Shadow Libraries and Solarpunk Futures

A shadow library is an online database that provides access to content that would otherwise be paywalled or restricted by copyright. Solarpunk is a subgenre of speculative fiction that envisions a future characterized by green energy and social justice. It often focuses on decentralized solutions to global problems and emphasizes the importance of community and collective action.

In this course, we will explore the relationship between existing shadow libraries and the futures dreamed of in solarpunk, using examples like the Pirate Care Syllabus, Low Tech Magazine, and mobile banned book libraries that operate off-grid.

Through a practice of critical making—that is, a combination of creative experimentation and analytical reflection—we will interrogate the social and political implications of these app and ebook technologies. The class will work together as a large group to propose, plan, and execute a project based on our explorations and analysis.

Guiding Principles

Since we’re approaching the authoring of mobile apps and ebooks a bit differently, I want to share with you some of the principles that guide how I think about and teach digital technologies:

• Technology is a broad category that begins at least as early as the first stone tools; it is not synonymous with the digital and networked technologies that we have come to use in our daily lives.
• Digital technology is not inherently good, ethical, or better than analog technology.
• All technological innovations come with positive and negative consequences, and all technological solutions and implementations involve ethical considerations.
• Digital technologies often use metaphors that obscure the material, environmental, and labor realities that underpin them. For example, there is no such thing as “the cloud”—there are only other computers in other locations. “Artificial intelligence” is trained and operated using underpaid and exploited labor.
• The already-ongoing climate crisis is going to change our relationship to both digital and analog technologies. We have a responsibility to plan for a low carbon future.
• Never use a high-tech solution when a low-tech one will work.
• Never make or buy something new when something that already exists can be repaired or repurposed.

Reading

• Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Bronte Christopher Wieland. ISBN: 1952271509.
• Lawrence Laing, “Shadow Libraries”
• "You can’t stop pirate libraries"
• Pirate Care: A Syllabus
• “In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub”
• “Can the Internet Survive Climate Change?”
• Kris de Decker et al, "How to Build a Low-Tech Website"
• HydroponicTrash, “Tiny Banned Book Library”

A garden of computers, as envisioned by Adobe Text to Image.

Learning Outcomes

1. Students will demonstrate applied and theoretical understanding of the role of mobile apps and ebook technologies in society.
2. Students will demonstrate an awareness of key ethical issues surrounding digital technologies, including environmental, social, and labor issues.

Assignments

Field Journal for a Low Carbon Future

For the duration of the semester, you will keep a physical (i.e. hard copy) field journal. Here you will take notes on our readings, react to our discussions, respond to prompts, and track your observations about digital technologies and the environmental, social, and labor issues associated with them. The look of your entries is up to you; I encourage you to think creatively about how you might capture your thoughts, feelings, research, reactions, etc. Visual communication is just as valid as written communication!

Pirate/Solarpunk Manifesto

Each student will compose their own manifesto expressing their views on one or more of the topics we cover in class. Topic, form, and content are up to you; creativity is highly encouraged.

Semester Project

As a group, the class will propose, plan, and create a project that demonstrates an applied understanding of mobile app and ebook technologies. The form, audience, and purpose of this project will be up to you as a group. We will look at a number of model projects for inspiration and guidance.

Appendix: Commonplace

Adapted process of reflective design, as outlined by Garnet Hertz

1. Identify disciplinary metaphors and assumptions: Identify core metaphors that guide and shape a discipline. For example, in the field of personal computing this could be 'desktop'. General assumptions of engineering include efficiency, reliability, convenience, and pervasive connectivity. Identifying metaphors can be the result of literature review, observation, or other research methods.
2. Research metaphoric occlusions: Carefully recognize and research what the metaphors and assumptions exclude, marginalize, or occlude. In the case of a computing desktop, embodied movement or position is marginalized. What disciplines, groups, or users are excluded by these metaphors?
3. Invert occlusions: Invert the core metaphor of the discipline by bringing the marginalized things to the center. Consider building a computer interface that uses the entire human body, for example. What would the new thing look like and how would it work? What if we designed only for occluded things?
4. Build the inversion: Physically build a new alternative that embodies the inversion. Low cost open source DIY tools, including digital design tools for physical fabrication, can accelerate this process. It is important to actually fabricate the thing because it has a tangible legibility, documents well, and has the potential to act as a meeting point or disruptor between different users and communities. Built things are 'real' and constructively propose how a system is envisioned differently.
5. Deploy the object: Disseminate the project through high quality video production, online documentation, and exhibition in a public setting. Depending on the project, qualitative data collection in the form of surveys, interviews, observations, or usability tests can be of substantial use in understanding the impact of the project, especially in measuring how it challenges and disrupts biases.

A Feminist Server Manifesto

In 2013, Constant, a non-profit, artist-run organization in Brussels, hosted the workshop "Are you being served?" During the session First Feminist Server Summit, artists and activists reflected on questions around the potential of a Feminist Server practice. The collective discussions brought the following outcome:

A feminist server...

• Is a situated technology. She has a sense of context and considers herself to be part of an ecology of practices
• Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist
• Builds on the materiality of software, hardware and the bodies gathered around it
• Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns
• Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible
• Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps
• Knows that networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice
• Is autonomous in the sense that she decides for her own dependencies
• Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; experiments with changing client-server relations where she can
• Treats network technology as part of a social reality
• Wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible
• Does not confuse safety with security
• Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity
• Tries hard not to apologize when she is sometimes not available