Recipes For Disaster - Message To CrimethInc

(Concerning your choice against making the texts in Recipes for disaster digitally available.)

Dear CrimethInc;

I've bought the book and I agree, it is very beautiful and readable. The design is great. It's a good thing that you chose to do it as a book, too; it's great to have available in handbook form, it's easy to find the chapter you're looking for in it, and it's useful for people who don't have access to computers.

I also see the fun/crafts factor in making a proper, traditional book over a series of »lowly« Internet articles, but that's also a pretty patronizing stance to take. You (intentionally or not) position yourselves as the anonymous but unchallenged prophets who are the only ones worthy to work with the text. This seems far from the »hands-on« anarchist ideal I cherish. I do respect you a lot for putting these texts together; but there's a lot of value in digitally available texts.

I've read hundreds of articles on Wikipedia, articles produced by commons-based peer production; a production form that some of us call revolutionary. It's a labour of love, by volunteers. Personally, I don't have a problem with computer reading. I've got some minor eyesight problems, and the room lightning is usually an issue when reading paper texts. Not so with my screen, with large enough letters.

Making your stuff available digitally would make it searchable, accessible by the blind, and easily annotatable and updatable. More people would find the text and some of them might choose to obtain the book in paper form as well, for themselves or for a friend or group.

You've written to a friend of mine that »books belong on paper«; I disagree, if by »belong« you mean »belong only«. The centralistic gutenbergian media like print are part of the shackling system. You've managed to publish and distribute a high-quality book; this is still something that very few are able to do. I'm happy that projects like Wikibooks exist, and I hope this idea will spread and improve. A paper book can reach people that digital texts can't reach, and vice versa.

I respect the anti-computer position that many punk anarchists seem to have, but I've seen so many wonderful, pro-anarchist things happen thanks to the Internet, so many people have found anarchism and seen it work in practice. (The Internet servers themselves are (non-)organized in anarchist fashion.) Computers might have drawbacks, but you still found them useful enough to typeset Recipes for disaster.

I am awed by many things the non-computer-using anarchists have done and built, too, and maybe making Recipes for disaster digitally available will get some of us geeks off our asses and down to the local Food Not Bombs.

However, anarchists have always been in the forefront when it comes to getting information to and from people. We have a tremendous opportunity when we have access to digital tools, and I don't want to see that squandered.

Now, we (a disparate group of vague acquaintances and friends) will try to scan and digitalize the book to provide it in digital form; so we can more easily comment on it, point activists towards specific chapters, and search it. Maybe even add some of our own experiences or advice.

If you choose not to help us with this project by sending texts and source images, we will proceed anyway, but it will have to involve plenty of unnecessary labour on our behalf, and images might suffer from the scanning process. So your help is very welcome.

Hopefully, respectfully, and with gratitude for your making of this book in the first place,
Sunnan

Senast ändrad 14 maj, 2008 9:00 by Oeoe visa ändringar
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