Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Håkan Geijer (hakan_geijer@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-May-2025 00:21:48 JST Håkan Geijer

   Contentious and hostile opinion, but anarchists who are creating educational material or propaganda (books, zines, podcasts, etc.) and don't make all of it free and easily accessible to everyone are doing something very wrong.

   There are many reasons, but one that really gets my goat is that there is, for better or worse, a clear scene or social milieu around the discussion of new and relevant topics. By not making it possible for everyone to participate, people are being kept out of "the room" and are less able to be "part of the conversation." Charging for access to topical material gatekeeps who else might be allowed to contribute to the discussion. It implicitly privileges those already in the know.

   We want our ideas to spread, to be built upon, to replicate and evolve. Does keeping our ideas behind a paywall help with this?

   • Embed this notice
     Håkan Geijer (hakan_geijer@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-May-2025 00:33:42 JST Håkan Geijer

     in reply to

     • Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝

     @richpuchalsky Yeah, my biggest gripe is publishers who don't even sneakily upload everything to Anna's Archive or IA even if they don't make downloads directly accessible from their website. It's just some bytes! They're infinitely replicable! It costs you nothing!

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ (richpuchalsky@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-May-2025 00:33:43 JST Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝

     in reply to

     @hakan_geijer

     For my "actual job" I do projects where I help to create databases of pollution and corporate violation data, and I won't do a project where the data aren't publicly accessible. There can be a "get the whole database at once" level of access for paying institutions to support the project, but there has to be at least also a base level of public, free Web access.

     Anarchist projects should be even more so.

   • Embed this notice
     Sunflower Björnskalle 🌻 (apodoxus@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 01-May-2025 01:24:13 JST Sunflower Björnskalle 🌻

     in reply to

     @hakan_geijer This just seems obvious to me. Is this really controversial or maybe do specific people you're referring to just suck balls?

   • Embed this notice
     Håkan Geijer (hakan_geijer@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-May-2025 01:24:13 JST Håkan Geijer

     in reply to

     • Sunflower Björnskalle 🌻

     @apodoxus It's a recurrent phenomenon, like making content gated for patrons, bougie zines that can only be bought, and a bunch of publishers of books in many languages not having their books on various archive sites.

   • Embed this notice
     sidereal (sidereal@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-May-2025 03:49:26 JST sidereal

     in reply to

     @hakan_geijer A big part of why I’m an anarchist is when I was younger and first getting into politics it was like:

     “Wanna learn about capitalist politics? Gotta buy all these expensive textbooks, hoss.”

     vs.

     “Wanna learn about anarchism? Here, it’s all free on the internet because we are engaging in a serious project to improve the entire world.”

   • Embed this notice
     Abolisyonista (abolisyonista@ni.hil.ist)'s status on Thursday, 01-May-2025 14:55:33 JST Abolisyonista

     in reply to

     @hakan_geijer Hated a guy that kept doing this, he's the most famous anarchist from the Philippines too, Bas Umali. He'd keep gatekeeping anarchism in many other ways too. Unfortunate that Philippine anarchism is still quite associated with him.

   • Embed this notice
     🏴 (liegeof@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 30-May-2025 18:00:30 JST 🏴

     in reply to

     @hakan_geijer

     Yeah. afaict, Antipolitka's book-zine is paywalled; when I asked one of the (many) contributors, they gave me the whole copy for free immediately. So harm no foul? But also we shouldn't have to ask and/or know folks, especially since its research/analysis of Balkan nationalism is *extremely* topical/relevant w.r.t. the Russian invasion of Ukraine (should be free because of that, not despite).

     https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1648