Kevin Sanders

So far this morning, I have mostly been reading this incredible thesis, which I would encourage you to read: uwo.scholaris.ca/bitstreams/7...

For the record, I didn't even get to it. But the sautéd mushrooms were on point.

*(2000) -- he died in a plane crash in 1994 :(

In case you can't get by the flurry of posts, I've been brain breaking myself this weekend. I didn't get very far, but I dislike productivity, so that's fine. I cracked a few more important nuts with regards to my application of thought to this silly task of producing thunks that will be assessed.

(That's a warning to socialists, FYI. Especially those that don't have a read on socialist-anarchist histories... I will be pissed if you start killing me because of your bloody insistence on The Process™ In *your* means of production or whatever.)

I was most interested in open access about 19 years ago. Bureaucracy really kills the buzz.

Interdependent autonomy is too wordy to catch on, so I'll stick with anarchism(s). We go this. Right?

I propose dissolving power (and institutions and other concentrates thereof).

The reason this is unpopular is often framed as though society has always operated upon power. This is inaccurate, ahistorical, and anthropocentric.

I reiterate that fighting for/gaining/accumulating (etc.) power is, counterintuitively, incorrect. I mean, non-anarchists point to why: "The operation of domination is in defining the political, so that power appears to operate in political vacuum (that is, in no place, nowhere)" (Readings, 2020).

i've been posting too much about how miserable AI is making me at work (higher ed)

i'd missed this student paper story about my uni's ChatGPT contract, which includes admin admitting that they didn't release survey results re faculty's feelings re AI because faculty handed them their ass in it:

If everyone just engaged with anarchism on anarchistic terms, honestly, we'd all be a lot less fucking stressed.

Trying the wee version before opening the full-size bottle...

Rolo-ing out of the boat is harder than one might imagine.

(I do not regret my decisions... yet.)

YES THEY ARE!

I might be minded to point the blame at the wind and rain, the disagreements I have with theory, my (unexpected) writing inertia, or whatever. But I was just hangry all day.

Time for a nightcap?

Bois, I may have even overextended my carbohydrates today. Jaysis. The four rounds of toast breakfast, the pasta lunch, and the x2 portions of chips are really weighing upon me of the evening.

And the award for Best Snacktor in a Leading Role goes to … 🏆

(I am, to nobody's surprise, concerned about the idea of libraries and HEIs acting as funnels to pump money into the corporate factories and their machineries for producing "open content" as though that is some kind of social or political endgame for OA or anything else.)

*not all libraries, of course, as many refrained from falling into the trap. It is much more common of a problem in the UK than elsewhere, and there are stillany great examples of UK HEI libraries divesting budgets towards e.g. community-led OA over time etc.

I agree. But the uptake of them has consolidated such publishers' control of the publishing markets while demonstrating better "value" from institutional budgets. (Tis a classic problem of economising progress rather than finding more appropriate ways to value value -- a library-side* failure imo.)

The Academic Publishing System’s Most Pointless Bottleneck BY ROBERT M. KAPLAN Peer-reviewed scholarship remains the central currency of academic life. It advances careers, drives innovation, informs policy, stimulates economies, and lays the groundwork fo…

Wish academics would focus more on the underlying politics of knowledge production and less on continually proposing reforms to manuscript submission systems.

The linguistic sleight of hand/marketing of "transformative"/"transitional" agreements is that they don't declare what they are transitioning *from* or *to* (or at all). Schrödinger's pupa is stuck in the same locus of library expenditure and the pressure to publish in ""prestigious"" outlets.

This requires valuing the social and the political attributes of radical forms of publishing, rather than simply economising the future of it.

I share van Gerven Oei's (2025) prioritisation of "alternatives to the atrophied communities – if this word may even still apply – of the universities and the massified authorships of the outsourced publishing machines" rather than the recuperation of corporatised institutions through liberal OA.

Part of the problem that we culturally, professionally, and operationally suffer from is the attribution of social and/or political value(s) to a business model rather than the relationalities and intentionalities of the publishing activity itself.

In DUTCH AFRO BECOMINGS, artist-curator Charl Landvreugd argues we do not have a language to understand Dutch Afro-ness & articulates the way Blackness has been (mis)understood across multiple decades of cultural policy.

#OpenAccess & #FREE to download:

tinyurl.com/4cnpz7ed

#BlackArts #Hybridity

"Transformative agreements" were always envelopment products that were designed to bolster the extant political and economic dynamics of scholarly publishing's dynamics within an open paradigm. They are the embodiment of institutional ossification and a working practice of 'open at any cost'.

DISTORTION: "Ultimately, in their current common form, big R&P agreements ask research institutions to further sacrifice control of the scholarly communication system to for-profit publishers by incentivizing submissions to their journals."