What Do We Not Think About When We Think About Money?

The following is a version of a post to the Radical Open Access mailing list written in response to the Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism conference. Organised by the Radical Open Access Collective, the conference was held at Cambridge University Library and online on 10-11 April, 2025.

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Just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone involved in making the third Radical Open Access conference last week such a great success. It was fantastic hearing about everyone's projects. And the range of topics was inspiring: from the thoughtful provocations on infrastructural politics and the messy labour of maintenance (including those relating to recent developments with PubPub), to the generous comments on collaboration, community and collective care. I came away with a renewed sense of hope and possibility, and you can't ask for much more than that.

Thinking about it over the weekend, it has all left me with a question I'd like to raise by way of continuing the discussion with both those who were able to attend the conference and those who weren't.

It's a question about money.

I often worry about money, although not in the way one might imagine. I mean, when it comes to open access publishing projects, financial sustainability matters - of course it does. But, I wonder, to what extent has the toxic, 'neoliberal', 'managerialist' university shaped even us to focus on the money, funding and funding models, the business side of things, paid/free/volunteer/service/recognised & rewarded labour? Even how radical OA can capitalise on the current financial crisis of the university (at least in the UK and US)?

In common with many 21st century academics, I've been encouraged, over recent years especially, to think about money a lot and to ask questions such as: have I generated enough of it to keep my job? To keep the jobs of others? To do the things we really want to do (like organise conferences such as Radical OA III, or have the time to run OA journals and presses)? The toxic university has been very effective in making its problems our problems in that respect.

And this is only going to get worse as we move further into the current 'masks-off' era, where many employers have abandoned the pretense of making work attractive with free parking, nice 'creative' open-plan spaces, crayon-colored furnishings, coffee shops, mindfulness sessions, horizontal-ish management structures and an expressed concern for work-life balance. Instead, what we're seeing is a return to an overt emphasis on top-down micromanagement, hypersurveillance, monitoring and control - only now with the added bonus of AI that can check emails. (Hello, good you could join us!)

So, to repeat, money is extremely important, yes, I appreciate that. But what gets lost when it becomes one of the main lenses through which we view radical open access, including its relation to social justice activism? (Not the only one, but one of the main ones.)

I guess this is a variation on Naomi Klein's question: 'What aren’t we building when we are building our brands?' What might we not be thinking about when so many of us are so focused on thinking about how to financially sustain our OA projects?

Take social justice. Do we need to consider whether, these days, it's mainly activists and those in some way connected to institutions such as universities, museums and art galleries who strongly and overtly align themselves with social justice activism? In the US and the UK, many interpret Kamala Harris’s 2024 defeat by Trump as signalling the close of the era shaped by movements like Occupy, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the rise of DEI initiatives. Witness articles such as this one from just yesterday, arguing that an interest in social injustice and activism shows galleries like Tate Modern to be out of touch and is the reason why their visitor numbers are down. From this perspective, the dominant political divide is no longer so much left vs right, but insider vs outsider, between those who are part of the liberal establishment and those who are not.

If so, where does this leave us in the Radical Open Access Collective?

I appreciate we ourselves might argue in turn that the deeper issue remains the concentrated wealth and power of the 1% - financial institutions, multinationals (including academic publishers), Big Tech, BigAI, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos et al; and that the 'liberal elite' is just being used as a diversionary tactic so populist politicians and/or neoliberals can protect the rich and powerful while still presenting themselves as being on the side of 'ordinary' people.

Nevertheless, the question stands, given that in the above 'liberal establishment' insider v outsider framing that is now dominant in numerous places around the world, many of us - as highly educated professionals involved in publishing works that are often of specialist, minority interest - are no longer seen as necessarily being on the side of the angels, simply because we're on the left: How do we respond? How can we respond?

Of course, I understand all this is probably raising issues far larger than anything we can realistically resolve in terms of radical open access. Still, I'd be interested to learn what people think.

Thanks again to all those involved for such an intellectually stimulating and fruitful event.

Thinking with AI: new open access book

Announcing the latest title in Open Humanities Press's Technographies series:

Thinking with AI, edited by Hannes Bajohr:

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/thinking-with-ai/

This edited volume explores a novel approach to the intersection of artificial intelligence and the humanities, proposing that instead of merely writing about AI, scholars should think with AI. Rather than treating AI as an external subject of study, the essays explore how concepts from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science can provide ways to rethink core humanistic questions of meaning, representation, and culture.

Critical AI Studies typically focuses on AI’s societal implications—its role in surveillance, exclusion, and global capitalism. This volume extends that critique, but also explores how AI brings our already existing understanding of aesthetics, language, history, and knowledge into relief and stands in an often productive conflict with them. AI’s pattern recognition and generative capabilities, for example, provokes new ways to grasp aesthetic unity, reimagine language as an autonomous system, and reconsider the boundaries between text and image.

The essays illustrate how AI can be used as a productive metaphor and intellectual tool for the humanities. From formalizing concepts like Stimmung and vibe to challenging traditional distinctions between writing and thought or between history and data, the book shows how AI can be not just an object of study but a conceptual catalyst that ignites unexpected connections to long-standing humanistic concerns. By engaging AI in this way, scholars can not only critique it but also expand the horizons of their own fields.

With essays by Peli Grietzer, Leif Weatherby, Mercedes Bunz, Hannes Bajohr, Fabian Offert, Lev Manovich, Babette Babich, Markus Krajewski, Orit Halpern, Christina Vagt and Audrey Borowski.

The Rest Is Substack: Mehdi Hasan, Zeteo and the Parallel Establishment

I recently watched a February 2025 interview on the BBC’s Media Show with Mehdi Hasan, the journalist behind Zeteo. He’s using paid subscriptions to Substack to build a left-leaning media company (complete with branded hoodies) as an alternative to legacy outlets such as the BBC. Naomi Klein, Owen Jones and Cynthia Nixon are already involved in delivering content.

I'm not uncritical of Substack, nor unaware of how it works. Still, at first glance, I could see the appeal. OK, Zeteo is largely comment and opinion-driven - because, as we know, these platforms require a constant stream of (ideally clippable) content to keep engagement high. And it’s much easier to come up with that on a regular basis if you're offering 'hot takes'. Yes, Gary Lineker's The Rest Is ... podcast empire, we're looking at you. And, indeed, a lot of the material on Zeteo does come across as filmed podcasts and Zoom calls. Podcasts and Zoom calls with high production values maybe, but podcasts and Zoom calls nonetheless.

However, I can understand why liberal-left journalists might be drawn to Substack, and to Zeteo - especially given what's going on at the likes of the BBC, Washington Post and Guardian right now. (The Observer’s John Naughton can’t go a week without recommending something from a Substack newsletter in his Networker tech column - usually by a man. What's that about?) So I got intrigued.

But before even more of us rush out to join Substack, let me say that lasted all of about five minutes.

Then I came across this piece from a few days ago on America 2.0, which delves deeper into the politics of Substack. It highlights how the platform isn’t just a neutral tool for independent writing and journalism - it’s also a key pillar of what Marc Andressen, Balaji Srinivasan and other advocates of the 'Network State' call the 'parallel establishment'.

At the inaugural Network State conference in Amsterdam in October 2023, Srinivasan laid out a vision in which Silicon Valley elites replace existing legacy institutions with their own alternatives:

So for example, at the top there's San Francisco and we're replacing San Francisco with things outside it like Cul-de-Sac in Arizona and Prospera in South America and Cabin, which is in Texas, but also around the world ....

We're gonna take out Harvard, and we have parallel education that's Replit, that Synthesis ... but it's also AI tutoring, the Thiel Fellowship, Emergent Ventures ....

We replace media with parallel media. It’s Twitter and X, it’s Substack. ... This concept of the parallel establishment, if you take up all of these new institutional replacements ... that’s a parallel establishment.

The goal? Pretty much what we're seeing unfold in the US right now. Disrupt and dismantle democratic societies and their institutions - governments, government departments, federal agencies, universities, the courts, the press, even cities - and replace them with decentralized, corporate-backed alternatives that function as competing fiefdoms. Seen in this context, Substack isn’t just an outlet for independent writing and journalism; it’s part of a broader push to erode traditional public institutions in favor of privatized, libertarian tech enclaves.

So, just in case anyone is tempted, while Substack and Zeteo may seem like promising alternatives to legacy media, you know... best keep in mind how they fit into the bigger picture.

Masked Media by Gary Hall - new open access book from Open Humanities Press

Announcing the latest title in Open Humanities Press MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series:

Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence by Gary Hall

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

If we want a socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? It’s this question Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, and the Culture-Led Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author and the book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these uncommon communities of theorist-mediums are testing the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge that are enabled by various media technologies, from writing and print, through photography and video, to computers and GenAI. By thinking outside the masked black box that renders Euro-Western knowledge-making practices invisible – keeping the human ontologically separate from the nonhuman, be it animals, the planet or algorithmic machines – they show there’s no such thing as the human, in any simple sense, the nonhuman already being in(the)human.

Masked Media is one such experimental project. It is not a ‘human-authored’ work. Instead, the thinking within it has been generated by a radically relational assemblage that includes AI and more. Although the book appears under a real name – ‘Gary Hall’ – which, like Banksy and Karen Eliot, acts as a mask, it is not the intellectual property of a singular human individual, and is published under a Collective Conditions for Re-Use licence to reflect this. Masked Media shows how such norm-critical experimentation is of vital importance to our understanding of everything, from identity politics and the decolonialisation of knowledge, through epistemologies of the Global South and the possibilities of open city infrastructure, to extractive capitalism, planetary destruction and the Anthropocene. It thus constitutes a call to radically redesign theory for a time of multiple crises.

In Masked Media, a follow-up to A Stubborn Fury, Hall proceeds to show how our ways of writing and working can be reinvented to produce a more socially just future after the years of austerity, the coronavirus pandemic and (re)election of Trump.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Masked Media is available open access (and can be downloaded for free):

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

Masked Media is a media experiment as much as it is a work of deft media philosophy. Moving beyond well-worn practices of book authorship, Masked Media yields something far more substantial: a collaborative media praxeology for the twenty-first century and beyond. More than a book, then, the pages assembled here represent an all-too-rare achievement that makes good on the posthumanist promise to collaborate with nonhuman materials and challenge deeply rooted notions of human sovereignty pervading academe. This is an experiment in performative media theory that is sure to inspire a new generation of theorist-practitioners across a wide range disciplines and practices. .

Adam Nocek, Director of the Center for Philosophical Technologies, Arizona State University

Before reading Gary Hall’s new book, you might think it was just another quantifiable volume by an established media theorist about the relationship between academic conventions, the development of new digital technologies and their embedding in an inescapable economic system. As you read it, however, the masks fall and you have to ask yourself who actually wrote this book – and is it a book at all? The positions discussed, critical as they are of liberalism and individual authorship, provide indispensable material for training new AI models in order to enable them to become equally self-reflexive and authorship-critical media, themselves performing authorial agency.

Cornelia Sollfrank, artist and researcher

A crucial volume for understanding the profound transformations in the perception, notion and political value of sharing information and related infrastructures, reflecting a few decades of practice. It deeply challenges the whole concept of authorship with a new radical approach, where the ‘author’ has a collective and multiple dimension, in which human and nonhuman authors are seemingly integrated.

Alessandro Ludovico, Winchester School of Art, editor of Neural magazine

Making it Unfair, or Who Owns Creativity? AI, Copyright and the Battle for Wealth and Control

Today has seen yet more protests - this time from newspapers and musicians, the latter including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Annie Lennox - against AI companies for using their copyrighted work without permission to train generative models.

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/made-in-britain-stolen-by-generative-ai-3552357?srsltid=AfmBOoob68TTNnxBjj9RpcBcR8XQC3dUNlNM11WPxSpZwgvW1mCCsVbw

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/1000-artists-release-silent-album-to-protest-uk-copyright-sell-out-to-ai/

Yet, to reiterate, the solution to what OpenAI, Stability AI and co. are doing is not to preserve or strengthen existing copyright law. That would be to continue upholding a system that benefits a relatively small group of organizations and creatives - Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Annie Lennox included - to the disadvantage of nearly everyone else.

Or is that, in fact, the issue? Is the debate really about who gets to belong to this small, privileged group in the future? Newspapers, musicians/music companies, or BigAI?

Crucially, the approach of the wider UK Creative Industries’ Make It Fair campaign - of resisting AI ‘piracy’ by preserving or strengthening copyright law - ignores the fact that, as David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu make clear in their recent book Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Copywrongs:

• Copyright is a major driver of inequality in the twenty-first century.
• It plays a pivotal but often overlooked role when it comes to understanding the roots of disparities of wealth in modern societies.
• the wealthiest corporations globally derive their power primarily from owning copyright and patents, with ‘sixteen of the fifty richest people in the world’ amassing their fortunes entirely or partially from copyright-related industries.

What’s so fair about this?