Article and rationale:
Gary Hall: Thank you for the invitation to contribute to the issue of the Journal of Peer Production you are putting together on ‘OPEN’. We’d be happy to. Open Humanities Press is a press rather than a journal (although the OHP collective does currently include 21 journals: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/journals/titles/.) The most recent manifesto either Sigi [Jottkandt – ed] or myself has produced about the philosophy that underpins OHP (as well as some of the other collectives we are part of: i.e. the Radical Open Access Collective: http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk; ScholarLed: https://scholarled.org), is ‘The Inhumanist Manifesto’ (see below). I initially wrote this 10 point manifesto as part of an article for the inaugural edition of the open access journal Media Theory, which itself had the theme of the manifesto: see Vol. 1, No.1, 2017: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/29/24. A revised, longer version was then published as The Inhumanist Manifesto: Extended Play, in Mark Amerika et als Techne: Art+Research E-Pamphlet series, which comes out of The Techne Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I’m attaching a copy of this longer version for you. Sigi and I would be happy for you to have this short, 10 point version of the Inhumanist Manifesto as our contribution to the issue you are planning, if you think it would work. (It seems to resonate with your interest in biosphere, the environment etc.).
Download PDF: OAB Open Humanities Press
Excerpt: The Inhumanist Manifesto
By Gary Hall
1. Work collaboratively and collectively.
2. Operate according to a non-profit philosophy.
3. Act in a non-rivalrous, non-competitive fashion to explore new models for property, ownership and the economy.
4. Take a hyper-political approach.
5. Gift labour as a means of developing notions of the community, the common and of commoning that break with the conditions supporting the unified, sovereign, proprietorial subject.
6. Generate projects that are concerned, not only with representing or critiquing the world, but also with intra-acting with the world.
7. Interrogate those propositions that are often taken for granted by theory. The list is a long one. It includes data, the digital, the human, technology, the printed text, the network and copyright. Other propositions that are assumed by theorists when drawing conclusions about the media are capitalism, liberalism, humanism, freedom, democracy, community, communism, and the commons.
8. Engage with the existing institutions – especially those to which theorists are most closely tied such as the university, the library, and the scholarly publishing industry – so as to transform them.
9. Use different personas or masks to experiment with producing multiple authorial ‘I’s, different to the liberal humanist subjectivity that is the default adopted by even the most supposedly radical of theorists.
10. Reinvent both the humanities and the posthumanities as the inhumanities by adopting ways of being and doing as theorists that actually take account of and assume an intra-active relation with the nonhuman.