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So this talk is about
public libraries, perhaps
some of you still remember,
perhaps some of you have been
in one once.
They are sources of free knowledge,
something which the Internet is also
for us especially.
The Internet brought a lot of new
possibilities.
To get informed,
everybody can access it,
libraries once where
exactly this is the way to
get informed, but
with the possibilities of the Internet
and e-books and everything showing
up, libraries get lost
on the way.
Maysam, as we talk about this
and I really ask you to welcome him
with a heartwarming applause.
OK, good.
So, hey,
I'll start I'll start a little bit
from from behind from the history.
So 15
years ago after the dotcom
crash, we thought that the
year of the Linux desktop
will is just about corner.
It will just happen any time.
And then we also thought that the venture
capital learned the lesson of blowing
up the bubble out of any
out of proportion
a few years later.
I think if I remember correctly,
that that was actually the keynote
in Berlin at the CCC.
Ebon Mogollon gave a
lecture, which I still remember
as one of the best lectures ever,
and he proclaimed
that we won, that we
won and liberated the world of
software.
There was two thousand four, I
think the world of software, the world
of hardware, and that
the next world we should
win is the world of radio
spectrum. And radio
spectrum is important because that's the
very medium medium
where the the tragedy of commons
is not really like is not
present as as we know in
the world of land. That's why we thought
that the next one is,
is the radio radio frequency
spectrum.
And then it took four years and Google
brought Gmail, then
YouTube appeared and then delicious.
If anyone remembers that it
brought us Foxon to me than
Twitter was just about to get its full
momentum.
And the same happened for Facebook
and that was
the peak of that.
So this was the year 2006
and
it was the peak of what Silicon Valley
celebrated and preached
for so long.
So venture capital would
invest into free software startups
and many of these startups would
become successful.
Then they will be bought by large
corporations, which had great
kindergartens and coffee machines
and also do not evil.
The age of Attention Economy provides
user service services for free and
technical infrastructure, sustainable
finance support from the advertisers.
It took a few more years before
the open Internet as we
knew it became
the graveyard grave graveyard of
abandoned open protocols.
And as my.
As my friend Damian said
in a tweet, a very good
one.
Yeah,
so, yeah, well, Microsoft
never succeeded a million startups
replacing open Internet protocols with
proprietary.
So we lost around
2009, if anyone remembers
the Google waves.
And that was probably the last kind of
utopian or whatever enthusiastic
open protocol kind of project.
Then we lost Exxon, BP.
We lost our sense.
We lost voice over IP, we
lost federation, we lost distribution,
we lost the autonomy.
When I said lost again, it's
it's it's complicated, as you know.
And I must admit, in
in 2006, I was
fascinated with that landscape,
at least because of my skeptical
social our environment.
I wanted to research that phenomenon
more.
And then I applied for Jianwen like
Academy with research called Ruling
Class Studies, and I
got a research position.
And then I started to work on
methodological methodology or how to
understand and analyze.
These tech giants
are the new class which
which literally writes
the rules, how to, how to run stuff.
So I started to profile Google and Amazon
and here is just one of the examples.
From 2000.
From from 2011.
So it was at the Media
Lab, Prather's I use
someone else's JavaScript, don't be
impressed with my JavaScript kung fu.
But what I
did here, what I try to do is kind of
explain what's the scope was the scale
of of of Google.
And then I was trying to see, OK, what's
the relation to free software?
How much of that software stack is
actually written as
a free software and how much of that is
written by Google and then try to come
up with some kind of approximation
of how much time, how
many developers and how much
money you would need in 2011
if you wanted to if
you wanted to write the software stack
off of Google.
And you can see some of the numbers from
that time.
But at the end, it was just like I
kind of rounded it and it was more
like 12 years
of development, a billion dollars just
for software stack and a thousand
developers also
kind of like organizing it so
that they can do some things in parallel.
Anyway, that was that was what I was
doing in 2000
and 2000, 11,
and also did some some stuff
about Amazon and whatnot.
But in order to write text and that's
what they kind of what they expected me
to do and not just a Python
scripts and JavaScript, I had
to read more in order to write
more. I need to read more.
So not any more. Just technical
specification, but also like the
books that theory books and
Java, like, was one of the best places in
the world for that.
The best bunch of Marx's Lacanian
Psaltis areas J'accuse
not. And so, so I had like
a very good, very good
environment there.
And they read the books a lot.
And also they
just like everyone, especially at that
time they were downloading books from
Wikipedia, my fellow researchers
in 2000 11.
And that was from Wikipedia
and Library Library and you.
But when I would ask them,
what do they have on their hard disks?
What are the books they have,
they wouldn't really know.
And then they would just admit that
that one, they need a book.
They probably have it on their
hard disk in a very messy directory.
But they would just go to the to library
and you and download it again.
And
I mean, a few people here can understand
that I was not really kind of happy that
that's how things should be done.
And then I.
Oh, no more.
There is a literature books.
Sorry, I didn't.
I'm sorry,
I just download the wrong
euro, but it will be back in
a second, just a second
blog.
I have it here.
Cable companies,
it's here now, mind
you, one of my friends here always
ask me how why
I don't do the
what's the name, the Microsoft
PowerPoint.
And I'm sorry, I really can't remember.
It was not like and
that's what I do. So he says, like,
how can you be convenient,
confident that much.
But I'm not I'm scared, as you
know, it's kind of it doesn't work.
But anyway, it was just like after
after less than than a month at Yanmei,
like I wrote a blog post,
lecture books.
And then I tried also
to explain a few things.
So it was not just the how to, but it was
also kind of a little
bit performative in
kind of making a mediatory kind of
lecture what can be done.
And then it's good if you
do like if you are very kind of
meticulous and then if you do like the
proper kind of manual,
the title of the book and then the
auteur, things like that, and then
you can do this in your terminal
and then you can send me this text file
and then I will know what are the books
you have, of course, that no one would
ever do that. But I just tried to explain
what how hard it can be done and then
also introduced what are the resources
where you can actually find
the good metadata for the
for the books?
And also I found out
great software,
which is called Culebra
and and
and realized that in Culebra
you can really just
with one click, you can bring all
of the metadata from from Internet.
So you have a book you've downloaded from
Library Neun.
It's still 2011
and then you download that and
then you get it there.
And that's that's used to be quite a hard
job. If you were not on digital
networks and having the software, if
you were like a librarian from from
from before.
But what was even
better was that
that that
you could also run a Web
server from that Culebra.
So
what I was doing is that,
yeah, there is one small thing
before in 2012, in the beginning
library that a new PDA was
shut down
by the court case and
and everybody panicked.
All of my friends, they they
didn't know how to handle their message
directories.
And so everybody around Facebook was
like already kind of quite popular.
And you could see that people were
freaking out because Wikipedia
is not anymore there.
And I had a few things in place
at that time.
And I started to
I started to share my Culebra library.
So what I was doing is that I,
I would run this Web server
in Culebra and
just second.
From Marks, it's kind of hard to.
Copy text still.
Let's try to do that here.
It's good that it works.
This, yeah, so what
I was doing is that I just like use
this little line in my
terminal and what it will allow me
is that I would just say, OK, when I'm
running that Web server
from my Culebra, then
I will just like tunnel
it or just like send it to my server.
And I had access to a few servers
and then people would be able to get my
to get my library.
Just putting something like
this.
In the brothers and what they
would do, they would just access my
my Calibra from my laptop
and I would get the books and
then they were interested.
Hmm, for sure.
And I liked it.
And I also realized that I just
became I became
kind of an amateur librarian where
people, because they didn't know about
you don't need to like, copy this line.
I'll show you, like now it's kind of
much, much better.
It's much easier to do that.
Yeah. So so I became amateur librarian.
I liked it. My friends liked it
and I realized that.
That something else could be done?
I could imagine
that what's happening?
What's happening to the library world
is what was already happening
to other to other worlds
when there is one, when the software
just like enters the field.
So in that sense, that's what already
happened in design after Photoshop,
it happened to journalism.
After WordPress,
it happened to advertisement after
Edwards, it happened to photography
after Instagram.
So in a way, you can imagine that the
Calibra being a very
simple tool and very easy to use
is the way how you can just like do the
libraries today.
And then if you share it and if many
people are doing that, then you would
just end up with the public
library as
as as we know, for like more
than a hundred and fifty years or
at least like hundreds and a few decades.
So that's that's what
what we could what
we could do. So I'll just show
you a little
a little video here.
And that's what I imagined for the
libraries. So this is the.
This is sadly at home, and
that was at one moment
the biggest distributed computer in the
world, and that was where people would
just run the screen savers in
order to have the
science
and like crunched some numbers.
And a lot of people were quite
enthusiastic about that.
And this is how amateurs and
scientists, amateurs and professionals
could work happily and for
the benefit of the society.
So this is what I was what I was thinking
about.
OK,
but then the regenesis
of fire, the story behind me,
as I told you, it never works, but
extubate.
It's not shut down.
OK, so let's
see. OK, 15 minutes.
That's fine.
So then it
didn't really work.
So my blog post, as you saw
it, didn't really work for my friends.
No one was really doing that.
Also, no one had access to servers
and they were always very scared from
the terminal.
So they like to type text
into Google's search bar, but they don't
like to type text into the terminal.
It's not a big difference, but
emotionally, I think that it's huge.
So I'll just show you.
I'll just show you what I did at a time.
So this was the first version
of what I did at that
time, so you have a command line
and then it was because I didn't
know better the time you would also
need like a gibber account and then you
would kind of like any Gerba
account.
But then I didn't know how to handle
it was not super secure because I could
get whatever password.
So it wasn't really secure at the time.
But what it worked is that if you would
run this
in your in your terminal,
your your library
would just get online and
and people could use it.
And then a few people actually started
to use it.
And my friend Anthony
ause he got like super enthusiastic
about it and he was he was using
that OK.
And I was happy so that that provided
me some time
and motivation to.
Yeah.
The quotes, few shortcuts
for full screen, they're all different.
And then Damien
then Damien showed me something.
You remember the guy from the tweet,
he showed me something.
I'll just use it here again.
In English people,
so he showed me this and what he said
is that I'm
sorry, it needs it needs
zero here.
So what he told me is that you
can actually send the zero to
the server and then server will give you
the whatever the port for your tunnel.
And then if you do a little bit of the
magic of the sad
like here, then you can just like make
a make another command line
interface, which will be just kind
of simpler.
You would also need to do something like
this, like couple of lines
in your engine X, which will just like
whenever you go into WWE, double
the number of support.
If there is a tunnel there, it will get
there. If there is no, then it will just
tell you bad gateway or whatever.
You can just like make a custom e-mail
for that. So it was kind of moving.
It was kind of moving.
And I'll show you
I'll show you another thing which
was already better.
It got on GitHub and yeah,
and then it's a video, because
I'm just a
little bit more scared of a lot of so
you start the contest in Culebra
and then you go back.
So it's like already happening.
And then you go back and then you do the
lecture books in
your terminal.
And then in that terminal it
will just like make that tunnel and it's
still come online.
But for myself, it was just like you
can see that it's easier.
So there is no Jabor account.
So it's kind of getting further
in order to please people
who want to do safety at home, but they
don't want to do like
user logging and things like that.
So this is just like this
is just a much, much
easier because there is no login,
but you still need to type something
into a terminal.
And then you can also see
here that chat is
working.
And also you don't need to
you know, you don't need to log in.
So in a way, it's getting there and
you can be even some kind of
pseudo identity there.
You can you can you can develop your
persona and then you can, like, chat
with people. You can send your your URL.
So it's getting there.
It's kind of getting in the direction of
Forseti at home.
As as as I as I
as I showed you and
about that time,
about the time I got I
got an invitation to curate the new media
festival HYP in Ljubljana.
And usually when you are curator,
you make some fancy concept, you
make an open call, and then you would
just like send a lot of spare messages
to all of your artist friends so that
they have to do that so that you actually
end up with a good exhibition and
the works are really not bad.
But the bad thing was that I really
didn't know what's going on in the new
media art or whatever, and I was
completely obsessed with the public life.
I'm not really good programmers, so these
kind of things are taking quite some
time. For me. It's kind of like months
thinking about it.
So what I what I what I proposed
is that, OK, let's let's let's set
up a public library.
So the public library is, as
we know, is the place where we go and get
the knowledge.
And then it's based on the idea
of I'll just show you
that this was basically the proposal.
The public library is free access to
books for every member of society.
It changed a little bit later.
So now we use more free access
to knowledge for every member of society.
It's a library catalog.
It's a librarian with books ready
to be shared, meticulously cataloged.
Everyone is the librarian.
When everyone is a librarian, library,
library is everywhere.
And
and that was kind of that resonated.
These these people are tee'd
like into left these kind of
things.
And then we we we we started
doing that.
And then what we
did is we
also showed.
So in order to make an ambiance
for that a library is that
we wanted to show that it's already
happening. So it's not just that we are
doing that, but but it's already
happening. Some of that is
ahk.
Yeah, this is ARC
around like 40, 50 thousand books,
let's say around more than one hundred
thousand users.
It's kind of forum based user users
are uploading everyday books.
You can see this
and then these books get it's
whatever place there
is. It's you can do the research.
You can collect it into the.
Let's do the.
Collections, you can see what kind
of collections, how much of the books
you can see, it's also not like a great
librarians. We can see that it
started with like different
whatever.
Then there is the Mona Scott, which is
also a great, great thing.
And much more people
heard about Ubu
unmovable.
But motocorp is kind of better,
and Kenneth Goldsmith would say the same,
so more scope is vickki for collaborative
studies of the arts, media and humanities
mostly, or at least at the beginning,
it was focused on
Eastern Europe and
Central Europe, avant garde,
new avant garde and things like that.
And it does look amazing,
amazing kind of thing.
So I'll just show you one page here.
It's like avant garde modernist
magazines. And then there is, of course.
There's some tax, but then you can see
all of these covers, and the great thing
is that you can also download all of
them.
So this is how we imagine
the how we how we imagine the public
library, remember the universal access to
books, a universal universal access
to.
Then Ubu, it's probably like much more
along the Kenneth Goldsmith, it started
in 1996.
Next year there will be like 20, 20
years, 20 years of this project.
And it's the best and probably
the most kind of well
known archive of the
avant garde, avant garde art on
an Internet.
So what was happening there is that
we we
we brought and made this
kind of set up.
We kind of tried to show
the show
people what what the public library
could be.
And this is just Brian did it since
here he did how
art and Library Genesis
are different.
And I'll just show you
something.
So this is these are heroes.
I'm pretty sure that you know about them,
a library genesis.
And at the time, it was around like a
million million of the books.
We had around like 11 terabytes to
download, and it took quite a couple of
weeks in order to get it.
So what we had there is that we had the
ambient saying, like we have a million
of books in this space and people
would be like, yeah, this is great.
So even we have it on Internet, just
having like a mirror nearby.
And we also had like a posters with
with the QR codes.
You could go with your mobile phone and
download. It was like super quick because
it was, of course, like the local,
local, local mirror
and people started to do things like
this. This was just a joke.
It was mainly the joke was like how
much time one would need
to make something like this.
So this is just like overlap in between
Library Genesis and arge.
And then if you click on that, the links.
Yes, of course it doesn't work anymore
because Libyan dot org got shut down, but
we will get back to that later.
So these are the things which are
happening.
And then,
for example,
Robert Oxhorn.
Did a few things, he's amazing,
and then, for example, Monaco
did this, so it's from the discus
networks of Hitler
and then it just like made
manually the index
or whole of all of the people.
And then when you click on this.
Then you go into
the experimental, rather experimental
view.
Oh, no, I think that I would bring
Chrom now.
Yeah.
So you can see so
it brings you to the to the very
kind of reference in the book, and it's
done for one book for
Discourse Networks of Hitler and
these interfaces.
Yeah, you can see it's kind of
it's kind of nice.
It's kind of like it provokes you to
think, it provokes you to experiment.
It provokes you to play.
But this can only happen if
we have that local mirror because.
No, no, no, no.
For hackers really want to wait for
all of the metadata and things like that.
So these are just like few things which
which happened in your Bianna.
OK, I'm still good.
And then it
kind of made me
do more, I also kind of
OK, I have to do more.
These guys are so great.
So this is the aggregation website.
It's called Library Memory of the World
that was doing that last night.
All of these flickering is because I
don't know how to encode things.
So I don't know which is worse if I do
that live or if I just do the videos.
But so there are no animations
really here. When you see them, it's it's
not happening.
So.
So this is what I did.
So from the before you
remember that the command line, it's one
line I could do that.
No one else, like few people can do that.
And I made it into the command line.
But you need to log in and then I change
that so you don't have to login.
And then finally after novae sudden
and of go through, it was like
complaining and saying like, but we are
civilians.
We we we don't go to Termina.
And I'm like, OK,
whatever. It took me like a couple of
months in order to bring
the plug in into
into Calibra. And what plugin does
is that? When you click on
start sharing, it starts sharing.
It does exactly the same thing.
It's just that it's gooey.
And then it also gets you into the
into the into the chat.
And then you can see that your books
are here. You can see that now it's not
11 librarians, but it's like
12 librarians.
And one of these is
can it book for your book for your is a
guy from Library Genesis.
All of the names are shuffled from the
big list of the of the great librarians.
And you can see now I go like back
and forth. You can see this is the same.
So if you go and download it from
Internet, what will
actually happen is that it
will download from the very
laptop which started that.
So the metadata gets into
the Mongo DB, whoever likes
that kind of vocabulary, and then
it's kind of faster.
But the download actually happens from
the let's say like a peer to peer.
This is another librarian.
It can if you use and it's
cok, it's digitized library
in Mammo Zagreb.
This is where I'm coming from
then.
This is by
yeah.
This is by a politics which I
made for my friend who who made
a great curriculum and
then she can use it for her
students.
But what I also edited this is called
Bloodstone Alchemist,
used to use it for the is the word for
the magnet. So it's kind of like a book
while it looks like sharing and all
of that. So it's when you're on the on
the Web page, it's an important book
directly to calibrate.
So that means that when you're on the
website, on the Web website
and you have the plug in calibrate,
it will recognize what's the in
the in the back.
And then you can see that it just got
with all of the metadata.
So in a way it's kind of a peer to peer,
but it's not the gated community.
It's also very exposed to the
it's very exposed to the world.
So at the moment when you are doing
this, it's.
Yeah, it's it's.
Yeah.
It's kind of a peer to peer with the
access from the public.
That's why it's public library, why it's
not like a peer to peer, whatever.
What did I what I was like showing here?
Let me see a few more of
these. Never mind.
Then I'll show you like, OK, so how to
get further.
So this is the idea.
So I set up a server,
but today you can also and this
is still in the phase of
the 2011 Kapiloff
command line line.
So what we have here is that we
have everything.
What you need to run a memory of
the road is kind of packed up
into something which is fancy these days.
It's called containers and Dockers.
And then if you use this,
then you can see there is mongered.
There is where, Bob? There is a chat,
the chat server presently there is engine
X and
these are composed for.
Yeah. And this is one of the providers,
this is called Digital
Ocean. So digital oceans don't
tell you because they know that you are
scared from the terminal.
So they don't call it a virtual machine,
which they call it droplet.
So I don't have a droplet
here, but
I will make it. So what I do here, I just
this is one line command line I make
the machine create on digital ocean.
You can see the token even if you like
recording this, but yeah, whatever.
And then it's making that.
So it's making digital ocean
droplets. So it's making a virtual
server on their infrastructure.
You will see just in a second.
It's here, it's called Aliceville at
Cherbourg's
Ocean, LSP Ocean.
And what I'm actually making here
is that everything, what I can do
locally, everything what I do for my
server. Now I'm saying, OK, now,
from now on, whatever you
do in this terminal, just
do on the digital ocean.
That's what I'm making.
This is another command line.
So this is like a second one which
which we did here.
And then,
OK, this is kind of slow.
Yeah. Now I'm making another docker,
which is just like the one which is the
Linux image, which will be
shared with all of the other images
later on. It's kind of a composition
of a couple of different services.
And this is where we where we
are getting it shows
that, yeah, it happened.
And then I say build
more building, whatever.
Then I'm just like starting
it up and you
have to see the scrolling text.
This is very exciting.
Once I was crying when
I saw it at C.C.C., when they did
the first SMS gateway, if you remember,
like almost ten years ago,
it was just like the end of the
lecture. And the only thing which we
could see is the scrolling text
we were stressing on the free
software, whatever base.
And yeah. So this is exciting.
So what I did when you when you are
running that is with a completely
different domain, then
if you go to third thought
that new domain in this in this case,
you have no confusion, then you get
your confusion.
It's a dot org.
You can see it's self sign,
whatever if you like.
So this is if you want to make
completely your own memory
of the world. So this is how easy
is this? So couple of terminal
command lines and then you have
everything set up.
So it takes
not more than 15 minutes
and you can see that now.
It just works everything.
What worked in on the memory of the
world. So what I'm showing you this
because this is the vision.
This is what we can do.
This is how fast or
how far we can go.
And I'm sure that
John Gerber, who's doing another great
software, it's called Open Media Library.
Check it out. It's a peer to peer for
sharing books.
I'm really excited about when it will
come out so he
can do at least ten times faster
what I what I do.
So in a way, this is easy.
It took me a few years and I was
not only doing that, I most of the time
I do nothing
but. But but this is what, what, what,
what I'm not what what I'm trying
to show you here.
And it seems that it
seems that it's yeah.
The world is not really ready
for these visions.
So what we were
really kind of experiencing is
that there is a certain kind of
schizophrenia.
So I mean,
new media remedy, age old
media, media pay
on my. To their media producers,
which themselves pay homage to their own
media predecessors, Computer
Graphics Remedy AIDS film, which imitates
photography, which imitates painting,
attempts to understand new media
technologies always thoughtfully settle
on a set of metaphors of the
old and familiar to approximate what
is similar and yet rests upon
the liminal edge of these metaphors.
To play with these insights into the new,
every chosen metaphor has its semiotic
distance decay or inverse square
law, which shows how far it can carry
understanding and insights into the given
phenomena.
The intellectual work in the age of
mechanical reproduction got its
unfortunate metaphor intellectual
property and as the age
of mechanical reproduction was becoming
more and more the age of discrete and
digital reproduction.
Another metaphor was emerging,
a metaphor which reveals the quandary
left after the decades of decay
of intellectual property, exponentially
distancing itself from the intellectual
work proper.
And that metaphor is schizophrenia.
So, yeah, I'll just skip
a couple of these and I'll show you
a few. I'll tell you about a few
examples of capitalism.
And she's Affinia.
So Sony Music.
Sony is a great a
great example.
So.
Sony started, I'll also
skip this, I'll just explain in a few
words, it usually is longer than reading.
But anyway, so Sony
had that famous a court case
in in 1984.
It's called Betamax case.
That means that they just made like a
video recorder.
And then Jack Valenti, who was the head
of the Motion Picture Association
of America, he was saying, oh, video
recording video recorder is like
Jack the Ripper for the women and things
like that. So it was like they were
freaking out.
But Sony won in a sense, and they
kind of settle the ground for
the technology not to be that easily
shut down. And, you know, the Walkman
and CD, DVD
and and all kind of hardware
which Sony made, which allowed
us to copy and share.
But then only five years later, in 1989,
Sony bought its first major Hollywood
studio, Columbia Pictures.
And then a year later, they
also bought like Sony BMG.
And then they
were suing Joel Tenenbaum
for downloading and then sharing 31
songs in 2009.
And the jury awarded 675
thousands to the music companies.
And that was like a twenty two thousand
per song.
And it's known as the second file sharing
case. The first file sharing case
was about 24 songs.
And in second trial, jury awarded music
companies and two million.
Basically, it's too long to read it.
It's 80000 per song.
And Jamie Thomas was a Native American
mother of four from Brainerd, Minnesota,
and worked at the time as a natural
resource coordinator for the Miller
Band of Indians.
And then Sony has quite a few
conflicts under its own umbrella.
And that's what we know about capitalism
and schizophrenia, of course.
But we don't care that Sony, that Sony's
problem, whatever they hold, however,
they did deal with their conflicts.
But then there is another one, which when
it happens, it's kind of disturbance.
And that's the one with Amitay.
So, Amity, you all know, I'm
sure, all of Heggs, the founding
fathers of hacking
fire truck on top of whatever
replica of campus police car on
the roof of the great dorm.
They were having quite a few of their,
like, books on that.
They started Open Courseware
in 2002 to publish all, of course,
materials online and make them widely
available to everyone.
Then the World Wide Web Consortium in
1993, One Laptop Per Child in 2005.
So and they were also very well known
that that their open campus wireless
network was
was was always open to
the paywall. Journalists like
a severely Blackwall, Springer, Taylor,
Francis, Little Francis Sage
and the others.
And we know how they
how they generated to be
a very, very big tragedy
at one moment.
But also at the same time, in the
corner
at MIT Press published numerous
books which we love
and which were very
constituting for
for us in public library.
One of them is paper machines about cards
and catalogs.
So the idea, the development of the
catalog is very important.
And it goes yeah, it
goes pretty, pretty
close to the to the computer.
And that's why the librarianship as
as resources is super important.
That's what we learned from MIT Press
book by Marcus Krajewski.
Then Eric von Hippel, democratizing
innovation.
Then Svenne speakers the big Urca
art from bureaucracy.
Then send me a text.
Yeah, it's kind of facing any schism
would be quite hard without the similar
text.
Then cybernetic revolutionaries imagine
a possession or Borys
is art, power and
and the way how we are articulating
that it's not only me here, it
was kind of like a convincing
and part of these softwares
which I was writing.
So all together is like convincing quite
a few people.
So we got exhibited at Reina Sofia
Museum, which is a very fancy one,
transmedia Gustafer.
I stood guard at twenty
two in London.
Ninety eight weeks.
It was all I had, opening keynote
at the Tombs of Media, the Brown
University.
So in a way it was quite
successful projects.
So also it was a
big honor, but not that big of
a surprise that we got.
We got an invitation to write for
Tactical Media Anthology,
and that's supposed to be published
by MIT Press.
So I just show. You
I'll show you that contract.
So this is how it looks like,
and you can see that
you will not receive any Fiorelli for
the contribution, of course
the labor is not recognized and then
you have.
Not really, not many rights,
in a way, that's how the scientific
publishing work today, and that's
what we got. But we were like, oh yeah,
fine, great, yeah.
MIT Press, Tactical Media, that's what we
love.
We'll write something about
a public library.
And we had an idea to
write about
schizophrenia.
And what I was reading just minutes
before that was
from the text, which is supposed to be
published in these tactical media
ontology.
But three weeks later,
we also got this
and for the art cover
by Boris Gross, which I just mentioned
before.
So it's copyrighted.
This is not from MIT Press.
This is just like I
cannot have in my
email.
So what happened is that
very schizophrenic situation happened
in the very in the very situation
with the Amitay.
And it's not a surprise.
So what I'm what I'm trying to
say is not a Amitay here
is in particular evil.
It's just that when you have completely
non appropriate.
Metaphore.
Embedded into the legal regulation,
you will necessarily end
up with a schizophrenic subject
when it happens to Sony.
We don't care, but when it happens
to MITI, we care.
And the consequences of people
who are living, who are working, who are
inspired, who are part of that
orbits around the MITTIE,
that's that's that's very dangerous.
But Gross is also well known to
be to be a guy who called
Jesus Christ the first ready
made art.
And when he talks about the new
because when he appeared supposedly
Nieporent to the Earth, he was like a
human.
And then it's great that this is like
this is. No, it's not it's not
Christmas today.
Right.
Yeah, so
yeah, so yeah,
he agreed as a human and then later on
he kind of appeared as a God, so
completely different.
So this is what is new.
You never know when you see it.
It's not that you that you didn't see
something from before, but
only in retrospect, if you can see that
something was new.
So in that sense, he's a very good writer
on avant garde art, especially on
a Russian abogado.
Also, I recommend from very far
from from this book, I recommend
I recommend
article essay on privatization,
especially because privatization, he
proves there is
it's just like as artificial
as nationalization.
When Communists got there
and had a quite good argument why
we should also care about people
being equal through the economic
redistribution, not only
through the access to knowledge.
Rich liberals, as we can see, also
like completely like fucking this up.
So in that sense, when that happened,
people would say it was artificial and a
civilization was artificial.
But
but but but privatization
was just as artificial as
as nationalization.
And when we come to the digital networks,
then it's even more obvious.
So I can tell you just a few things about
the public libraries, why it's important
to support it, public libraries
are disappearing completely.
Public libraries are not able to buy
digital books from the publishers
when they have money because publishers
don't let them buy them when they
can buy them.
Then there is a very
nasty technology called DRM,
which will count how many times you
borrow the book and then after 26 times,
you have to buy it again.
So as we go further, we can see the
public libraries are just completely shut
down working.
I don't know what's going on.
I only recently
got.
See, but I
need to know
that's
OK.
Yeah, whatever.
I have no idea what's going on.
OK, but then.
This is what also happened,
so Regenesis, which got after
the Wikipedia and library
that and you, together with books and
science, computer science hub is much
more important.
They all got shut down by Elsevier
and elsewhere, is well known to be
a very bad guy, which
makes a huge profit on
mostly publicly funded researchers
and selling us a couple of times
something which was already over.
And what what was happening
here is,
yeah, I'm sure that you all hear
about that and I'll just like show you.
Or maybe I can tell you that so Elsevier
was like running a court
case in you are again getting an
injunction which will let them shut
down the
websites, even not reaching them
because these websites are in Russia.
So it's kind of hard to get there.
So what they do is that they make their
IP addresses of the of the of their
servers into the blacklists, or
they are just like taking off their
domain. This is the way how they shut
down most of the websites these
days end up in there.
They are fighting for that.
This is what Elsevier is doing.
And I will just finish
with this.
Can you try?
Again, with.
Without the if if you hear guitars
and just like,
oh, OK, I think
that now you can go out
and cover for the great
difficulty of making sure that we can
carry on as normal
but carry on every piece
of paper.
I don't even know how to deal with that
ID.
If I thought that
would be
someone or this is
this is a reading of this letter
and hand and
this is the letter we wrote some
time in the elements.
And in that letter it
says basically we
it brings Little Prince saying that he
meets up with this man who accumulates
starts with the sole purpose of being
able to buy more stars.
And then is that
business that is of some use
to my little Kano's because
he's cleaning them and it is of use
to my flower, which he does
every day. But you have no use to the
stars that you own.
And we go here more with the
examples of how severe
is bad luck and
who are the good guys and the good guys
of science and liberty geniuses.
And of course, and it sounds like
it's just our heroine.
And she says if we manage
to shut down our projects or force them
into The Dark Knight, demonstrated how
important the public does not have
the right and the knowledge and have a
big hero. And unfortunately,
I have only time to read
you open it.
Just this all
from opening
from Give You Open Access Manifesto
by Aaron Schwab.
It's a it's a it's a it's a great
document. We need to take information
wherever it is stored and make
our copies and share them with the world.
We need to take stuff that's out of
copyright, the archive.
We need to buy secret databases
and put them on the web.
We need to download scientific journals
and upload them to file sharing networks.
We need to fight for guerilla open access
with enough of us around the world will
not just send a strong message.
Opposing the privatization of knowledge
will make it a thing of the past.
Will you join us?
Yeah, I'm done.
We have ten minutes for questions.
Yeah, thank you very much.
So thank you very much,
everybody who has a question, please come
up to the microphone, say, here in both
ISO's.
Please make sure to speak up loud
and clear to everybody on the streams and
also later in the morning can understand
your questions.
Maxygen, can you send me your URL for
the discussion later?
So we have a question of the Internet,
do I see this right?
Hello and no,
this is just an announcement.
Hello, I am here
that there will be a discussion
about this talk at
eight, 30 at 14
today at eight thirty
in 14.
We will have a discussion about this
talk.
And so far, there are no questions from
the Internet.
OK, thank you very much.
Maybe I can also announce what
we would like to discuss.
So.
Yeah, so yeah, if there are no questions
or just like raise the hand, we have a
question over there, but since we
are ten minutes, you can perhaps make a
short announcement or just just a little
bit at the end they go with a question
first.
Yeah. My name's Chris.
Great. So OK, thanks for that.
And the quote there at the end was
really, really good. Have you looked into
alternative methods of distribution of
data, including IPS, which is the
interplanetary file system by Bennets
and CO?
The the nice idea about that one is that
it has this wonderful stigma, genic
quality, which is that when you download
content and you like it, you can
spin it. So spinning is a verb,
the equivalent of liking on Facebook.
The difference being that now that you've
pinned it, you become a host, that Faulds
no need to have a fixed IP or a droplet
on digital ocean.
You can set up something as small as a
Raspberry Pi and start serving up
files, including these ebooks that you're
talking about in a way that when you like
some content and download it and consume
it, you instantly become a host for that
file. Actually looked into these these
kinds of alternatives.
I was in RC Channel a few times and
trying to convince that I don't want
to give my files and
the library's first
to IP first and then to Fuze.
So in a way, yeah, this is this
is the problem at the moment, which I see
with the IP address, which needs to
duplicate anything which you want to
share. And I have like around
100000 books and I don't have
at the moment on my laptop enough of
a hard disk to make them like duplicated.
So I agreed there are great
technologies also that are great.
Calibra, you can run it
behind the Tor.
We are now trying to rewrite everything
with with college.
DIBADJ The B where the thinking will
get for free and then with web torrent
as as as as true Web RTC
and things like that. So that's, that's
all fine. What I don't want to provide,
even when I do my kind of
and not really good software,
I don't think that we should propose
to the world a technical solution,
because here we have much bigger
things stake.
And Alexander Bucheon was very
much right about it.
We need civil disobedience.
We need more people to go
and stand out with their names
and fight politically.
And then we can we can improve
our infrastructures.
We can we can do the federation.
We can do the distribution.
We can do anonymous.
But that's exactly what we would like to
discuss at A13
in Anarchist Village is like,
should we really stick?
And is it enough to stick with
the with the discourse
of the privacy and individualism
and individual rights?
Because this is predominant today
and in a way doesn't really support
sharing. It doesn't support
a solidarity as kind of a
universal concept.
I know all of the problems which
when you bring such a kind of term,
but still we need we need that and we
need to do that as wide as
possible. And we cannot do that
with people who know how
to do a block change, how
to do the whatever the elliptic
curves, encryption and things like
that, unfortunately.
But at the same time, it's not
unfortunate. It's also that the world
doesn't need software engineers
to run their utopian
fantasies. And that's why
I think that IPF is great.
But at the moment, when it becomes
the solution, when it invites people
and another round and turn of the hide
and seek game with the authorities,
I'm kind of against it.
But when I program,
I like this idea.
I like to play with these ideas.
It's kind of like much, much more fun
to do something that complex than.
Metadata, cataloging and
whatever the decision
of the regular expression against
something else, to
unify the metadata from different
databases, but these are also important
and we need to have more people
doing that.
But more than anything else, I think that
it's if you have access, just as Aaron
Schwartz had access to any privileged
source, just like make it available,
that's that's what is more important.
All good. Thank you.
OK, we have another question, please.
So in direct response to what
you just said is my question
with the entire talk is what it is about,
because
if it's not really about the,
well, KODET solution, is it more like a
work of art that is to show to inspire
people what would be possible if they
could share their databases
without actually proposing a solution?
How to do it this way?
Because this way seems to duplicate a lot
of other efforts, like it seems to
address a lot of different topics, like
how to store, how to redistribute, but
also how to catalog, how to synchronize
catalogs. I mean, these are all very
complex problems that have been Technip
before that are tackled right now.
There are solutions.
But am I to understand that the point
of your particular implementation was not
so much as to provide a technical
solution, but to show to,
well, less skilled people
to what would be possible to give them an
easy outlook and to inspire
them to find a political solution.
Because I talk about wondering these
these things don't seem to work.
The technical solution seems handicapped
in so many ways, which is perfectly
fine. It's still very interesting that
everybody who has ever struggled with the
problem of cataloging their like
e-books and stuff like that is highly
appreciative of all the effort.
But also we know that, well, I don't want
to start yet another
metadata database on my own that I
can use and two friends of mine can use.
And this seems to be, in a way, similar
approach. But if it's about art, if it's
about inspiring people, that's a great
thing. And I was wondering which of the
two things it tries to be.
I mean, you said like, there is one thing
which is super bad and the other one
which is like Supergrid and I have to
decide what I do.
If you if I understood you correctly,
yes, this is mostly
inspiring, but it's not only inspiring, I
think that it is important that you
do.
Your metadata, did you do
your database that you share
your books, so in that sense and whatever
you use.
I can agree or disagree, I can
propose something else, but what
we try to do here is that this is
a proposal how we envision
the public library.
So public libraries, free access to
knowledge for every member of society.
It's a library catalog.
We need one and we need a human being.
We need a human knowledge here.
And that's the librarian.
So in a way, what we did with
memory of the world is
a colony implemented in
implementation, a proof of concept
or like this is kind of where
what we are trying to achieve.
If there is anyone else doing that,
great. Use it and and
try to liberate, try
to make knowledge not
not any more privileged,
privileged access.
So in that in that sense, I wouldn't go
I don't think that with this talk
or what we do here that
we propose as a solution,
the technical one.
But what we do meanwhile
meanwhile, we also try to.
Join the political struggles,
but when there is no one, we
do the fucking metadata fixing,
you know, like and we download and
and then there are like 25000 books
and they're like 25000 more.
And they are quite nice catalogs, which
people did quite nice catalogs,
which people curated.
And that's the fruit of our work.
So in that sense, I wouldn't go that hard
and harsh against any technical
solution. If you know any better, which
kind of follows these, please
tell me.
IPTF is great, but it's not
there yet because it duplicates
the big fights in my heart is if there is
some. Some other.
Yeah, please. There is open media library
coming.
Hopefully what I ask
Sebastian and Jan is like, OK,
make it accessible through the Internet,
not just for people for open
with open media library and things like
that. Thank you very much.