NFTs - Does It Have To End This Way?

Developments surrounding non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are just one recent way in which the discourses of modernity have endeavoured to continue to privilege individualistic, original and fixed modes of production and reception in the face of the transition to a post-Gutenberg galaxy of non-rivalrous, easily reproducible copies. And this is the case in spite of the potential NFTs were initially held to have to subvert the traditional art world by cutting out cultural intermediaries such as galleries, museums and dealers, and handing over the selling and exchange of art to decentralised communities of creators.

NFTs use a cryptographic protocol of the kind that underpins cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum to track the ownership of a unique digital asset – say, the original digital file of Chris Torres’ Nyan Cat gif or Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet – and guarantee its authenticity and scarcity, thus enabling it to be monetised. First posted online in April 2011, an NFT of the original Nyan Cat was sold in February 2021 for £416,000. Similarly, an NFT of Dorsey’s first tweet was bought for $2.9m at the peak of the non-fungible token market in August 2021, which was then worth a total of $28bn in monthly trading.

Yet by the beginning of 2023 one commentator could already write, following the closure of the NFT marketplace on Sam Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt crypto-exchange FTX, that ‘the most glaring sign of NFTs’ dismal future is not their descending value – by July 2023 the NFT of Dorsey’s tweet was worth just $4 - but their growing resemblance to the rest of the art market’.

95% of NFT collections have now been found to be worthless.

‘How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’

The Piracy Years: Internet File Sharing in a Global Context, ed. Michael High, Markus Heidingsfelder and Holger Briel has now been published. It contains ‘How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’, which is available open access.

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pb-assets/OA%20chapters/Briel_9781802076622_ch5_OA-1687267442.pdf

Here's part of the blurb:

'Combining research essays, interviews, and overviews, The Piracy Years brings together leading scholars and infamous digital pirates from China, Germany, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In 1999, Napster transformed the availability of online content, but the site was quickly sued into oblivion. Despite the highly publicised shutdowns of a number of P2P websites, many continue to thrive, and digital piracy has become a global phenomenon. This book argues that any future media theory will have to contend with such web practices remaining an integral and politically formative part of the Internet.'

Elbakyan of course recently won the Electronic Frontier Foundation  Award for Access to Scientific Knowledge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/eff-award-winner-alexandra-asanova-elbakyan

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota. 

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Ecological Rewriting is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):  

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/ 

Book description 

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium is the first book in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series. Supported by the COPIM project, it is the creation of a collective of researchers, students and technologists from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Led by Gabriela Méndez Cota, this group of nine (re)writers annotate and remix The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness by the philosopher Michael Marder and the artist Anaïs Tondeur (originally published in OHP’s Critical Climate Change series) to produce what is a new book in its own right – albeit one that comments upon and engages with the original. 

 In the Mexican context, experiments with art, writing and technology have a history that is tied less to academic publishing or avant-garde scholarship and more to community-building and grassroots organising. It is important, then, that in creating Ecological Rewriting the collective led by Méndez Cota are inspired by locally influential Cristina Rivera Garza’s theorization of re-writing as dis-appropriation, rather than appropriation of another’s work. Alongside philosophical concepts such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘literary communism’, Rivera Garza’s ethical poetics is here turned into the proposition that the reuse of open access materials does not need to be understood as appropriation or reappropriation of ‘knowledge’. Instead, it can be conceived as a creative exercise in ‘unworking’ or ‘disappropriating’ academic authorship which responds to The Chernobyl Herbarium’s invitation to think through (vegetal) exposure and fragility. Thus, the authors challenge property and propriety by creating singular, fragmentary accounts of Mexico’s relation with Chernobyl. In the process they explore ways of bearing witness to environmental devastation in its human and non-human scales, including the little-known history of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement in Mexico – which they intersect with an experimental history of plant biodiversity. The resulting book constitutes both a practical reflection on plant-thinking and a disruptive intervention into the conventions of academic writing. 

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium exists as an online version (https://doi.org/10.21428/9ca7392d.07cdfb82) and as a print version (forthcoming). The online version is an experimental publication with links to the original sections of The Chernobyl Herbarium that the writers responded to, so that the reader can follow an associative trail between the two publications.

Authors 

Gabriela Méndez Cota, Etelvina Bernal Méndez, Sandra Hernández Reyes, Sandra Loyola Guízar, Fernanda Rodríguez González, Yareni Monteón López, Deni Garciamoreno Becerril, Nidia Rosales Moreno, Xóchitl Arteaga Villamil, Carolina Cuevas Parra 

Editor Bio

Gabriela Méndez Cota is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México. Inspired by deconstruction, psychoanalysis and technoscience feminism, her research explores the subjective and ethical dimensions of technological/political controversies in specific contexts. Her books include Disrupting Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Among other places, her work has appeared in New Formations, Media Theory, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identities (2020). With Rafico Ruiz, she co-edits the open access journal of culture and theory, Culture Machine (culturemachine.net). Between 2019 and 2021 she led a practice-based educational initiative on critical/feminist/intersectional perspectives of open access, which included a collaboration with the COPIM project led by the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK, and resulted in a collective rewriting of The Chernobyl Herbarium (Open Humanities Press, 2015). 

Series 

Ecological Re-writing is published as part of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series, edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Gary Hall and Rebekka Kiesewetter: 

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/

Invest in the De-liberalisation of Society

This is an 'author's cut' of the fifith section of 'Defund Culture'. The first section, titled 'The Culture War and the Attack on the Arts', is available here. The second, 'Culture Must Be Defunded' is here. The third, 'The Ruin of Culture', here. The fourth, 'Culture and the University as White, Male, LIBERAL HUMANIST, Public Space', is here. Versions of the first three of these sections appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy. The rest I'm making available for the first time here.)

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In this context Eddo-Lodge is far more radical than her popular status would suggest, for all some have found Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race confrontational, even controversial. Those who read her book (rather than merely reacting to its title) will find passages such as the following: ‘After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo’. For many of my collaborators and I, this deconstruction of structural power must include the persistent mechanisms and habits of mind that legacy theorists – including Latour, Escobar and even Ahmed – continue to conform to when they write and present their books as if they are the personal expressions of an autonomous named individual; one who lives and works in isolation from all human and nonhuman others, and who has the moral and legal right to be recognised as their original, sovereign, proprietorial authors. (And this is the case even though these legacy theorists may explicitly acknowledge in the content of their work that a given composition is, in Escobar 's words, an ‘emergent heterogenous assemblage’, and that ‘all creation is collective, emergent, and relational’.) They then hand their books over to reputable publishing firms (Duke, Stanford, MIT etc.). These firms turn them into commercial products in the form of materially conventional, fixed and finished volumes of long-form argument, that can be purchased at a price determined by the copyright and property regime presided over by late capitalism’s market logic. It’s a configuration of power that works to make sure a relatively small number of ambitious, high profile and well-resourced thinkers continue to have ideas, concepts, indeed whole philosophies and worldviews, attributed to them as theirs, as part of their unique intellectual trademarks. As Kevin Ochieng Okoth asks in an article on ‘Decolonialisation and Its Discontents’ with regard to the decolonial studies of Mignolo and others: ‘What are the implications for anti-imperialist struggle in the global South if those at the forefront of challenging the Eurocentricity of knowledge production are based in the resource-hoarding universities [and publishing houses, I would add] of the Global North (especially the US)? Is there not a danger of reproducing precisely the kind of epistemic coloniality from which we are trying to de-link?’

To listen to the arguments of Ahmed and Todd once more: what I’m doing in saying this is holding these theorists ‘up to the goals they define for themselves’. It’s the structures of culture and the university that stop them from realising many of their ‘most transformative’ ambitions, including exploding these structures, blowing them apart. The pre-formatted liberal humanist ‘dimensions of the academy itself prevent the reimagining’ of theory and scholarship. As the work of Ahmed and Todd bears witness, it’s hard to think of many academic theorists whose responses to the supremacy of white, male, liberal humanist culture that’s behind the marginalisation of people from working-class, Black, Global Majority and LGBTQIAP2S+ communities do not take the categories and frameworks of white, male, liberal humanism as their default starting point for doing so. This is because the de-liberalisation of theory cannot take place until theorists themselves are prepared to engage in the de-liberalisation process in a substantive, structural and physical way, and are willing to recognise that this liberal humanist space is an existing and continuous, if exhausted, reality.

This is what many of my collaborators and I are endeavouring to do: we’re testing some of the strange, new, unsettling – what, following Escobar, we might call non-universal, non-modernist, non-liberal humanist – modes of creating and sharing knowledge and theory that are now possible. As we’ll see over the course of what follows, norm-critical experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, Photomediations, Radical Open Access Collective, ScholarLed, COPIM, Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers and the How to Practise the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities are attempting to unsettle our accepted, common-sense, liberal humanist ideas of the autonomous subject, the individualistic human author, the unified, stable, fixed and finished book, originality, creativity and copyright. They are doing so by emphasizing instead a range of alternative, non-oppositionally different concepts and values, definitions and distinctions regarding the composition, production and circulation of contemporary theory and research (many of which we’ve learnt from theory). At the present time an incomplete list, which no one text or work could hope to enact in its entirety, includes:

• ontological relationality
• pluriversality (i.e, non-univcersal, non-modernist-liberal)
• intra-active collaboration – of humans and nonhumans
• co-constitution
• collectivity
• polyphony
• processuality
• performativity
• pre-figuration
• situatedness
• responsible openness
• the event (over the finished object or artefact)
• creativity as repetition, modulation, détournement, disappropriation, ‘piracy’
• remixing, reconfiguring, refashioning, reversioning, reframing
• making & unmaking
• learning & unlearning

As such our experimental projects are designed to help us engage in (and transition to) the de-liberal humanisation of our institutions, our culture, even our bodies and how we live and work together.

A History of Asking, by Steven Connor - new open access book from OHP

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of A History of Asking, by Steven Connor.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, A History of Asking is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-history-of-asking/

Book description:

Asking is one of the simplest and most familiar of human actions, and has a right to be thought of as single most powerful and most variously cohering form of social-symbolic gesture. Because so much is at stake in the act of asking, asking, or asking for, almost anything, whether information, help, love or respect, can be asking for trouble, so a great deal of care must be taken with the ways in which asking occurs and is responded. A History of Asking is the first attempt to grasp the unity and variety of the technics and technologies of asking, in all its modalities, as they extend across a spectrum from weak forms like begging, pleading, praying, imploring, beseeching, entreating, suing, supplicating and soliciting, through to the more assertively and even aggressively self-authorising modes of asking, like proposing, offering, inviting, requesting, appealing, applying, petitioning, claiming and demanding. The book considers the history of 6 broad modes of petitory practice. The act of begging, both among animals and humans is considered in terms of its theatrics. The institution of the political petition, protocols for which seem to arise in also every system of government of which we have knowledge, is tracked through from late medieval to nineteenth-century Britain. The act of prayer, central to religious practice, though often the last form of religious behaviour to fall away among those lapsing from adherence, and one of the religious practices that is most likely to be adhered to in the absence of any other religious commitment, is the subject of sustained scrutiny. The appeal of prayer is essentially to the fact of participation in language, and the specific forms of commitment to the condition of being bound, bindable, or biddable by it. Wooing and the associated economics of seduction and solicitation are tracked through from the formalisation of the conventions of courtly love in the 12th century through to modern techniques of flirtation. The book revives the antique term ‘suitage’ in order to discuss all the forms of sueing and suitorship for favours or advantage, as well as, more broadly the act, pursued almost life-long, of trying to get one another to do things for us, in particular in indirect or vicarious forms of what may be called ‘interpetition’, such as the dedications of books to patrons, the institution of the testimonial or letter of reference and the practices of flattery. A History of Asking concludes with a discussion of the many ways in which our necessarily parasitic relations on each other in a complex society are both conveyed and dissimulated, especially through the ways in which we summon and salute different kinds of service. 

Author Bio

Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English Emeritus in the University of Cambridge and Professor of Living Well with Technology at King’s College London. He is a writer, critic and broadcaster, who has published books on Dickens, Beckett, Joyce and postmodernism, as well as on topics such as ventriloquism, skin, flies, air and numbers. His website at http://stevenconnor.com includes lectures, broadcasts, unpublished work and work in progress.