Collective Infrastructures for Publishing

Presented at Collective Infrastructures for Publishing, London, October 2025

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Hello, My name is Femke and I am here today first and foremost to speak about the publishing practice of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, an activist research structure that I am co-directing together with Miriyam Aouragh, Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha and Seda Gürses.

But I am also here with a thick history of shared practice, and very moved by feeling among many old and new friends. Thank you for being here.

I was trained as a graphic designer in the Netherlands in the early 1990's at the moment that digital typesetting, and desktop publishing were being introduced. It sparked an interest in how digital tools and practice interrelate, all the way to today, trying to articulate, contest and reimagine what is going on at the intersection of computational infrastructures and collective life with The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest.

[Hey Microsoft, tech tip]

With Matthew Fuller, Michael Murtaugh and Calum Selkirk I was involved in the first years of what is now called XPUB and then MA Media Design in Rotterdam; a project through which many of the threads presented here today have crossed or are still connected. I worked with and for the daily team of Constant in Brussels from which we set up the design caravan Open Source Publishing, together with Nicolas Maleve, Pierre Huyghebaert and Harrison in 2006. More recently, with Eva Weinmayr, we took on the task to support a rethinking of conventional Open Content licenses, which resulted in the Collective Commitment to reuse (cc2r).

[cc2r]

This biographical note first of all for the pleasure of situating myself among this amazing network of networks, but also maybe the quickest way to explain why the insurgent research practice of TITiPI carries or remains stitched to many traces of tools and practices that are present in this room.

It also explains a long commitment to relational, sideway modes of operating that allows for and actively works on porosity across thinking, practices, institutions and technologies.

TITiPI is an activist research initiative rooted in both academic and community research. We started it as a way to intersect multiple ongoing collaborations, each concerned with the way that computational infrastructures impact collective life. We understand contemporary computational infrastructures to be a continuation of racial capitalism, which means we need to go beyond the imaginary of “the alternative” –– replacing one application by another, or one publishing platform by another, but instead need to develop practices and methods that face the overwhelming task of dismantling the cloud regime as such.

At TITiPI we are therefore instituting a space for radical research on the impact of computational infrastructures in collaboration with many communities of practice: environmental activists, digital and racial justice ngo's, academic researchers, artists, cultural organisations and engineers to name a few.

It is a non-profit association administratively based in Belgium and operating transnationally between Basel, Barcelona, Amsterdam, London and Brussels. Our work is economically possible through a mix of academic subcontracting, cultural commissions, philanthropic and arts funding and in general inventive reuse of institutional resources.

As we state in our institutional bio (that we cannot seem to update for the life of us) that 'we articulate, activate and re-imagine together what computational technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making.'

We chose the term Technology in the Public Interest as a stealth intervention in a field that is defined by benevolent depoliticised NGO's on the one hand, and over-articulate Marxist tech bros on the other. Or as Helen Pritchard said in a recent conversation with Kate Rich:

"One of the things I realised after we had taken up the public interest term, is how much Marx actually wrote about cooperation in the public interest. And specifically that this articulation of cooperation of public interest is for workers, migrants, queers, and all of the oppressed – not for the elites. So, I think public interest functions in quite a different way in TITiPI than it does for example in these huge university or NGO projects of public interest technology, where it's definitely a public interest for racial capitalism. For us, to be able to enter into those spaces by using the name “public interest” is part of the resistance to the idea that public interest should be serving the big tech companies and the richest people in the world." (FoAM, Technology in the Public Interest)

Publishing is of great importance in this work, but requires many improvisational elements to navigate between very different traditions and expectations from activist-publishing on the go, academic publishing and multiple understandings of accessibility.

TITiPI prefers to work with tools and habits already in place, rather than proposing completely new systems, or attempting to converge or cohere them. This is as much the case for how we organise, how we network, and how we publish. It is a way to exercise what we have called 'elastic solidarities' or as Jara Rocha formulates it:

"We need elastic solidarities because these infrastructuring practices we are talking about, which in their very functioning are concerned with how to depart from colonial, extractive and hyper-agile logics, happen in a realm of super thick and hence uneasy dependencies. To think with elasticity helps, as a material description of how solidarity might take place, when that network of dependencies is there. (...) Sometimes it might need to stay tight, other times it can be loose, but that looseness doesn't mean the solidarity stops. I think that's fundamental, especially with difficult relationships or engagements with other social actors and structures." (FoAM, Technology in the Public Interest)

EXAMPLES

At times publications have gotten stuck halfway, needed to be parked for months or had to be smuggled out of the confines of over-precious academic referencing or defensive fact checking. We also have made many mistakes like passing typos onto each other, omitting some individual acknowledgment while foregrounding others, we forgot about the way discursive practice might preclude other forms of thinking and acting, or we mistook a call to action for a research outcome and vice versa.

The kind of publishing infrastructures we need at TITiPI (but I think we are all trying to figuring out together) are ones that allow us to publish with discomfort; to keep some negotiation space and porosity for misinterpretation, opacity and mutual smuggling.

For TITiPI, these collective publishing infrastructures are part of building transitional spaces for thinking and deciding about what technology is and for who. Their many versions of porousness and elasticity are essential iterations, they allow conversations between very different groups and interests to circulate and resonate.

Collective publishing infrastructures are spaces to stay attentive to how we can structurally change our approach to maintenance, our expectation of seamless availability and reliance on always-online computation. As transitional infrastructures they count on an approach that Black feminist author Kara Keeling would perhaps call «beginnings that happen in the middle of things».

A little song, a nocturnal creation myth or ‘sketch’ in the middle [...]; it is not a genesis story of the logos and light, but a song of germination in darkness [...] I begin with it because doing so calls attention to the improvisational elements of any beginning, which always happens in the middle of other things. (Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures)