Ruling Class Studies (Digital Libraries)

Ruling Class Studies is a research of the latest state of the art in innovation, adaptation, and intelligence in capitalism that looks closely at the Google, Facebook, Amazon and eBay (GFAeB) that are digital natives and related sociopolitical context of their existence. In this research I am primarily interested in a relationship between commons based peer production, a role of amateurs entering different professional fields, a role of a user in GFAeB distribution and production, and the their related extraction of value. The GFAeB dominant position in provision of some of the most important infrastructures of today led to the dependency (on them and their infrastructures) that require radical rethinking of political, economic, and legal regulations from the perspective of public, private and business sector, as well as the very concepts of autonomy and freedom from the perspective of the digital counter-culture.

The idea of universal access to knowledge embodied in the institution of a public library provided us exceptional de-commodified access to knowledge in the world of its evergrowing commodification. In the history of processing and organization of information there are three particular historical sequences where libraries’ genealogy could provide us relevant insights: (pre-computers) the last phase of a development of index card catalog and its applications (libraries, businesses), (computers) transition from index card catalog to digital catalogs, (network) transition from a digital catalog to a (global) networked one.

Contact

Marcell Mars