User:ThomasW/Notes RadicalTactics

Warwick, Henry Radical Tactics of the Offline Library, (2014), Amsterdam, INC

Computers, by their nature, copy. Typing this line, the computer has copied the text multiple times in a variety of memory registers. I touch a button to type a letter, this releases a voltage that is then translated into digital value, which is then copied into a memory buffer and sent to another part of the computer, copied again into RAM and sent to the graphics card where it is copied again, and so on. The entire operation of a computer is built around copying data: copying is one of the most essential characteristics of computer science. One of the ontological facts of digital storage is that there is no difference between a computer program, a video, mp3-song, or an e-book. They are all composed of voltage represented by ones and zeros. Therefore they are all subject to the same electronic fact: they exist to be copied and can only ever exist as copies. Page 9

The systems that contain the data belong to individuals and files are directly exchanged from one drive to the other through the internet. There is an intermediary (labeled ‘P2P ORG’), and the amount of control, interference or value the intermediary provides or inserts is variable. For example at Napster, the Napster database was controlling. Other more decentralised systems, such as the gnutella network, are less so, due to the structure of gnutella style file sharing. The fundamental point is that individuals in the public realm have drives with files on them, and through the internet their computers directly communicate and send files (or in the case of torrents, parts of files) to each other. This puts them in a position of equality to one another – all are free to trade with all, and their collective libraries of files create a positive commons of contribution. Through chat systems, blogs, and other social media, they are able to form communities of preference and trust that increase the value of the data aggregate as a distributed commons. Page 14

Data lockers are simply giant closets in the cloud filled with files, and people need to know how to find the files they want. Some have search engines built in, but they don’t act like filters. Over the years blogs have taken on this role of being a guide to files. Users find a download link to a file in the data locker through these blogs. Contrastingly, P2P system Napster didn’t store copyrighted data, and was not in control of the direct transmission of the data itself; it merely set up the conditions by which data could be transmitted from peer to peer. Through a chat client Napster created social value and facilitated the filtering of data between users as they formed communities of interest. The database of users and their files used to make the file sharing connections was their undoing. Datalocker architecture such as iTMS, Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, MedNet, Rdio, JSTOR, and others, allows file transfers or the streaming of media,. Other data lockers are more engaged with letting people store their files in the ‘cloud’ (i.e., on internet servers) and make them available to others, such as Mediafire, Rapidshare, DepositFiles, and others. These data lockers came with front-end assemblies that enabled non-members to download files. Some of them directly operate with a locker (like library.nu with ifile.it), while others are more ‘locker agnostic’ (AVAX) and others sit somewhere in between. One hybrid is aaaaarg.org, which has its own file storage system but also can link files in other data lockers. Page 17

The defects and strengths of the Alexandrian Library can be used as a guide for the Personal Portable Library. Alexandria had many strengths: its size, its range, its function as a copying device, its ‘shareability’ (albeit slow and hideously expensive), its library science innovations, and the quality of its inventory. Some of the defects are also instructive: its growth through appropriation, theft and chicanery, its centralization, its error prone copying system, its expense, and its existence as an institution which conferred power, honour, and influence to its directorship and the local government. The Personal Portable Library can and should appropriate and optimize ideas inherent in the Alexandria Library. It can quite easily adopt and wildly improve some of the strengths: size, range, the function as a copying device, ‘shareability’, and the quality of inventory. To begin with the size, the Library of Alexandria was about the same size as my university’s library, and subject to the same analysis: the total data size of the collection would be less than 3 TB and would fit on a drive the size of a book and cost less than $200. If each book were an EPUB file of 1 MB in size, the storage need would be approximately 530 GB, which would fit on a drive the size of a deck of cards and cost less than $80. While the cost of such a drive is completely out of reach for billions of people on the planet (according to the World Bank Development Indicators of 2008, about half the world, 3.5 billion people, live on less than $2.50 a day for many people in industrialized nations it’s not an insurmountable cost, and for a good many people in the overdeveloped world, it’s a fairly trivial price. Cost is a comparatively low hurdle. Moreover, the range of the collection of a Personal Portable Library would easily exceed the Library of Alexandria, as there are many fields of enquiry, study, and art that have come into being since then. In terms of resembling a copying machine, the Personal Portable Library only exists as a copy.

Digital data lacks origination, since it always alreadyexists in a state of reproduc tion. The Personal Portable Library isn’t just a copy of the Library of Alexandria, but a kind of amplified socio-political inversion of it, in that the Alexandrian Library was a product of forced tribute to a central repository, while a Personal Portable Library is a library that exists precisely to be curated, copied and shared. Page 26

A bulky predecessor of the Personal Portable Library was the portable set of bookcases developed by Walter Benjamin. In his 1931 essay ‘Unpacking my Library’, he investigates a number of perceptions and experiences in the development of his own personal library. Loaded into a series of trunks or cases, Benjamin always carried a core collection of literature with him to have at his disposal. Benjamin reveals how he acquired precious books at auctions and the tactics he used to win out over other more well-heeled customers. He also talked about the kind of mania required in book collectors, one that is based in an aticipation and intense desire: ‘Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, which suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books.’ And, he noted: ‘For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. Page 30

Another angle on that is provided by Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men when he said in a recent interview in answer to the question why ‘we bother with the real world if we all sit in front of our computers for the majority of our lives anyway’:

Because the real world is real, and the virtual world doesn’t really exist. Computers are only good for communicating simple information from one point to another, which is an improvement over the telephone, or town criers, or smoke signals. But the smoke signal has to reference something visceral. In Egypt, Facebook was supposedly so important, but it was really useful only to tell everyone to go to Tahrir Square, and that only worked because everyone knew there was a reason to. Facebook didn’t give the reason; everyone knew why because of life.45 Page 33