label

politics

Linked to 13 items

• from: Clusterduck (chapter)

  54:23 politicsThe most powerful technology is collective narratives. And as long as we don’t change the collective narrative in which we are, and at the moment this is the dominating collective narrative, still that of late capitalism, whatever emancipatory or liberatory potential those technologies have, will not be able to fully manifest in this society we have at the moment. On the contrary, it will be used to enhance control and the extraction of value and so on. That’s what we are seeing with artificial intelligence and all the other technologies that were named.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 46:04 I think there is a certain duality there. If you look at the practice of Open Source Publishing, there’s also a certain joy and interest in these technical questions. So that’s also driving the motivation to do this. For me, our work and its experimentations are interesting and it’s more interesting than working with existing proprietary tools. politicsThere’s also a political layer where making graphic design using proprietary software limits your choices very strongly. In the case of publishing on the web, that’s ironic because, from the onset, it has been open-source, and developed with the idea of people expressing themselves, but also maintaining their own infrastructure and its ever-continuing centralisation. So for me, it is extremely relevant to maintain and develop your own infrastructure and to use tools which support or even invite you to do this. I mean, there is a challenge there, because it needs to be maintained and it crumbles by itself. Existing platforms have developed a business model where that kind of work that’s sometimes also boring can be financed and can be supported. But I’m not sure I fully answered your question, I notice I get stuck a little bit because there’s always an ambivalence of being both optimistic about open-source and being a pessimist in that there are open questions that capitalistic models have found ways to answer, but we also see that those answers are often exploitative. I have a very strong desire to find paths around, but these are always fragile and complex and also situated, I think, in the sense of how they’re linked to specific people in specific situations.

• from: Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Irene 04:24 Well, apart from Glissant, there are a lot of other, mostly Latin American decolonial thinkers, as well as Ariella Azoulay, who’s also very important, especially her book “Potential History”. Her background is in photography, so she talks a lot about images and archives, especially the violence behind archives and structures. Of course, publishing, writing, and communicating in the English language is not ideal, and I always say, maybe at some point, I’ll be fed up with all the limitations of publishing, and I’ll move on to another format. politicsBut I think there’s a lot to be done within this format, a lot of opacity is important, a lot of refusal, and a lot of subverting in how you put things together. I find it interesting because by doing that, you question how we think about knowledge and how we think about what is important and what is not important.

• from: Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Another example is ‘citational rebellion,’ inspired by Sarah Ahmed. She wrote a very cool essay on her blog about how citation works within knowledge creation and publication. Then inspired by Zoe Todd, who wrote about Ahmed, politicsI’ve come to realize how citations work to legitimize the work of some, while ignoring those of others. For this reason, Todd describes how she will only reference Indigenous thinkers. Her point is that the white men that are always cited — she talks about Bruno Latour specifically — were not the first to think of something. Nine out of ten times, they were not. And you can find an equal source from someone else, someone of colour or a woman for instance. I currently want to expand the Subversive Publishing series. I’m going to apply for funding because I’m working on open access, I want to make a collection of texts that go into this a little bit further and are also an umbrella of how I think about publishing and Errant. I hope to do that next year.

• from: Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Irene 1:10:26 I could be very cheeky because, from the colonial perspective, there is no future, this whole concept is fraud. But I won’t go into it, you can read the first issue of Errant; there are some thoughts about that. Maybe the future for me is not so much about technical development or progress in a traditional sense. politicsHowever, the process of learning to give more space to fit the politics of what we are trying to do into the working methods, I think this is very, very important. This comes down to giving space to “other” voices, and the question is, how do you really make space for that? I am talking about how I organize things and how I see them, and I have to fight for that. So far, people don’t get it. They don’t get that this is the only way for me to move forward. Of course, privately, I go through depression, and burnout, but it’s not just me who’s hypersensitive, it is everyone that we work with in the cultural field, especially those who have to deal with real precariousness. Art or cultural sectors have been too bent with political wills, especially now when we see the direction taken to the right. We have to resist this, which we can do by ourselves. Doing these very small things, little subversive acts is resistance. Things I have been developing and thinking about last year are definitely not done, so I keep going, and I am planning to publish more about it and hopefully infect other people with some of these thoughts.

• from: Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

  Ilan 42:02 One of the things we learn from you is that we don’t care if we are read — we don’t care if people are reading us. I mean, readership is just a statistical mass of people that needs to be quantified. Every author is frustrated about the amount of books being sold. The artists are frustrated, asking how many people came to their opening, how many reviews did they get, how many sales, et cetera. And we learn from you is that politicsthinkership is what matters, not readership. So, people that you can think with, right? So, a book is just a signal to a community of thinkers.

• from: Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

  Kenneth 57:20 politicsI mean, the notion of silence is violence, it was only one type of discourse that was allowed to be spoken anyway, as you’re saying, a discourse of noise was not permitted. A discourse of nonsense was not permitted. A discourse of perversity was not permitted. This was a totally contradictory notion. There is only one type of voice that’s allowed to be expressed. I find that kind of repression to be fascistic in its own way. So, it’s become complicated. alternative publishing practicesThere’s an English word that’s called woodshedding. Sometimes, guitarists in particular, would just drop out for a really long time to work on new techniques and to just go into the woodshed and disappear for a while and come out with some other thing. So I think that this notion of disappearance can be really productive and also really radical, but also, there’s just so much fucking noise. I mean, everybody now has to be so public all the time. What is that? Why do we have to be so public?

• from: Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

  So their taste was wrong, so it was just reifying some sort of stupid traditional notions of literature. politicsThey just didn’t have the imagination or the taste, or actually I want to call it perversity, to feed the machine stuff that would break it, because they couldn’t afford to break it. They needed to monetize it. Artists have always been the best, really good at breaking things rather than trying to make something stable. Again, it goes back to the W. H. Auden quote that says poetry makes nothing happen, Its beauty is its lack of utility. So when you try to harness art to become useful, you betray its base quality. Its quality is to be useless. Poetry makes nothing happen.That’s why it’s beautiful in a culture where we’re so geared up toward productivity to make a space where nothing happens. That sounds really radical to me, and that’s the way I read Auden. It’s probably the wrong way to read it, but I really am inspired by that quote.

• from: Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

  Silvio 20:25 I’ve been involved mostly in the Netherlands, in Italy and now in Portugal. I have to say politicsI’m concerned because I think that somehow, even though I’m a bit critical of the way the funding structure is dealt with (especially when it comes to publishing in the Netherlands), the new political climate is not good. We have seen what’s happening to BAK and other institutions in the Netherlands, that’s not a good sign. That kind of limitation of funding will have repercussions throughout the continent. Nowadays I think that sustainability should be a sort of “international coming together” to defend the funding of the centre, of the core, because the core also affects, somehow and in a small way, the margin and the periphery. And this is interesting because in the past years, “the periphery”, so to speak, the margins, have rightly so developed a sort of pride in saying “we are autonomous, in terms of language, we don’t want to depend on and replicate the agendas of the rich European countries”. While this makes sense, there is a worrying situation that is not just about single countries, but about Europe.

• from: Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

  Silvio 1:02:16 Of course, I was following the development of those concepts such as squad wealth. I think some things upset me about that formulation, while others were saying something similar to this idea of the individual still being part of the community. What annoyed me there was the depiction of the institutionalized person. In the text, if I remember well, there was a meme depicting the person who works for the institution as a “wage cuck”. You know, like a cuckold. That annoyed me. politicsFirst of all, because I am a person that works for an institution, and also it doesn’t acknowledge this dynamic of being inside, which to a certain extent, is going to be true. If it’s not true, it’s very hard to survive without that “wage cuckness” sort of thing. I would be very curious to see what’s the state of this squad now, in terms of who got the professorship, who started this and that, without any envy or jealousy, but just to check the validity of the theory, because after all, they were like institutionalizing themselves by that.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  politicsThose of us who are operating under the previous set of conditions, how do we resize, right size? How are we re-relevant or what is still relevant, what is not relevant? Those are hard questions, but just thinking purely as someone who reads and writes as naturally as I do anything, I feel like it’s never been better. The future is individual voices or voices of small groups of people being incredibly influential in ways that will probably be very problematic in some cases. I think the future is more free form. Once people perfect these systems, like Twitter, Instagram, all these things have been perfected, then you have people looking for how else do I express something. Earlier this year, Tavi Gevinson, star writer of Rookie Magazine, released a zine she made about Taylor Swift that she put out on a standalone website with the print-on demand button. You could click to get a copy, you could download it, and that did great. It’s hard. It’s competitive. It’s noisy. There’s so much. That sucks. But it’s also great.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  Yancey 35:55 politicsIt is important to own your identity. We’ve seen a lot of examples of platforms going defunct and data being lost and what felt safe was not. I think homesteading on the internet is advisable, but not everyone has the geek in the group. For a lot of creative people, every one of those steps is the antithesis of everything that they want to do. So it’s like: “give me the thing that does the thing”, and I find generally people start that way and then, as you get more advanced in your career and you have more of a reputation at stake, you start to look for more of the self hosted solutions.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  As a second step, as a second order, begin to reveal the ways it’s also better for you and the affordances it creates. politicsAnd it can’t be that software, and that is a political position, should only be open source, because then no one will make software and no one will maintain. You know, maintaining open source is a nightmare. You need what a lot of projects try to do, which is you have a pro-social give back to the commons relationship generally. The bigger you get, the harder that is. One could argue that Facebook’s contributions to the world of development have been huge. You know react and various things that they’ve contributed that came out of their engineering team and you know we’re part of their practice. That comes from big tech and it is something that we all rely on. Engineers, any, most engineers are interested in those kinds of solutions. They just get blocked by business objectives and say, you know we can’t do that, but I think it’s a lot of great impulses and affordances that I hope we can stay open to.