Public Library Brown

publiclibrarybrown

## the narrative

we started our 'public library' journey by simple proposal...
> see slide 1

we came out with that proposal following the big promise launched back in the 19th century after the bourgeois revolution... 
> see slide 2

and that promise says:
people are equal....

what made that promise historically important, which from the today's perspective does not sound as conceptually very demanding concept, is that desired equality would be part of the political project of establishment and governance of that very equality...

achieving that goal is not easy... but at least most of the bourgeois of the time agreed: access to knowledge is a minimal requirement for that new society to build...
> see slide 3

some of them thought of access to knowledge as the way how the non-educated violent working class will learn how to become a good citizens and then behave and not lead the new society into the wave of chaos once again.. bourgeois didn't need the chaos just after the royals learned their lesson through the revolution and (if not dead) calmed down (for a while) ready to negotiate the new power configurations...

others of that time thought of the access to knowledge in the true spirit of enlightenment so that access to knowledge for every member of society should bring to the human kind more of encyclopedias, dictionaries of philosophy, more people like voltaire, diderot, rousseau and more emancipation for people.. because
people are equal...

most of the time promises, thoughts, concepts come with its own limits, scope or we can also imagine that as - borders. a kind of selectively permeable, porous membrane configured to allow certain kinds of matter and not to allow other kinds. when not for *liquids and chemicals* but for *people, ideas and capital* it is these rules of filtering and regulation that are perfect example of a political instrument....

i'm sorry for using a vocabulary of biology, i know exactly what this *playing with a fire* triggers here...

that promise, "people are equal", is a political instrument whose rate of passage depends on pressure, concentration and temperature of the ones, the people, being filtered and regulated.
> see slide 4

that promise, a border, a membrane, a political instrument is of course not only filtering and regulating physical dimension or only geographical one but it functions via imaginary, conceptual, administrative, legal and recently more and more network protocol based dimensions... more about that later...

"people are equal" as an guiding principle and ideal was always about a solidarity, organization and struggle for the ones from the other side of the membrane. back in the 19th century for the ones not owning any property, who had only their labour to sell to survive,  a women, people of colour, immigrants, indigenous people, lgbt movement - as said - it took a long time, solidarity, organization and struggle for all of them to get the right amount of pressure, concentration and temperature to pass the membrane of *a promise, filter and regulation* that we - people - are all equal. these same struggles are not over. and the new ones are started...

our 19th century promise was born after the collapse of ancient regime which ended up in the unbearable unjust which could be only turned upside-down (once again)... 

in "What Was Revolutionary about the French Revolution?" Robert Darnton considers how the collective experience of a complete collapse of the social order looks like.

i quote:
> see slide 5

*"In 1789 the French had to confront the collapse of a whole social order—the world that they defined retrospectively as the Ancien Régime—and to find some new order in the chaos surrounding them. They experienced reality as something that could be destroyed and reconstructed, and they faced seemingly limitless possibilities, both for good and evil, for raising a utopia and for falling back into tyranny."* 

In the dictionaries of the time, the word revolution was said to derive from the verb to revolve and was defined as “the return of the planet or a star to the same point from which it parted.” French political vocabulary spread no further than the narrow circle of the feudal elite in Versailles. The citizens, revolutionaries, had to invent new words, concepts . . . almost an entire new language in order to describe the revolution that had taken place.

they began with the vocabulary of time and space. if my French is any better I would tell you more new names of the months than just thermidor for example. it was an adoption of the whole new calendar, with decimalization of the time of a day, and decimalization of currency, and for the space they introduced the metric system. gram became unit of mass. 

in Paris, 1,400 streets were given new names. every reminder of the tyranny of the monarchy was erased. the revolutionaries even changed their names and surnames. Le Roy or Leveque, commonly used until then, were changed to Le Loi or Liberté. To address someone, out of respect, with vous was forbidden by a resolution passed on 24 Brumaire, Year 2. Vous was replaced with tu. because:
people are equal

the watchwords Liberté, égalité, fraternité (freedom, equality, brotherhood) were built through *literacy, new epistemologies, classifications, declarations, standards, reason, and rationality*. what first comes to our mind about the revolution will never again be the return of *a planet or a star* to the same point from which it departed.

> see slide 6
 
the revolution bootstraps itself.

this revolution is the foundation lying down on a left side of a dream and struggle of
> see slide 7

but public library needed another utopian dream for the balance on the right side of its name. and that side is a strange kind of utopia of an epistemological kind. that is very certain kind of optimism that we will find the way to formalize language, come up with symbols and notations, rules of their manipulations which will bring not just hermeneutic consistency to the text being analyzed, written and read but to carry on that comprehensiveness to the collections of texts, and annotations of collections of text and collections of annotations of collections of texts and just go further and further...

in my favourite book on libraries 'paper machines' markus krajewski led us throgh the journey of inventing the index card catalog from Conrad Gessner’s Bibliotheca Universalis, Leibniz’s proposals for a universal library during his tenure at the Wolfenbüttel library in the late 17th century; to Gottfried van Swieten’s catalog of the Viennese court library, via Melvil Dewey and his decimal system of classification and even more interesting Paul Otlet who established fascinating Mundaneum with around 18 million index cards on wide range of topics. One could even subscribe to the Mundaneum so it is probably the easiest to imagine Mundaneum as very slow Wikipedia with requests and responses being transfered via regular mail. 

that was the time when people dreamed big and few of these  dreams established itself as the foundational values of our societies today. one of them is public library. an institution no one really questioned through almost the whole 20th century. there were some evil people, during the war in the 90s in croatia where i come from, who would throw away books because these books wouldn't fit their fascist worldview but not even evil people would question if public library should exist.

paul otlet's best friend henry la fontaine dreamed about the world as a political project where all people will be equal and live in peace. that dream led to the establishment of league of nations and later united nations. the two world wars and the century full of wars didn't really convince many that that's the one easily achieved. 

i'm sure in this room this story so far triggered quite few alarms of a critique of universalism. i like to think of myself as not being very naive. especially when it comes to politics (and technology). i also don't want to start a long digression on universalism so let me say only few things:

> see slide 8

i think that thinking about the universalism can be a process where the experience and the voice of oppressed and marginalised is invited, shared and made into a start of a political struggle for - universalism. that kind of universalism or just thinking of universalism is not something one can always generate but sometimes you just wait for that.

i had a conversation about this very moment, about universalism with our dcrl colleague bernard geoghegan just before coming to brown. he sent me this quote i liked a lot. so i kind of quote bernie who quotes donna haraway who quotes gayatri spivak on humanity:

> see slide 9

"*My stakes are high; I think "we" -that crucial material and rhetorical construction of politics and of history-need something called humanity. It is that kind of thing which Gayatri Spivak called "that which we cannot not want." We also know now, from our perspectives in the ripped-open belly of the monster called history, that we cannot name and possess this thing which we cannot not desire. Humanity, whole and part, is not autochthonous. Nobody is self-made, least of all man. That is the spiritual and political meaning of poststructuralism and postmodernism for me.*"

i would like to go back to the utopias which in the case of public library first met in 19th century:
political - public and
epistemological - library.
also the idea of the world being united where people who are equal live peacefully. 

'public library' got recognized and established as social institution with a mission and role no one would (almost) ever question. i'll get to that shortly.

league of nations, united nations - well - it's complicated.

> see slide 10

The Internet has, as in many other situations, completely changed our expectations and imagination about what is possible. The dream of a catalogue of the world – a universal approach to all available knowledge for every member of society – became realizable. A question merely of the meeting of curves on a graph: the point at which the line of global distribution of personal computers meets that of the critical mass of people with access to the Internet. If not itself becoming the 'public library' internet should by any projection from the past - knowing what is 'public library' and then what is internet - let public libraries blossom. 

However, the emergence and development of the Internet is taking place precisely at the point at which an institutional crisis—one with traumatic and inconceivable consequences—has also begun.

The internet is a new challenge, creating experiences commonly proffered as ‘revolutionary’. Yet, a true revolution of the Internet is the universal access to all knowledge that it makes possible. However, unlike the new epistemologies developed during the French revolution the tendency is to keep the ‘old regime’ (of intellectual property rights, market concentration and control of access). The new possibilities for classification, development of languages, invention of epistemologies which the internet poses, and which might launch off into new orbits from existing classification systems, are being suppressed.

In fact, the reactionary forces of the ‘old regime’ are staging a ‘Thermidor’ to suppress the public libraries from pursuing their mission. Today public libraries cannot acquire, cannot even buy digital books from the world’s largest publishers.ix The small amount of e-books that they were able to acquire already they must destroyed after only twenty-six lendings.x Libraries and the principle of universal access to all existing knowledge that they embody are losing, in every possible way, the battle with a market dominated by new players such as Amazon.com, Google, and Apple.

In 2012, Canada’s Conservative Party–led government cut financial support for Libraries and Archives Canada (LAC) by Can$9.6 million, which resulted in the loss of 400 archivist and librarian jobs, the shutting down of some of LAC’s Internet pages, and the cancellation of the further purchase of new books.xi In only three years, from 2010 to 2012, some 10 percent of public libraries were closed in Great Britain.xii

The commodification of knowledge, education, and schooling (which are the consequences of a globally harmonized, restrictive legal regime for intellectual property) with neoliberal austerity politics curtails the possibilities of adapting to new sociotechnological conditions, let alone further development, innovation, or even basic maintenance of public libraries’ infrastructure.

> see slide 11

Public libraries are an endangered institution, doomed to extinction.

Petit bourgeois denial prevents society from confronting this disturbing insight. As in many other fields, the only way out offered is innovative market-based entrepreneurship. Some have even suggested that the public library should become an open software platform on top of which creative developers can build app storesxiii or Internet cafés for the poorest, ensuring that they are only a click away from the Amazon.com catalog or the Google search bar. But these proposals overlook, perhaps deliberately, the fundamental principles of access upon which the idea of the public library was built.

Those who are well-meaning, intelligent, and tactful will try to remind the public of all the many sides of the phenomenon that the public library is: major community center, service for the vulnerable, center of literacy, informal and lifelong learning; a place where hobbyists, enthusiasts, old and young meet and share knowledge and skills.

Fascinating, no?

Unfortunately, for purely tactical reasons, this reminder to the public does not always contain an explanation of how these varied effects arise out of the foundational idea of a public library: universal access to knowledge for each member of the society produces knowledge, produces knowledge about knowledge, produces knowledge about knowledge transfer: the public library produces sociability.

The public library does not need the sort of creative crisis management that wants to propose what the library should be transformed into once our society, obsessed with market logic, has made it impossible for the library to perform its main mission. Such proposals, if they do not insist on universal access to knowledge for all members, are Trojan horses for the silent but galloping disappearance of the public library from the historical stage. Sociability—produced by public libraries, with all the richness of its various appearances—will be best preserved if we manage to fight for the values upon which we have built the public library: universal access to knowledge for each member of our society.

> see slide 12

Freedom, equality, and brotherhood need brave librarians practicing civil disobedience.

Library Genesis, Aaaaarg.org, Monoskop, UbuWeb are all examples of fragile knowledge infrastructures built and maintained by brave librarians practicing civil disobedience which the world of researchers in the humanities rely on. These projects are re-inventing the public library in the gap left by today’s institutions in crisis.

These are the brave librarians and projects without we would never start the 'public library' project.

> see tab http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

Library Genesisxv is an online repository with over a million books and is the first project in history to offer everyone on the Internet free download of its entire book collection (as of this writing, about fifteen terabytes of data), together with the all metadata (MySQL dump) and PHP/HTML/Java Script code for webpages. The most popular earlier repositories, such as Gigapedia (later Library.nu), handled their upload and maintenance costs by selling advertising space to the pornographic and gambling industries. Legal action was initiated against them, and they were closed.xvi News of the termination of Gigapedia/Library.nu strongly resonated among academics and book enthusiasts circles and was even noted in the mainstream Internet media, just like other major world events. The decision by Library Genesis to share its resources has resulted in a network of identical sites (so-called mirrors) through the development of an entire range of Net services of metadata exchange and catalog maintenance, thus ensuring an exceptionally resistant survival architecture.

> see tab http://aaaaarg.fail/

Aaaaarg.org, started by the artist Sean Dockray, is an online repository with over 50,000 books and texts. A community of enthusiastic researchers from critical theory, contemporary art, philosophy, architecture, and other fields in the humanities maintains, catalogs, annotates, and initiates discussions around it. It also as a courseware extension to the self-organized education platform The Public Schoolxvii.

> see tab http://ubu.com/

UbuWeb is the most significant and largest online archive of avant-garde art; it was initiated and is lead by conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith. UbuWeb, although still informal, has grown into a relevant and recognized critical institution of contemporary art. Artists want to see their work in its catalog and thus agree to a relationship with UbuWeb that has no formal contractual obligations.

> see tab http://monoskop.org/Monoskop

Monoskop is a wiki for the arts, culture, and media technology, with a special focus on the avant-garde, conceptual, and media arts of Eastern and Central Europe; it was launched by Dušan Barok and others. In the form of a blog Dušan uploads to Monoskop.org/log an online catalog of curated titles (at the moment numbering around 3,000), and, as with UbuWeb, it is becoming more and more relevant as an online resource.

Library Genesis, Aaaaarg.org, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Dušan Barok show us that the future of the public library does not need crisis management, venture capital, start-up incubators, or outsourcing but simply the freedom to continue extending the dreams of Melvil Dewey, Paul Otlet and other visionary librarians, just as it did before the emergence of the Internet.

With the emergence of the Internet and software tools such as Calibre and “[let’s share books],” librarianship has been given an opportunity, similar to astronomy and the project SETI@home, to include thousands of amateur librarians who will, together with the experts, build a distributed peer-to-peer network to care for the catalog of available knowledge and here is our reference implementation or proof of concept:

> see tab http://library.memoryoftheworld.org/

we can for sure say that this proposal, a vision, then reference implementation at Memory of the World.org after three years of existence is successful. it resonates with people's hearts.

after a launch in ljubljana in 2012, in 2014 we transformed again the space of stuttgart's kunsteverein into public library, then in zagreb couple of months ago we did the same in galerija nova, 'public library' was exhibited in reina sofia museum, invited to transmediale, calvert22 in london, 96weeks in beirut.. a lot of places.. on of these being the keynote at brown. this is not the end of my talk but i have to say here thank you very much for letting me open this conference...

from the very beginning we were trying to anticipate what are the legal consequences of our and the civil disobedience of projects we respect and support. we would always half jokingly invite the organizers as witnesses to the court case from te near future...

we always felt that there is a consequence of implementing the inappropriate concepts into legal regimes, in our case the inappropriate concept is intellectual property. so the consequence is a society full of schizophrenic subjects. that particular regulation made almost the whole population into criminals. our favourite joke some 10 yrs ago was the question:  do you know anyone who knows someone knowing someone else who never downloaded illegal software, music, movies, games, books? the answer was: dear grandmother. now the schizophrenic ambient didn't end at all and we are let with the morbid joke saying there are only few grandmothers these days who are not criminals.

when david garcia and eric kluitenberg invited me to write for their forthcoming book 'tactical media' these were the ideas i discussed with my dear friend and partner in crime tomislav medak. we got a contract by mit press. usual things. no money. few rights. prestige. 

> see mit press contract .pdf

didn't catch our attention. but then a week later we also got a 'take down' notice from the same mit press. for the same project we week earlier got contract to sign. and i'm not sure if that qualifies for the irony, but i found it quite hilarious, the take down notice was for the book 'art power' by boris groys.

> see url https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/fKUYephPM7yohWqj4Hfb-rppohHRP1bHYMdy-uBiOsjX5D_a

if i would see someone doing this cheap semiotics plays i would probably boo silently from the audience. but at the same time i would also understand the giggling excitement of anyone doing it, would be a little envy and of course let the bastard do the thing.. that's what i expect from you :)

boris groys is famous to call jesus christ first ready made and an author i found as one of the best writing on russian or soviet constructivism and avantgard.. quite few of my communist comrades would ask me to remove this book for being too liberal, to conservative, whatnot, but i want to say i love groys writings... argh, and i can see i don't have enough time to go with all of my quotes and notes from 'art power' but i will only show you the table of contents..

i'm sure you can easily imagine how many books published by mit press could support the civil disobedience and fight against the exclusivity of the world today but also the exclusivity of mit or mit press in particular, who's just like other publisher today.

but in case of mit and then mit press in particular there are a number of promises and legacy they can not any more stand for, and in the same way the bourgeois revolution could be revisited, and liberal democracy checked if the promises we found foundational for the society are still here...

mit appeared, in our little story, as one of the best examples of schizophrenic subject... proud of starting hacking but then killing our hacker's hero, internet's own boy, proud of opening up knowledge resources but then using its ip addresses range exclusive only for the insiders.. what i would like to say here is that i don't see schizophrenic deadlock as something evil nor that mit is evil but if inappropriate values and concepts become part of our legal regulations this is where we end up...

we ended up in the exclusive world where all people are not equal... i showed you already [let's share books]

this summer i did something which circumvent the internet being exclusive by ip address islands... we started with ip address not knowing in which country they are sitting.. then some companies did a job of annotating that and many organizations and countries are using that to exclude certain kind of people.. university don't let outsiders access to jstor.. germany don't let you see most of the videos on youtube.. bbc don't let non-uk residents to watch their online resources.. iran, turkey, china you know all about their control of internet...




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