Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

To start the series, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  Last week, Jennifer Garcon shows how the long marriage between Haitian politics and Haitian radio has endured, despite multiple and conflicting alliances, high drama, and attacks from all sides. The powerful and the powerless have even in their enmity presumed that if they could harness radio’s power they would ascend to political power. Her story recounts one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life.

The sweeping stories of Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive (now at Duke University), its more than 5300 recordings fully digitized and described in English, French and Haitian Creole) come together in this all too brief account. Laura Wagner, who listened to each recording and wrote the descriptors, writes of the work itself, the emotional, financial and intellectual challenges involved, and the reason this archive is essential to anyone interested in Haiti, or radio, or racial justice.

Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

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For four years, I spent forty hours a week in a cubicle in a converted tobacco warehouse with noise-cancelling headphones over my ears, listening to and describing the entire audio archive of Haiti’s first independent radio station, Radio Haïti-Inter. Though my title was “project archivist,” I am not an archivist by training. But I am compelled to compile, assemble, and preserve stories from lost people and lost worlds. Sound is more intimate than printed words or video. With sound, voices are inside your head, as close as another person can be. As I processed the Radio Haiti collection, I would forget that many of the voices I heard every day belonged to people I never knew in life. Sometimes in my dreams I would see the station’s director, Jean Dominique, alive and laughing.

Radio Haïti-Inter was inaugurated in the early 1970s. Dominique, an agronomist by training, quickly became the most recognized journalist in Haiti. His professional partner and wife, Michèle Montas, Radio Haiti’s news editor, was a Columbia Journalism School graduate who trained several generations of Haitian journalists. Dominique was part Ida B. Wells, part Edward R. Murrow, part Sy Hersh, part Studs Terkel, part Hunter S. Thompson. He was an investigative journalist who uncovered human rights abuses, government corruption, and corporate malfeasance. He was an activist who possessed the charisma of a theater star, the crackling wit of a satirist, and the public intellectual’s gift for insight and analysis. After Dominique was assassinated on April 3, 2000, more than fifteen thousand mourners attended his funeral.

In 2013, Montas donated the archive of Radio Haïti-Inter — more than 1600 open-reel tapes, more than 2000 audio cassettes, and approximately 100 linear feet of paper records — to Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, under the condition that it be digitized and made available to the widest possible public in Haiti. Thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council on Library and Information Resources, today the Radio Haiti Archive is a free, publicly accessible, trilingual digital collection. Its over 5300 audio recordings represent the most comprehensive archive of late 20th-century Haitian history. Radio Haiti still speaks, despite government repression, multiple exiles, the assassination of Dominique, the attempted assassination of Montas in December 2002, the closure of the station in 2003, and the 2010 earthquake. That the archive exists is a miracle. 

According to its mission statement, the Rubenstein Library “builds distinctive collections of original materials and preserves them for use on campus and around the world. In support of Duke University’s mission of ‘knowledge in service to society,’ we collect a diversity of voices in a wide range of formats… We invite students, scholars, and the general public to explore the world through our unique collections.” the library seeks to preserve the voices of marginalized people, and make various kinds of materials (including sonic media) available to audiences beyond Duke, beyond the United States, and beyond academia.

In Radio Haiti’s broadcasts, rural farmers, activists from poor urban neighborhoods, sex workers, marketwomen, Vodou patriarchs, and refugees narrate vivid stories of their lives and worlds. The aurality of radio allowed speakers and listeners who were not traditionally literate to participate in the political life of Haiti. Likewise, the aurality of the Radio Haiti collection makes it a trove of information that appears nowhere else. It is invaluable for academic researchers and ordinary audiences alike. It is a people’s history of Haiti, told through voices that are silenced in the written record.

Most libraries in poor countries like Haiti lack the resources to restore, digitize, and process audiovisual materials, but wealthy institutions in wealthy countries tend to neglect sonic archives. Unlike written records, audio is difficult to skim, and therefore harder for researchers to use. The rights considerations are often fraught. Audiovisual archives are expensive and difficult to preserve, digitize, and process; as a result, many projects, including Radio Haiti, depend on highly competitive external grants. While these days many universities prize Black archival collections (sometimes to the point of commodification, as Steven G. Fullwood argues), it’s another matter when those collections are audio, especially non-English language audio. In Radio Haiti’s case, the audio is in Haitian Creole and French. All of these factors made Radio Haiti a complex project. But I believe the complexity of a project like Radio Haiti could be mitigated if institutions were to truly make custodianship of marginalized collections a priority. In other words, some of the complexity isn’t inherent to the collection, but rather to the system that was not built to accommodate it.

As I processed Radio Haiti, I ached for the cane-cutters that the Duvalier dictatorship effectively sold to the Dominican Republic, former political prisoners describing horrific torture,  and migrants risking their life at sea. But it was not my trauma. In some ways, this project was challenging because I am not Haitian, but it was also easier because the anguish was not my own. I understood the archive’s importance, but I did not feel the pain in my bones. 

So, yes, the material in the archive could be heavy, but the project was difficult mainly because the current practices of US academic libraries are incompatible with a project like Radio Haiti. For the last year and a half of the project, there was no remaining grant money or internal funding for an intern fluent in Haitian Creole or French to earn a living wage. When I proposed seeking additional funding to support an intern to help describe the audio, I was told it would be unfair to other staff who are likewise underpaid. In order to finish before my own grant-funded salary ran out, I listened to and created multilingual narrative description for an average of ten recordings a day. Every day was a race against time. I was reprimanded for “overdescribing” the audio, and told, “Don’t do the researcher’s job for them.” Library leadership and I did not share the same objectives. Despite their stated commitment to digitize Radio Haiti and make it available to the Haitian public, they still considered traditional academic researchers the target audience, while I was thinking of ordinary people in Haiti, trying to access the audio on a secondhand smartphone with a limited data plan.

Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor ask, “what happens when we scratch beneath the surface of the veneer of detached professionalism and start to think of recordkeepers and archivists less as sentinels of accountability… and more as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual responsibility?” They call for empathy between the archivist and the creators, subjects, users, and audience of the archive. I believed that “slow processing” — providing detailed, trilingual description of each Radio Haiti recording — was a necessary act of empathy, and the only way to honor the voices in the archive and make the collection truly available to Haitian audiences. If I provided only “minimal description,” Radio Haiti’s audio would remain lost. 

The work was exhausting. I began to have panic attacks. One administrator encouraged me to develop “strategies for self-care.” “Self-care,” which places the responsibility onto the individual worker, is not a solution to burnout. What I needed were more resources.

Like everyone else in the neoliberal US university, archivists are bound by concrete considerations of political economy. They are being asked to do more with less: they must eliminate backlogs and process more collections more quickly, without improvements in salary, staffing, or workspace. Library work remains a feminized profession, one that downplays and erases the intellectual labor of those workers who “merely” process collections. The archivist is the invisible technician, while researchers discover. And so my intent is not to impugn any individual. Rather, I point to the structural factors and cultural attitudes — including institutional white supremacy — that make traditional archives inhospitable to collections like Radio Haiti. 

Former archivist Jarrett Drake contends that “the purpose of the archival profession is to curate the past, not confront it; to entrench inequality, not eradicate it; to erase black lives, not ennoble them.” As a white American woman, my personal experiences were obviously not comparable to those of archivists and scholars of color who endure racism regularly, but my time as the Radio Haiti project archivist revealed to me how Black archival collections are subjected to structural racism. The Radio Haiti collection was created by and for Black people. It centers the voices, perspectives, and experiences of Black people. It is a sonic archive, in a field that prioritizes traditional paper collections. It is largely in Haitian Creole, a disparaged language spoken mostly by Black people. It is from a country that has been colonized, exploited, invaded, occupied, vilified, pitied, embargoed, evangelized, and intervened upon for centuries. And finally, its primary audience is not anglophone academics, but Haitian people. 

Many library workers at predominantly white institutions make extraordinary efforts to combat systemic white supremacy, but low-level staff cannot create change when the larger institution remains hidebound. Bringing Radio Haiti back to Haiti required intellectual work, passion, and love. To represent diverse voices and make a collection like Radio Haiti truly accessible to a worldwide public, traditional archival institutions must undergo a radical transformation. They must confront assumptions about what makes a collection “difficult to process,” commit resources to collections that foreground the voices of marginalized people, and support the work of staff who give those collections the care they deserve.

Editor’s Note: Minor changes have been made since publication for clarity and to add links to sources. Nothing substantive has been changed. 12:48 PM EST, 5/3/2021

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Featured Image: Picture of a painting of Radio Haiti tied to a cross with the inscription (in translation): “The proverb goes: each firefly lights the way for itself [every man for himself]. We say: unity makes strength. Let’s help Radio Haiti-Inter lay its cross down so that it is not crucified.” Radio Haiti Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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From 2015 to 2019, Laura Wagner was the project archivist for the Radio Haiti Archive at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill, where her research focused on displacement, humanitarian aid, and everyday life in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Her writings on the earthquake and the Radio Haiti project have appeared in Slate, Salon, sx archipelagos, PRI’s The World, and other venues. She is also the author of Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go, a young adult novel about the earthquake and its aftermath, which was published by Abrams/Amulet in 2015. She is currently working on a book about Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Radio de Acción: Violent Circuits, Contentious Voices: Caribbean Radio Histories–Alejandra Bronfman

Black Excellence on the Airwaves: Nora Holt and the American Negro Artist Program–Chelsea M. Daniel and Samantha Ege

SO! Amplifies: Marginalized Sound—Radio for All–J Diaz

Collectivity, copying, care. Sharing knowledge is key; no one should be irreplaceable. Copy before you transfer. Care about your content and be transparent about your biases, as archiving is never truly objective.

Last Friday, the Networks of Care event series initiated by nGbK Berlin took place. Artist Cornelia Sollfrank introduced Old Boys Network (OBN), a cyberfeminist alliance from the late 1990s in need of archiving and preserving today. Guests revealed their archiving experiences, strategies and pitfalls they encountered while building archives of different types, ranging from initiatives started by national institutions to self-organised independent projects. 

Going into this, I wanted to develop a better understanding the challenges of digital archiving. Now I appreciate the importance of the commons and care in the context of these cultural practices. I will share the most insightful points from the event, and reflect on the significance of informed and honest archive-making.

Sollfrank explained that OBN was hard to define and pin down. It aimed to facilitate discussions about cyberfeminism through research, experimentation and direct action. She noted the challenges of documenting a shapeshifting organisation; sometimes a network, sometimes a group, or a collective with an aesthetic dimension.

OBN home page (click on image to visit).

The talks

Curator Mela Dávial-Freire reflected on the difficulties Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid had archiving materials that belonged to local LGBTQ+ activist groups from the 1990s. Posters, banners, and photographs of demonstrations exposed different archiving issues. Some materials were kept in multiple spaces, their authors/makers were often unknown, and emotional involvement complicated acquiring and circulating the content. Dávial-Freire noted that the project unbalanced the musem’s collection, which gathered millions of documents to date. This was a good thing, as it made the institution reconsider its archiving strategies.

Art scholar Michael Hiltbrunner explained his practical approach to archive-making while gathering information about the early days of the F+F School of Experimental Design (now the F+F School of Art and Design, in Zürich). He worked with time witnesses from the 1970s, when the school was founded, and maintained positive relationships with individuals who provide insights, leads and materials. The goal for his project was to create a platform that has an openness to it, one that allows interaction.

Monoskop founder Dušan Barok noted the importance of working with independent servers. Monoskop’s server allows other websites to use it as a host, free of charge, and offers basic maintenance tools. He clarified that while running a server is not a precondition for creating a digital archive, it is a good solution. He stressed that we should be wary of the current trend of storing information in “the cloud,” as they routinely run statistics and analytics of users.

Monoskop’s main page right now (click to visit)

Curator and cultural worker Laurence Rassel urged everyone to consider sustainability from the beginning of the project, going as far as asking: “What happens when the archivist dies? Who knows how the archive works, how to add to it and maintain it?” Based on her experience as director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, where she opened the archive some ten years ago, she highlighted the importance of using free and open-source software. She also mentioned that being transparent with the public and cultural workers about each step of archive-building should not be overlooked.

The aftermath

Based on the talks, I identified overarching themes and most valuable advice: collectivity, copying, care. Sharing knowledge is key. No one should be irreplaceable, and their knowledge should not disappear when they do. Copy content before you transfer. Care about your work and the networks that are involved in its creation and maintenance. Be transparent about your biases, as archiving is never neutral.

In the discussion, a point was raised about the untouchability of archives. Some participants believed that archives are ever-changing, and that with each interaction, they shift just a little into something different. Others said that the value of an archive lies in its autonomy; people may interact with the content or add information, but the very nature of the archive should remain unchanged. I tend to side with the first camp, seeing interaction as added value, but I understand the core of an archiving project should be respected.

I wish there had been enough time during the event to discuss what strategies may be used to build the OBN archive. However, it seems like the project has just begun. I am sure the discussions gave ideas to the OBN team. The meeting left me wondering about the fragility of archives, how we rely on them always being there, but may be disappointed to find traces instead. Digital archivisation does not lift the anxiety of losing content, and comes with its own set of challenges; technical, logistical, even emotional.

Nothing lasts forever. One day, archivists, their archives, and anyone interested in them will be gone. There is no way of telling when this happens. But maybe it doesn’t matter. It is up to us at this moment to decide what feels urgent, and how to record it and share it for as long as it retains a degree of importance. 

Kaucylia Brooke’s “Boy Mechanic” project, documenting the disappearance of lesbian bars in the US and Germany. [Cologne Edition, 2004]

I wrote my master thesis on the ways artistic research activates engagements with queer temporalities. I focused on projects that utilised archives, used archiving strategies, and/or acted as archives themselves. While archival artworks operate on a different set of priorities than the projects discussed during this event, there are similarities between them. In my research, among themes of nostalgia, longing and speculative thinking, I identified an overwhelming sense of community; a desire to relate to others across time (and space), coming together in the present to establish these connections. The question of how to build sustainable digital archives is multifaceted, especially now that cultural events happen almost exclusively online. What traces do they leave? Do archivists recognise their power as individuals who decide what to record, and what to discard? It is clear that only collaborative, transparent efforts can preserve content that would otherwise fade and dissipate, way before its time.

“To stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours… It is in these ecstatic moments that we arrive (or move inexorably towards) collective potentiality.” – José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (2009).

Interview by Hoçâ Cové-Mbede

In March 2021 London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit issued a warning towards students and universities to stop visiting Sci-Hub, the first website in the world to provide mass and public access to millions of research papers, a project designed, programmed and maintained by Alexandra Elbakyan since 2011.

The press statement displays terms and compounds such as malicious, phishing, compromised access, cybercrime, bad actors, fraud and hacking in order to build a specific profile that speculates around the active use of the site. The move is not surprising or impressive for Sci-Hub’s standards, since its rise as one of the most important sources/archives for scientific research globally, Elbakyan has been dealing with constant turmoil: suspensions from social media platforms, permanent blocks, takedown orders, legal prosecution for copyright infringement, spying accusations, censorship and media backlash.

But not all sides are hostile in advance, the scrutiny and feedback taken from public and private conversations about the apparatuses that paywall database-knowledge for profit also devised a reputation for Elbakyan during all these years, cementing her as an unparalleled figure to talk about digital + bypass redistribution (aka the Robin Hood of Science Publishing), and not only that, Sci-Hub’s way to operate and interact puts interesting question marks on the limits of online ownership and the involvement of academic institutions regarding open access.

2021 will bring backward-looking moments for Sci-Hub, in September S-H will celebrate a decade of existence, which hopefully will open reviews about the impact of the uninterrupted service the site provides, analysis on the media-portraits made of Elbakyan by third actors in the public sphere, and our role in the current corporate model of production/access of scientific knowledge.

In June of 2020 I contacted Alexandra to have an extended conversation that covers S-H’s revolution in science, copy + paste archival practices in favour of copyright abolition, US Justice Department targeting S-H as an undercover espionage-project, private ownership of science, prejudices against women in IT, astrology and its nexus with information flow and Elsevier’s attempts to worldwide-block S-H.

This conversation previously appeared in a shorter version on Netzpolitik.org.

Hoçâ Cové-Mbede: Multiple profiles depict you with specific associations and comparisons with other projects or personas historically and culturally related with online piracy in the USA—from Piratebay, Megaupload and Napster to Wikileaks, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. What are your thoughts on how the media covers Sci-Hub? I’m thinking in particular of an article in Nature from 2016 and a profile published in The Verge in 2018, both of which get cited regularly in relation to Sci-Hub.

Alexandra Elbakyan: In my opinion, Sci-Hub’s media coverage was very little, unfair and biased. I would even say that discussion of Sci-Hub was censored in the media. Sci-Hub is a real revolution in science comparable to CRISPR but the media prefer to keep silent about it.

Sci-Hub started in 2011 and from the very beginning was recognized as a revolutionary Open Science project and gained huge popularity among researchers. But only in 2016 did articles about Sci-Hub in the media start to appear. That censorship is perhaps the result of the general perception of Sci-Hub as a Russian project opposed to the US.

I would say that the discussion of Sci-Hub in the journal Nature is very small compared to its real impact. In particular, Nature published very detailed descriptions of such open science projects as Unpaywall with pictures. The Unpaywall project is tiny compared to Sci-Hub, but Nature published only very short pieces about Sci-Hub, without pictures. So some readers of Nature journal who do not know much about the topic will have the wrong impression that Unpaywall is much bigger than Sci-Hub, because Nature has described it in detail while discussion of Sci-Hub was little. But in reality, the opposite is true: Unpaywall is tiny compared to Sci-Hub. If Nature was unbiased to Sci-Hub it would have put Sci-Hub on its cover picture in 2016.

You’re correct that even those articles about Sci-Hub that appeared in the media are focused not on the project itself but on comparisons, trying to belittle Sci-Hub and present it as secondary, while in reality it is revolutionary and unique. In the Verge article, journalists have presented a skewed picture of my conflict with the Russian science fund “Dynasty”, supporting Dynasty. They did not even bother to ask me about the information they collect so I could comment on it!

Wrong information appears not just in the media, but in more reputable sources also, for example, books, such as “Shadow Libraries” published by MIT and in dissertations. I read some of them and there were serious mistakes in my biography and the description of how Sci-Hub works. Again, authors of these works did not even bother contacting me.

However in Russian media the current state of affairs is much worse. An extremely unfair picture of me is being promoted; good facts about Sci-Hub are not published. I am being presented as a person who blocked access to academic literature while the reality is opposite. I opened access and not blocked it.  Also, usually journalists attach to their articles the most horrendous photo of me they can find, instead of asking me to send them a good photo. I guess that some of the bad media publications about me and Sci-Hub could be directly paid by Elsevier.

There’s a current pattern of legal tactics that label common words or compounds employed in open knowledge activities as criminal-by-association in regards to free access and text-private-property. Why do you think these legal tactics under the argument of capitalist loss have been used to try to slow down sharing networks and archival repositories? 

There is a huge industry around science publishing and copyright law in general, and they have enough money and power to support the status quo.

Do you think the measures against you, like the legal prosecution directed by Elsevier to cease Sci-Hub in 2015, are similar to Middle Age’s curses intended to protect against the theft of books?

Alexandra Elbakyan: In the Middle Ages books were copied by hand and it was a very tedious task and books were precious. So to protect books from stealing, a popular method was to insert a curse in the beginning or the end of the book, so that somebody who would steal that book will be cursed and go to Hell or get an illness or something else very bad will happen to them. Because Elsevier and other publishers also insist that their books and articles are being stolen by such websites as Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, I thought that is quite funny if they would also try using curses to protect their articles and books. Perhaps that will be a better method than suing us for copyright?

Images by Hoçâ Cové-Mbede.

It is fascinating how the tense relationship between the USA and Russia during the Cold War plays an important precedent in the public eye to generate plots and theories about the origins and intentions of Sci-Hub on copyrighted territories, even though you repeatedly insisted that Sci-Hub is a project you started in 2011. These theories suggest a plethoric range of possibilities, from a fully state funded project by Russian Intelligence, to an ongoing investigation directed by the US Justice Department that targets Sci-Hub as an undercover espionage-project. What is your response to these accusations and what is behind the constant emergence of conspiracy plots toward Sci-Hub?

Alexandra Elbakyan: First of all, these suspicions are understandable: Sci-Hub is an openly communistic project, coming from the former USSR or Russia, with a picture of Lenin pinned on its twitter page. I studied information security at the university, supported Putin politics and Sci-Hub uses supposedly hacked credentials to log in into university systems. All these facts taken together create a classical picture of some Russian intelligence. Also US authorities could suspect that Sci-Hub is an attempt to influence US researchers by the Russian government.

And the second reason for conspiracies is that Sci-Hub is a very cool and advanced project. So many people think: how could an Armenian woman coming from Kazakhstan create this herself? There should be a team of developers behind her face and so on. We still have a lot of prejudices against women, especially young—still many people think that women cannot code or do some serious work in IT—prejudices against race and countries. Just think of the Borat movie about Kazakhstan! After watching this movie, who can believe that something great such as Sci-Hub—and many people consider it great—can come from Kazakhstan? And so on. The funniest thing here is perhaps that because of all that, who will consider me for any great job at all? Hence all I can work on is a project that is illegal in all countries. But even then that work will not be considered mine. It is necessary to note that these prejudices were much stronger a few years ago, when Sci-Hub started, now they are becoming weaker.

In 2016 Marcia Mcnutt (former president of the National Academy of Sciences) wrote a column for Science Magazine titled My love-hate of Sci-Hub in which she argues that downloading papers from Sci-Hub could create collateral damage for authors, publishing houses, universities, fellowships, science education, among other areas. The love-hate scenario Mcnutt paints is nonetheless confusing for the debate she wants to open about corporate knowledge inside institutions, since the whole text leaves serious cracks in her depiction of the publishing system’s function. Accidentally in the same text, she evidences a chain of normalized exploitation towards researchers in her community—by not rewarding them. To use her own words “Journals have real costs, even though they don’t pay authors or reviewers, as they help ensure accuracy, consistency, and clarity in scientific communication.” If access means power and power is fueled by elevated amounts of money, what are the standards of politically correct access to information aiming for, if not capital accumulation?

Of course Sci-Hub creates damage: damage to the status quo, because old ways of doing things die and a new reality is born—what is perceived as damage to old ways is just transformation and change.

In her article Marcia McNutt says: “Authors do not benefit from download statistics, for example, which are increasingly being used to assess the impact of their work.” That does not seem to be a strong objection to me. After all, the real impact is when some work is cited, not just downloaded? I download many papers for later reading, for example. You can download and read some paper because it has a catchy title, but it will turn out to be useless for your work.

Sci-Hub collects download statistics, although they are not public, but all download statistics have been recorded since 2011 and I have a plan to add the number of views each paper has in the future. So Sci-Hub can be updated to provide such information.

The article goes on… “Libraries cannot properly track usage for the journals they provide and could wind up discontinuing titles that are useful to their institution. As institutions cancel subscriptions, the ability of non-profit scientific societies to provide journals and support their research communities is diminished.” In my opinion, it is very good when institutions cancel subscriptions, because we need to get rid of that outdated subscription model that operates by blocking access to knowledge for everyone who has not paid for a subscription. I don’t see it as damage but as a good thing.

The argument continues that journals have real costs. My response is that the prices currently charged for subscriptions are not used to cover the costs but simply to increase the profits. An example to illustrate this is that papers published in the 2010s and earlier are paywalled. Why? There is no reason—these papers have been published more than 10 years ago. Haven’t the costs of publishing them been covered already? They could be free, but they are being kept with closed access only to extract more profits.

Sci-Hub’s borderless pirate distribution is generating not only scientific capital but also cultural capital, in an availability of knowledge never experienced before. Language barriers aside, the capacities for scientific development in countries with research shortages may have significant growth in the next ten years thanks to Theft Trade Communication.

In a presentation you made this year about the mythology of science titled The Open Science Idea you made an unexpected statement: modern science grew out of theft. What is the nexus between cognition, communism, and theft inside your studies about the cultural history of science?

Since about 2010 I have had astrology as a hobby (yes, I know that is considered to be pseudoscience) and in modern astrology, there is planet Mercury that is responsible for all communication and information flow. That is because Mercury is an ancient god of language and speech, trade, travel, and theft. I thought that corresponds very well with Sci-Hub’s mission  and the common idea behind all these different activities is the idea of communication. We can find similar gods in other cultures and they are also gods of knowledge, and the god Mercury later developed as god of alchemy, astrology or the earliest forms of science. What we can see here is that science from its inception was connected to communication or to the idea of making something common. Hence private ownership of science by corporations is contradictory to science itself.

Is also worth noticing the high contrast amid the graphic assertions from Elsevier and Sci-Hub and what each one represents and stands for in regard to power and information. I’ve always wondered about Sci-Hub’s logo genesis, because in this case the graphisms go beyond the symbolic.

Alexandra Elbakyan: The history of Sci-Hub logo is less intriguing than it appears to be. When Sci-Hub started in 2011, its first logo was a simple Soviet hammer and sickle, and when the mouse pointer hovered upon it, a text showed up stating: “Communism is … common ownership of the means of production with free access to articles of consumption.”

I took this communism definition from a Wikipedia page and it fitted Sci-Hub very neatly. I was lucky because that definition of communism in Wikipedia was only in 2011—if you check earlier versions of Wiki articles about communism or later versions, they do not contain anything about “free access to articles.”

In 2014 I created a group in a social network to bring together Sci-Hub users (vk.com/sci_hub). First I used the Mendeleev table as a logo, after that it was an alchemical serpent. Later I decided to look up some pictures in Google with a key and books to use as a group logo, and found Raven sitting on books, holding a key. I loved that picture and immediately put it up as a logo on Sci-Hub’s social network group. Later in 2015, I decided to re-design Sci-Hub website and create a more current design, and used the group raven logo as a website logo.

Now that you discovered attractive routes to study information patterns and similarities through history, What do you think about the future of file-sharing consumption under severe .net regulations?

It is quite hard to predict the future, but I hope everything will be OK with Sci-Hub and it will have millions of daily visitors, not just half a million, and be recognized as a legal project.

We are in the middle of important changes at institutional, corporate and cultural levels in the context of Open Science and information access. In June of 2020 MIT ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new contract, and recently the University of California also renewed negotiations launching open access resolutions with the company. At the same time, many universities are inaugurating new protocols and initiatives to ensure wide and free access for academic resources. Do you consider the recent measures taken by academic organizations to be enough to abolish the paywall-economy?

As we can see paywalls are still there, and Sci-Hub is getting a lot of traffic. It could help if all—or most—science organizations stopped support of the paywall system, not just MIT and the University of California.

In May 2020 you were nominated for the John Maddox Prize by Fergus Kane after almost ten years of navigating heavily corporate waters. One curious detail about the award is that it has support from the international scientific journal Nature, Nature’s news team covered Sci-Hub’s legal battle in New York courts unfavorably. What is your approach to this nomination and how significant could it be for Sci-Hub’s potential?

I have seen many times in social networks how people say that I should get a Nobel Prize for Sci-Hub! So I expect a Nobel Prize, not just John Maddox, but of course the prize condition of Sci-Hub is just as unfair as its media condition. Sci-Hub has existed for 9 years so far, praised—and sometimes worshipped—by researchers all around the world: many people say that without Sci-Hub they would barely be able to do science, the project is extremely popular and considered to be revolutionary and… in the nine years of its existence it never got a single prize! That John Maddox nomination is a small step towards justice.

Can you elaborate the statement you made about Elon Musk’s Neuralink similarities with your Global Brain project developed back in 2010?

I’ve written a lot about neural chips in my blog and participated in conferences on that topic. Now Elon Musk is working on exactly the same things I wanted to work on and talked about 10 years ago. But there is not as much work as there is publicity: nothing is done yet, but everyone all over the world knows about that Neuralink—so when you talk about brain chips or brain-machine interfaces, people will immediately think that you’re somehow copy-cating Elon Musk, right? In fact, that topic of brain chips is quite old, attempts to develop and discuss something similar were made back in 2003 and earlier, it all started way before Elon Musk, but the advertisement works in such a way that most people think that is Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

A similar thing happened with Aaron Swartz. His name became so strongly associated with that “free science papers” topic that when people finally learned about Sci-Hub it was perceived as nothing but a shadow copy of Aaron Swartz work, while in reality Sci-Hub started and became popular before Aaron Swartz’s case.

Sci-Hub was a unique and extremely revolutionary project, but it became perceived as a shadow copycat just because it was given publicity only after the name of another person has been associated with the idea of freeing science by stealing research papers. In the beginning, it really felt as if Sci-Hub was working hard to free itself from that “copycat“ image. And I wonder whether something similar is being done with Neuralink. Elon Musk is very unappreciative of communism, as we can see from his twitter. So, I wonder if Sci-Hub was somehow the reason behind Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

What is your opinion about Elsevier’s Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI) founded together with other large publishers that proposes an analysis engine with biometric data and conspicuous usage patterns spyware, to prevent “cyber-attacks targeting institutions” and even hosting a presentation titled “The threat presented by Sci-Hub and other state-sponsored or individual bad actors”?

Actually I don’t know much about that surveillance scandal, I myself learned from Twitter about their plans, some people posted a link to that Times Higher Education article, I wanted to read it but it was not available in full—I had to register in their website. I did that, read the article and then re-posted it in Sci-Hub’s twitter. A well-known Open Access advocate Björn Brembs, who was mentioned in that article, has more on this topic in his twitter. I do not know him, but he often shares opinions in support of Sci-Hub.

You mentioned before that since 2010 you study astrology/modern astrology as a hobby. I would like to ask you to do a prediction about Sci-Hub (or Elsevier).

Ha! You’re the first journalist to ask such questions. Most questions are just duplicates: they ask how Sci-Hub works, why the science must be open, and what I’m going to do next. I cannot give a prediction for Elsevier, because for astrology, you need to know precisely, in minutes, time and place of birth—or, for websites and companies, time and place where they launched first. I can do it for Sci-Hub only. I actually looked into the Sci-Hub natal chart only in September 2017, when my friend’s ex-boyfriend, interested in astrology, contacted me and asked about Sci-Hub.

Sci-Hub has Mars in Cancer in its 10th house. What does that mean? 10th house (out of 12) is the middle of heavens. Mars is a god of war and god of heroes, so perhaps that’s why Sci-Hub is fighting the system. Usually Mars in Cancer is considered to be bad for Mars, because, as I read in one astrology source, Mars is a planet of energy, and inside Cancer that energy is hitting the shell and gets blocked, so the person’s energy is blocked, until sometimes that shell explodes. I thought that is a good metaphor of what Sci-Hub does: that is the service to breaking walls or shells where Science is currently incarcerated. On the other side, that is destiny: Sci-Hub gets blocked everywhere. You can also make a rough prediction, that since Mars is in Cancer, Mars is in a weak position, that usually signifies losers, or people who prefer to sit at home with their mother (Cancer is home/mother sign) than go fighting, because they think that will be smarter. Partially, that description fits Sci-Hub: so far it lost in all courts, because it was never participating—and that is a actually a smart thing to do, because fighting against such a huge corporation as Elsevier, with current law on their side, would obviously make no sense. But in astrology, as well as human life, is more complicated than just win or lose.

To compare, I have Mars in first degree. Aries (the strongest position that Aries can be) in 3rd house. The 3rd house in the human horoscope represents communication, studying and information—people often say that I’m too aggressive when communicating. Another feature I noticed in Sci-Hub’s horoscope is Neptune in the 6th house. That house represents work (not career) and Neptune is the planet of confusion (Neptune in astrology is opposed to Mercury, planet of rational knowledge). I noticed that no matter how much I explain how Sci-Hub works, still after several years people are very confused about it.

There is the 12th house in the human horoscope that represents death and life outcomes, Sci-Hub has the Sun and Venus here, they both bring luck and good fortune. So I hope the outcome of Sci-Hub will be better!

In September of 2020 the http://sci-hub.tw domain was blocked under a Website Infringement Complaints lawsuit by Elsevier using legal representation from Beijing. Can you explain the reasons behind this worldwide block and the suspicious follow-up appearance of fake look-alike Sci-Hub domains?

I have doubts about the real reason for the Elsevier lawsuit. Why? Well, I bought the .tw domain a few years ago from one Russian Internet company and since then, sci-hub.tw was never blocked, while other domains (Sci-Hub had a lot of them) did not live long, a couple of months or so. But the .tw domain was miraculously resilient to this. I was thinking, perhaps Chinese government (back then I did not know about the conflict between mainland China and Taiwan) was silently supporting Sci-Hub because of communist ideas?… What prevented Elsevier from seizing the .tw domain, just like they did with all other domains? (Another resilient domain is .se but Pirate Party in Sweden is backing it up).

When sci-hub.tw suddenly got blocked in September, I contacted that Russian company asking them what happened, because I had no letters from the domain registrar in my mailbox that are usually sent before the domain gets blocked. They took a long pause and then responded that they had asked the company where the .tw domain was registered, but they were silent and did not reply. I asked whether I can ask them myself, and they gave me an email. I sent a letter on 29 September, but then already I felt something was not clear here. The company responded the next day, very shortly, ‘we have sent you the document, please check, thanks’ I asked whether they could send me the document again because I received nothing! After 10 days, they finally responded with a document, explaining that there was a lawsuit filed by Elsevier (I posted that on Sci-Hub Twitter).

Then it popped up. sci-hub.tw was a very popular domain, it popped up first in Google search results, 45% of Sci-Hub users were coming from Google and other search engines (now percentage of search traffic is only 22%) but after it got blocked, it disappeared and instead, some suspicious ‘Sci-Hub’ websites started to appear first in Google (I also posted about that on Twitter)

By suspicious ‘Sci-Hub’ websites I mean scihub.wikicn.top, sci-hub.tf, sci-hub.ren, sci-hub.shop, and sci-hub.scihubtw.tw. These websites are actually the same, and they worked as a proxy to Sci-Hub, so they receive request from the users, redirect it to real Sci-Hub website (using some non-blocked Sci-Hub address) and give user the response, hiding/masking the address of real Sci-Hub. Actually, such websites can, in theory, have good goals, just to unblock Sci-Hub in those places where access to real Sci-Hub is blocked, for example, scihub.unblockit.top or scihub.unblockit.lat work the same way – but we can easily see these as generic services to unblock various blocked websites.

In the case of the websites mentioned above, the first time I encountered this was when one of the Sci-Hub domains was blocked in Russia. In such cases I usually add a new Sci-Hub domain for Russian users to work. After .se was blocked in Russia back in 2019, I quickly added sci-hub.st (if I remember correctly) as a replacement but then I noticed, that surprisingly, instead of this new domain published by me, people promoted some ‘sci-hub.ltd’ website. I opened it and it worked as a proxy, and I really did not like that, also because .ltd domain means ‘limited’ and Sci-Hub should not be limited. I found their IP address and configured Sci-Hub, so that when Sci-Hub is accessed though sci-hub.ltd proxy, it shows the REAL Sci-Hub addresses that people can use instead.

After I did that, the sci-hub.ltd author contacted me, and instead of providing some good reason for his .ltd website, such as “we want to provide access to Sci-Hub where real addresses are blocked” mumbled something about promoting Sci-Hub through this domain!

Then coronavirus happened and I forgot about this, but this September it all resurfaced as a replacement for the .tw website worldwide. These websites are adding advertisements while real Sci-Hub has no advertisements. They use suspicious domains such as ‘shop’ or ‘tf’ which reads as ‘thief’. Just like previously, I replaced their content with real Sci-Hub addresses (.st .se and .do) and they were aggressively fighting it! They tried using multiple proxies to hide their IP, they were desperately replacing and removing real Sci-Hub addresses from my message, they changed my email (!) on my About page (sci-hub.do/alexandra) to some another email registered at 163.com, and later they removed link to my page completely. If they had good intentions, just to unblock Sci-Hub, they could SIMPLY provide real Sci-Hub addresses in the left menu, with an explanation that they are only a proxy to help people when Sci-Hub is inaccessible by real addresses. They did nothing, instead they started to redirect to some Sci-Hub database mirror instead, and for new articles they put a completely fake “proxy search” page, while in fact it does not search anything, is just an imitation of the real Sci-Hub.

I really suspect that these websites are kind of man-in-the-middle attack from publishers (or somebody else!), who are providing fake Sci-Hub websites instead of the real one, to manipulate or control Sci-Hub’s image. But they could not do this with the.tw domain live, they needed to block it in order to replace Sci-Hub with their fake Sci-Hub they can control. This happened soon after I posted “About me” information on Sci-Hub for everyone to read. See? Somebody might want to prevent such information from being posted, so they need a controlled Sci-Hub, so there will be no “About me” or “about Sci-Hub” pages that can provide true facts about Sci-Hub. Media is controlled, but I could post my story on Sci-Hub, and everyone respects Sci-Hub… they want to block this opportunity. Additionally, simple advertisements already create a negative impression of Sci-Hub as some shady website, while real Sci-Hub does not rely on advertisements.

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Co-edited by Serafin Dinges.

Hoçâ Cové-Mbede is a writer, graphic designer and cultural vector, who focuses on interviews-as-templates to explore topics fueled by Silicon Valley criticism, guerilla media, surveillance aesthetics and technology + information. C-M’s work has been featured on platforms such as the Institute of Network Cultures, The Wrong Biennale, TTT in Art & Science, The Quietus and Metal Magazine.

Alexandra Elbakyan is a web developer and a researcher focused in neuro and cognitive sciences, Open Access/Science and theories of knowledge, with a bachelor degree in Computer Technology and master’s degree in Linguistics from the Saint-Petersburg State University in Russia. Elbakyan is the founder of Sci-Hub, the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to millions research papers.

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

Last week, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  This week, Jennifer Garcon shows how the long marriage between Haitian politics and Haitian radio has endured, despite multiple and conflicting alliances, high drama, and attacks from all sides. The powerful and the powerless have even in their enmity presumed that if they could harness radio’s power they would ascend to political power. Her story recounts one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life. Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

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On January 23, 1973, Jean-Claude Duvalier, only 18 months into his life-long appointment, received a call that threatened to profoundly destabilize his nascent presidency. On the other end was Clinton E. Knox, a close political ally and advisor, who also happened to be the US Ambassador to Haiti. Knox, Jean-Claude was informed, along with US consul general Ward Christensen were being held hostage at a residence just outside of Port-au-Prince. To secure the safe return of two high-ranking US officials, the captors demanded the release of political prisoners, a hefty ransom, and a plane to facilitate their escape. The kidnappers “meant business,” reported The Washington Post, Times Herald on Jan 26, 1973, and during the call, Knox warned Jean-Claude of the severity of the situation, that they ”threatened to blow my head off, if they didn’t get what they wanted.”

Just hours before, Knox, boasting of Haiti’s improved political situation, told a Miami Herald reporter that, “everything [was] calm.” Since Francois Duvalier’s death in 1971, the new president had been aggressively courting international aid. In a marked departure from his father’s political rhetoric, Jean-Claude openly declared his intention to lessen authoritarian conditions in Haiti. He called for the organization of new political parties and the reestablishment of a “freer” press. Thanks to Knox, millions in international and humanitarian aid–previously suspended because of Francois’s long history of human rights abuses– began pouring into the country. In truth, Jean-Claude never intended to fully democratize Haitian society, he instead hoped that a few small concessions would help him to secure the benefits of appearing to do so. But soon, his new “liberal policies” allowed for the public expression of widespread discontent and opposition that had long festered just beneath the surface.

Since Francois Duvalier’s 1957 election, Haiti’s government had systematically and strategically cut off avenues of civic participation in political life. During his 14-year rule, Francois co-opted any existing institutions that could oppose his consolidation of power, including the church, the army, and the press. This was a stark contrast to the political campaign season that led to his election, wherein aspiring political figures frequently made impassioned radio speeches in the hopes of courting new supporters. Over the airwaves, presidential hopeful Daniel Fignole sometimes summoned his woulo konmpresè, a popular force of over 10,000 supporters to the street in protest. Duvalier shaped his Noirist ideology in part via public discourse over the airwaves.  However, after taking power, he closed off these avenues of political engagement. By limiting the flow of information, the regime fostered social alienation and mistrust amongst different sectors of the population. 

The vibrant political debates that characterized the 1940s and 1950s Haitian media were replaced with round-the-clock pro-government propaganda. Nearly all independent radio stations and newspapers were shuttered, leaving only pro-Duvalier stations, like La Voix de la Révolution Duvalieriste, and papers like newspapers Le Nouveau Monde and Panorama. When, in 1971, a gravely ill Francois announced the transfer of the presidency to his politically inexperienced 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude, there were no national outlets for citizens to register their resistance. However, many anticipated that the death of Papa Doc would create a political vacuum too large for his son to fill. This possibility inspired new anti-government efforts.

At 4 pm on January 23, as he was leaving his office in Port-au-Prince, Ambassador Knox was accosted and forced into an unmarked sedan. He was driven to his home just outside the city. The kidnappers, brandishing a small arsenal, demanded an audience with the young president. Instead, and in a breach of protocol, Knox contacted the consul general and lured him to the residence, where he too was taken hostage. Two hours later, Jean-Claude Duvalier received the distressing call. 

The young president found himself in a dire situation, given his long-regarded political disinterest. Both critics and supporters of the Duvalier regime believed he would be too weak and ineffectual to hold power. Up until then, Duvalier’s reliance on loyal old guard Duvalierists and his close relationship with Knox had sustained his presidency.  Encouraged by the prospect of millions in international aid, Jean-Claude began distancing himself from the violence of his father’s regime. Jean-Claudisme would tolerate criticism, promote free speech, embrace dissent and welcome repatriating exiles.  As Knox frequently argued, Jean-Claude had “embarked on a course diametrically opposed to the one [Francois Duvalier] pursued.” 

The 1973 kidnapping would be the first public reckoning for the new regime; the first open challenge to Jean-Claude’s political legitimacy. The kidnappers, anti-government leftists, demanded the immediate release of 31 political prisoners, safe passage out of the country, and $100,000 ransom. A final demand would not materialize until the early morning on January 24. After hours of negotiations with Duvalier’s administration, the kidnappers tacked on one last demand; that the details of the kidnappers be shared with Haitian citizens via a national radio broadcast. In defiance of the advice of his father’s most trusted advisers, and to save Knox’s life, Jean-Claude acquiesced. 

At approximately 10am on January 24, French Ambassador Bernard Dorin interrupted existing radio programming with a special announcement: Ambassador Clinton Knox had been kidnapped and held captive by three anti-government rebels. To secure his release the Haitian government had agreed to release 12 political prisoners, pay $70,000 US dollars in ransom, and charter an aircraft to transport the kidnappers and released prisoners to exile in Mexico. 

By conceding, Jean-Claude acted outside of the existing political framework set in place by his father. The Haitian public had come to expect consistency in political culture; any and all opposition was to be immediately crushed. That morning the airwaves carried the news of the dictatorship’s fragility to listeners far and wide. On the heels of the unprecedented announcement, Radio Haïti-Inter began reporting on the kidnapping developments to audiences around the nation.  When Jean L. Dominique, a former agronomist, went on-air, it was the first time since 1957 that domestic news was transmitted without censorship. Listeners were now given unfettered access. Dominique and co-anchor Marcus Garcia were the first reporters to arrive at the Knox’s residence, while he, Ward, and the kidnappers were still inside. Radio Haiti journalists described the surreal scene in detail, and conducted interviews with newly released political prisoners. When Knox finally emerged, listeners were privy to his fragile state, he appeared intoxicated and was clutching a bottle of rum; a stark contrast to his strongman image. When the kidnappers safely boarded an Air-Haiti plane bound for Mexico City, where they were promised (and granted) asylum, Dominique reported from the runway. For the listening public, the scene was simply remarkable.

The broadcast would undoubtedly be the most politically consequential of the kidnappers’ demands. It would mean that, for the first time of Jean-Claude’s young presidency, and for the first time in decades, news of the dictatorship’s fragility and fallibility would reach the entire Haitian populace.  Almost immediately, one journalist noted a change in the country, noting in  “Haiti: Trouble Ahead in Latin America in February 1973 that, when Jean-Claude conceded to the kidnapper’s demands, “Haitians finally realized that Papa Doc was gone forever” (Special Collection and University Archives, Rutgers University, Robert J. Alexander Papers, [MC974.1 Box 3]).

Citizens awoke to find themselves now living in a Haiti where anti-government resistance could succeed. In Isle of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean, Alejandra Bronfman argues that, “as listeners understood themselves to be listening along with others,” new possibilities for social and political life were revealed. For Haitian citizens living under the yoke of an authoritarian government, radio listening became a way to engage in politics and reclaim political agency in defiance of government overreach and repression. Widely accessible radio receivers could bridge areas otherwise geographically disconnected from urban, and often political, centers. Moreover, uncensored kidnapping coverage transformed Haiti’s political arena by radically changing popular ideas of what kinds of resistance were possible. 

In the aftermath of the kidnapping, Jean-Claude moved quickly to plug the political vacuum that has emerged in the wake of the kidnapping. He was determined to change popular memory of the event. Haitian newspapers began to praise Duvalier’s political acumen in saving the life of two US officials.  A mass rally was organized two days later to celebrate the President’s achievement. There, Jean-Claude gave his first ever public speech entirely in Haitian Kreyòl. “Little Duvalier,” he said, “would never hesitate to crush two or three vagabonds if he wanted to.” Addressing any would-be imitators, he warned, “I will be waiting for them with a big coco macaque.”

As the government tried to hold onto power, new journalists and broadcasters were increasingly singled out by the administration. In 1980, a press crackdown led to the arrest of over 100 independent print and radio journalists. Despite government repression, radio broadcasting has been credited with the eventual ouster of Jean-Claude in 1986. The Knox Kidnapping was an early moment that signaled the possibility of a political alternative to Duvalierism. Even Knox agreed. Years later, he’d describe the ordeal as “one the most amazing things to happen in [Haiti] [“Envoy Relates Haitian Rebel Death Threats.” The Washington Post, Times Herald, Jan 26, 1973].

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Featured Image: Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas return to Haiti in from exile in 1986 after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, met by 60,000 plus people. Radio Haiti Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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Jennifer Garcon is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship. Garcon instructs on the use of digital tools, methods, and literacies via tutorials and one-on-one consultations and provides project management and infrastructural support that helps faculty, students, and staff build innovative and sustainable digital projects. She collaborates closely with Penn and Philadelphia-area partners to develop and expand sustainable models for the care of vulnerable collections of data. Garcon received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Miami, an MA in English and American Literatures from Hunter College, a BA in English Literature and Cultures from Brown University. Her academic research interests include radio broadcasting, populist political rhetoric, and grassroots social movement in the Cold War Caribbean. Since 2016, she’s been a research associate with the Library of Congress’s Radio Preservation Task Force.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Radio de Acción: Violent Circuits, Contentious Voices: Caribbean Radio Histories–Alejandra Bronfman

Kawa: Rediscovering Indigeneity in China via Reggae–Junting Huang

SO! Reads: Tsitsi Jaji’s Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity–Celeste Day Moore

Maya Man is a young artist, dancer and technologist from New York. Utilising her background in coding and computer science, she makes projects that enhance and expand online experiences. Her work incorporates themes of joy, nostalgia and curiosity all at once, often leaning on early internet aesthetics while projecting a vision of embodied technological bodies into the future.

Maya Man’s personal website (2021). Click to explore.

Maya’s art excites me because it celebrates the possibilities that open up when people and machines work together, and avoids falling into naiveté over the possible risks of such collaboration. I hope more people recognise the potential her works have to change our relationship to the internet and AI. My aim here is to show and discuss a few key works, and invite you to explore Man’s projects yourself, as they are best when experienced first-hand.

Moving with the Machine

“PoseNet Sketchbook” was the first Maya Man artwork I saw online. It is made with a modified algorithm sourced on tensorflow.js. PoseNet tracks a moving body and creates a variety of distorted moving images based on the user’s movements. When I saw the work, I immediately thought of Myron Krueger’s first experiments with immersive environments in the 1970s, like VIDEOPLACE, developed in the 1970s and 1980s.

One of many PoseNet experiments

Still from YouTube video showing one of Krueger’s VIDEOPLACE experiments (1985).

Both works show an interest in tracking and modifying the movements of a body. However, I thought Maya’s work facilitated a more intimate relationship between the participant and the technology capturing their movements. Since the 1970s, our understanding of developing everyday technologies deepened, and various machines entered our daily lives and the very fabric of societies. This shift irreversibly affected how we interact with everyday technologies, and influences the level on which we acknowledge or bypass their existence and visibility.

In Kruger’s immersive environments, the experiences were communal, new and exciting, all-encompassing for as long as participants interacted with the meticulously-built environment. Man’s work, on the other hand, disenchants the spectacle of technological possibility and represents the inseparability of our entanglements with the machine. “PoseNet Sketchbook” exists in multiple places at once, on computer screens of individual users as their shapes shift, distort and layer. The miracle of endless possibility is gone – now, we explore what to do with what remains. Each movement is like a brushstroke, and the effect lasts for as long as the browser tab is open. There is something beautiful and pure in this temporary interaction.

Some of Maya Man’s PoseNet experiments, available to try (click on image).

An intimate staring contest

The idea of close encounters with daily technologies appears in Maya’s other works, establishing itself as a theme. The screens of users are their primary mode of exhibition and existence. Take, for instance, “Glance Back,” a Google Chrome extension that captures the webcam image from a device once a day and prompts the user to record what they were thinking about at that moment.

This process makes visible the data collection that already occurs in search engines and on other platforms that facilitate our online activity. While the browser extension asking you about your thoughts might be jarring to some, it is simply a more streamlined and direct cousin of algorithms that track and predict our actions. “Glance Back” adds nuance to these relations. It acts as a personal diary and prompts personal interest in the performing machine. Unlike other modes of online surveillance, “Glance Back” operates under the agency and consent of the user. Maya explains on the project’s website: “It’s important to note that all of the photos are saved to your browser’s local storage. This means that they never leave your machine. This is a collection shared purely between you and your computer.”

To me, “Glance Back” provides an opportunity to acknowledge the physical and emotional closeness between ourselves and our machines, especially now, when we use them to work, relax, but also socialise with other internet users (our friends and family). Or, more specifically, “Glance Back” allows users to decide whether or not they wish to share such personal data with the extension. Choosing to download it can be an act of making visible the personal connections many of us already have with our devices. However, can it lead to acknowledging this relationship might be toxic? I am not sure. I would love to see Maya engage with the concept of surveillance capitalism and the attention economy further in her practice.

What are you willing to share?

What happens when we willingly share personal information online? A few things. We begin building an archive of feelings and reflections; a sporadic, erratic digitised diary. We hope somebody out there listens, interacts, relates. We might even share things online that we are unwilling to communicate face-to-face. However, doing this invites unwanted attention too, and provides a source that others can use in malicious ways in the future.

Using code as her medium, Maya reinterprets Madeleine’s large file of personal data she’d shared with the artist. Maya built a website that shows notes from Madeleine’s iPhone. What emerges is an intimate portrait of a young woman recording significant, useful and introspective information over the years. For personal use, until now. Looking at the website, I feel like an intruder, even though I am aware she shared the data willingly. Still, it feels too personal to be accessed by just anybody.

Madeleine’s Notes.

I cannot help but keep swiping and reading note after note, and the blue skies in the background add to the whimsical, otherworldly feeling the website evokes. Can this be a modern-day confessional, embedded in code and designed to fit a specific aesthetic, a millennial nostalgic about websites they grew up visiting? I am conflicted, but I keep looking. I realise that this project shows online activity does not have to be so heavily curated. Madeleines.notes and Glance Back take away the users’ ability to select, edit and filter content that reflects who they are. Why not give that agency away? To think how many hours I’ve spent thinking about how to present myself online. I am sick of it now, like many others. I want to refuse to participate in the spectacle, but I am unsure how. Is there an alternative way of relating to social networks? I see Maya’s work can be a stepping stone towards a more balanced and healthy relationship between our actual selves and our virtual/online extensions.

Digital Literacy Now

Maya’s presence online takes many forms, but always carries an interest in embodying compassion and care through machine learning and code. I consider her website to be an artwork in and of itself, a source for artworks and education; points of departure. The Racial Justice Bookshelf needs to be mentioned here. It is a resource made to make it easier to buy anti-racist books from black-owned businesses in the US. Then there is are.na; Maya’s scrapbook of inspiration and information, an ever-growing archive of online happenings and references.

The difficult part is this: Maya’s work does require quite a high level of digital/internet literacy. In the beginning, I struggled to understand how are.na or GitHub even work. However, when I moved past confusion, I started to appreciate and see the exciting potential of alternative platforms, creative coding, and the artistic expression they allow.

“Pretty Machines” on Man’s are.na

Maya speaks openly about her passion for computers and coding, and her interest in facilitating new interactions between bodies and everyday technologies they already encounter and absorb. The future of online content can be more transparent and genuine, based less on the logic of the attention economy and more on the needs and interests of individual users, who come together to experience and share their embodied technological selves. It starts with looking back at the machine that is already watching.

In the early morning of April 14th, 2021, the four editors of the journal DOXA were arrested by Russian authorities. Armen Aramyan, Natasha Tyshkevich, Volodya Metelkin and Alla Gutnikova appeared in court later that day. The purpose of the charges were made clear by the judge – to silence critics – who ordered the editors to house arrest and has restricted them from all electronic communication.

DOXA is a Russian student-run popular journal dedicated to critiques of the modern university. They have served as a clearinghouse for disseminating radical philosophy, especially feminist, Marxist, and anarchist voices. It also hosts editorials about the sprawling Russian university system, highlights student protests, and organizes solidarity for students harassed for speaking out.

The charges against the editors are preposterous. DOXA had posted a rather innocent video urging others to protest without fear and that expelling students for political reasons was unlawful. In response, the Russian communications authority Roskomnadzor demanded they remove the video. DOXA complied and removed the video. Even then, the editors were charged under Article 151.2 of Russian law (“involvement of youth in activities that can be harmful to them”).

Perhaps there is some honor to being charged with the same crime as Socrates? Yet it is remarkable to suggest that university students need protection from DOXA. Only one who uses education to manufacture obedience outlaws critical thinking as self-harm. And it is no coincidence that laws like these are also used against social critics, queers, and migrants.

The Institute of Network Cultures urges all charges to be dropped against the DOXA editors and that all harassment of students immediately cease.

More information:

1) https://doxajournal.ru/ (in Russian)

2) Chronology of Events (in English) https://open-assembly.calarts.edu/index.php/2021/04/14/doxa-chronology-of-events/

3) News report on the Amnesty site: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/04/russia-police-searches-at-student-magazine-are-a-new-low-for-press-freedom/

4) The Moscow Times: Russian Student Journalists Face Jail Over Navalny Protest Video https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/04/14/russian-student-journalists-face-jail-over-navalny-protest-video-a73585

The information above has, in part, been collected by ‘Dark Deleuze’ Andrew Culp, now teaching at Calarts/LA. Please sign his petition. He writes: