diff --git a/content/mirror/ubu.md b/content/mirror/ubu.md
index 7acacd7..3746713 100644
--- a/content/mirror/ubu.md
+++ b/content/mirror/ubu.md
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ title = "Ubu"
has_reflections = ["shardslist.md", "cristobal.md", "endtimes.md", "relational.md"]
+++
-## The ambient
+# The ambient
First, we are building an ambient, a (fictional) room filled with bookshelves. In that room, whenever you reach for a book, it is immediately clear why that book is there. It's a place where you could easily lose yourself by following a reference from some specific part of our collective publication. Or you could start by sitting inside the library and lose yourself in exploring all of the references on surrounding bookshelves.
@@ -15,17 +15,17 @@ Building that library will be as easy as sending a reference – an article, a b
Our collective publication emerges from that initial sharing of texts and thoughts, building a three-level hierarchy of written documents:
-## Shards
+# Shards
A lot of us approach the task of writing a text first by jotting down some notes. Those notes often have references to items in the catalog/bibliography. Notes relate to each other. More often than not, notes get dropped, with the hope they might better serve us in the future in another process of writing.
We like to understand our notes as shards. Shared shards. Shards collected/curated together build a reflection. We encourage editing someone else's shard or picking it up for your own reflection(s). Collective writing is hard but such guestures could help. That's our hope at least.
-## Reflections
+# Reflections
Reflections collect shards and build upon them. A reflection is a work in progress, a bit more articulate than a shard. A short essay if you want.
-## Mirror
+# Mirror
Mirror: Ubu. It's a single document describing our endeavour. A mirror is gradually built from reflections which are built from shards. This process is neither linear nor unidirectional. A shard could come from a spark kindled by a sentence being written in the mirror document or from a reflection. Forget about spark. This is the moment where metaphorical starts to ruin its purpose.
diff --git a/data/books/catalog.json b/data/books/catalog.json
index c7208fd..5344809 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
**
\n
from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices:
\n
\u00a0
\n
\u00a0
\n
\"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.\"
\n
from https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2012/10/2/academic-paywalls-mean-publish-and-perish:
\n
\u00a0
\n
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.
\n
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.
\n
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.
\n
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.
\n
Philology haunts the humanities, through both its defendants and its detractors. This article examines the construction of philology as the premier science of the long nineteenth century in Europe. It aims to bring the history of philology up to date by taking it seriously as a science and giving it the kind of treatment that has dominated the history of science for the last generation: to reveal how practices, instruments, and cooperation create visions of timeless knowledge. This historical inquiry therefore asks how one modality of textual interpretation could morph into an integrated system of knowledge production, which ostensibly explained the whole human world. Ultimately, it advances a central argument: philology operated as a relational network, one that concealed diversity and disunity, projected unity and stability, and seemed to rise above the material conditions of its own making. The article scrutinizes the composition of philology as a heterogeneous ensemble, the functioning of philology comparable to other sciences, whether human or natural, and the historical contingency in the articulation of philology.
\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.
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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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**
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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.
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Philology haunts the humanities, through both its defendants and its detractors. This article examines the construction of philology as the premier science of the long nineteenth century in Europe. It aims to bring the history of philology up to date by taking it seriously as a science and giving it the kind of treatment that has dominated the history of science for the last generation: to reveal how practices, instruments, and cooperation create visions of timeless knowledge. This historical inquiry therefore asks how one modality of textual interpretation could morph into an integrated system of knowledge production, which ostensibly explained the whole human world. Ultimately, it advances a central argument: philology operated as a relational network, one that concealed diversity and disunity, projected unity and stability, and seemed to rise above the material conditions of its own making. The article scrutinizes the composition of philology as a heterogeneous ensemble, the functioning of philology comparable to other sciences, whether human or natural, and the historical contingency in the articulation of philology.
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In The Preparation of the Novel, a collection of lectures delivered at a defining moment in Roland Barthes's career (and completed just weeks before his death), the critic spoke of his struggle to discover a different way of writing and a new approach to life. The Neutral preceded this work, containing Barthes's challenge to the classic oppositions of Western thought and his effort to establish new pathways of meaning. How to Live Together predates both of these achievements, a series of lectures exploring solitude and the degree of contact necessary for individuals to exist and create at their own pace. A distinct project that sets the tone for his subsequent lectures, How to Live Together is a key introduction to Barthes's pedagogical methods and critical worldview.
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In this work, Barthes focuses on the concept of \"idiorrhythmy,\" a productive form of living together in which one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other. He explores this phenomenon through five texts that represent different living spaces and their associated ways of life: \u00c9mile Zola's Pot-Bouille, set in a Parisian apartment building; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which takes place in a sanatorium; Andr\u00e9 Gide's La S\u00e9questr\u00e9e de Poitiers, based on the true story of a woman confined to her bedroom; Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, about a castaway on a remote island; and Pallidius's Lausiac History, detailing the ascetic lives of the desert fathers. As with his previous lecture books, How to Live Together exemplifies Barthes's singular approach to teaching, in which he invites his audience to investigate with him -- or for him -- and wholly incorporates his listeners into his discoveries. Rich with playful observations and suggestive prose, How to Live Together orients English-speaking readers to the full power of Barthes's intellectual adventures.
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Call it \u201cZen and the Art of Farming\u201d or a \u201cLittle Green Book,\u201d Masanobu Fukuoka\u2019s manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book \u201cis valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical. It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture because it is not just about agriculture.\u201d Trained as a scientist, Fukuoka rejected both modern agribusiness and centuries of agricultural practice, deciding instead that the best forms of cultivation mirror nature\u2019s own laws. Over the next three decades he perfected his so-called \u201cdo-nothing\u201d technique: commonsense, sustainable practices that all but eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizer, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort.
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Whether you\u2019re a guerrilla gardener or a kitchen gardener, dedicated to slow food or simply looking to live a healthier life, you will find something here\u2014you may even be moved to start a revolution of your own.
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\"I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm.\"
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With these words, Roland Barthes describes a concept that profoundly shaped his work and was the subject of a landmark series of lectures delivered in 1978 at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, just two years before his death. Not published in France until 2002, and appearing in English for the first time, these creative and engaging lectures deepen our understanding of Roland Barthes's intellectual itinerary and reveal his distinctive style as thinker and teacher. The Neutral ( le neutre), as Barthes describes it, escapes or undoes the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western thought and discourse. These binaries are found in all aspects of human society ranging from language to sexuality to politics. For Barthes, the attempt to deconstruct or escape from these binaries has profound ethical, philosophical, and linguistic implications. The Neutral is comprised of the prewritten texts from which Barthes lectured and centers around 23 \"figures,\" also referred to as \"traits\" or \"twinklings,\" that are possible embodiments of the Neutral (sleep, silence, tact, etc.) or of the anti-Neutral (anger, arrogance, conflict, etc.). His lectures draw on a diverse set of authors and intellectual traditions, including Lao-tzu, Tolstoy, German mysticism, classical philosophy, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and John Cage. Barthes's idiosyncratic approach to his subjects gives the lectures a playful, personal, and even joyous quality that enhances his rich insights.
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In addition to his reflections on a variety of literary and scholarly works, Barthes's personal convictions and the events of his life shaped the course and content of the lectures. Most prominently, as Barthes admits, the recent death of his mother and the idea of mourning shape several of his lectures.
Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current\u2011day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants\u2019 relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.
", "publisher": "Yale University", "authors": ["Markus Krajewski"], "formats": [{"format": "epub", "file_name": "The Server_ A Media History From the Prese - Markus Krajewski.epub", "dir_path": "Markus Krajewski/The Server_ A Media History From the Present to the Baroque (42)/", "size": 14254580}, {"format": "pdf", "file_name": "The Server_ A Media History From the Prese - Markus Krajewski.pdf", "dir_path": "Markus Krajewski/The Server_ A Media History From the Present to the Baroque (42)/", "size": 4721345}], "cover_url": "Markus Krajewski/The Server_ A Media History From the Present to the Baroque (42)/cover.jpg", "identifiers": [{"scheme": "isbn", "code": "9780300180817"}, {"scheme": "amazon", "code": "0300180810"}, {"scheme": "google", "code": "iR9dDwAAQBAJ"}], "languages": ["eng"]}, "6b1ec0c2-1e5c-47ec-9c2c-828877f7fba0": {"title": "World Projects: Global Information Before World War I", "title_sort": "World Projects: Global Information Before World War I", "pubdate": "2014-12-29 23:00:00+00:00", "last_modified": "2022-12-03 12:40:44.121218+00:00", "library_uuid": "ebc0648d-8711-411d-84f8-51d40f9eb96b", "librarian": "glassblower", "_id": "6b1ec0c2-1e5c-47ec-9c2c-828877f7fba0", "tags": ["TracingConcepts", "Library"], "abstract": "Markus Krajewski is emerging as a leading scholar in the field of media archaeology, which seeks to trace cultural history through the media networks that enable and structure it. In World Projects he opens a new portal into the history of globalization by examining several large-scale projects that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, shared a grand yet unachievable goal: bringing order to the world.
Drawing from a broad array of archival materials, Krajewski reveals how expanding commercial relations, growing international scientific agreements, and an imperial monopolization of the political realm spawned ambitious global projects. World Projects contends that the late nineteenth-century networks of cables, routes, and shipping lines\u2014of junctions, crossovers, and transfers\u2014merged into a \u201cmultimedia system\u201d that was a prerequisite for conceiving a world project. As examples, he presents the work of three big-thinking \u201cplansmiths,\u201d each of whose work mediates between two discursive fields: the chemist and natural philosopher Wilhelm Ostwald, who spent years promoting a \u201cworld auxiliary language\u201d and a world currency; the self-taught \u201cengineer\u201d and self-anointed authority on science and technology Franz Maria Feldhaus, who labored to produce an all-encompassing \u201cworld history of technology\u201d; and Walther Rathenau, who put economics to the service of politics and quickly transformed the German economy.
With a keen eye for the outlandish as well as the outsized, Krajewski shows how media, technological structures, and naked human ambition paved the way for global-scale ventures that together created the first \u201cworld wide web.\u201d
Today on almost every desk in every office sits a computer. Eighty years ago, desktops were equipped with a nonelectronic data processing machine: a card file. In Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski traces the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable parts (file cards) that became ubiquitous in offices between the world wars. The story begins with Konrad Gessner, a sixteenth-century Swiss polymath who described a new method of processing data: to cut up a sheet of handwritten notes into slips of paper, with one fact or topic per slip, and arrange as desired. In the late eighteenth century, the card catalog became the librarian's answer to the threat of information overload. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, business adopted the technology of the card catalog as a bookkeeping tool. Krajewski explores this conceptual development and casts the card file as a \"universal paper machine\" that accomplishes the basic operations of Turing's universal discrete machine: storing, processing, and transferring data. In telling his story, Krajewski takes the reader on a number of illuminating detours, telling us, for example, that the card catalog and the numbered street address emerged at the same time in the same city (Vienna), and that Harvard University's home-grown cataloging system grew out of a librarian's laziness; and that Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey Decimal System) helped bring about the technology transfer of card files to business.
", "publisher": "MIT", "authors": ["Markus Krajewski"], "formats": [{"format": "mobi", "file_name": "Paper Machines_ About Cards & Catalogs, 15 - Markus Krajewski.mobi", "dir_path": "Markus Krajewski/Paper Machines_ About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (44)/", "size": 2810720}, {"format": "pdf", "file_name": "Paper Machines_ About Cards & Catalogs, 15 - Markus Krajewski.pdf", "dir_path": "Markus Krajewski/Paper Machines_ About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (44)/", "size": 5711545}], "cover_url": "Markus Krajewski/Paper Machines_ About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (44)/cover.jpg", "identifiers": [{"scheme": "google", "code": "y3UwKT7ddPIC"}, {"scheme": "isbn", "code": "9780262015899"}, {"scheme": "goodreads", "code": "12829225"}], "languages": ["eng"], "series": "History and Foundations of Information Science"}, "6f04fd8c-ccd5-4933-bd8d-c329713c416a": {"title": "Momo", "title_sort": "Momo", "pubdate": "2005-01-01 23:00:00+00:00", "last_modified": "2022-12-03 12:47:23.304821+00:00", "library_uuid": "ebc0648d-8711-411d-84f8-51d40f9eb96b", "librarian": "glassblower", "_id": "6f04fd8c-ccd5-4933-bd8d-c329713c416a", "tags": [], "abstract": "\n
At the edge of the city, in the ruins of an old amphitheatre, there lives a little homelss girl called Momo. Momo has a special talent which she uses to help all her friends who come to visit her. Then one day the sinister men in grey arrive and silently take over the city. Only Momo has the power to resist them, and with the help of Professor Hora and his strange tortoise, Cassiopeia, she travels beyond the boundaries of time to uncover their dark secrets.