Chapter 4

Angels of Our Better Infrastructure

“Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule.” – subRosa Collective

Anyone who lingers long enough in independent publishing will eventually feel a peculiar kinship with Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. The angel stares back at us from the debris: magneto-optical drives, orphaned software suites rendered incompatible by the imperatives of progress, digital accounts mouldering in abandoned corners of platforms no longer indexed. The ruins mount ever higher. And under the conditions of accelerated consolidation – distribution monopolies, platform capture, financialization – the wreckage takes on new forms – bankrupt presses, shuttered bookstores, distributors erased through buyouts or algorithmic obsolescence. The scene is not simply one of loss but of forced forgetting. Publishing, we tell ourselves, is the process of making things public. Yet things do not simply appear in a public; publics themselves are produced through the circulation of media. No public exists prior to the infrastructural choreography that calls it into being. The bourgeois public sphere, the proletarian counter-public described by Negt and Kluge, the many fugitive counterpublics of feminist, queer, and anticolonial struggle – all emerge through specific arrangements of print, mail networks, listservs, distribution circuits, hosting infrastructure. Publics are infrastructural effects. In the idealized narratives of media studies, we are told that reflexive engagement with our tools enables empowerment. Perhaps. But anyone who has worked under the temporal regimes of precarity – deadlines, rent cycles, the ongoing catastrophe of everyday crisis – knows this reflexivity is a luxury. Most people do not think about the infrastructures they use until those infrastructures stop working. This is true of writers and editors, and often true even of theorists who compose elaborate critiques of digital capitalism yet remain unsure how to maintain the server hosting their own text. We touch technology mostly at its surfaces; we understand it primarily through breakdown. It is precisely at this seam – where breakdown reveals the contours of the system – that ServPub intervenes. We inhabit the aftermath of the early internet, when “freedom” appeared as an emergent property of networked openness (a mirage, always). That horizon has collapsed into what Tiziana Terranova calls the corporate platform complex: a regime of capture in which infrastructures of publication and distribution are wholly subsumed under the extractive logics of platformization. We work, increasingly, after the internet – not in its wake, but under its governance. Tools make themselves known when they refuse to function, when they “go on strike.” The Constructivists understood objects as collaborators, co-workers in a distributed labor process. When an object goes on strike, the labor it performs becomes visible. ServPub approaches publishing infrastructure through a similar politics of disclosure: akin to the socialist feminist strategy of Wages for Housework, which rendered domestic and reproductive labor visible so it could be contested, ServPub draws attention to the hidden caring labor of digital maintenance. Publishing is not simply a matter of authorship or design; it is an ecology of servers, backups, scripts, version control, creative hacks, and anxious caretaking. Making these operations apparent is the first step toward reorganizing them. Much of the work gathered in this book concerns digital infrastructure at the scale of writing and editing. But parallel dynamics unfold in print production and distribution. ISBNs, metadata standards, Nielsen BookData, warehouse logistics – each constitutes a silent governance regime shaping what a book can be and how it can travel. In the para-infrastructural shadows of online retail, we find arbitrage operations skimming margins off distributors, micro-insurers underwriting logistical risks, reputation economies governed by algorithmic visibility. These layers are rarely considered when we speak of “publishing,” yet they condition every independent experiment. Autonomous publishing has always entailed infrastructural politics. The current momentum around open access – welcome though it is – often amnesiacally disconnects itself from earlier struggles in which publishing served as an engine of organization. Lenin’s enthusiasm for the newspaper as a machine of discipline and coordination; the Italian autonomists’ experiments in pirate printing that enabled new workers’ inquiries; feminist publishing collectives devising distributed editorial practices. These histories are not footnotes but foundations. So perhaps the point is not to reinvent academic publishing. Indeed, perhaps the category of academic publishing is itself an obstacle, delimiting the horizon of what publication could become. What if, instead, we pursued publishing as a studious practice – study in the sense elaborated by Harney and Moten: the collective improvisation of shared intellectual and material life? Studious publishing would treat infrastructure not as a neutral channel but as a site of political possibility. It would attend to the relationalities of writing, editing, printing, distributing, and maintaining – treating them as terrains for autonomy-in-practice. ServPub does not aim to magically solve these problems, at least not by itself, nor does it need to. Its wager is different: to render visible what already surrounds us, to open a field of experimentation where we might organize differently. Experiments are not endpoints; they are propositions, invitations to collective re-composition. To engage in this work requires developing our technical sensibilities, our infrastructural literacies – recognizing where our practices reproduce extractive systems and where they might begin to erode them. From here, we might cultivate infrastructures whose operations enact the ethical and political values we claim to hold: infrastructures that care, that distribute agency, that invite collaboration, that refuse capture. In this way, these principles become – in a riff on Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address – the better angels of our infrastructure. Not transcendental guardians but practices of shared autonomy, emerging through the work of building, maintaining, and reimagining the systems that enable us to publish at all. We become autonomous only together, in the infrastructures we build together, and in the publics that gather – precarious, partial, provisional – through their circulation.

References

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• Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
• Reiche, Claudia and Verena Kuni, Eds. Cyberfeminism. Next Protocols. Autonomedia, 2004.
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• Wright, Steve. The Weight of the Printed Word: Text, Context and Militancy in Operaismo. Brill, 2021.