Taylor R. Genovese is a PhD student in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program at Arizona State University. He has a BA and an MA in Anthropology and is interested in radical (techno)politics, the anthropology of outer space, utopian futures, and multimodal ethnography. He is also a blogger at Footnotes (http://footnotesblog.com/ ), a new anthropology group blog dedicated to the practice of being multimodal, anticolonial, and iconoclastic. More at: http://taylorgenovese.com/  and on Twitter @trgenovese –RA

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Ryan A: Hey, remember that time when you posted on twitter about the AAA takedown notice? What did you think about that notice?

Taylor G: [laughs] You know, that tweet is a good lesson for academics to never underestimate what kinds of social media content will go viral. When I reached 150 retweets, I was pretty shocked. When I reached 750, I was just laughing to myself at the never-ending notifications. When it reached 1,700 retweets and 4,100 likes, I was fairly certain the AAA was going to order its hit squad after me at the annual meeting.

But I think there is a valid reason why my rather unnuanced, iconoclastic snark ended up striking such a nerve in this era of academic precarity: people are feeling the corporate noose tighten ever quicker around the neck of our universities. The wealth disparity between administrators and, not only professors, but the bulk of academia—untenured, precarious lecturers and graduate students—mirror the enormous disparity between large academic publishers and the scholars that provide them unpaid labor in the form of writing manuscripts, reviewing them, and serving on editorial and advisory boards.

To me, the AAA notice unfortunately signaled to the member base that the organization was going to be siding with the large, exploitative journal corporations rather than its membership. One sentence in particular irked me: “AAA has put the author agreement in place to protect authors, and to prevent unauthorized or inappropriate usage.” Exactly from whom is the author being protected? Those pesky hustlers on the street peddling academic articles? (“No thanks, Bob, I’ve read enough bootlegged anthropology articles about Papua New Guinea; let me know when you get something multispecies in!”) I actually think most of us would be thrilled to find that our articles were being printed out and hungrily consumed by a general audience! After all, we’re not being paid by the publishers to write them.

Instead, the second part of the statement shows what’s really going on. The “unauthorized or inappropriate usage” of our writing ends up undermining the incredibly high institutional access fees that the journal publishers charge; including the $20-40 single-use charges it imposes on independent scholars. As the author, we never see any of that money. Does the AAA see any of that money? At least a large portion of it goes directly to the large journal publishers themselves.

As I said in my original tweet, the CEO of Wiley makes over $4 million year. Erik Engstom, the CEO of the Relx Group, which used to be Elsevier, makes £10.5 million a year. That’s $14 million. Insanity!

Even if you aren’t the type to hum The Internationale in your sleep before throwing Molotovs in the street, I think you can appreciate the incredibly unjust theft that is happening in academic publishing.

RA: So I hear you have a new article you’re working on that’s about neoliberalism, publishing, and open access. Are you telling me that open access isn’t going to save us from the perils of corporate publishing models?

TG: Right, so, actually that tweet brought a colleague of mine, A.M. Stapp at Pierce College, as well as Joseph M. Gabriel at Florida State University, together to begin to collaborate on this paper in which we’re nearly finished.

Essentially, what we are arguing is that the platform of open-access publishing is actually more of a landscape in which both neoliberal and radical actors are able to interact. We discuss this through the tragic story of hacktivist Aaron Swartz, who was charged in 2011 with 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and 2 counts of wire fraud for downloading millions of documents from JSTOR on his authorized MIT account. Swartz hung himself at the age of 26 rather than face the $1 million in fines and 50 years of imprisonment that the federal government was expected to sentence him with.

In our paper, we ask: why was the U.S. so eager to punish Aaron with such brutality? Aaron’s own justification for downloading those articles was the freedom of information and the open spread of knowledge. We argue that today, there seems to be a dialectic between openness and monopolization emerging within neoliberal discourse—where on one side stands the Old Guard of gatekeepers and on the other side stands Aaron, hacktivism, and open-access culture more broadly. I don’t want to give too much of the paper away yet—since it is a transforming, collaborative project—but what we argue is that the types of forces that Aaron dedicated his life to fighting are now some of the strongest proponents of an open-access model—this is what Nick Srnicek has called “platform capitalism.”

The best examples of this, especially in reference to your question, are academic social networks like Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Both of these corporations present themselves as champions of open-access and the sharing of knowledge, but are actually rather nefarious in the ways in which they monetize the work of scholars for capital gains. In the case of Academia.edu, they even attempt to add legitimacy by using the .edu domain name, when in actuality the company is run by venture capitalists, not by an academic institution. And now, they are offering “premium memberships” in an attempt to further profit off our data and writing.

So this is the complex landscape of open-access. We need to be critical of all these projects rather than expect them to be egalitarian by default just because they endorse an open-access approach—some of those that were eager to see Aaron Swartz imprisoned are now promulgating, and hoping to twist and profit off of, his ideals.

RA: What about viable alternatives? Not just new ideas that sound a little better, but projects that can actually open up new ways of doing this publishing thing. Do you think something like SocArXiv, for example, has the potential to be transformative here?

TG: I think projects like SocArXiv, run by the Open Science Framework—which, I might add, was set up by academic institutions and research librarians, not venture capitalists—is a step in the right direction. The so-called “hard sciences” have been utilizing arXiv to share their research for a long time; and, actually, the scientists that I have spoken to have said that they use arXiv almost exclusively to keep up with research and collaborate with each other—the actual journal articles, which come out months later, are merely used for CV purposes.

In my view, the only way forward with academic publishing is open-access, but it must be an open-access that is controlled democratically. SocArXiv is beginning to do that; their steering committee consists of all academics, although I think they should include adjuncts and graduate students on their committee as well. The next step, I think, is to leverage large academic journals to tear down their paywalls. This task, of course, is enormous and complex. In the meantime, we need to think of ways to collectively use our academic freedom to resist the corporate hold on academic journals and our organizations. We should continue publishing our pre-prints on non-corporate, open-access sites and promote only those preprints which are publically accessible. When possible, we should try to submit more of our research to open-access journals. We should organize and lobby our academic organizations, which are supposed to advocate for us, to battle against the corporatization of publishing.

And on a more important micro scale, we, as anthropologists, should collaborate on projects more. Perhaps this is changing, but anthropologists have tended to approach publishing as a solitary process and single-authored papers/books are the norm. To change the publishing model to something more collaborative and democratic requires a change in the mode in which we approach research itself. We must all become multimodal. We need to legitimize—in the eyes of admission and tenure committees—blogs, social media, drawing, photography, soundscapes, filmmaking. We need to write, to make, to create, to play collaboratively. We also need to become accessible to the public and our participants.

RA: All of this sounds good to me! Including the push for more collaborative writing and publishing. But we’re slow to change. The single-authored book or article reigns. The mathematicians (and other hard scientists) are way ahead of us on this, including how they use platforms like ArXiv. It seems we have call after call of people saying we need to rethink all of this, engage with broader publics, and open up how we publish. But not much happens. One of the biggest challenges, I think, is getting people interested. Is it just apathy? Is publishing a boring issue? Are people just too busy?

TG: Apathy might be part of it, but if I can get a little indignant and provocative, I think a majority of it is connected with cowardice, especially from senior, tenured faculty; and this includes some faculty that claim to be on the side of those disadvantaged by the publishing status quo. I have experienced this first hand in the publishing realm from academics I truly respected and thought were allies who ended up completely turning their backs on junior faculty and/or graduate students in order to side with dominant, abusive power structures and the cronies that latch on to them. I’m sure many have experienced this kind of betrayal and lack of reflexivity throughout the academy. I think David Graeber said it best in his tweet: “Academia is full of people who confuse cowardice and maturity.”

Furthermore, the widespread cowardice in academia must also be viewed in an intersectional manner. These issues are tendril-like—creeping into and intertwining with issues like publishing, working conditions, racism, sexism, continued colonialism, bullying, etc. It’s a problem that requires an engagement with a broader politics, as you say. However, in order to do this, we need to disrupt the system of hierarchy that enables bullies and abusers to rise to positions of power, thereby enabling cowardice to become the status-quo. In general, as the precariat, we need to collectively organize against academia’s corruption and our mistreatment within that system. This call is far from novel: PrecAnthro is doing good transnationalist work, Eli Thorkelson has called for a Union for Job Seekers, secondary education teachers are engaging in wildcat strikes throughout multiple states, and graduate student unions are collectively bargaining and striking against this robust neoliberal cowardice. I believe a uniquely 21st century syndicalism may be forming, thanks in part to social media and virtual solidarity, but only time will tell.

RA: Only time will tell indeed. So what’s your guess? When it comes to all these questions of publishing and precarity, what do you think will happen? Will the status quo just…persist? Or is there actually space for “publishing otherwise,” as Marcel Laflamme once put it?

TG: The status quo will persist, of course…until it doesn’t. What I mean is that we need to hit that critical mass of resistance before change can happen. Publishing otherwise has the potential to create some change, especially if it is articulated as an “exilic space,” but it also possesses the potential to just reinforce the status quo the same way that most reformist rhetoric and action tends to plaster over structural inequalities—the allegorical band-aid over the dismembered limb.

That said, I don’t really believe in forecasting these types of things. I don’t know what will happen. But I do believe we are living in a moment of revolutionary momentum with an unbelievable potential for change. Hunter S. Thompson has a famous quote from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas where he is lamenting over the perceived failure of social movements in the 1960s. He says: “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil […] We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

I think that wave did roll back throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Hunter was right. We experienced neoliberal intensification as “reformers” attempted to stave off capitalism’s impending death by making it not only an economic system, but also a political and social one. Now, I believe, a new wave is beginning to crest and it’s an enormous groundswell of revolutionary potential. All that’s left is for us to collectively catch that wave and shred!

RA: I see what you did there with that optimistic surfing metaphor. Something new may be building; I hope so. Thanks so much for taking the time for this interview, Taylor.

TG: That metaphor was just for you! Thanks, Ryan.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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