diff --git a/content/reflection/shardslist.md b/content/reflection/shardslist.md
index 7613e7f..fc65c7c 100644
--- a/content/reflection/shardslist.md
+++ b/content/reflection/shardslist.md
@@ -20,7 +20,8 @@ has_shards = [
"senseofimagination.md",
"theimaginary.md",
"technologicaldeterminism.md",
-"toolsinrelationalpractices.md"
+"toolsinrelationalpractices.md",
+"libgenscihubletter.md"
]
+++
diff --git a/content/shard/libgenscihubletter.md b/content/shard/libgenscihubletter.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..24993b3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/content/shard/libgenscihubletter.md
@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
++++
+title = "In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub"
++++
+
+In Antoine de Saint Exupéry's tale the Little Prince meets a businessman who accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day. Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week.
+
+> It is of some use to my volcanoes, and it is of some use to my flower, that I own them,
+
+he says,
+
+> but you are of no use to the stars that you own.
+
+There are many businessmen who own knowledge today. Consider Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher, whose 37% profit margin[^1] stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest databases of academic material, which are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the richest university of the global north, has complained that it cannot afford them any longer. Robert Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library, says "We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices."[^2] For all the work supported by public money benefiting scholarly publishers, particularly the peer review that grounds their legitimacy, journal articles are priced such that they prohibit access to science to many academics - and all non-academics - across the world, and render it a token of privilege.[^3]
+
+Elsevier has recently filed a copyright infringement suit in New York against Science Hub and Library Genesis claiming millions of dollars in damages.[^4] This has come as a big blow, not just to the administrators of the websites but also to thousands of researchers around the world for whom these sites are the only viable source of academic materials. The social media, mailing lists and IRC channels have been filled with their distress messages, desperately seeking articles and publications.
+
+Even as the New York District Court was delivering its injunction, news came of the entire editorial board of highly-esteemed journal Lingua handing in their collective resignation, citing as their reason the refusal by Elsevier to go open access and give up on the high fees it charges to authors and their academic institutions. As we write these lines, a petition is doing the rounds demanding that Taylor & Francis doesn't shut down Ashgate[^5], a formerly independent humanities publisher that it acquired earlier in 2015. It is threatened to go the way of other small publishers that are being rolled over by the growing monopoly and concentration in the publishing market. These are just some of the signs that the system is broken. It devalues us, authors, editors and readers alike. It parasites on our labor, it thwarts our service to the public, it denies us access[^6].
+
+We have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with no economic barrier to access and at a much lower cost to society. But closed access’s monopoly over academic publishing, its spectacular profits and its central role in the allocation of academic prestige trump the public interest. Commercial publishers effectively impede open access, criminalize us, prosecute our heroes and heroines, and destroy our libraries, again and again. Before Science Hub and Library Genesis there was Library.nu or Gigapedia; before Gigapedia there was textz.com; before textz.com there was little; and before there was little there was nothing. That's what they want: to reduce most of us back to nothing. And they have the full support of the courts and law to do exactly that.[^7]
+
+In Elsevier's case against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, the judge said: "simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website, disserves the public interest"[^8]. Alexandra Elbakyan's original plea put the stakes much higher: "If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge."
+
+We demonstrate daily, and on a massive scale, that the system is broken. We share our writing secretly behind the backs of our publishers, circumvent paywalls to access articles and publications, digitize and upload books to libraries. This is the other side of 37% profit margins: our knowledge commons grows in the fault lines of a broken system. We are all custodians of knowledge, custodians of the same infrastructures that we depend on for producing knowledge, custodians of our fertile but fragile commons. To be a custodian is, de facto, to download, to share, to read, to write, to review, to edit, to digitize, to archive, to maintain libraries, to make them accessible. It is to be of use to, not to make property of, our knowledge commons.
+
+More than seven years ago Aaron Swartz, who spared no risk in standing up for what we here urge you to stand up for too, wrote: "We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to 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, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?"[^9]
+
+We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us. The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced across the internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs, humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our voices.
+
+Share this letter - read it in public - leave it in the printer. Share your writing - digitize a book - upload your files. Don't let our knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries - care for the metadata - care for the backup. Water the flowers - clean the volcanoes.
+
+_Date: 30 November 2015_
+
+Dušan Barok, Josephine Berry, Bodó Balázs, Sean Dockray, Kenneth Goldsmith, Anthony Iles, Lawrence Liang, Sebastian Lütgert, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Marcell Mars, spideralex, Tomislav Medak, Dubravka Sekulić, Femke Snelting...
+
+[^1]: Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon.  PLoS ONE 10, no. 6 (June 10, 2015): e0127502. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502., “The Obscene Profits of Commercial Scholarly Publishers.” svpow.com. Accessed November 30, 2015.
+[^2]: Sample, Ian. . The Guardian, April 24, 2012, sec. Science. theguardian.com.
+[^3]:  - Al Jazeera English. Accessed November 30, 2015. aljazeera.com.
+[^4]: . TorrentFreak. Accessed November 30, 2015. torrentfreak.com.
+[^5]: [Save Ashgate Publishing](https://www.change.org/p/save-ashgate-publishing). Change.org. Accessed November 30, 2015. change.org.
+[^6]: [The Cost of Knowledge](http://thecostofknowledge.com/). Accessed November 30, 2015. thecostofknowledge.com.
+[^7]: In fact, with the TPP and TTIP being rushed through the legislative process, no domain registrar, ISP provider, host or human rights organization will be able to prevent copyright industries and courts from criminalizing and shutting down websites "expeditiously".
+[^8]: . TorrentFreak. Accessed November 30, 2015. torrentfreak.com.
+[^9]:  Accessed November 30, 2015. archive.org.
diff --git a/content/shard/senseofimagination.md b/content/shard/senseofimagination.md
index 03861e4..f01e295 100644
--- a/content/shard/senseofimagination.md
+++ b/content/shard/senseofimagination.md
@@ -4,3 +4,9 @@ glassblowers = ["sreckohorvat.md"]
+++
The worlds are constantly ending. The point is to widen our sense of imagination and go beyond the paralysis in thinking and acting.
+
+Back in 1957, in what has to be considered one of his classical essays "Commandments in the Atomic Age", Günther Anders published a warning to widen our sense of imagination: " (...) you have to violently widen the narrow capacity of your imagination (and the even narrower one of your feelings) until imagination and feeling become capable to grasp and realize the enormity of your doings; until you are capable to seize and conceive, to accept or reject it - in short: your task is: to widen your moral fantasy. "[^1]
+
+Today, when we are faced by the accelerating climate crisis, nuclear threat and extinction, when our imagination seems to be shrinking (and we can only see the end at the horizont), what we have to do is to go into the opposite direction - imagine many possible worlds beyond the end itself.
+
+[^1]: 
diff --git a/data/books/catalog.json b/data/books/catalog.json
index 6d23ac5..27e1ee3 100644
--- a/data/books/catalog.json
+++ b/data/books/catalog.json
@@ -1 +1 @@
-{"f1ec532c-6cd2-4329-864f-3197bdc1e323": {"title": "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity", "title_sort": "Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, The", "pubdate": "2023-04-03 22:00:00+00:00", "last_modified": "2022-12-02 16:26:49.215974+00:00", "library_uuid": "ebc0648d-8711-411d-84f8-51d40f9eb96b", "librarian": "glassblower", "_id": "f1ec532c-6cd2-4329-864f-3197bdc1e323", "tags": [], "abstract": "\n
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution--from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality--and revealing new possibilities for human emancipationFor generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this dialectic has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors illustrate how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual blinders and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing during all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organizations did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more open to playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and begins to imagine new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.
\n
Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of\u00a0global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the\u00a0distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's\u00a0fiats of inclusion and exclusion.
In Art Power, Groys examines modern and\u00a0contemporary art according to its ideological function. Art, Groys writes, is produced and brought\u00a0before the public in two ways -- as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda. In the\u00a0contemporary art scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function. Arguing for the\u00a0inclusion of politically motivated art in contemporary art discourse, Groys considers art produced\u00a0under totalitarianism, Socialism, and post-Communism. He also considers today's mainstream Western\u00a0art -- which he finds behaving more and more according the norms of ideological propaganda: produced\u00a0and exhibited for the masses at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Contemporary\u00a0art, Groys argues, demonstrates its power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed\u00a0against itself -- by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a critique of the image. In Art Power, Groys examines this fundamental appropriation that produces the\u00a0paradoxical object of the modern artwork.
\n
In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state. Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions, which required great transformations in social relations and in the relationship between humans and nature.
\n
This new edition is substantially revised and expanded, with extensive new material on imperialism, anti-Eurocentric history, capitalism and the nation-state, and the differences between capitalism and non-capitalist commerce. The author traces links between the origin of capitalism and contemporary conditions such as \u2018globalization\u2019, ecological degradation, and the current agricultural crisis.
\n
Hacked Transmissions is a pioneering exploration of how social movements change across cycles of struggle and alongside technology. Weaving a rich fabric of local and international social movements and media practices, politicized hacking, and independent cultural production, it takes as its entry point a multiyear ethnography of Telestreet, a network of pirate television channels in Italy that combined emerging technologies with the medium of television to challenge the media monopoly of tycoon-turned-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
\n
Street televisions in Italy represented a unique experiment in combining old and new media to forge grassroots alliances, fight social isolation, and build more resilient communities. Alessandra Renzi digs for the roots of Telestreet in movements of the 1970s and the global activism of the 1990s to trace its transformations in the present work of one of the network\u2019s more active nodes, insu^tv, in Naples. In so doing, she offers a comprehensive account of transnational media activism, with particular attention to the relations among groups and projects, their modes of social reproduction, the contexts giving rise to them, and the technology they adopt\u2014from zines and radios to social media. Hacked Transmissions is also a study in method, providing examples of co-research between activist researchers and social movements, and a theoretical framework that captures the complexities of grassroots politics and the agency of technology.
\n
Providing a rare and timely glimpse into a key activist/media project of the twenty-first century, Hacked Transmissions marks a vital contribution to debates in a range of fields, including media and communication studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, social movements studies, sociology, and cultural theory.
\n
Increasing numbers of people live and work abroad as non-nationals, while states filter and categorise residents and their rights in ever more complex ways. What does citizenship mean for the millions of people in Europe who are migrants of some form or another? If democracy stays cast in its national mould, the path ahead in the 21st century may be one of exclusion and disenfranchisement. Unless, that is, citizenship can be reimagined.
\n
This book analyzes the recent development of Gulf capitalism through to the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. Situating the Gulf within the evolution of capitalism at a global scale, it presents a novel theoretical interpretation of this important region of the Middle East political economy.
\n
Our current economic system could not exist without the number systems, coins, banknotes, documents, advertisements, interfaces, typefaces and information graphics that graphic designers have helped to create. Even speculative design and social design play their part in fueling the economic system. Capitalism has brought tremendous wealth, but it has not done so evenly. Extreme income inequality and environmental destruction is the price future generations have to pay for unbridled economic growth. The question is whether ethical graphic design is even possible under such conditions.
CAPS LOCK uses clear language and visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. By sharing examples of radical design practices that challenge the supremacy of the market, it hopes to inspire a different kind of graphic design.
\n
Contributors (alphabetically): Razvan Amironesei, Aparna Ashok, Abeba Birhane, Crofton Black, Favour Borokini, Corinne Cath, Emily Denton, Serena Dokuaa Oduro, Alex Hanna, Adam Harvey, Fieke Jansen, Frederike Kaltheuner, Gemma Milne, Arvind Narayanan, Hilary Nicole, Ridwan Oloyede, Tulsi Parida, Aidan
\n
Peppin, Deborah Raji, Alexander Reben, Andrew Smart, Andrew Strait, James Vincent
\n
In Radiation and Revolution political theorist and anticapitalist activist Sabu Kohso uses the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster to illuminate the relationship between nuclear power, capitalism, and the nation-state. Combining an activist's commitment to changing the world with a theorist's determination to grasp the world in its complexity, Kohso outlines how the disaster is not just a pivotal event in postwar Japan; it represents the epitome of the capitalist-state mode of development that continues to devastate the planet's environment. Throughout, he captures the lived experiences of the disaster's victims, shows how the Japanese government's insistence on nuclear power embodies the constitution of its regime under the influence of US global strategy, and considers the future of a radioactive planet driven by nuclearized capitalism. As Kohso demonstrates, nuclear power is not a mere source of energy\u2014it has become the organizing principle of the global order and the most effective way to simultaneously accumulate profit and govern the populace. For those who aspire to a world free from domination by capitalist nation-states, Kohso argues, the abolition of nuclear energy and weaponry is imperative.
\n
About the Author
\n
Sabu Kohso is a writer, editor, translator, and activist and the author of several books in Japanese.
The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care—childcare, healthcare, elder care—to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.
The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.
The Care Manifesto demands that we must put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. This means the transformation of how we organise work through...", "publisher": "Verso Books", "authors": ["The Care Collective", "Jamie Hakim", "Jo Littler", "Catherine Rottenberg", "Lynne Segal"], "formats": [{"format": "epub", "file_name": "The Care Manifesto - The Care Collective.epub", "dir_path": "The Care Collective/The Care Manifesto (18)/", "size": 170285}], "cover_url": "The Care Collective/The Care Manifesto (18)/cover.jpg", "identifiers": [], "languages": ["eng"]}, "e771cfaf-8cdc-41d7-8685-795d2acb93e5": {"title": "Kolyma Tales", "title_sort": "Kolyma Tales", "pubdate": "1995-01-31 23:00:00+00:00", "last_modified": "2022-12-01 16:58:46.022861+00:00", "library_uuid": "ebc0648d-8711-411d-84f8-51d40f9eb96b", "librarian": "glassblower", "_id": "e771cfaf-8cdc-41d7-8685-795d2acb93e5", "tags": [], "abstract": "\n
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours. This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.
\n
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700\u00a0titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the\u00a0series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date\u00a0translations by award-winning translators.
\n
Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.
\n
Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner\u2019s towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade.
\n
Volume 3 of the Nobel Prize winner\u2019s towering masterpiece: Solzhenitsyn's moving account of resistance within the Soviet labor camps and his own release after eight years.
\n
After serving as a decorated captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced to prison for eight years for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. Solzhenitsyn vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, the year The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet prison system, first appeared in the West.
\n
Does 2 + 2 = 4? Ask almost anyone and they will unequivocally answer yes. A basic equation such as this seems the very definition of certainty, but is it?
\n
In this captivating book, Helen Verran addresses precisely that question by looking at how science, mathematics, and logic come to life in Yoruba primary schools. Drawing on her experience as a teacher in Nigeria, Verran describes how she went from the radical conclusion that logic and math are culturally relative, to determining what Westerners find so disconcerting about Yoruba logic, to a new understanding of all generalizing logic. She reveals that in contrast to the one-to-many model found in Western number systems, Yoruba thinking operates by figuring things as wholes and their parts. Quantity is not absolute but always relational. Certainty is derived not from abstract logic, but from cultural practices and associations.
\n
A powerful story of how one woman's investigation in this everday situation led to extraordinary conclusions about the nature of numbers, generalization, and certainty, this book will be a signal contribution to philosophy, anthropology of science, and education.
\n
From the Inside Flap
\n
Does 2 + 2 = 4? Ask almost anyone and the answer will be an unequivocal yes. A basic equation such as this seems the very definition of certainty, but how is this so?
\n
In this captivating book, Helen Verran addresses precisely that question by looking at how science, mathematics, and logic come to life in Yoruba primary schools. Drawing on her experience as a teacher in Nigeria, Verran describes how she went from the radical conclusion that logic and math are culturally relative, to determining what Westerners find so disconcerting about Yoruba logic and to a new understanding of all generalizing logic. She reveals that in contrast to the one-to-many model found in Western number systems, Yoruba thinking operates by figuring things as wholes and their parts. Quantity is not absolute but always relational. Certainty derives not from abstract logic, but from cultural practice and association.
\n
A powerful story of how one woman's investigation into an everyday African situation led to extraordinary conclusions about the nature of numbers, generalization, and certainty, this book will be a signal contribution to philosophy, anthropology of science, and education.
Benjamin Fondane—who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges's friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz—was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, \"a torture and a spur.\" Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom—the State, History, the Law, the Idea.
Existential Monday, the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English, includes four of Fondane's most thought-provoking and important texts, \"Existential Monday and the Sunday of History,\" \"Preface for the Present Moment,\" \"Man Before History\" (co-translated by Andrew Rubens), and \"Boredom.\" Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the...", "publisher": "New York Review Books", "authors": ["Benjamin Fondane"], "formats": [{"format": "epub", "file_name": "Existential Monday - Benjamin Fondane.epub", "dir_path": "Benjamin Fondane/Existential Monday (23)/", "size": 911234}], "cover_url": "Benjamin Fondane/Existential Monday (23)/cover.jpg", "identifiers": [{"scheme": "isbn", "code": "9781590178997"}], "languages": ["eng"]}, "03752270-ca9b-4647-ac83-938c5d55ee22": {"title": "Strange Tools", "title_sort": "Strange Tools", "pubdate": "0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00", "last_modified": "2022-12-02 16:50:28.546079+00:00", "library_uuid": "ebc0648d-8711-411d-84f8-51d40f9eb96b", "librarian": "glassblower", "_id": "03752270-ca9b-4647-ac83-938c5d55ee22", "tags": [], "abstract": "
\n
A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves
\n
In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva No\u00eb raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, No\u00eb offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.
\n
Popular wisdom warns us against premature optimization. And yet, in a quest for public legitimacy and tidy problem domains, many fields discourage vitally necessary descriptive and conceptual work in favor of statistical analysis and laboratory experiments. Topics of unprecedented complexity are tackled using rote, mechanical approaches, by researchers who routinely fail to realize how much linguistic and conceptual clarification is a precondition of headway. Meanwhile, sociological and professional incentives prevent the sorts of synthetic work that might de-provincialize researchers' theories, and initiate exactly those conceptual refactorings which would advance the discipline.
\n
from https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html:
\n
\u00a0
\n
As it stands today, modern software is built with extreme short-sightedness, designed to be run on disposable electronics and near impossible to maintain. We decided to not participate. Our aim is to create a machine that focuses on answering the handful of little tasks we need, which is centered around building playful audio/visual experiences.
\n
First published in French in 2010, Equaliberty brings together essays by \u00c9tienne Balibar, one of the preeminent political theorists of our time. The book is organized around equaliberty, a term coined by Balibar to connote the tension between the two ideals of modern democracy: equality (social rights and political representation) and liberty (the freedom citizens have to contest the social contract). He finds the tension between these different kinds of rights to be ingrained in the constitution of the modern nation-state and the contemporary welfare state. At the same time, he seeks to keep rights discourse open, eschewing natural entitlements in favor of a deterritorialized citizenship that could be expanded and invented anew in the age of globalization. Deeply engaged with other thinkers, including Arendt, Ranci\u00e8re, and Laclau, he posits a theory of the polity based on social relations. In Equaliberty Balibar brings both the continental and analytic philosophical traditions to bear on the conflicted relations between humanity and citizenship.
\"Where does our current obsession for interactivity stem from? After the consumer society and the communication era, does art still contribute to the emergence of a rational society? Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach toward contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting.\" - product description.
", "publisher": "Les Presses du R\u00e9el", "authors": ["Nicolas Bourriaud"], "formats": [{"format": "pdf", "file_name": "Relational Aesthetics - Nicolas Bourriaud.pdf", "dir_path": "Nicolas Bourriaud/Relational Aesthetics (28)/", "size": 1128559}], "cover_url": "Nicolas Bourriaud/Relational Aesthetics (28)/cover.jpg", "identifiers": [{"scheme": "goodreads", "code": "75263"}, {"scheme": "google", "code": "GAxhQgAACAAJ"}, {"scheme": "isbn", "code": "9782840660606"}, {"scheme": "amazon", "code": "2840660601"}], "languages": ["eng"]}, "25f86ef8-70d5-4dc4-8ce9-2ae7f46dbfd9": {"title": "Image-Music-Text", "title_sort": "Image-Music-Text", "pubdate": "1978-06-30 23:00:00+00:00", "last_modified": "2022-12-02 17:18:44.506270+00:00", "library_uuid": "ebc0648d-8711-411d-84f8-51d40f9eb96b", "librarian": "glassblower", "_id": "25f86ef8-70d5-4dc4-8ce9-2ae7f46dbfd9", "tags": ["Literary Criticism", "Semiotics & Theory", "Performing Arts", "General"], "abstract": "These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath, are among the finest writings Barthes ever published on film and photography, and on the phenomena of sound and image. The classic pieces \"Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative\" and \"The Death of the Author\" are also included.
\n
**
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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution--from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality--and revealing new possibilities for human emancipationFor generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this dialectic has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors illustrate how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual blinders and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing during all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organizations did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more open to playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and begins to imagine new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.
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Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of\u00a0global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the\u00a0distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's\u00a0fiats of inclusion and exclusion.
In Art Power, Groys examines modern and\u00a0contemporary art according to its ideological function. Art, Groys writes, is produced and brought\u00a0before the public in two ways -- as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda. In the\u00a0contemporary art scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function. Arguing for the\u00a0inclusion of politically motivated art in contemporary art discourse, Groys considers art produced\u00a0under totalitarianism, Socialism, and post-Communism. He also considers today's mainstream Western\u00a0art -- which he finds behaving more and more according the norms of ideological propaganda: produced\u00a0and exhibited for the masses at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Contemporary\u00a0art, Groys argues, demonstrates its power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed\u00a0against itself -- by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a critique of the image. In Art Power, Groys examines this fundamental appropriation that produces the\u00a0paradoxical object of the modern artwork.
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In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state. Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions, which required great transformations in social relations and in the relationship between humans and nature.
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This new edition is substantially revised and expanded, with extensive new material on imperialism, anti-Eurocentric history, capitalism and the nation-state, and the differences between capitalism and non-capitalist commerce. The author traces links between the origin of capitalism and contemporary conditions such as \u2018globalization\u2019, ecological degradation, and the current agricultural crisis.
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Hacked Transmissions is a pioneering exploration of how social movements change across cycles of struggle and alongside technology. Weaving a rich fabric of local and international social movements and media practices, politicized hacking, and independent cultural production, it takes as its entry point a multiyear ethnography of Telestreet, a network of pirate television channels in Italy that combined emerging technologies with the medium of television to challenge the media monopoly of tycoon-turned-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
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Street televisions in Italy represented a unique experiment in combining old and new media to forge grassroots alliances, fight social isolation, and build more resilient communities. Alessandra Renzi digs for the roots of Telestreet in movements of the 1970s and the global activism of the 1990s to trace its transformations in the present work of one of the network\u2019s more active nodes, insu^tv, in Naples. In so doing, she offers a comprehensive account of transnational media activism, with particular attention to the relations among groups and projects, their modes of social reproduction, the contexts giving rise to them, and the technology they adopt\u2014from zines and radios to social media. Hacked Transmissions is also a study in method, providing examples of co-research between activist researchers and social movements, and a theoretical framework that captures the complexities of grassroots politics and the agency of technology.
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Providing a rare and timely glimpse into a key activist/media project of the twenty-first century, Hacked Transmissions marks a vital contribution to debates in a range of fields, including media and communication studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, social movements studies, sociology, and cultural theory.
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Increasing numbers of people live and work abroad as non-nationals, while states filter and categorise residents and their rights in ever more complex ways. What does citizenship mean for the millions of people in Europe who are migrants of some form or another? If democracy stays cast in its national mould, the path ahead in the 21st century may be one of exclusion and disenfranchisement. Unless, that is, citizenship can be reimagined.
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This book analyzes the recent development of Gulf capitalism through to the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. Situating the Gulf within the evolution of capitalism at a global scale, it presents a novel theoretical interpretation of this important region of the Middle East political economy.
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Our current economic system could not exist without the number systems, coins, banknotes, documents, advertisements, interfaces, typefaces and information graphics that graphic designers have helped to create. Even speculative design and social design play their part in fueling the economic system. Capitalism has brought tremendous wealth, but it has not done so evenly. Extreme income inequality and environmental destruction is the price future generations have to pay for unbridled economic growth. The question is whether ethical graphic design is even possible under such conditions.
CAPS LOCK uses clear language and visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. By sharing examples of radical design practices that challenge the supremacy of the market, it hopes to inspire a different kind of graphic design.
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Contributors (alphabetically): Razvan Amironesei, Aparna Ashok, Abeba Birhane, Crofton Black, Favour Borokini, Corinne Cath, Emily Denton, Serena Dokuaa Oduro, Alex Hanna, Adam Harvey, Fieke Jansen, Frederike Kaltheuner, Gemma Milne, Arvind Narayanan, Hilary Nicole, Ridwan Oloyede, Tulsi Parida, Aidan
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Peppin, Deborah Raji, Alexander Reben, Andrew Smart, Andrew Strait, James Vincent
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In Radiation and Revolution political theorist and anticapitalist activist Sabu Kohso uses the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster to illuminate the relationship between nuclear power, capitalism, and the nation-state. Combining an activist's commitment to changing the world with a theorist's determination to grasp the world in its complexity, Kohso outlines how the disaster is not just a pivotal event in postwar Japan; it represents the epitome of the capitalist-state mode of development that continues to devastate the planet's environment. Throughout, he captures the lived experiences of the disaster's victims, shows how the Japanese government's insistence on nuclear power embodies the constitution of its regime under the influence of US global strategy, and considers the future of a radioactive planet driven by nuclearized capitalism. As Kohso demonstrates, nuclear power is not a mere source of energy\u2014it has become the organizing principle of the global order and the most effective way to simultaneously accumulate profit and govern the populace. For those who aspire to a world free from domination by capitalist nation-states, Kohso argues, the abolition of nuclear energy and weaponry is imperative.
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About the Author
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Sabu Kohso is a writer, editor, translator, and activist and the author of several books in Japanese.
The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care—childcare, healthcare, elder care—to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.
The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.
The Care Manifesto demands that we must put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. This means the transformation of how we organise work through...", "publisher": "Verso Books", "authors": ["The Care Collective", "Jamie Hakim", "Jo Littler", "Catherine Rottenberg", "Lynne Segal"], "formats": [{"format": "epub", "file_name": "The Care Manifesto - The Care Collective.epub", "dir_path": "The Care Collective/The Care Manifesto (18)/", "size": 170285}], "cover_url": "The Care Collective/The Care Manifesto (18)/cover.jpg", "identifiers": [], "languages": ["eng"]}, "e771cfaf-8cdc-41d7-8685-795d2acb93e5": {"title": "Kolyma Tales", "title_sort": "Kolyma Tales", "pubdate": "1995-01-31 23:00:00+00:00", "last_modified": "2022-12-01 16:58:46.022861+00:00", "library_uuid": "ebc0648d-8711-411d-84f8-51d40f9eb96b", "librarian": "glassblower", "_id": "e771cfaf-8cdc-41d7-8685-795d2acb93e5", "tags": [], "abstract": "\n
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours. This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.
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For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700\u00a0titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the\u00a0series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date\u00a0translations by award-winning translators.
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Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.
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Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner\u2019s towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade.
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Volume 3 of the Nobel Prize winner\u2019s towering masterpiece: Solzhenitsyn's moving account of resistance within the Soviet labor camps and his own release after eight years.
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After serving as a decorated captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced to prison for eight years for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. Solzhenitsyn vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, the year The Gulag Archipelago, his epic history of the Soviet prison system, first appeared in the West.
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Does 2 + 2 = 4? Ask almost anyone and they will unequivocally answer yes. A basic equation such as this seems the very definition of certainty, but is it?
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In this captivating book, Helen Verran addresses precisely that question by looking at how science, mathematics, and logic come to life in Yoruba primary schools. Drawing on her experience as a teacher in Nigeria, Verran describes how she went from the radical conclusion that logic and math are culturally relative, to determining what Westerners find so disconcerting about Yoruba logic, to a new understanding of all generalizing logic. She reveals that in contrast to the one-to-many model found in Western number systems, Yoruba thinking operates by figuring things as wholes and their parts. Quantity is not absolute but always relational. Certainty is derived not from abstract logic, but from cultural practices and associations.
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A powerful story of how one woman's investigation in this everday situation led to extraordinary conclusions about the nature of numbers, generalization, and certainty, this book will be a signal contribution to philosophy, anthropology of science, and education.
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From the Inside Flap
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Does 2 + 2 = 4? Ask almost anyone and the answer will be an unequivocal yes. A basic equation such as this seems the very definition of certainty, but how is this so?
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In this captivating book, Helen Verran addresses precisely that question by looking at how science, mathematics, and logic come to life in Yoruba primary schools. Drawing on her experience as a teacher in Nigeria, Verran describes how she went from the radical conclusion that logic and math are culturally relative, to determining what Westerners find so disconcerting about Yoruba logic and to a new understanding of all generalizing logic. She reveals that in contrast to the one-to-many model found in Western number systems, Yoruba thinking operates by figuring things as wholes and their parts. Quantity is not absolute but always relational. Certainty derives not from abstract logic, but from cultural practice and association.
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A powerful story of how one woman's investigation into an everyday African situation led to extraordinary conclusions about the nature of numbers, generalization, and certainty, this book will be a signal contribution to philosophy, anthropology of science, and education.
Benjamin Fondane—who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges's friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz—was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, \"a torture and a spur.\" Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom—the State, History, the Law, the Idea.
Existential Monday, the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English, includes four of Fondane's most thought-provoking and important texts, \"Existential Monday and the Sunday of History,\" \"Preface for the Present Moment,\" \"Man Before History\" (co-translated by Andrew Rubens), and \"Boredom.\" Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the...", "publisher": "New York Review Books", "authors": ["Benjamin Fondane"], "formats": [{"format": "epub", "file_name": "Existential Monday - Benjamin Fondane.epub", "dir_path": "Benjamin Fondane/Existential Monday (23)/", "size": 911234}], "cover_url": "Benjamin Fondane/Existential Monday (23)/cover.jpg", "identifiers": [{"scheme": "isbn", "code": "9781590178997"}], "languages": ["eng"]}, "03752270-ca9b-4647-ac83-938c5d55ee22": {"title": "Strange Tools", "title_sort": "Strange Tools", "pubdate": "0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00", "last_modified": "2022-12-02 16:50:28.546079+00:00", "library_uuid": "ebc0648d-8711-411d-84f8-51d40f9eb96b", "librarian": "glassblower", "_id": "03752270-ca9b-4647-ac83-938c5d55ee22", "tags": [], "abstract": "
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A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves
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In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva No\u00eb raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, No\u00eb offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.
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Popular wisdom warns us against premature optimization. And yet, in a quest for public legitimacy and tidy problem domains, many fields discourage vitally necessary descriptive and conceptual work in favor of statistical analysis and laboratory experiments. Topics of unprecedented complexity are tackled using rote, mechanical approaches, by researchers who routinely fail to realize how much linguistic and conceptual clarification is a precondition of headway. Meanwhile, sociological and professional incentives prevent the sorts of synthetic work that might de-provincialize researchers' theories, and initiate exactly those conceptual refactorings which would advance the discipline.
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from https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html:
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As it stands today, modern software is built with extreme short-sightedness, designed to be run on disposable electronics and near impossible to maintain. We decided to not participate. Our aim is to create a machine that focuses on answering the handful of little tasks we need, which is centered around building playful audio/visual experiences.
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First published in French in 2010, Equaliberty brings together essays by \u00c9tienne Balibar, one of the preeminent political theorists of our time. The book is organized around equaliberty, a term coined by Balibar to connote the tension between the two ideals of modern democracy: equality (social rights and political representation) and liberty (the freedom citizens have to contest the social contract). He finds the tension between these different kinds of rights to be ingrained in the constitution of the modern nation-state and the contemporary welfare state. At the same time, he seeks to keep rights discourse open, eschewing natural entitlements in favor of a deterritorialized citizenship that could be expanded and invented anew in the age of globalization. Deeply engaged with other thinkers, including Arendt, Ranci\u00e8re, and Laclau, he posits a theory of the polity based on social relations. In Equaliberty Balibar brings both the continental and analytic philosophical traditions to bear on the conflicted relations between humanity and citizenship.
\"Where does our current obsession for interactivity stem from? After the consumer society and the communication era, does art still contribute to the emergence of a rational society? Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach toward contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting.\" - product description.
", "publisher": "Les Presses du R\u00e9el", "authors": ["Nicolas Bourriaud"], "formats": [{"format": "pdf", "file_name": "Relational Aesthetics - Nicolas Bourriaud.pdf", "dir_path": "Nicolas Bourriaud/Relational Aesthetics (28)/", "size": 1128559}], "cover_url": "Nicolas Bourriaud/Relational Aesthetics (28)/cover.jpg", "identifiers": [{"scheme": "goodreads", "code": "75263"}, {"scheme": "google", "code": "GAxhQgAACAAJ"}, {"scheme": "isbn", "code": "9782840660606"}, {"scheme": "amazon", "code": "2840660601"}], "languages": ["eng"]}, "25f86ef8-70d5-4dc4-8ce9-2ae7f46dbfd9": {"title": "Image-Music-Text", "title_sort": "Image-Music-Text", "pubdate": "1978-06-30 23:00:00+00:00", "last_modified": "2022-12-02 17:18:44.506270+00:00", "library_uuid": "ebc0648d-8711-411d-84f8-51d40f9eb96b", "librarian": "glassblower", "_id": "25f86ef8-70d5-4dc4-8ce9-2ae7f46dbfd9", "tags": ["Literary Criticism", "Semiotics & Theory", "Performing Arts", "General"], "abstract": "These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath, are among the finest writings Barthes ever published on film and photography, and on the phenomena of sound and image. The classic pieces \"Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative\" and \"The Death of the Author\" are also included.
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from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices:
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\"The system is absurd, and it is inflicting terrible damage on libraries. One year's subscription to The Journal of Comparative Neurology costs the same as 300 monographs. We simply cannot go on paying the increase in subscription prices. In the long run, the answer will be open-access journal publishing, but we need concerted effort to reach that goal.\"
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from https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2012/10/2/academic-paywalls-mean-publish-and-perish:
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On July 19, 2011, Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer and activist, was arrested for downloading 4.8 million academic articles. The articles constituted nearly the entire catalogue of JSTOR, a scholarly research database. Universities that want to use JSTOR are charged as much as $50,000 in annual subscription fees.
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Individuals who want to use JSTOR must shell out an average of $19 per article. The academics who write the articles are not paid for their work, nor are the academics who review it. The only people who profit are the 211 employees of JSTOR.
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Swartz thought this was wrong. The paywall, he argued, constituted \u201cprivate theft of public culture\u201d. It hurt not only the greater public, but also academics who must \u201cpay money to read the work of their colleagues\u201c.
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Your second thought after awakening should run: \u2018The possibility of the Apocalypse is our work. But we know not what we are doing\u2019. We really don\u2019t know, nor do they who control the Apocalypse: for they too are \u2018we\u2019, they too are fundamentally incompetent. That they too are incompetent, is certainly not their fault; rather the consequence of a fact for which neither they nor we can be held responsible: the effect of the daily growing gap between our two faculties; between our actions and our imagination; of the fact, that we are unable to conceive what we can construct; to mentally reproduce what we can produce; to realize the reality which we can bring into being.