#Collabrary: A Methodological Experiment for Reading With Reciprocity

ON LIBRARIESI was visiting public libraries and ultimately writing my dissertation about them and realizing it’s not about people engaging with kind of romanticized documents. There is some of that in the library, but it’s also compromised bodies interacting with compromised bodies, often the most marginalized people in societies and also really be... See more

Alongside technical tools, we need ways of defining and explaining social norms and expectations about contribution and value sharing. We need collective mechanisms for decision-making about shared assets, that make people feel heard while recognising the limitations, constraints and realities of their maintenance. We need people and organisations ... See more

And one additional thing, not only about disseminating information and building networks, but it’s also about creating knowledge as well. This is something that has happened increasingly or the realization increasingly over the past several years or a couple of decades, that libraries are not just about disseminating published material. It’s valida... See more

They are spaces of intergenerational learning, they’re spaces of kind of civic engagement. And also where other social services fall short because of neglect and underfunding. Public libraries often have to pick up the slack there. That’s not something we’re typically going to ask an archive to do. So just the fact that there is so much that they’r... See more

Our current instruments and infrastructures are struggling to cope. Traditional employment contracts enforce rigidity, property rights are divisive and major institutions like the International Monetary Fund only consider narrow, money-centred definitions of value.Developing civic infrastructures such as food forests would reduce strain upon global... See more

Relationships occur in spaces of centralized power, necessarily extractive and driven largely by self-interest. To build a real coalition is resource-intensive; it doesn’t come naturally. PvP is the norm; imagining connections outside the boundaries of a single organization or a single partnership is hard to do because the blueprint hasn’t been the... See more