespreadpressures to adopt gold OA, to date over two-thirds of OA journals listedin DOAJ still do not charge APCs (Morrison, 2018).

refer todiamond OA as a new model (Normand, 2018; Raju, 2017).

where as the Gold Route is seen as open only at theaccess end. (Wilson, 2007a; see also Tottossy and Antonielli, 2012; Wilson, 2010)

The shift in the name of the diamond/platinummodel only increases the confusion.

This obscures through definitional vagueness the vital issue ofwhether gold OA entails Article Processing Charges (APCs), which makearticles free to read, but not free to publish. It also effectively suppressesclear consideration of a pre-existing distinction between gold OA and

wing to itsimmediate openness and removal of copyright barriers to sharing or re-use

with little attention

urther muddled

but more questions need to be raised about whether they sharethe same interests

Profit margins of thetop corporate publishers have continued to rise even after the shift to OA,

Three historicalissues have been central to framing the OA debate: the history of scholarlyjournals, the digitization of scholarly publishing, and the journal pricingcrisis.

As high-lighted by Kamerlin et al. (this collection), academic journals date back over300 years, and evolved to structure knowledge sharing within non-profit,disciplinary frameworks of scholarly societies and academic bodies. Theirengagement with corporate publishers only emerged from the mid-20th cen-tury, amid academic funding cuts and corporate takeovers of smaller pub-lishers, particularly affecting the social sciences (Larivière et al., 2015).

and internal norms of free scholarly content, andacademic labour for reviewing and editing provided to the journal free ofcharge.

that have informed thetrajectory of OA in scholarly publishing and development research.