Resource
The surface is not the place for nuance. If we allow ourselves to believe this then we resign ourselves the worst it has in store. We shirk the great responsibility of imagining it otherwise and facing up to its exorbitant demand for our attention, our work, our way of life.
It is true that on the surface scholarship is open to all forms of attack. Many times it seems impossible to have a truly open forum without being besieged by armies of bots and trolls. It is a space that invites and rewards the sharpest wits and the dullest polemics, whatever enflames the commentary and stokes the metrics of engagement.
We may approach this is a question of surface tension, of finding the right tensility of reference and context so that nodes of commentary are propelled toward each other more by the weight of their discrete citations. We may imagine a generative web of citation tuned to to promote nuanced, multifaceted debate. We may weave curricula from these webs , reticulae with which one may gather credentials simply by casting a line, following a current or getting lost in the vortices of a newly unflattened depth. Students and colleagues may be required to follow the long circuitous route, but strangers and amateurs may also collide along the way like particles floating freely in the void, producing a new swerve that alters the trajectory of future passage.1
We may find ways to profit mutually from this work while ensuring that if the contract becomes stifling, it may be dissolved without jeopardizing the availability of property developed in the spirit of collaboration. The may reserve the right to divert new tributaries without fear that our resources will stagnate and dry up when our contributions are suddenly dammed behind another paywall.
Resurfacing the substrates of our collective memory in a manner that reinforces the structural and ethical integrity of discussion and debate requires an astonishing amount of maintenance work. heavily trafficked surfaces need to be relaminated and repolished perpetually, preferably by hand, and we may ensure that this more custodial labor is compensated, perhaps even more so than the work of authorship, creation, or publication.
we may also learn to refactor our stacks ourselves, to optimize the algorithms that control the flow of surface traffic. For open as it may seem, there will never be any shortage of detours and bottlenecks on the surface so long as our ideas about it remain connected something resembling a grid. If nothing else, we may find in the surface a mirror reflecting our ideologies and a screen on which to project them above us like so many constellations in the planetarium of the mind.2
Footnotes
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Cf. Roman poet Lucretius’ and his theory of the ‘clinamen’ (De Rerum Natura). Also the popular theme of navigation as cybernetics that has captivated thinkers so many formative thinkers of ‘the Web’ (Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, to name just a few). ↩
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Cf. Walter Benjamin’s theory of the ‘constellation’ as ‘dialectical image’ developed throughout his writings and compiled most extensively in the Arcades Project Convolute K: Theory of Knowledge (Arcades Project). See also Adorno’s frequent interrogations of this theory (mostly in their correspondence) ↩