Welcome to the fourth special issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine, Urgent Publishing Debris. In May 2019, the Making Public: Urgent Publishing took place. Among others, it asked the following questions:
* -"How to realize sustainable, high-quality alternatives within this domain of post-digital publishing?"
* -"How can designers, developers, artists, writers and publishers intervene in the public debate and <spanclass='highlight-cornflower'>counter misinformation in a meaningful and relevant way?</span>"
* -"What are <spanclass='highlight-lilac'>new publishing strategies for our current media landscape?</span>"
* -"How to <spanclass='highlight-applegreen'>design for urgency without succumbing to an accelerated hype cycle?</span>"
The presentations, debates and conversations all have been officially documented in blogposts on the Institute of Network Cultures website, videos and pictures. But what about the notes, the pictures, the recordings and the tweets of the conference's visitors? What do they have to tell us of how each person experienced the conference? This special issue aims to <spanclass='highlight-green'>provide new readings of the event by creating remixes of the official archival sources with the "unofficial" debris circulating around it.</span>
In order to facilitate the navigation between articles, making connections visible where they might have only been implicit, the editors have decided to define eleven overarching topics (<spanclass='highlight-blue'>Social/Community</span>, <spanclass='highlight-pink'>Activism</span>, <spanclass='highlight-cornflower'>Post-truth</span>, <spanclass='highlight-lilac'>New forms</span>, <spanclass='highlight-green'>Authorship/Makers</span>, <spanclass='highlight-applegreen'>Speed</span>, <spanclass='highlight-yellow'>Positioning</span>, <spanclass='highlight-coralred'>Locality</span>, <spanclass='highlight-orange'>Relationality</span>, <spanclass='highlight-brown'>Authoritarianism</span>, <spanclass='highlight-gray'>Parasite</span>). Each of the topics was attributed a colour and the source material is highlighted accordingly.
Furthermore, each remix has a dispersed editors' note, wherein each editor reflects in more detail on the program, how it connects to the conference's topic and how it might answer any of the aforementioned questions.
Subtitle: Roel Roscam Abbing in conversation with Florian Cramer (Report)
Subtitle: Roel Roscam Abbing in conversation with Florian Cramer
Authors:<spanid='hide'>UP</span>
Date: 2015-12-02 10:29
Authors: <spanid='hide'>Silvio Lorusso</span>
Template: article_mod
Remix of a [blogpost](https://networkcultures.org/makingpublic/2019/05/20/federated-publishing/) by Silvio Lorusso
Remix of a blogpost by Silvio Lorusso and a debris of tweets, complemented with a dispersed editor's note.
*Florian Cramer and Roel Roscam Abbing talk about federated social networks, how they work, what they do, and what chances and pitfalls they present for the publishing domain.*
A public conversation on federated publishing took place during the lunch break of the final day of the Urgent Publishing<sup>[1](#footnote-j1)</sup> conference. Florian Cramer, reader in 21st Century Visual Culture/Autonomous Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy, asked Roel Roscam Abbing a few questions on federated networks, their origin, and their techno-social implementation.
Roel Roscam Abbing is a researcher and artist who works on networks, infrastructures and the politics that inform them. He’s a founding member of varia<sup>[2](#footnote-j2)</sup>, a space for developing collective approaches to everyday technology located in Charlois (Rotterdam). Varia hosts and employs a series of federated networks, such as one based on XMPP<sup>[3](#footnote-j3)</sup>, an open standard for messaging.
@ -22,7 +23,7 @@ Roscam Abbing is one of the admins of a Mastodon instance called post.lurk.org a
In order to join Mastodon, a user needs to pick up an instance, which might be confusing at first given the sheer diversity among the existing ones. Picking one instances doesn’t mean you can’t communicate with other ones, however. They do however form their own distinct communities with rules and guidelines. Roscam Abbing highlighted the presence of code of conducts on many of these instances as well as shared customs, such as stating one’s pronouns in their bio. <spanclass='highlight-blue'>These codes of conducts are meant to communicate to potential visitors on what that community considers (un)acceptable behaviour.</span>
In this respect, Cramer remarked that safe space doesn’t necessarily mean progressive or left-leaning, but it can also be a zone that purposefully breeds far-right sentiments and ideas. From this point of view, Mastodon can be seen as “the perfect technology for distributing a troll farm”. In fact federated social media share a common ground with the interests of a subset of 4chan users, in particularly the board /g/ where free software and alternatives to commercial media are often discussed and promoted. Similarly interest in these networks can also be linked to cyberlibertarianism.
<spanclass='highlight-brown'>In this respect, Cramer remarked that safe space doesn’t necessarily mean progressive or left-leaning, but it can also be a zone that purposefully breeds far-right sentiments and ideas. From this point of view, Mastodon can be seen as “the perfect technology for distributing a troll farm”.</span> In fact federated social media share a common ground with the interests of a subset of 4chan users, in particularly the board /g/ where free software and alternatives to commercial media are often discussed and promoted. Similarly interest in these networks can also be linked to cyberlibertarianism.
There are several ways to preserve a sense of safety within an instance. For example, other servers can be silenced (users will still be able to get their content in their personal timeline) or fully blocked, in a process called 'defederating'. Roscam Abbing pointed out that defederating caused quite a stir among inhabitants of the fediverse, as it goes against the principle of openness and unlimited interconnection that are the hallmark of web and free software ideology. One way to motivate the implementation of silencing and blocking at the instance level can be summarized as "we don’t have to read your bullshit".
@ -32,17 +33,6 @@ The issue of privacy was also raised by Cramer, who spoke of synchronization whi
Cramer and Abbing discussed the "composition" of the people involved in a project like Mastodon: <spanclass='highlight-lilac'>not necessarily male engineers rooted in computer science but often designers and media people with a particular attention to user interface (Mastodon looks much better than the average free software project) as well as communities typically underrepresented in free software development such as people of color, queer, etc.</span>
The questions from the audience revolved around the notion of governance. Roscam Abbing responded that the development of the project is currently based on the "benevolent dictator" model, as the creator of Mastodon has the power to take final decisions (in fact there have been Mastodon fork-tryouts, where the main focus has been a different form of governance). <spanclass='highlight-green'>Furthermore, not all labour that goes in the project is acknowledged: work that is not code is often rendered invisible.</span> This has lead to disenfranchisement from queer and POC communities that in the early stages contributed a lot to the platform. <spanclass='highlight-green'>One of the most interesting spaces to understand where Mastodon is going is the issue tracker<sup>[9](#footnote-j9)</sup>: this is where plenty of users, not necessarily developers, request, discuss, and criticize features.</span>
<pclass='dispersed'><b>Dispersed editor’s note:</b> Commercial micropublishing platforms such as <spanclass='highlight-applegreen'>Twitter and other corporate social networking platforms may offer the speed required by the notion of urgent publishing.</span> However, they are rife with <spanclass='highlight-cornflower'>misinformation, troll attacks, cyberbullying, etc.</span> As highlighted by Roscam Abbing, the development of Mastodon was driven by the dissatisfaction of historically marginalized communities, often the target of such attacks, with these (and other) aspects of commercial platforms. The federated social web tries to experiment with <spanclass='highlight-blue'>radically different ways of conceiving digital sociality, supported by a decentralized technical infrastructure. The focus on communities, codes of conduct and moderation present in many of the instances and projects of the Fediverse attests to this.</span> In this sense, besides speaking to the notions of <spanclass='highlight-applegreen'>'speed'</span> and <spanclass='highlight-cornflower'>'post-truth'</span>, federated publishing connects with other overarching themes of the conference, namely <spanclass='highlight-blue'>'community'</span> and <spanclass='highlight-coralred'>'locality'</span>. However, as Florian Cramer pointed out, the federated social web is not an inherently emancipatory project, as the existence of alt-right Mastodon instance Gab proves. Nonetheless, for all the reasons listed above, federated publishing deserves to be developed further as a possible answer to the challenges of publishing in post-truth times.</p>
The questions from the audience revolved around the notion of governance. Roscam Abbing responded that the development of the project is currently based on the "benevolent dictator" model, as the creator of Mastodon has the power to take final decisions (in fact there have been Mastodon fork-tryouts, where the main focus has been a different form of governance). <spanclass='highlight-green'>Furthermore, not all labour that goes in the project is acknowledged: work that is not code is often rendered invisible.</span> This has lead to disenfranchisement from queer and POC communities that in the early stages contributed a lot to the platform. <spanclass='highlight-green'>One of the most interesting spaces to understand where Mastodon is going is the issue tracker<sup>[9](#footnote-j9)</sup>: this is where plenty of users, not necessarily developers, request, discuss, and criticize features.</span>
Subtitle: Presentations and discussions with Clara Balaguer, Padmini Ray Murray, Morten Paul, and Nikola Richter, moderated by Florian Cramer
Date: 2015-12-02 10:29
Authors:<spanid='hide'>UP</span>
Template: article_mod
Remix of report by Inte Gloerich
Remix of a blogpost by Inte Gloerich and a debris of notes and tweets, complemented with a dispersed editor's note.
*Inventing new ways of publishing between fast populism and slow academia. How to counter misinformation and stimulate open public discussions through a speedy publishing process, high quality content and spot-on positioning?*
<pclass="caption">Tweet by Institute of Network Cultures.</p>
This panel served as an excellent kick-off to the conference: excited participants, urgent discussions, and a good overview of the topics to come. Moderator Florian Cramer framed the debate with a few opening words about what this 'post-truth' moment is that we find ourselves in.
@ -25,13 +29,13 @@ In this session we hear from practitioners that go beyond disciplinary boundarie
### Morten Paul
*Morten Paul (DE) is editor at the humanities publishing house August Verlag Berlin. Studied German Studies, Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the University of Konstanz and Goldsmiths College, London.*
*Morten Paul (DE) is editor at the humanities publish-ing house August Verlag Berlin. Studied German Studies, Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the University of Konstanz and Goldsmiths College, London.*
Morten Paul is editor at the humanities publishing house August Verlag Berlin. He starts his talk with the statement that <spanclass='highlight-cornflower'>the notion of 'post-truth' is wrong to begin with. There is in fact a proliferation of truths, there are too many truths! While post-structuralism killed the truth, the right-wing has been allowed to flourish because of it.</span> The problem with alternative facts is not so much the alternative, but the positivist understanding of 'facts'. This is too reminiscent of conspiracy theories: facts are truths that are out, but covered up. Alternative facts have been around for as long as we can remember.
By historicizing these phenomena, Morten tries to go beyond the shock the left seems to be in right now. Having researched the history of far right magazines in Germany, he is able to discern that the strategies we see around us now have in fact always existed. Far right activism and the rise of right wing political parties historically go hand in hand, and are supported by a certain ideological cohesion on the right that the left lacks.
By historicizing these phenomena, Morten tries to go beyond the shock the left seems to be in right now. Having researched the history of far right magazines in Germany, he is able to discern that the strategies we see around us now have in fact always existed. <spanclass='highlight-brown'>Far right activism and the rise of right wing political parties historically go hand in hand, and are supported by a certain ideological cohesion on the right that the left lacks.</span>
@ -40,6 +44,7 @@ By historicizing these phenomena, Morten tries to go beyond the shock the left s
*Nikola Richter (DE) is a writer, journalist, and publisher who combines comprehensive knowledge of the cultural and literary sector with an interest in online media and a broader perspective on political and social issues. In 2013 she founded the publisher mikrotext.*
Nikola Richter is a writer, journalist, and publisher. She also draws historical parallels in her talk, although of a different nature. While we are talking about the speed of publishing in relation to social media virality, <spanclass='highlight-applegreen'>she says that the history of publishing was always also about speed. Think back to the 16th-18th century chapbooks: street literature that was cheaply produced and meant to spread popular cultures widely.</span>
@ -93,6 +98,9 @@ Following Sara Ahmed, academics have to acknowledge their complicity in these po
<pclass='dispersed'><b>Dispersed editor’s note:</b> Publishing doesn't exist in a political void. It is, therefore, <spanclass='highlight-yellow'>always an act of positioning.</span> The examples brought by the speakers of the session speak to this: Clara Balaguer's 'mosquito press', Nikola Richter's chapbooks, Morten Paul's research into the history of the far right magazines, etc.
As such, for what Nikola Richter calls "an ethical publisher", <spanclass='highlight-applegreen'>the question of speed is crucial, especially in politically unstable times where misinformation circulates faster and wider.</span><spanclass='highlight-lilac'>What new responsibilities do publishers have in 'post-truth' times?</span></p>
<spanclass='highlight-coralred'>In the West, it is easy to be critical of the medium itself, forgetting about situations in other parts of the world where the benefits of connecting outweigh the downsides of the business.</span><spanclass='highlight-cornflower'>To deal with the post-truth, the answer should always be 'more discussion', never more authority.</span>
Lídia Pereira
5 years ago