Rodrigo Ochigame
Algorithms of oppression have been around for a long time. So have
radical projects to dismantle them and build emancipatory alternatives.
—–
A three-folded article about disruptive information systems, which
recalls the ways in which the Cubans decided to reorganize their
libraries after the revolution, and decided not to follow the Soviet
model, and the story of the Intercommunication, a worldwide network of
textual exchanges about Overcoming Domination.
The article starts on a note regarding the commercial algorithms of
search, which serve marketing-related interests, and sell ads rather
than serve the needs of the users. Then it unfolds in two tales of
disruption of information systems, the first brings us to the Cuban
libraries after the revolution.
similar way than British libraries, which Lenin had visited. In Cuba,
the organisation of the libraries after the revolution took a different
turn, in that they did not want a perfectly centralised organised
library, but instead developed the concept of biblioteca popular,
which would deploy in many places, have the books move around through
bibliobúses, and in which the librarians would play an important role.
organise the amount of information and publications. Cuban scholars
contested the “information laws” in which information is supposedly
unequally distributed. They compared the unequal distribution of
information to that of wealth under capitalism. Cuban statisticians
concluded that those regularities observed were likely to be influenced
by the capitalist system, in which the very few “on top” get more and
more attention, while the wider mass of less popular papers gets
dismissed and forgotten.
“Cuban libraries shouldn’t rely on these metrics to make such
consequential decisions as choosing which materials to discard.
Traditional informatics was incompatible with revolutionary
librarianship because, by treating historically contingent regularities
as immutable laws, it tended to perpetuate existing social inequalities.”
disruption of information systems but in a different political context
led by the liberation theology movement in Brazil and Latin America
which was under authoritarian regimes at the time. They created
diffusion centers which “received and distributed, by mail, submissions
of short texts (or five-page summaries of longer texts) analyzing
situations of “domination” from a worldwide network of participant
organizations, connected via regional episcopal conferences in Latin
America, North America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceania.” (…)
Eventually, a text from a women-led christian community, which
denunciated the Roman Catholic Church, led some of the conservatives
bischops to complain about Intercommunication to the Vatican, which sent
emisaries to intervene, arguing that the project bypassed the Vatican
authority.
https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/