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A Review of Alessandro Sbordoni’s Beyond the Image

“There is no gold standard for the image anymore.” Alessandro Sbordoni

There is no temptation whatsoever to read Sbordoni’s Beyond the Image: On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century as another lament over the collapse of visual truth in the digital age. Here I encounter none of the popular anxieties about deepfakes, social media, artificial intelligence, and the exhaustion of meaning. Beyond the Image successfully dodges the danger of being another nostalgic defense of representation, referentiality, and “Truth.” There is no conservative plea for the return of visual authenticity. This text is a troublesome and indispensable diagnosis of a historical mutation and a break in the regime of visibilities that condition our perception of things.

From a typical Foucauldian standpoint, I see in Sbordoni’s project an observation that another reorganization has occurred for vision as a field of power. Maybe even a potential for a line of resistance as anti-ocularity, a rejection of the algorithmic gaze in favor of parrhesiastic techniques of seeing and being-seen? What the book ultimately charts is the emergence of a post-visual regime where it is not just the case that seeing no longer guarantees knowledge; the idea that looking at something was ever a proof for something being the case is as old a lie as Platonism. Images never really promised reference, and truth was always emergent; it is always a mere superstructure, a connaissance on top of the governmentality, the savoir of the visible. What the book inaugurates is something more relevant, interesting, advanced – an accurate description of how this particular regime, the twenty-first century, manages, governs and deploys its own optical regimes. We are instructed on how perception is trained, formatted, optimized, and governed through algorithmic systems whose primary allegiance is (clearly) not to meaning but to circulation-for-its-own-sake, profitability, and control. Beyond the Image is, I argue, in its own right a genealogy of Pictorial Panopticism: a regime of images that discipline subjects according to the dictates of Capital.

Pictorial panopticism does not just operate by showing too much, it is an organizational principle of vision, a closed circuit. The image does not need to persuade, convince, or even deceive. There is no depth and everything is on the surface, the image only needs to circulate and create fiat value. Power is not invested in the content of the images, content is just the dynamism, the speed of the image; value is produced through movement alone. The rankings, indexes, repetitions that conjure up an imminence, the feeling of an impending doom that sustains anxious scrolling… The crisis diagnosed in Beyond the Image is epistemological and political.

On the one hand, classical panopticism functioned through asymmetrical visibility; on the other hand, being seen without seeing, pictorial panopticism functions through total participation and horizontal diffusion of visibility. It cuts the head off the watchtower. Everyone looks; everyone produces; everyone is exposed. The subject is no longer disciplined by the gaze of the Other but by the requirement to remain legible within an image-economy whose criteria are opaque and whose evaluative metrics are endlessly shifting. One is not punished for invisibility; one simply disappears inside a hall of infinite refractions.

This mutation also marks a deeper anthropological shift: the passage from the mirror stage to the screen stage, from the gaze to the stare. Where the mirror once structured subjectivity through misrecognition, doubling, and identification, the screen abolishes distance altogether. It absorbs directly without reflecting. The gaze, historically bound to desire, lack, and the possibility of resistance, is replaced by the stare: continuous, frictionless, optimized for meaningless endurance. The consumer becomes the regime’s preferred format of subjectivity: measurable, segmentable, endlessly adjustable. To stare is not to contemplate, but to remain operational, available, and extractable. What appears as participation is, in fact, a mode of capture in which vision is no longer oriented toward the world but synchronized with the imperatives of circulation.

This is the decisive mutation Sbordoni tracks: the passage from representation to operativity. Images no longer even pretend to stand in for reality; they stand in for other images, for data, for probabilities, for SEO optimizations (while SEOs are just words-becoming-images). Vision becomes a relay between interfaces. The image triggers an image. It activates. In this sense, pictorial panopticism is inseparable from algorithmic governance. To see is to process; to be seen is to be processed. What makes Beyond the Image compelling is its refusal to mourn this transformation in moral terms. There is no nostalgia for lost depth, no call to restore authenticity, no fantasy of returning to a pre-digital innocence. Sbordoni does not ask us to believe in images again. He asks us to recognize that belief was never the point. Images have always been technologies of power; what has changed is the speed, scale, and abstraction of their deployment.

Since I have a certain habit of reading theory in a particular way, I have to take the next logical step and search Sbordoni’s work for an opening where I can speculate on possibilities for resistance against the tyranny of the image. Clearly, the post-visual regime has no concern for truth, in fact it tosses truth around like a cheap whore, managing its distribution, deployment, and circulation. We can’t rely on better representations as forms of counter-conduct. It must take the form of interruptions, hesitations, refusals to optimize. What becomes political is not what is shown, but how visibility is inhabited. Slowness, opacity, refusal, misuse; these can be weaponized as both aesthetic and strategic gestures.

What ultimately matters, then, is not the ontology of images but their effects on the subject. Sbordoni’s analysis consistently displaces attention from visual content to the transformations images impose on modes of being, attending, and enduring. Images no longer address a viewing subject; they configure one. They train attention spans, modulate affect, recalibrate thresholds of tolerance and boredom, and normalize a state of permanent availability. The subject that emerges from this regime is not deceived or persuaded, but formatted, i.e. rendered compatible with the rhythms, demands, and extractive logics of the image-economy. In this sense, pictorial panopticism is not a theory of control through sight, but a theory of subjectivation through circulation: what images do is produce a subject for whom visibility is no longer an event but a condition of survival.

In this sense, Sbordoni’s work resonates less with traditional visual theory than with a specific and much more effective genealogy of anti-ocular practices. Beyond the Image is therefore not a theory of images but a theory of the conditions under which images govern. Its critical force lies in showing that the post-visual does not mean the disappearance of images but their total saturation of social life. We do not live after images; we live inside their logistics: it is a becoming-image of the body. The panopticon dissolves into interfaces, feeds, metrics, and predictive models. If there is a pessimism here, it is a lucid one. But it is not paralyzing. By refusing the language of loss, Sbordoni forces us to abandon false hopes and misplaced critiques. There will be no return to truth through images, because truth was never their function. The task, instead, is to learn how power perceives and how Capital trains us to perceive for it.

But first. . .

An Introduction to Bro-casting Trump: A Year-long SO! Series by Andrew Salvati

“The Manosphere Won.”

That is how Wired succinctly described the results of the 2024 election the day after Americans went to the polls.

Among the several explanations offered for Donald Trump’s stunning victory over Kamala Harris, the magazine’s executive editor Brian Barrett argued, one surely had to acknowledge the crucial role played by that “amorphous assortment of influencers who are mostly young, exclusively male, and increasingly the drivers of the remaining online monoculture.”

Sure, there might be some validity in saying that Trump’s election had to do with inflation, with immigration policy, or with Joe Biden’s “doomed determination to have one last rodeo.” But his appearance on several popular male-centered podcasts in the months and weeks leading up to November 5 likely did much to mobilize support for his candidacy among their millions of viewers and listeners. Talking to Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, Andrew Schulz, and Shawn Ryan “cement[ed Turmp’s] status as one of them, a sigma, a guy with clout, and the apex of a model of masculinity that prioritizes fame as a virtue unto itself,” Barrett wrote.

Indeed, during the president-elect’s victory speech, given in the early morning hours of the 6th, his longtime friend and ally Dana White, president of the UFC, took to the speaker’s lectern to acknowledge the contributions that these podcasters and their audiences had evidently made in elevating Trump to the presidency for the second time. “I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” he said.

As a media strategy, this was something of an evolution of Trump’s approach in 2016, in which the former reality TV star had used Twitter to such great effect to bypass legacy media institutions and bring his unfiltered message directly to voters. This time around, and reportedly at the direction of his 18-year-old son Barron, Trump again leveraged the massive reach of new media platforms to speak directly to his target demographic of Gen-Z men.

But the strategy was also of a piece with Trump’s frequent assaults on the press, which he typically characterizes as the “enemy of the people.” Appearing in some of the friendlier precincts of the podosphere allowed Trump to skirt around mainstream journalists with their “nasty” questions and cumbersome norms of neutrality and objectivity, and to bask in the mutual admiration society that some of these interviews became. Indeed, as Maxwell Modell wrote in The Conversation not long after the election, podcasters, in contrast to professional journalists, “tend to opt for more of a friendly chat than aggressive questioning, using what research calls supportive interactional behavior … this ‘softball’ questioning can result in the host becoming an accomplice to the politicians’ positive self-presentation rather than an interrogator.”

Podcasts, in other words, provided Trump with a congenial space to self-mythologize, to ramble, and whitewash some of his more extreme views.

In total, Trump appeared on fourteen podcasts or video streams during his 2024 campaign (Forbes compiled a full list, including viewership numbers, which can be found here), which together earned a combined 90.9 million views on YouTube and on other video streaming platforms (it should be noted, first, that these are not unique views – there is likely an overlap between audiences; second, that these numbers do not include audio podcast listens, which, because of the decentralized nature of RSS, are notoriously difficult to pin down).  

For her part, meanwhile, Kamala Harris also made the rounds on podcasts popular with women and Black listeners – key demographics for her campaign – including Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s All the Smoke, and Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay. It has been suggested, however, that the Harris camp’s failure (or perhaps unwillingness) to secure an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience was a significant setback, and could have provided an opportunity to reach the young male demographic with whom she was struggling. In any event, while the counterfactual “what-if-she-had-done-the-show” will likely be debated for years to come, Rogan eventually endorsed Trump on November 4, throwing his considerable clout behind the once and future president.

While a comparison between Trump and Harris’s podcast strategy during the 2024 campaign would make for an interesting academic study, in the following series of posts, I will be particularly concerned with Trump’s success with the so-called podcast bros – partially because my own research interests are in the area of mediated masculinities, but also because they may have put him over the edge with a key demographic – with Gen-Z men.

Over the next few posts, I will examine several of Trump’s appearances on largely apolitical “bro” podcasts during the 2024 campaign season, including his interviews with Logan Paul, Theo Von, Shawn Ryan, Andrew Schulz, the Nelk Boys, and Joe Rogan. In the course of this examination, I will pay attention not only to what Trump said on these shows, but also to the way in which they established a sense of intimacy, and how that intimacy worked to underscore Trump’s reputation for authenticity. Along the way, I will also discuss the podcasts and podcasters themselves and attempt to locate them within the broader scope of the manosphere. Finally, given the passage of time since Trump’s appearances, I will consider to what extent, if any, individual hosts have become critical of his administration’s policies and actions – as Joe Rogan famously has.

Before I begin, however, I want to make a quick note about the sources: Following what is quickly becoming standard practice in the field, each of the “podcasts” that I analyze in this series has a video component, and in fact, may very well have been conceived of as a video-first project with audio-only feeds added as a supplement, or afterthought. For this series, though, my interest has centered on podcasting as a listening experience, and so the reader may assume that when I discuss this or that episode of Theo Von’s or Andrew Schulz’s podcast, I am referring specifically to the audio version of their shows. This is also why Trump’s interview with Adin Ross will not appear in this series – it was livestreamed on the video sharing platform Kick, and was subsequently posted to Ross’s YouTube channel (and thus is it technically not a podcast).

With that being said, let’s dig in. I will proceed chronologically, with Trump’s first podcast appearance on the boxer/professional wrestler Logan Paul’s show, Impaulsive, which dropped on June 13, 2024.

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With about 13 minutes remaining in Logan Paul’s roughly hour-long interview with Donald Trump, the conversation turned to aliens. “UFOs, UAPs, the disclosure we’ve seen in Congress recently,” Paul explained, “it’s confusing and it’s upsetting to a lot of Americans, because something’s going, there’s something happening. There are unidentified aerial phenomena in the sky, we don’t know what they are. Do you?”

For his part, Trump responded gamely, and after respectfully listening to Paul, proceeded to tell a story about how, as president, he had spoken with Air Force pilots, “perfect people,” who weren’t “conspiratorial or crazy,” who claim that “they’ve seen things that you wouldn’t believe.” Still, Trump admitted that he had “never been convinced.”

I start with this turn in the conversation not necessarily to dismiss the 29-year-old Paul as a conspiratorial thinker or an unserious interviewer, but rather to highlight the overall tone of the Trump episode, which was overwhelmingly chummy and fawning. It was clear from their deferential posture that Paul and his co-host Mike Majlak were in awe of the former president, and asking such questions was a way of keeping it light and easy.

Logan Paul, after all, is not known for his incisive political commentary. Indeed, in the 17 episodes of Impaulsive that were released in the six months preceding the Trump interview (all of which I have listened to for this piece), political issues hardly featured at all. One exception came during the December 19, 2023 episode with his brother Jake Paul (also a professional boxer, who was recently knocked out in a fight against Anthony Joshua), in which Logan and Majlak discussed the prevalence of right-wing or MAGA content and signifiers as the inevitable backlash to the excesses of the left and the “woke mind disorder,” as Majlak put it. Another example was the January 31, 2024 episode with former co-hosts Mac Gallagher and Spencer Taylor, in which Majlak went on a self-described “rampage” about the problems at the U.S. southern border (in particular, he referenced the Shelby Park standoff, though without naming it), and in which Paul’s father, Greg Paul, got on the mic to declare his support for “Trump 2024.” But other than these incidental moments and superficial takes, the show is not really the place for nuanced discussions of public policy or electoral politics. (Indeed, in the January 31 episode, Paul even attempted to stop Majlak’s rant by noting that listeners didn’t really tune into the show for political discussion).

Nor does Impaulsive, despite all its testosterone-fueled bro-iness, seem to fit comfortably within the manosphere, as I understand that term and what it signifies. Indeed, though Paul and Majlak seem to have fixed ideas about gender and about the differences between men and women, absent from their discussions (at least during the six month sampling of episodes that I listened to) is the kind of misogynistic and reactionary “Red Pill” rhetoric that characterizes manosphere discourses.

This isn’t Andrew Tate, after all, and it’s important that we keep track of the distinction.

Impaulsive, rather, serves as a venue for Paul and Majlak to have informal, free-wheeling conversations with their guests – which have included fellow wrestlers, sports stars, internet personalities, rappers, pastors, and even Chris Hansen – on a range of other topics of interest to the hosts. If there is a throughline in all of this (aside from Paul and Majlak’s interest in how guests navigate their social media presence), it is certainly the relationship between the two co-hosts, their similar immature (we might more charitably say “goofy”) sense of humor, their mutual interest in combat sports, and their past history of online and offline hijinks all providing the basic framework for much of their conversation. It also gives Impaulsive listeners a sense of intimate connection with the pair, a sense that they are in the room as a silent participant in the hang.

And Paul has had a decade’s worth of experience in making comedic content. Having first earned a following by posting short videos on Vine as a college freshman in 2013, he dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a full-time career as a social media content creator. Fortunately for him, the gambit worked, and his content was soon reaching hundreds of thousands of followers across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in addition to Vine, and a compilation of his videos posted to YouTube amassed more than 4 million viewers in its first week. A number of TV and movie appearances followed, and in 2018, Paul began what would eventually become a professional boxing career with a white-collar match against the British influencer KSI.

Paul’s rise to notoriety wasn’t unmarked by controversy, however. In late December 2017, at a time when he had something like 15 million YouTube subscribers, Paul earned widespread condemnation for his insensitivity after he posted a video to the site showing the body of an apparent suicide victim in Japan’s infamous Aokigahara Forest, and making light of the situation. As a result of the backlash on social media – which included a Change.org petition urging YouTube to deplatform the creator that garnered over 700,000 signatures – Paul removed the video and issued an apology for his actions (this apology was itself criticized for being disingenuous and self-serving, and Paul was later compelled to issue another). For their part, YouTube took disciplinary measures against Paul, which included removing the creator’s channel from the Google Preferred advertising program, and removing him from the YouTube Red series Foursome, among other things.

But that wasn’t all. About a month later, YouTube announced that it would temporarily suspend advertisements on Paul’s channels (the revenue was estimated to be about a million dollars per month) due to a “recent pattern of behavior,” which, in addition to the Aokigahara Forest controversy, now included a tweet in which he claimed that he would swallow one Tide Pod for every retweet he received, and a video in which he tasered a dead rat. The suspension seemed to be little more than a slap on the wrist, however, and two weeks later, in late February of 2018, ads were restored on Paul’s channels.

The controversies continued after the launch of Impaulsive in November 2018. In an episode released the following January, as Paul and Majlak and their guest, Kelvin Peña (aka “Brother Nature”) were discussing their resolutions to have a “sober, vegan January” followed by a “Fatal February” (vodka and steaks), Paul chimed in and suggested that he and Majlak might do a “male only March.” “We’re going to go gay for just one month,” he announced. “For one month, and then swing … and then go back,” Majlak concurred. The implication that being gay was a choice drew sharp criticism online, including a tweet from the LGBTQ+ organization GLAAD, which pointed out, “That’s not how it works @LoganPaul.”

We could continue. But it’s also worth mentioning that in early 2019, Paul underwent a brain scan administered by Dr. Daniel G. Amen, which revealed that a history of repetitive head trauma from playing football in high school had damaged the part of his brain that is responsible for focus, planning, and empathy. Such a revelation may explain some of Paul’s poor decision-making. But it has also been suggested that this may be an excuse for the creator to not own up to his shortcomings. And the diagnosis hardly stopped him from starting a boxing career, which he freely admitted “is a sport that goes hand-to-hand with brain damage.”

But even while Paul’s head injuries may have, to some extent, affected his ability to form human connections, it hasn’t completely severed the possibility. On Impaulisve, Paul often shows a genuine curiosity about his guests, a desire to understand their perspectives, and displays a sense of esteem for those, like the WWE superstars Randy Orton and John Cena, whom he knows personally and professionally outside of the context of the podcast. Even amid the raucous Morning Zoo atmosphere of the show, Paul’s tone when speaking to his guests is usually deferential and flattering, and creates a space not only for sharing intimate revelations about, say, the challenges creators face while living so much of their lives in public (a common topic), but also allows guests an opportunity to present themselves and their work in the best possible light.

This kind of dynamic was at play during the Donald Trump interview, in which Paul and Majlak offered the former president plenty of opportunities to boast about the historic accomplishments of his first term and of his 2024 campaign, and to air his many grievances – against Joe Biden, the media, the Democratic Party, and the lawyers prosecuting the many cases against him. Impaulsive, in other words, became a platform for Trump to remediate his typical campaign rhetoric, a means of delivering familiar content in a way that privileged quiet intimacy rather than grandstanding performances.   

This sense of intimacy derived, in large part, from the setting in which the episode was recorded: Paul and Majlak were sat close to Trump in a wood-paneled room at his Mar-a-Lago estate. But it also stemmed from the kinds of questions that the co-hosts asked Trump. At one point in particular, the conversation turned, as it often does on Impaulsive, to combat sports, and to Trump’s love of the UFC. Opening up on this non-political and heavily masculinized subject – and casually mentioning the cheers he receives when he attends UFC events in person – likely increased the former president’s appeal among Impaulisve listeners, who, according to Paul and Majlak, are mostly wrestling and UFC fans themselves. 

Other questions about combat sports – like whether Paul’s brother Jake could win an upcoming fight with Mike Tyson – further cemented the sense that Trump was a fan among fans, and thus created conditions for what podcast researcher Alyn Euritt calls “recognition,” moments in which listeners may feel a sense of intimate connection with a speaker/host and with the larger listening audience.

But what stuck out to me when listening to the episode and thinking about intimacy and podcasting, was the way in which the calm and deliberate pacing of the conversation, with help from the co-host’s gentle guidance, largely prevented the former president from straying into the kind of stream-of-consciousness delivery that characterizes much of his public discourse, and which has come to be known as the Trump “weave.” Kept on course by a friendly interlocutor pitching softball questions, Trump can sound lucid, even rational – and one can see how, in listening to this, his supporters, and even those apolitical listeners in the Impaulsive audience, can get swept up and taken along for the ride.

This is perhaps true for those moments, which occur often, where Trump touts his own successes and popularity. At the beginning of the episode, for instance, after Trump gave Paul a shirt emblazoned with his famous mugshot (which Paul called “gangster” and said “it happened, and might as well monetize it”), the former president launched into a string of familiar complaints about how his prosecution in that case had been an “unfair” miscarriage of justice, and how it had nevertheless resulted in a fundraising boon for his campaign. “I don’t think there’s ever been that much money raised that quickly,” he declared. Uncritically accepted by the co-hosts – and even encouraged by their muffled chortling – such defiant but matter-of-fact posturing may have seemed reasonable to Impaulsive listeners, an understandable response to what was presented as a blatant act of political persecution.

But the apparent honesty and reasonableness of Trump’s views even seemed to extend to his inevitable criticisms of Joe Biden and the American news media, criticisms which were likewise encouraged by Paul and Majlak’s laughter. When Majlak, for instance, asked Trump whether he was “starting to come around or soften your views on some of the networks that you may have not gotten along with in the past?” Trump’s blunt response, “no, they’re fake news,” was met with legitimating chuckles, and with Paul’s concurring statement, “yeah, fake news.” It was Trump’s follow-up, however, in which he put special emphasis on his May 2023 town hall with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, that he elaborated his position, revealing that though he had thought the network had turned a corner in terms of its friendliness, or at least neutrality, toward him, they were instead “playing hardball.” Delivered almost in a tone of resignation, Trump seemed to give the impression that his poor (in his eyes) treatment by the press was a given, that their hostility, though unfair, was something that simply had to be endured. Again, this explanation, communicated in such an intimate conversational setting, seemed to suggest a cool and reasonable assessment of the situation and prepared listeners to later accept his more extreme view, expressed less than a minute later, that CNN was “the enemy.”

Overall, then, the episode, which ended with Paul, Majlak, and Trump filming a TikTok video in which the podcaster and presidential candidate squared off face-to-face as if shooting a fight promo, offered Trump a platform to connect with other combat sports fans, to burnish his reputation for authenticity, and to legitimize his many grievances. And while the number of new MAGA converts his appearance earned is an open question, what is clear is that Impaulsive afforded Trump an opportunity to directly speak to a demographic that was increasingly important to both campaigns.  

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Series Icon Image Adapted from Flickr User loSonoUnaFotoCamera CC BY-SA 2.0

Featured Image: Paul making his entrance as the WWE United States Champion at WrestleMania XL, CC BY-SA 2.0

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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Taters Gonna Tate. . .But Do Platforms Have to Platform?: Listening to the Manosphere—Andrew Salvati

Robin Williams and the Shazbot Over the First Podcast–Andrew Salvati

“I am Thinking Of Your Voice”: Gender, Audio Compression, and a Cyberfeminist Theory of Oppression: Robin James

DIY Histories: Podcasting the Past: Andrew Salvati

Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre –Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas

Gendered Sonic Violence, from the Waiting Room to the Locker Room–Rebecca Lentjes

Portals such as GeoCities, Worlds, The Palace, and Habitat allowed their users to participate in an alternative reality in which, whether through supposedly naive websites, chat rooms, or metaverses, the primary goal was always to share interests and connect with people from different territories. Over time, as has happened with our organic habitat, many of these networks underwent a kind of virtual gentrification, the main consequence of which was forced submission to terms and conditions dictated by the most powerful people in the world: the 1% that began to be fought against on Tumblr and 4chan more than ten years ago. Following this, as a result of the twenty-year nostalgia cycle, a large number of users have recently become interested in a period they experienced only peripherally: the turn of the millennium. And although to a large extent it is a mere superficial and aesthetic issue, its premise of a failed bright future or utopia echoes an enthusiasm numbed by the logic of a world that is increasingly less suited to human rhythm.

This is where the video game Hypnospace Outlaw, produced by No More Robots in 2019, comes in. The game circles around contradictory feelings of nostalgia at the dawn of the internet. Beyond being a virtual tour loaded with popular references, Hypnospace Outlaw functions as a truthful and realistic tribute to an often idealized way of being virtual. Therefore, based on its narrative and formal analysis, parallels will be established with which to rethink the fin-de-siècle period of internet history and how it dialogues with a future situated in the present. Through certain commonplaces of nostalgia that beat tacitly in this work, we will reflect on the need to advocate for a renewed spirit with which to face a virtual everyday life that, despite being beneficial, consumes us as a community into a distracted and gray mass. Therefore, an approach to creations such as Hypnospace Outlaw will allow us to take a step back and rescue a transformative potential from a privileged position, that of the present, which is already filtered by the true lived experience.

You may ask Yourself, ‘Where does that Highway go to?’. Narrative and Formal Notes

Despite being an offline video game, Hypnospace’s portrayal of an internet that has already been buried exudes a deep sense of liveliness. This is why it captivates from the very first moments and why it dialogues with a stagnant and automated present. On the contrary, this work emphasizes the human factor from the outset by pointing to the human-technology symbiosis as the fundamental pillar of a bright future [Fig. 1]. However, the irony of the approach lies in the fact that these premises are endorsed by Merchantsoft, a company that has developed a device called HypnOS that allows its users to connect to the Hypnospace internet network while they sleep (hello Neuralink). The underlying intention of Hypnospace is to integrate technology into people’s daily lives, making it infinitely accessible. The dreamlike hyperbole behind the idea of never disconnecting from technology was evident in commercials such as the one for Windows 95, aimed at a general audience who could use the computer for any task and on any occasion (even in a restaurant!); or in others such as Newcom, in which a teenager physically enters the Information Superhighway, synonymous with the internet, which seemed to reference Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway.

Fig. 1 Screenshot from Hypnospace Outlaw. Frame from the video that welcomes the user and introduces them to Merchansoft technology.

Connecting and sharing with others under the laws of cyberspace were the symbol of a hopeful race toward the future, whose success depended on who had the power of these tools. This reasoning is followed by skeptical manifestos such as Mark Dery’s Culture Jamming, which, as early as 1993, saw the internet as a possible solution to an American society lobotomized by television. For Dery, through the virtual mirages of reality, users could take control of this technology to subvert stagnant cultural codes in an act that draws on détournement, photomontage, samizdat, and ultimately, hacking. The static nature and passivity of television would be replaced by the nomadism and interactivity of virtual communities that would gradually take up more space in our psyche, paving the way for true virtual reality. This narrative, also prophesied by the futurists of the time, is the roadmap for the equally naïve Hypnospace.

Within this sleepwalking internet, its users can create spaces in which to share their concerns with complete freedom, which means that, as in the 1990s, a unit (the player) is needed to moderate the content. This premise is the backbone of the entire work, which is nothing more than a MacGuffin to advance through a non-linear story about a company that led its invention to a fatal end. The enthusiasm radiated by websites such as GeoCities and humor blogs such as Something Awful inspired its developer, Jay Tholen, to create the game’s fictional websites[i], which follow a now-lost structure in which the host introduces themselves to the anonymous visitor and invites them to immerse in their interests in religion, skeletons, or cryptids [Fig. 2].

Fig. 2 Screenshot from Hypnospace Outlaw. Website discussing the cryptid Tall Green.

What is relevant about this artificial internet is how it mediates the feeling of nostalgia beyond postmodern intertextuality, as occurs, for example, in the life and work of Ann Hirsch, whose use of GIFs and vlogs shapes an art that deals with digital identity and hyperfemininity [ii]; while other artists such as Lizzie Klein capture the influence of virtual nostalgia in their work to create photographs that are essentially anachronistic [Fig. 3]. Therefore, the nostalgia that predominates in Hypnospace Outlaw is reflective in nature, aware of the inability and futility of returning to the past but, with a layer of contradictory irony, manages to bring it back [iii]. In this way, the work enters into the same hauntological game that has dominated certain internet phenomena and so seduced Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher, such as Vaporwave, the music of Leyland Kirby, or the digital crackling of vinyl records [iv]. Here, the slow start-up of the game interface, visually inaccessible websites, cyberbullying, and the emulation of poor bandwidth are details that shake up the present in order to de-idealize an artificially remote past.

Fig. 3 Photograph of Lizzie Klein’s ongoing project Health Freak.

It should be noted that the interest this work aroused at the time is partly a consequence of the proliferation of countless aesthetics and vernacular subcultures, ranging from the fascination with liminal spaces studied by Valentina Tanni and Raquel Luaces to the countless -core subcultures that form the backbone of the current Internet Core. Hence, Hypnospace Outlaw serves as a good example of capturing the nature of the aesthetic to which it belongs, Y2K, since this aesthetic umbrella encompasses all the imagery produced around the dreaded Y2K bug, which ultimately did not cause any problems. Therefore, the contradictory facet of nostalgia emerges in this work to the delight of a player who sees how certain characters gradually go crazy on their blogs with the advent of the year 2000.

As a contextual colophon to this part, it is worth recounting the final spiral of a story that is both emotional and tragic:

In the last setback, fears became reality and, during the turn of the millennium, the HypnOS  bands that all users were using failed at the same time due to a bad system update. This caused thousands of injuries and six deaths. However, the blame was placed on a teenager who created a harmless but eye-catching virus with the intention of getting a girl’s attention, a fact that unjustly condemned him to six years in prison. Despite this, years later, our final task will be to delve into files that prove how the computer cataclysm could have been avoided if the creator of Hypnospace had not succumbed to delusions of grandeur, as his stubborn obsession with improving the system went against numerous medical reports urging him to discontinue the product. After the success of our task, its creator confessed everything and accepted his sentence, but not before revealing that his remorse had been expressed through several letters lamenting the deaths of young and innocent victims [Fig. 4]. In the background, a melody accompanies the final scene with lyrics that continuously repeat the phrase: “Y2K, you let me down”.

Fig. 4 Screenshot from Hypnospace Outlaw. Letter addressed to one of the collateral victims.

Towards Another Path. The Lessons of Hypnospace Outlaw

To create a fictional microcosm of Hypnospace’s caliber, it is necessary to engage in dialogue with the productions of its time through pastiche and self-referential aspects, in addition to the aforementioned intertextuality. This postmodern miscellany, common to our mass of contemporary cultural objects that capitalize on nostalgia, is evident in the zeitgeist that shapes the game to the point of creating something new. The utopia referred to here is the same one that underlies in every feeling of nostalgia, a utopia to strive for or a utopia that could have been but was not. However, what has prevailed in our era is that failed utopia, the one that was glimpsed after the end of history and which, according to Grafton Tanner, was consolidated after the 9/11 attacks [v].

The designers are fully aware of this fact, as behind the façade of references that shape Hypnospace Outlaw, there are other more subtle ones that play with the ironic ambivalence typical of a virtual culture accustomed to playing with masks. Several examples clearly illustrate this. Merchantsoft (Microsoft), the company that designed Hypnospace, is followed by SquisherZ (Pokémon), a game that consists of collecting fluffy creatures; Professor Helper (Clippy), a virtual assistant who is not usually very helpful [Fig. 5]; the free music distribution system FLST (Napster); and websites with interactive hypertext stories that marked the work of net artists such as Olia Lialina, Mark America, and Shu Lea Cheang.

Fig. 5 Screenshot of Hypnospace Outlaw. Professor Helper website.

However, the most interesting ones are those that not only reference but also redefine the notion in question. This is the case with the harmless virus that was nothing more than a covert declaration of love, reminiscent of the famous ILoveYou computer worm; or with Mindcrash, a euphemism for the Y2K problem that caused so many deaths; while other events, such as the one that merged numerous websites into one, thus forcibly displacing many users, seem to allude to the subsequent birth of Web 2.0, the cornerstone of the platforms that now dominate the internet and stoned the virtual flâneur without a destination of his own on a website without hierarchies.[vi]

Although the internet has proven to be a tool capable of distorting time and turning the past and present into a spongy mass, as Simon Reynolds points out [vii], the fact that anyone can access any object under the guise of nostalgia does not necessarily symbolize that we are facing a cultural recession. As with many advances, the significant change lies in the accessibility and speed they bring, not in the new opportunities they offer, as these were often already possible before.

Due to the pace at which phenomena occur on the internet, it is natural for new cultural trends to coexist with outdated ones that manage to pass the novelty filter, a fact that further accelerates contemporary presentism. This is where the aforementioned aesthetics would be situated, which, when referencing the past, always err on the side of translating the selective amnesia of a community that identifies with anachronistic and poeticized codes. That is why Hypnospace Outlaw shows not only how much has been lost (or expired) in recent decades in terms of the internet, but also, as glimpsed earlier, it collects what only a historically blind person would miss, such as finding gore content by chance or being greeted by a shrill MIDI melody on every website. However, what has gradually evolved is the new sense of community to which the work refers so much.

Today, some of the contradictory notions of Gary Cross’s consumed nostalgia are even more noticeable. From his thesis on nostalgia that has been absorbed and regurgitated by the market through objects and passing fads, it is worth mentioning his interest in how it has created micro-identities common to a large number of people who interact with each other from a position of individuality [viii]. This code of conduct is the basis for hegemonic forums such as Reddit or, conversely, 4chan. Therefore, despite the loss brought about by a new vertical and commercialized model of the internet, what is truly desired is a human factor that remains latent beyond the mere consumption of virtual content.

Over time, the internet became completely ingrained in people’s lives, occupying both their work and leisure time. It is the place where you pay your bills. Society, seeing its pace of life and work mediated by the internet, created refuges out of nostalgia, sharing experiences and interests through those same platforms that were built on the ruins of others in the past. We saw how a non-place like the internet, that is, an anonymous, transitory place with no agency, became for different generations of people a landscape of nostalgic escape where everyone could partially recognize themselves and align themselves to ensure a different future. And although this fact may be inexorably conditioned by market and political interests, nostalgically longing for a promised future can always awaken in those who identify with it a sudden interest that brings with it the possibility of change.

The Possible Internet

In essence, part of that promised future portrayed by Hypnospace Outlaw has actually been realized in our reality, only based on the same socioeconomic dynamics that sustain the network. Aesthetically, the informational and visual anarchy that prevailed on the internet at the turn of the century has been replaced by more accessible, intuitive, and concrete interfaces, which has brought with it an oversimplification that advocates for easier navigation of different websites at the expense of a flatter appearance. Hence the artistic interest in recovering that spirit of “anything goes” that was lost in pursuit of a corporate aesthetic that, for the moment, still predominates in all spaces. Those who, beyond its aesthetic value, revere bastions of that era such as the green head of the Windows Player [Fig. 6a/6b], are not only indulging in nostalgia, but are also seeking, through these lost remnants of craftsmanship, an agency within an internet that is inseparable from everyday life.

Fig. 6a “Green Head.” Skin for the Windows Millenium Edition operating system music player, 2000.

Fig. 6b “Green Head.” Skin for the Hypnospace Outlaw music player.

The denial of the future, which has been exacerbated by an essentially retrograde technology such as the algorithm, could be mitigated if the mercantilist factor that brings with it the rebirth of past eras were removed. In order to avoid superficial gestures that feed back into communities as commodities, which Byung-Chul Han refers to as the “end of all community”,[ix] we must turn in a direction that escapes the nihilism of eras such as the one described here, whose non-collapse after the year 2000 condemned it to having to “fulfill” its promises. This fact, however, is what certifies that another path is possible despite the development that the internet and its culture may have undergone.

Although currently taking a step forward and opposing the hegemonic internet through the use of decentralized networks or free software applications is equivalent to the attitude of a contemporary Thoreau, the truth is that their mere existence shows how the flame lit by collectives and artists such as Monochrom, Critical Art Ensemble, and Sadie Plant through manifestos is still alive and becoming more necessary than ever. Works such as Hypnospace Outlaw, which require careful attention and special dedication to immerse oneself in the reflection of a world that once was, possess a transformative spirit, hidden behind the veil of nostalgia that is not always properly glimpsed. If we dissociate the consumerist and viral aspects of these works and aesthetics with echoes of the past, we can turn to transgressive creations that use the abject, the queer, dreams, the kitsch, glitches, or ecology as banners to shake the foundations of present-day culture. Although immaterial, it is essential to take a stand against what dissipates our agency in what remains of cyberspace. After all, even though it has been reviled and misrepresented, the continuum that pursues nostalgia as an engine of change still feeds back into culture; what remains, therefore, is to cautiously position ourselves behind the lights of a feeling capable of imagining new presents.

—

Author bio

Francisco Villalobos is currently developing his thesis on internet culture at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Based on the theoretical framework of post-internet and digital folklore, his PhD research investigates how internet culture has created a vernacular language about digital daily life and the consequences of living conditioned by internet technology. He is also interested in the role played by video games on the internet and in other audiovisual manifestations that shape today’s cyberspace.

—

References

[i] Richardson, L., (2023). “The influences and surprising origins of Hypnospace Outlaw” RockPaperShotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-influences-and-surprising-origins-of-hypnospace-outlaw.

[ii] Chan, J., (2012). “The Real Ann Hirsch: The Power of Performative Fiction” Illuminati Girl Gang Vol. II, Oct 29. https://htmlgiant.com/web-hype/illuminati-girl-gang-vol-2/.

[iii] Boym, S., (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books: 18.

[iv] Fisher, M., (2014). Ghosts of my Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: zero books: 74 – 76.

[v] Tanner, G., (2022). Las horas han perdido su reloj. Las políticas de la nostalgia. Barcelona: Alpha Decay: 47 – 49.

[vi] Darling, J., (2015). “Arcades, Mall Rats, and Tumblr Thugs” in Lauren Cornell, Ed Halter (eds) Mass Effect. Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century. Massachusetts: MIT Press: 325 – 328.

[vii] Reynolds, S., (2011). Retromania. Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: Faber and Faber: 62.

[viii] Cross, G., (2015). Consumed Nostalgia. Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press: 14 – 18.

[ix] Han, B.-C., (2021). No-cosas. Quiebras del mundo de hoy. Barcelona: Taurus: 31.

A Project by the Dutch Media Art Collective SETUP

The networking site Facebook, founded in 2003, was once the beating heart of our online social world—the place where we felt connected, friendships were formed, and self-discovery developed. These days, the platform has become a symbol of everything that can go wrong with social media: polarization, hate, disinformation, data extraction, and AI slop. When Facebook is mentioned, a widespread sense of unease is evoked. We should have cancelled our accounts a long time ago, yet many of us still cling on; there are still more than 3 billion active monthly users worldwide. Instead of calling on guilt and pushing alternatives, SETUP asked itself the simple question: why can’t we let it go?

In public debates about social media, our emotional attachment to these platforms is rarely discussed. Facebook isn’t just an app. It’s a digital diary of our lives, full of memories, relationships, and events. To start that conversation, we built the Facebook Museum: a place where we collectively can say goodbye to Facebook, where we both celebrate and question this platform’s beautiful and ugly sides. Before we can let go of Facebook, we first need to understand how and why we’re attached and what role Facebook played in our lives.

In July 2025, the Dutch Media Art Collective SETUP opened the world’s first temporary Facebook Museum in the main hall of Utrecht Central Station, the Netherlands’ busiest railway station. A pop-up museum where visitors could donate their own Facebook data, relive memories, and discuss their digital identity. The project attracted over 5,000 visitors and received widespread national media attention. The response illustrated the heartfelt need to reflect not only critically, but also emotionally and collectively on our digital past – and with it our digital future.

In December 2025, SETUP received financial support from the Dutch SIDN Fund to scale up and diversify the Facebook Museum in 2026.

Please visit www.facebook.museum (at the moment only in Dutch) to get an impression of the experience, the press coverage and visual material. This introductory posting gives an overview of the different elements of the museum and what SETUP imagines are possible directions the project can take.

What’s there to experience? Visitors can participate in the curation of what should be remembered about our joint time on Facebook, score keepsakes in the museum shop and vote on a suitable location for the permanent Facebook Museum. In addition, they can donate their Facebook data, reflect on their favorite Facebook moments and leave a card for this on a remembrance wall.

Existing Museum Sections:  

Pedestals with Objects and Stories

Multiple pedestals feature objects symbolising the experiences of six people who have had a startling, or sometimes exemplary, experience with Facebook. The objects appeal to the imagination, such as a cat collar, a pile of pubic hair, or a squash racket. Each pedestal reads the opening of the said story, accompanied by a QR code that the audience can scan with their phone to explore the story further. The stories alternate between positive and negative experiences about, on, and around Facebook. From testimonials of cosy crochet Facebook group members, to traumatised content moderators or victims of online doxing. The individual stories can be read here (in Dutch).

Preservation Wall

The preservation wall is a large blue wall holding three screens on which typical Facebook content passes by: cat pictures, illustrious Facebook groups, and memes. Visitors can vote on what content to preserve as Facebook’s cultural heritage by pressing the corresponding buttons below the screens.

Remembrance Wall

Like the preservation wall, the remembrance wall is a place of memories and nostalgia. Visitors can leave their personal (both beautiful and unpleasant) experiences with Facebook on the wall. Other visitors can browse through these testimonials and reflect on everything we have experienced together on this platform.

Data Donation Box

As the text on the Museum facade indicates (“Don’t delete your Facebook profile yet!”), we do not advise people to remove their Facebook profile indiscriminately. In addition to a trip down memory lane and insight into how culture-defining Facebook is (and has been), visitors also have the opportunity to donate their own Facebook data. They can put their downloaded Facebook data on a USB stick and submit it to the museum, to ensure that this valuable digital cultural heritage is not lost. We have made a clear step-by-step plan for the visitor on how to export your data from Facebook, archive it, and donate it to the museum if desired:  https://www.setup.nl/app/uploads/2025/12/a5large-fbdata-wikkelvouw-1mmbleed-fogra39.pdf

Scale Model of the Proposed Permanent Museum

Halfway through the exhibition space, you will come across a scale model of the permanent museum in the shape of a huge F. Next to the model, there’s a map of the Netherlands. Here, visitors can vote where the future permanent museum should be located, by pasting a blue sticker on their desired city, village or place.

Merchandise

An exit through the gift shop. At the moment available are: In Memoriam candles, t-shirts, postcards, wooden USB ‘coffins’, tote bags, booklets (a DIY guide to Facebook scrapbooking), and (tracking) cookies.

Future Exhibition Options:

1. The Complete Museum Setup (unmanned)

A setup which we can show for a month or more, and tell our full story. In essence, it’s the collection of all museum components as we used them during the pilot at Utrecht Central Station, yet adapted to the context where visitors can look around independently. No crew or museum hosts from SETUP are required for this. The Utrecht Central setup was focused on luring passers-by, selling merchandise and talking to visitors.

2. Small Museum Setup (unmanned)

A setup that we can place at a desired location for at least a week or a month. It is a more compact and focused version of the exhibition at Utrecht Central Station.

3. The Festival Experience (manned)

A setup for a few days or a long weekend, in which visitors quickly get a compact but strong impression. During Betweter Festival 2025 (a science festival in Utrecht with 2,500 visitors), we have already carried out a successful pilot. Here, visitors can share memories and craft mourning cards for their favourite Facebook moments using content from their own Facebook profile. For this, we provide photo printers, scrapbook materials, and other decoration materials. This activity results in spontaneous conversations about digital memories. If desired, we can adjust this experience to the context of your event.

Talks, Keynotes and Panels that SETUP Offers

Polarisation, screen addiction, brain rot. Our conscience speaks increasingly stronger to leave Facebook. However, this is easier said than done. How do we find emotional closure from this platform? And how do we preserve all the digital cultural heritage we have collectively created on it?

A talk of your preferred duration about our research findings on our attachment to big tech’s social media platforms in launching the Facebook Museum, and why it is so difficult to break free from these. We also provide insight into the design process of the Facebook Museum. Depending on the request, we can focus the talk on one or multiple of the themes and topics below. Additionally, it is possible for one or more of our colleagues to take part in a panel on the themes and topics below. If desired, we can also assemble and/or moderate a panel.

Themes that can be discussed:

• Influence and dependence on big tech platforms (both individual and societal)
• Collective attachment to big tech platforms
• Detachment of big tech’s social media (both rational and emotional), and what alternative strategies and language to develop for it
• Moving away from big tech’s social media on a business / professional level
• Design fiction, future fiction, speculative design methods:how to explore alternative future scenarios by means of artistic research
• Digital cultural heritage and how to curate, archive, and make it sustainably available

If you are interested in one or more of our Facebook Museum components, we can send a quote tailored to preferences and adjustments. For this, please contact Jiska Koenders – jiska@setup.nl

This first overview of the Facebook Museum project was written by SETUP’s staff member Marissa Memelink, together with Geert Lovink@INC.

About SETUP

The Utrecht-based Dutch cultural organization SETUP, founded in 2010, researches the impact of technology on society. Our focus isn’t investigating technology as a technical object (“how does it work?”) or as an expressive medium (“how can I make art with it?”) but as a force field within our community. SETUP creates accessible designs to make these power dynamics and their abstract effects tangible for a large audience. In doing so, we focus on the everyday future of technology. Because stories about new technology still often revolve around science fiction themes: a distant future where either everything is possible – or everything goes wrong. AI, for example, in 100 years will either “solve all our problems” or “take all our jobs.” But these scenarios omit important questions. Who pays the price for this new technology? What power does it create, and where is this situated? What interests are at play, and what ideologies constitute the design of these systems? That’s why we explore near-future scenarios in our artistic research, for which we look ahead a maximum of 5 to 10 years.

SETUP’s mission is to create a technology-critical society. A society in which everyone can participate in discussions and reflections on the development and deployment of new technology. Eventually, this will lead to other hardware, platforms, and power structures. But it all starts with a critical community surrounding these systems, actively exploring what a healthy relationship with technology means for them. Our philosophy is that in order to move towards an alternative future with technology, one first has to be able to imagine it. We believe the arts provide the free space necessary to question and investigate these alternative scenarios. Artists play a crucial role in this: creating images and agendas, offering a broader perspective, and posing critical questions. Not just as a mirror, but also as a crowbar. www.setup.nl

Previous Projects by SETUP

Since its foundation in 2010, SETUP’s projects have been focused on the Dutch-speaking community and have always had a critical yet cheeky-hilarious approach. Some examples of previous projects:

The pottery-robot Man and machine are often portrayed in the media as competitors. But can we explore a complementary relationship? Forget all the robots that ‘catch up’, ‘beat’ or ‘replace’ us. Come and merge into a beautiful symbiosis with our pottery robot. – https://www.setup.nl/projecten/de-pottenbakrobot/

Nude prompting workshop Does the advent of AI image generators make nude model drawing more accessible than ever? We put it to the test and bumped into more interesting hiccups than initially expected… https://www.setup.nl/projecten/naaktprompten-naaktmodel-tekenen-met-ai/

Project dodo – an exoskeleton for the dodo Through advanced biogenetic engineering, scientists are currently de-extincting the long-lost dodo bird. But once returned to earth, how do we make the dodo 21st-century proof? A project exploring human techno-solutionist tendencies. https://www.setup.nl/projecten/an-exoskeleton-for-the-dodo/

Alternative stock photography for technology Shiny humanoid robots, green Matrix code or brains full of zeros and ones. Photos accompanying tech news leave a lot to be desired. They maintain a mystified impression of what the technology is and what it means for us. Could it be done differently? https://www.setup.nl/projecten/nieuwe-stockfotos-voor-technologie/

Audio-visual material about the Facebook Museum:

Photos (credits: Bas de Meijer): https://www.flickr.com/photos/setuputrecht/albums/72177720327588487/with/54659546529
Video: https://www.setup.nl/video/het-facebook-museum/

Articles by SETUP about the Facebook Museum (in Dutch):

We richten een Facebook Museum op
Stichting Facebook Museum is officieel – dit is ons bestuur
Na het Facebook Museum willen we sociale media niet meer verslavend noemen
Sociale media zijn massaal toxisch verklaard, tijd voor een waardig afscheid

Press publications (in Dutch):

Item op Radi0 1
https://www.nporadio1.nl/nieuws/wetenschap-techniek/ac2ab72e-c957-44e4-82a7-e92e2d0a9c02/afscheid-nemen-van-facebook-makkelijker-gezegd-dan-gedaan
Item op BNR nieuwsradio
https://www.bnr.nl/nieuws/tech-innovatie/10577510/eerste-facebookmuseum-ter-wereld-in-utrecht-digitaal-cultureel-erfgoed
Artikel op NOS online
https://nos.nl/regio/utrecht/artikel/654177-waarom-we-facebook-niet-gebruiken-maar-ook-niet-kunnen-loslaten
Artikel in Telegraaf
https://www.telegraaf.nl/video/uniek-facebook-museum-opent-doneer-jouw-data/77742247.html
Artikel in Trouw
https://www.trouw.nl/binnenland/in-utrecht-kun-je-al-rouwen-om-facebook-het-platform-werd-steeds-vijandiger~b8625de7/
Item in uitzending en online Hart van Nederland
https://www.hartvannederland.nl/het-beste-van-hart/panel/artikelen/facebook-sociale-media-social-hyves-panel-gebruikers-missen
Artikel in AD
https://www.ad.nl/utrecht/facebook-museum-op-utrecht-cs-we-hebben-er-jarenlang-lief-en-leed-gedeeld-die-data-is-waardevol~a439aaf5/
Item in Oranjezomer
https://www.kijk.nl/programmas/de-oranjezomer/SyLYboBPFSs

 

The following interview needs a longer introduction to properly contextualize the Brazilian social movements background. I first met Pedro Burity, a graduate student and researcher at the University of Brasilia, at the Association of internet Research conference, this October in Rio de Janeiro. Pedro researches sociot-echnical arrangements and imaginaries for social movements in Brazil. He works with civic tech, designing digital participatory processes and public services for governments. 

In Sao Paolo, we attended the launch of a book of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST), the Homeless Workers’ Movement, who projected the figure of Guilherme Boulos (a former activist, today a minister of Lula’s government). The MTST derived from the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement founded in 1984, is, which successfully organizes landless peasants through direct action (land occupations) and long-term organization, helping hundreds of thousands of families gain land access, establish cooperatives, and influence agrarian reform policies.

After the interview, which took place in Sao Paolo in a extremely crowded parque Ibirapuera, we quickly became friends, and I ended up spending a week at his house in Brasilia, where we continued our conversation and visited the various places of resistance of the city, such as Casa Comun – a shared space in Brasília dedicated to civil society organizations, movements and collectives that want to do political advocacy and incidency – the Ocupa Mercado Sul, and the University of Brasilia.

I enjoyed Brasilia’s campus, big and sunny, with brutalist architecture, many plants, a tragic history of brutal murders during the military dictatorship, which includes a designed place for socialization, conversation, and petting name beijódromo. The university, which welcomed us with students dancing to a concert of forrò on the roof during the lunch break on a Friday, seemed to me the best part of the city which otherwise is the result of a poor high-modernist architecture and planning ideal, one that signed a Faustian pact, trading legibility for good conditions of living (see for instance J.C. Scott’s masterful critique of the shortcomings of centralized planning, which uses the city as a case study). A city built for cars that still has a lot of traffic; where human activities are zoned – there is a pharmacy neighbour, a hospital neighboor, etc; a city that, how Pedro explains, has ended up internalizing the bureaucracy in the way of thinking of people. 

We also visited Ocupa Mercado Sul (Mercado Sul Vive), a concrete experiment in popular digital sovereignty in Brazil: an occupation and a lively space of popular culture, with music, theatre, cinema, popular education and the monthly Ecofeira in the old public market of Taguatinga. The Ocupa, which emerged as a response to real estate speculation and to reclaim an empty, degraded area based on the right to the city and the social function of property, is shown to use by Angel, a formidable activist and free software advocate. When we arrived, he welcomed us in space by counter-recording my interview with its own Iphone, narrating that the Ocupa is part of a larger network, the Rede Mocambos, a solidarity network connecting quilombolas, the Afro‑Brazilian communities formed by descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped captivity, with Indigenous and popular communities, artists, and artisans to build a “world shaped by their own territories, memories and struggles”. Most relevantly, he continued, Rede Mocambos combines cultural and political organisation with the development of community‑controlled digital infrastructure, with tools like Baobáxia, and community data centres that enables communities to store, manage and share their own audio‑visual archives and documents without depending on Big Tech or constant internet access. The network seeks to build autonomous “digital territories” that mirror and protect physical territories. 

After that, together with another friend, Rafael, we visited the Chapada dos Veadeiros, a national park with long hikes and stunning waterfalls, and during those days I learned the word gambiarra, which would prove useful for the rest of my trip, that refers to a clever, often makeshift, improvised solution or repair using limited resources, something like a “jury‑rig”. A bolsonarista hairdresser in Salvador later confirmed the concept in practice: in Brazil, everything is gambiarra.

In the interview, Pedro discusses the concept of popular digital sovereignty and the centrality of social movements in political change. Brazil may not be a utopia realized, but it has impressive base of popular self-organization that came to elect Boulos – the ministro do povo (ministry of the people) as someone screamed at the samba after the book launch – which highlight the link between popular movements, political imagination and state‑level change. It also has Central Bank which developed the first successful public Fintech in the world, o PIX, a public payment infrastructure that quickly and radically transformed daily life of millions of Brasilians, especially poor. As Pedro once told me: “Pix saved us from WhatsApp.”

***

I’d like to start with a terminological clarification. What are we talking about when we talk about digital sovereignty, and what do social movements mean by popular digital sovereignty? 

When we talk about digital sovereignty, we can refer to different traditions and different strands of thought. In my research, when we speak of sovereignty, we try to bring the perspective of people’s self‑determination within a given territory. I try to think of this idea in a way that is not only tied to the State, which is usually what happens when we talk about sovereignty. We try to bring in more of a popular perspective, linked to autonomy. And, when we talk about Latin America, we have a long tradition of struggles for sovereignty and autonomy, from different perspectives. It’s in this sense that we try to work with sovereignty as a form of self‑determination.

From there, we move into the digital dimension. The digital part is a bit more complex because we are talking about a structure, about a reality that involves very powerful actors. It’s hard to even imagine what digital sovereignty would actually be. We have been facing this difficulty of imagination, of the imaginary, of the ability to create different worlds. Digital sovereignty comes in precisely in this sense: how a people, how a society, manages to self‑determine in different ways, to create its own alternative worlds within the technology we already know and within what we don’t yet know, what remains to be invented.

Don’t the weaknesses of the concept of “the people” in the democratic tradition risk being repeated when we talk about popular digital sovereignty?

The notion of “the people” really does come a lot from Rousseau’s perspective, from the general will, but it has also been heavily transformed over time, not only in theory but also in practice, especially when we talk about “popular” and all the contradictions that the popular brings with it. A perspective that seems very interesting to me is that of Antonio Negri. It’s a perspective that has inspired many revolutionary movements in Latin America. Hugo Chávez himself used to say that the entire Venezuelan revolution draws its theoretical inspiration from Negri’s idea of constituent power, and that it is from this constituent power that sovereignty is born.

The difference from the Rousseauian perspective is that this general will becomes much more a matter of emancipation of people, not in the sense of a general will of single, homogeneous people, but of a diverse, diffuse people, povos, in which the general will means the inclusion of all these peopl within an emancipatory horizon. It is a much more class‑based perspective, which fuels several movements and revolutions in Latin America and helps to build what the people actually are, with all their contradictions, difficulties, and problems, but from a place that is different from the rest of the world. The Global South, or at least Latin America, has a different perspective on what “the people”, el pueblo, is. If we look at the many union leaders and revolutionary leaders we have had, that fits into this logic.

How does this history of struggle and colonialism help us understand what you’re calling popular digital sovereignty?

The history of Latin America is a history of struggle. Since the very beginning of colonisation, we’ve been dealing with different technologies and tools of oppression against our peoples. Digital colonialism is just one more form of this. Big Tech is bringing in ever more sophisticated technologies of oppression, surveillance, and colonialism. But we, as Latin Americans, have always managed to find a way out. It’s very striking how creative Latin American people are. There are similarities in the ways different peoples have dealt with colonisation historically, but it’s interesting to see that all of them managed to build their own tools of struggle from their own territories, cultures, and specificities.

It’s no different when it comes to digital technology. The Brazilian example is very powerful as a real possibility of building other worlds. And, within Latin America, we also have equally transformative initiatives, like FACTTIC, a large organization of autonomous cooperatives very closely tied to the feminist and autonomous tradition. If we look back, we can remember the Zapatista uprisings and revolutions: already back then, they were building liberating radios, community radios. In Brazil, we had hijackings of radio frequencies to broadcast communist messages during the military dictatorship. Latin America, with all its different people, each has its own way of building its digital sovereignty. And of course we will always stand together, as neighboring and solidarity‑based countries, in building the possibility of new technology that is more independent and emancipated from the technologies of the Global North, especially Silicon Valley.

Let’s move to the Brazilian case. What do you see as the interesting developments in the last few years? What has changed compared to some years ago?

I’m going to go back a bit to the idea of the State and talk a bit more about the difficulties of theorizing this “people” and of how we actually talk about digital sovereignty in practice. Today, digital sovereignty is a very hot topic, addressed by many countries, leaders, States and companies. It’s a contested concept. Part of that dispute comes from the companies, from Big Tech. On one side you have the States. On the other, this diffuse, confused, hard‑to‑pin‑down people we’ve been talking about.  In the Brazilian context, the issue of digital sovereignty has become a crucial point. Under Lula’s government, it appears in the way the government has been positioning itself ideologically on what sovereignty is, what it means to have control over one’s own resources, over one’s data. From there, we begin to talk about data, and this has become a very strong narrative, especially in the debate around regulating Big Tech, which is one of Lula’s major priorities today: regulation of Meta, of social media in general.

There are many contradictions in this discourse coming from the State, because the State is made up of many players, many figures and interests. The same contradictions that exist in the concept of sovereignty are present within state institutions. Today we have very important actors whose discourse is not very aligned with what actually happens in government. While digital sovereignty is being defended at the level of discourse, the government follows a different logic in practice, bringing large foreign data centres here, offering every kind of tax exemption. The systems the government uses today are Microsoft systems, Big Tech systems. So today, if these companies wanted to, Brazil would grind to a halt. That’s a very serious contradiction we face at the level of the State.

You mentioned that you think digital sovereignty on different levels. What do you mean? 

That’s where the popular perspective comes in. What is actually in the interest of these people? I tend to think from a more class‑based perspective. Is it in the people’s interest to have their data controlled by a large corporation, or to have the possibility of determining what will be done with the data they produce? Is it in their interest to be able to understand what they’re doing on their phone, to understand their smartphone, how their data are being used and what technology actually is? Part of what I understand as popular digital sovereignty is trying to break with this technical alienation we live with today, simply accepting what we use, of having an uncritical view of the tools we rely on. It’s about building the possibility of understanding and having autonomy—bringing these two concepts together—to choose the technologies we would like to use as Brazilians and as Latin Americans.

I usually think of sovereignty on three levels. On a more individual level, it’s about having the autonomy to choose whether you’re going to use WhatsApp, or another means of communication, whether you’re going to join certain platforms or not, and doing so with awareness of what’s at stake. On the community level, it’s about having control within a territory, within a community: running a small database, an infrastructure that enables independent communication, that allows that territory to have its own technological means. At the level of the State, it is above all about ensuring, through public policy, support for everything I’ve been talking about: support for this possibility of self‑determination. The importance of the State, in this role, is precisely to provide backing for these bottom‑up initiatives, to provide infrastructure and financial resources via public policy. That, for me, is the State’s main function in promoting sovereignty in the digital realm.

I tend to think that Big Tech platforms are, above all, infrastructures, with a few novelties. For example, they change more quickly, they allow third‑party services to be built on top of their infrastructure. But the history of infrastructures shows that there is little room for autonomy and self‑determination once these infrastructures – think of roads, or electricity – are already in place. How was PIX possible?

In terms of infrastructure, we’re talking about Brazil, a country of continental proportions. Brazil has a public higher‑education infrastructure that is free and of very high quality. Being a country in the Global South, Brazil built Petrobras, a company that operates in oil exploration, production, refining, sale and transport, which today competes with big multinationals like Shell, among others. All of this was built here, with local technology, labour and brains—sovereign technology. Today we’re in a complicated scenario, in which Big Tech’s dominance in technological terms is so strong that it’s hard for us to picture other scenarios. But we do have the conditions—in terms of education, people, territory and, I believe, imagination—to build an infrastructure that allows us to achieve this sovereignty, this self‑determination over how we’re going to develop our technology, as happened with PIX. 

PIX was born out of efforts to think a technology that would be unimaginable in the United States, for example. The way the US treats PIX shows this: they often see it as an unfair competitor to their credit card companies. But the key point is that PIX is not a commercial competitor in that sense. PIX is a public payment infrastructure. This perspective of the commons, of the public, is something we built and that today threatens the hegemony of US payment systems, for example. And here the popular aspect appears again. PIX is the result of the work of public servants. Where did these public servants come from? From public universities. Today, public universities are, for the most part, made up of women and, increasingly, of Black, brown and Indigenous people. These are increasingly diverse communities of students and researchers who embody Brazil’s cultural and technological richness. And when I talk about technology, I don’t mean only in the narrow sense of high‑end digital tech, but also in terms of social technologies, of how we organise ourselves as a community. From these social technologies, mixed with technique, with scientific and technological development, we are able to create marvels like PIX.

This ranges from small platforms for specific communities all the way up to the level at which these popular sectors manage to reach the State, influence public policy, bring in diversity. Even with all the difficulties and in what is often a catastrophic‑looking scenario, we manage to imagine a new world in which we can truly be digitally sovereign. 

 What are the specific conditions in Brazil that allow the transition from social movements to the government, and what does this tell us about the current relevance of social movements in transforming reality?

There’s a very powerful phrase that comes from social movements: “Only struggle changes life.” I think social movements are responsible for radical changes in how we largely see and build the world. These are movements that position themselves as actors who really imagine new scenarios, who are there in pursuit of social change. It’s from social movements that ideas and possibilities for different worlds are born. The case of the MTST is emblematic. One of the movement’s initiatives—outside the strictly digital universe but squarely in the realm of social technologies—is the Cozinhas Solidárias , “Solidarity Kitchens”, created to feed unhoused people in the cold nights of São Paulo. It started as an initiative feeding about 200 people a day in a public square and, little by little, with organization, work and these social technologies, it gained momentum and became an increasingly popular idea, a good idea. Today, roughly four years after the initiative began, the Cozinhas Solidárias have become public policy, and there are already thousands of kitchens around Brazil, feeding thousands of people every day. This is born from a small initiative within a social movement. We often underestimate the potential of a small, transformative idea. When we talk about the technology hub, we’re talking about Ocupa Lab, a social laboratory for technological innovation. It starts as a small lab, a 10‑square‑metre room in an occupation on the outskirts of São Paulo. There, people who often don’t have basic reading and text‑comprehension skills are taught how to use a mobile phone, how to deal with basic technological functionalities, placing people from these communities into the job market as programmers and software developers, and bringing a new worldview into this tech universe, which today is so skewed by the ideals propagated by Silicon Valley.

The potential of this initiative is enormous. By bringing in people with a different mindset, who think about technology in terms of how it can and should be, the sky is the limit. The movement’s idea is that these initiatives—from the tech school, which offers free courses, to “Contrate Quem Luta” (“Hire Those Who Struggle”), a digital solidarity‑economy platform that connects workers from the movement to people interested in hiring them, to clients—will become public policies, involving public infrastructure, public resources provided by the State, ever‑growing participation and ever‑greater technological development of these platforms, so that we can envisage an emancipatory, different, sovereign technology.

Popular digital sovereignty really is born from below, from those at the bottom. It’s initiatives are like those of the MTST itself, with its struggle for housing and territory, which today necessarily runs through technology. We have the MTST; we have initiatives that follow more autonomous currents, like MariaLab, which seeks to build secure infrastructures to protect the privacy of social movements, of individuals, of feminist groups. We have initiatives like data_labe (Datalab), which creates everyday tools to make life easier for people living in the peripheries, which is where the people are. 

In Latin America, we have networks like FACTTIC, an organization of independent, autonomous cooperatives, very closely connected to the feminist and autonomous tradition, which shows that it is possible to build technological‑production networks outside the traditional corporate logic. It’s these initiatives that will provide the possibility of building a new kind of technology, of imagining a world without Big Techs, a world in which we can truly have autonomy over what kind of technology we’re going to use and can determine ourselves as a technological power capable, above all, of caring for its own population. 

Do you think there are some practical steps that, over the next five years, Brazil or other Latin American countries can take to curb or at least reshape the penetration of Big Techs?

Absolutely. We’ve talked a lot about the popular, but I believe the State has a fundamental role here. Popular initiatives already exist; they need support. From the State’s point of view, there are a number of challenges in terms of platform regulation. Brazil has been experimenting with innovative and important initiatives in this field, but at the same time there are constant struggles in domestic politics, because the lobbying efforts of these companies are very strong. Regulation is, in my view, the first step: regulation of social media and, now, of artificial intelligence as well, built with the participation of social movements, civil society and the broader third sector.

Then comes investment. We have a large public higher‑education structure that is free and of high quality. It needs investment, labs—including social labs—resources. It needs state incentives to create new things. There is also the issue of creating our own data centres, rather than simply importing Amazon data centres because we have clean, abundant energy. We are capable of building our own data infrastructures, without importing infrastructures from abroad or bringing in foreign data centres that pollute what we have and keep our data under the control of US companies. We need to have our own data infrastructure so we can have greater control, hold the key to that vault which is currently in US hands. Today, a large part of our government data and citizens’ data is stored in databases abroad. Changing that is a fundamental step.

In the end, you speak not only of technological sovereignty but also of epistemic sovereignty. What does that mean concretely, for instance in the debate on artificial intelligence?

It’s not enough to try to compete in this technological landscape purely within the logic of the “artificial intelligence race”. That’s not sufficient. I don’t think we should enter this race in the same way it is framed today. Our role, as the Global South, as Brazil, as a people, is to think about the possibility of actually building new technologies, to imagine an artificial intelligence different from what we have today, or even to rethink what “artificial intelligence” means to us. Sovereignty is also about that: sovereignty of thought, of episteme. Technological sovereignty is deeply tied to epistemic sovereignty, to the production of knowledge and of meanings attached to that knowledge.

To think about epistemic sovereignty is to ask who defines what “intelligence” is, which data matter, which problems deserve to be prioritised by these technologies. It is to be able to say, starting from our Latin American experience, what the urgencies are that we want technology to address: hunger, housing, transport, police violence, environmental destruction. And, from there, to produce knowledge, data, methods and tools that respond to these issues, without simply importing ready‑made models from the Global North. In short, it’s not only about saying “we’re going to build our own technology,” but also about asserting: we are going to decide what counts as relevant technology, what counts as intelligence, what counts as progress, on the basis of our own criteria and needs.

 

Welcome to our December Newsletter!

We hope this newsletter finds you well as the festive month of December begins. We write with a big announcement about our new individual membership programme, news of recent publications, and a review of some of the highlights of our year.

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Support OBP: new membership programme!

We’re excited to share that our new individual membership programme is now live on Patreon—and we’d love for you to join us! Making high-quality, peer-reviewed academic research freely available has never mattered more. This year alone, we’ve released more than sixty open access books without charging authors mandatory fees.

If you’d like to support our work, you can now join one of our five new monthly membership tiers—ranging from £1 to £50. Members enjoy great perks: including free EPUBs of our latest books, discounts on print editions, access to our annual online conference, updates on open access developments, and invitations to exclusive conversations with our publishing team.

Most importantly, you’ll be helping to fuel our open access mission—just like the libraries in our library membership programme—making high-quality scholarly research freely available to readers everywhere.

Find out more and join our individual membership programme.

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Here's what happened this year:

Sixty-four new books this year, including TEN in November:

Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language by Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta (the first title in our new series in partnership with the Philological Society).

Hylo Narrans: Echoes of Material Marronage by Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn.

Performance Research Methods: Interdisciplinary Methods for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink & Laura Karreman.

Xouth, The Ape: A Tale of Manners by Iakovos Pitsipios & Neo G. Christodoulides.

Allocation, Distribution, and Policy: Notes, Problems, and Solutions in Microeconomics by Samuel Bowles & Weikai Chen.

The Intertwined World of the Oral and Written Transmission of Sacred Traditions in the Middle East by Alba Fedeli, Geoffrey Khan & Johan Lundberg.

A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib: In Search of Universal Betterment by Charles Webster.

A Place of Dreams: Desire, Deception and a Wartime Coming of Age by Alison Twells.

Joyce’s Choices: New Textual Parallels in James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and ‘Ulysses' by R. H. Winnick.

Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt by Linda Herrera.

And we have continued this activity in December, publishing several new titles:

Solidarity in Contingency: Rorty's Constructive Project edited by Elin D. Huckerby and Marianne Janack

More with More: Investing in the Energy Transition ― 2025 European Public Investment Outlook edited by Floriana Cerniglia and Francesco Saraceno.

Broken: Illness and Disability in Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Camilo Castelo Branco, Clarice Lispector, Victor Willing, Paula Rego and Ana Palma by Maria Manuel Lisboa.

All of our titles are free to read and download; we invite you to explore our complete catalogue.

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Thank you: to our peer reviewers and our volunteers

Every year, our publications are made possible thanks to the committed and generous work of the referees who review the manuscripts we receive. This includes those manuscripts we ultimately do not publish, as well as those whose release is announced in these newsletters. This year, an incredible 150 experts peer-reviewed our book manuscripts, and we thank all of our referees for their invaluable contributions. Some of our referees choose to be named, and we then share their names with the relevant author and include them in the published book. Since May of this year, we have begun recording their names on our website and you can view them there.

We also sincerely thank the five volunteers who have helped us with a range of editorial, production and marketing tasks in 2025: Hannah Bergin, Sophia Bursey; Tricia De Souza; Lila Fierek; and Elisabeth Pitts. We are very grateful to them for their work. You can view their names on our website along with those of volunteers from previous years.

Warm thanks to them all!

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Three new series partnerships!

The recently published Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language by Chikelu I. Ezenwafor-Afuecheta is the first book in our Publications of the Philological Society series, published in partnership with the Philological Society (PhilSoc), the oldest learned society in Great Britain devoted to the scholarly study of language and languages.

This is one of three new series partnerships we announced this year: the other two are Papers of the British School at Rome in partnership with the British School at Rome, which will showcase original research and creative work on Italy from prehistory to the present; and Politics & Fiction in partnership with the CAPONEU Consortium, a multilingual series that will explore what ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ mean in relation to fictions as found in literature, theatre, performance, poetry, film and visual art, and cultural production as a whole.

We are immensely proud to begin bringing this work to a global audience via open access. If you want to know more about partnering with us to publish a series, you can find out more on our website or contact our Managing Director, Dr Alessandra Tosi.

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Prize awards & nominations for our books

Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould were awarded the 2025 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize for their chapter, 'The Translatability of Love: The Romance Genre and the Prismatic Reception of Jane Eyre in Twentieth-Century Iran' in Prismatic Jane Eyre, edited by Matthew Reynolds, which shows how Iranian readers incorporated Bronte's novel into their understandings of love.

This year, three of our authors were shortlisted for the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards in the Environmental Humanities and Literary Studies categories. They were:

Kathryn M. Rudy, Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print traces the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500, dismembered in the nineteenth century & now reconstructed via Rudy's research.

Joanna Page, Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art shows how contemporary artists in Latin America reinvent older methods of collecting and displaying nature to create new aesthetic and political perspectives.

Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, a 6-volume study exploring a single, electrifying story from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem to its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Michael Hughes was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography prize for his book, Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life, a biography of a hitherto neglected Russian revolutionary figure.

Luke Clossey received an honourable mention from the judges of the Phyllis Goodheart Gordon book prize for the best book in Renaissance Studies for his work, Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520, a sweeping and unconventional investigation of Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history.

And finally Sandra Abegglen and her co-editors were nominated for an OEGlobal Open Education Award for Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education, a collection of essays that challenge the status quo and offer glimpses of a more humane and inspiring educational future.

Enormous congratulations to these authors for this recognition of their fine research and writing. We are proud to publish and celebrate their work, and we are also delighted that through these awards and nominations we could fly the flag for independent open access presses: we are honoured to represent this growing community.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

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Building open access networks & infrastructures in 2025

Highlights from the Open Access Books Network (OABN), which we coordinate in partnership with OAPEN, Sparc Europe and OPERAS, included:

• The OABN published an FAQ and blog post based on an expert webinar that focused on including third-party materials in open access books;
• Three authors who received ERC grants shared their experiences of publishing open access books and series;
• The OABN held an expert webinar on good metadata practice for open access publishers;
• It held two events focused on policymaking for open access books, including services for policymaking and a community event on contributing to the PALOMERA Knowledge Base.

Highlights from the Copim Open Book Futures project, building non-commercial infrastructure to develop open access book publishing, included:

• Thoth Open Metadata was nominated for the 2025 ALPSP Innovation Award and is set to release a significant upgrade early next year;
• Copim's Accessibility work package released its accessibility guide for open access book publishers, including a section on accessibility for librarians;
• Copim Compass was released, drawing together a comprehensive suite of resources to support open access book publishing;
• Copim is planning a conference on 26-27 February to explore: What's next for community-led open access book publishing? Sign up for free in person or online.

Other highlights:

• Our Co-Director Rupert Gatti wrote 'Beyond "No Fee": Why Diamond Open Access Is Much More Than Just a Business Model' with Pierre Mounier and Johan Rooryck in Current Trends in Open Science: Will Open Science Change the World? (Ledzioni LediPublishing, 2025);
• Our senior editor and outreach coordinator Lucy Barnes wrote 'How Should Diamond Open Access Work for Books?' with Iva Melinščak Zlodi, Vanessa Proudman, Ursula Rabar and Niels Stern, published in Katina;
• We published important blog posts on the topics of academic freedom—including a contribution from author Ash Lierman—and open licensing;
• Our series editor Geoffrey Khan has released a case study about publishing the Semitic Languages and Cultures series in open access;
• We have also given various talks this year, on topics including AI in open access publishing and fostering a culture of open access book publishing beyond mandates.

*Image credit: Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash *

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Open Book Publishers is now on Instagram! Follow us!

If you are too, please follow us there! We'll be sharing information about new books, conversations with authors, and glimpses 'behind the curtain' at the publishing process...

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OBP is a 'Top 100 UK social enterprise' for the fifth year in a row!

We are thrilled to announce that we are once again on this year's SE100 list! For more information, and to see the other excellent organisations who have been selected, see this webpage.

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That's all for this month ― and year! We wish you a peaceful holiday and a happy and healthy new year when it arrives.

See you in 2026!

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