A World Digital Library Is Coming True! by Robert Darnton | The New York Review of Books

A World Digital Library Is Coming True! by Robert Darnton | The New York Review of Books.

In the scramble to gain market share in cyberspace, something is getting lost: the public interest. Libraries and laboratories—crucial nodes of the World Wide Web—are buckling under economic pressure, and the information they diffuse is being diverted away from the public sphere, where it can do most good.

Not that information comes free or “wants to be free,” as Internet enthusiasts proclaimed twenty years ago.¹ It comes filtered through expensive technologies and financed by powerful corporations. No one can ignore the economic realities that underlie the new information age, but who would argue that we have reached the right balance between commercialization and democratization?

Consider the cost of scientific periodicals, most of which are published exclusively online. It has increased at four times the rate of inflation since 1986. The average price of a year’s subscription to a chemistry journal is now $4,044. In 1970 it was $33. A subscription to the Journal of Comparative Neurology cost $30,860 in 2012—the equivalent of six hundred monographs. Three giant publishers—Reed Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Springer—publish 42 percent of all academic articles, and they make giant profits from them. In 2013 Elsevier turned a 39 percent profit on an income of £2.1 billion from its science, technical, and medical journals.

All over the country research libraries are canceling subscriptions to academic journals, because they are caught between decreasing budgets and increasing costs. The logic of the bottom line is inescapable, but there is a higher logic that deserves consideration—namely, that the public should have access to knowledge produced with public funds.

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The struggle over academic journals should not be dismissed as an “academic question,” because a great deal is at stake. Access to research drives large sectors of the economy—the freer and quicker the access, the more powerful its effect. The Human Genome Project cost $3.8 billion in federal funds to develop, and thanks to the free accessibility of the results, it has already produced $796 billion in commercial applications. Linux, the free, open-source software system, has brought in billions in revenue for many companies, including Google.

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According to a study completed in 2006 by John Houghton, a specialist in the economics of information, a 5 percent increase in the accessibility of research would have produced an increase in productivity worth $16 billion.

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Yet accessibility may decrease, because the price of journals has escalated so disastrously that libraries—and also hospitals, small-scale laboratories, and data-driven enterprises—are canceling subscriptions. Publishers respond by charging still more to institutions with budgets strong enough to carry the additional weight.

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In the long run, journals can be sustained only through a transformation of the economic basis of academic publishing. The current system developed as a component of the professionalization of academic disciplines in the nineteenth century. It served the public interest well through most of the twentieth century, but it has become dysfunctional in the age of the Internet.

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The entire system of communicating research could be made less expensive and more beneficial for the public by a process known as “flipping.” Instead of subsisting on subscriptions, a flipped journal covers its costs by charging processing fees before publication and making its articles freely available, as “open access,” afterward. That will sound strange to many academic authors. Why, they may ask, should we pay to get published? But they may not understand the dysfunctions of the present system, in which they furnish the research, writing, and refereeing free of charge to the subscription journals and then buy back the product of their work—not personally, of course, but through their libraries—at an exorbitant price. The public pays twice—first as taxpayers who subsidize the research, then as taxpayers or tuition payers who support public or private university libraries.

By creating open-access journals, a flipped system directly benefits the public. Anyone can consult the research free of charge online, and libraries are liberated from the spiraling costs of subscriptions. Of course, the publication expenses do not evaporate miraculously, but they are greatly reduced, especially for nonprofit journals, which do not need to satisfy shareholders. The processing fees, which can run to a thousand dollars or more, depending on the complexities of the text and the process of peer review, can be covered in various ways. They are often included in research grants to scientists, and they are increasingly financed by the author’s university or a group of universities.

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The main impediment to public-spirited publishing of this kind is not financial. It involves prestige. Scientists prefer to publish in expensive journals like Nature, Science, and Cell, because the aura attached to them glows on CVs and promotes careers. But some prominent scientists have undercut the prestige effect by founding open-access journals and recruiting the best talent to write and referee for them. Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate in physiology and medicine, has made a huge success of Public Library of Science, and Paul Crutzen, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, has done the same with Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. They have proven the feasibility of high-quality, open-access journals. Not only do they cover costs through processing fees, but they produce a profit—or rather, a “surplus,” which they invest in further open-access projects.

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DASH now includes 17,000 articles, and it has registered three million downloads from countries in every continent. Repositories in other universities also report very high scores in their counts of downloads. They make knowledge available to a broad public, including researchers who have no connection to an academic institution; and at the same time, they make it possible for writers to reach far more readers than would be possible by means of subscription journals.

The desire to reach readers may be one of the most underestimated forces in the world of knowledge. Aside from journal articles, academics produce a large numbers of books, yet they rarely make much money from them. Authors in general derive little income from a book a year or two after its publication. Once its commercial life has ended, it dies a slow death, lying unread, except for rare occasions, on the shelves of libraries, inaccessible to the vast majority of readers. At that stage, authors generally have one dominant desire—for their work to circulate freely through the public; and their interest coincides with the goals of the open-access movement.

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All sorts of complexities remain to be worked out before such a plan can succeed: How to accommodate the interests of publishers, who want to keep books on their backlists? Where to leave room for rights holders to opt out and for the revival of books that take on new economic life? Whether to devise some form of royalties, as in the extended collective licensing programs that have proven to be successful in the Scandinavian countries? It should be possible to enlist vested interests in a solution that will serve the public interest, not by appealing to altruism but rather by rethinking business plans in ways that will make the most of modern technology.

Several experimental enterprises illustrate possibilities of this kind. Knowledge Unlatched gathers commitments and collects funds from libraries that agree to purchase scholarly books at rates that will guarantee payment of a fixed amount to the publishers who are taking part in the program. The more libraries participating in the pool, the lower the price each will have to pay. While electronic editions of the books will be available everywhere free of charge through Knowledge Unlatched, the subscribing libraries will have the exclusive right to download and print out copies.

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OpenEdition Books, located in Marseille, operates on a somewhat similar principle. It provides a platform for publishers who want to develop open-access online collections, and it sells the e-content to subscribers in formats that can be downloaded and printed. Operating from Cambridge, England, Open Book Publishers also charges for PDFs, which can be used with print-on-demand technology to produce physical books, and it applies the income to subsidies for free copies online. It recruits academic authors who are willing to provide manuscripts without payment in order to reach the largest possible audience and to further the cause of open access.

The famous quip of Samuel Johnson, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” no longer has the force of a self-evident truth in the age of the Internet. By tapping the goodwill of unpaid authors, Open Book Publishers has produced forty-one books in the humanities and social sciences, all rigorously peer-reviewed, since its foundation in 2008. “We envisage a world in which all research is freely available to all readers,” it proclaims on its website.

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Google set out to digitize millions of books in research libraries and then proposed to sell subscriptions to the resulting database. Having provided the books to Google free of charge, the libraries would then have to buy back access to them, in digital form, at a price to be determined by Google and that could escalate as disastrously as the prices of scholarly journals.

Google Book Search actually began as a search service, which made available only snippets or short passages of books. But because many of the books were covered by copyright, Google was sued by the rights holders; and after lengthy negotiations the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which transformed the search service into a gigantic commercial library financed by subscriptions. But the settlement had to be approved by a court, and on March 22, 2011, the Southern Federal District Court of New York rejected it on the grounds that, among other things, it threatened to constitute a monopoly in restraint of trade. That decision put an end to Google’s project and cleared the way for the DPLA to offer digitized holdings—but nothing covered by copyright—to readers everywhere, free of charge.

Aside from its not-for-profit character, the DPLA differs from Google Book Search in a crucial respect: it is not a vertical organization erected on a database of its own. It is a distributed, horizontal system, which links digital collections already in the possession of the participating institutions, and it does so by means of a technological infrastructure that makes them instantly available to the user with one click on an electronic device. It is fundamentally horizontal, both in organization and in spirit.

Instead of working from the top down, the DPLA relies on “service hubs,” or small administrative centers, to promote local collections and aggregate them at the state level. “Content hubs” located in institutions with collections of at least 250,000 items—for example, the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian Institution, and the collective digital repository known as HathiTrust—provide the bulk of the DPLA’s holdings. There are now two dozen service and content hubs, and soon, if financing can be found, they will exist in every state of the union.

Such horizontality reinforces the democratizing impulse behind the DPLA. Although it is a small, nonprofit corporation with headquarters and a minimal staff in Boston, the DPLA functions as a network that covers the entire country. It relies heavily on volunteers. More than a thousand computer scientists collaborated free of charge in the design of its infrastructure, which aggregates metadata (catalog-type descriptions of documents) in a way that allows easy searching.

Therefore, for example, a ninth-grader in Dallas who is preparing a report on an episode of the American Revolution can download a manuscript from New York, a pamphlet from Chicago, and a map from San Francisco in order to study them side by side. Unfortunately, he or she will not be able to consult any recent books, because copyright laws keep virtually everything published after 1923 out of the public domain. But the courts, which are considering a flurry of cases about the “fair use” of copyright, may sustain a broad-enough interpretation for the DPLA to make a great deal of post-1923 material available for educational purposes.

A small army of volunteer “Community Reps,” mainly librarians with technical skills, is fanning out across the country to promote various outreach programs sponsored by the DPLA. They reinforce the work of the service hubs, which concentrate on public libraries as centers of collection-building. A grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is financing a Public Library Partnerships Project to train local librarians in the latest digital technologies. Equipped with new skills, the librarians will invite people to bring in material of their own—family letters, high school yearbooks, postcard collections stored in trunks and attics—to be digitized, curated, preserved, and made accessible online by the DPLA. While developing local community consciousness about culture and history, this project will also help integrate local collections in the national network.

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In these and other ways, the DPLA will go beyond its basic mission of making the cultural heritage of America available to all Americans. It will provide opportunities for them to interact with the material and to develop materials of their own. It will empower librarians and reinforce public libraries everywhere, not only in the United States. Its technological infrastructure has been designed to be interoperable with that of Europeana, a similar enterprise that is aggregating the holdings of libraries in the twenty-eight member states of the European Union. The DPLA’s collections include works in more than four hundred languages, and nearly 30 percent of its users come from outside the US. Ten years from now, the DPLA’s first year of activity may look like the beginning of an international library system.

It would be naive, however, to imagine a future free from the vested interests that have blocked the flow of information in the past. The lobbies at work in Washington also operate in Brussels, and a newly elected European Parliament will soon have to deal with the same issues that remain to be resolved in the US Congress. Commercialization and democratization operate on a global scale, and a great deal of access must be opened before the World Wide Web can accommodate a worldwide library.

In Praise of Idleness By Bertrand Russell

In Praise of Idleness By Bertrand Russell.

I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines.

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Whenever a person who already has enough to live on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct takes the bread out of other people’s mouths, and is therefore wicked. If this argument were valid, it would only be necessary for us all to be idle in order that we should all have our mouths full of bread. What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income, he puts just as much bread into people’s mouths in spending as he takes out of other people’s mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do not give employment.

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In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man’s economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.

But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are invested in industrial enterprises. When such enterprises succeed, and produce something useful, this may be conceded. In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface card in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.

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I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

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Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

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To this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.

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The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day’s work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: ‘What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.’ People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.

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If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. the snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.

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Industry, sobriety, willingness to work long hours for distant advantages, even submissiveness to authority, all these reappear; moreover authority still represents the will of the Ruler of the Universe, Who, however, is now called by a new name, Dialectical Materialism.

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For ages, men had conceded the superior saintliness of women, and had consoled women for their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about the desirability of virtue, but not what they had told them about the worthlessness of political power. A similar thing has happened in Russia as regards manual work. For ages, the rich and their sycophants have written in praise of ‘honest toil’, have praised the simple life, have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement.

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A large country, full of natural resources, awaits development, and has has to be developed with very little use of credit. In these circumstances, hard work is necessary, and is likely to bring a great reward. But what will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?

In the West, we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labor by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.

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The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth’s surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: ‘I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.’ I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime.

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The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered ‘highbrow’.

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The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.

The method of a leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had to be taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women; moreover their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

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Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc, the girl who became a corporation – we make money not art

Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc, the girl who became a corporation – we make money not art.

Jennifer Lyn Morone has turned herself into a corporation and collection of marketable goods and services. Everything she is biologically and intellectually, everything she does, learns or creates has the potential to be turned into profits. Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc is a graduation project in Design Interactions but as Jennifer underlines, this is not a speculative project.

JLM Inc is a new business established to determine the value of an individual. The corporation derives value from three sources and legally protects and bestows rights upon the total output of Jennifer Lyn Morone:

 

1. Past experiences and present capabilities. These are offered as biological, physical and mental services such as genes, labour, creativity, blood, sweat and tears.
2. Selling future potential in the form of shares.
3. Accumulation, categorisation and evaluation of data that is generated as a result of Jennifer Lyn Morone’s life.

JLM Inc is not only an audacious long term performance, it is also an thought-provoking exploration into personal data exploitation by corporations and governments. The projects is an extreme form of capitalism which might ironically enable an individual to regain some ownership of and power over their own data. Jennifer Lyn Morone Inc is obviously a very personal venture but the designer is also beta testing on herself an app, the Database of ME or DOME, that will ensure that your identity and data can be collected and stored for you and only you.

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… I really have become an Incorporated Person. The process has not been standard or banal at all but that’s probably because I am not in business school setting up a business to sell something. Rather, I was on a critical design course reappropriating capitalist and corporate strategy to make being a person a business.

In November 2013 I starting looking into the details to incorporate, which seemed deceptively simple: choose the business name; decide what kind legal entity you want your business to be (I became a C-corporation); figure out where to incorporate (I did it in Delaware); find a registered agent; fill out some forms; and then pay.

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What I found interesting is that it is quite common for people to incorporate before they even know what they want to do. They can do this because, in Delaware where the majority of major corporations are located, all you need to state in the articles is that “The purpose of the corporation is to engage in any lawful activity for which corporations may be organized under the General Corporation Law of Delaware”. This is also the common way of describing what the company will do so as not to limit the ways in which it can make money.

As the founder of my corporation I turn over my skills, capital, possessions and intellectual property to it and these become its assets and increase its value. My identity (name, appearance and IP addresses) become the brand and are trademarked; my mental abilities (knowledge) as processes and strategies; my physical abilities as equipment; my biological functions as products, my data is the corporations property and the shares are my potential. These all become assets that I can now capitalise on. My debt is turned into the corporations liability, which actually increases the company’s value if it were to be sold.

By issuing shares I can raise capital, based purely on my potential success. In exchange the shareholder has partial ownership of my corporation. I wanted to do this to expose that shares in no way reflect the true value of a company, only its perceived value based on popularity and that stock markets are pure gambling.

As the founder I can set the price of the shares extremely low, the usual amount advised in 10,000,000 shares at $0.001 or $0.0001 per share, I opted for the latter. After that I applied for a tax number (EIN), which takes about an hour to receive. Then you have to set up a bank account after which you can buy your shares, usually at least a third of the shares, and reserve about 10-15% for stock equity to pay for any services needed. Then you look at what the corporation’s assets are, what’s your inventory, and include the work that has gone in so far and put a number to it. A valuation has to be done to then determine what the new price per share will be and this can be done by someone who is an experienced investor or a venture capitalist, but they basically just take that number that you have got and multiply it by 10 and then divide that by the number of shares.

How do you put value on things such as Education RCA and Live and work in Germany? And why is living and working in Germany proportionally more valuable than living and working in France?

Those prices actually have no reflection of how valuable the experiences have been. What the numbers represent are of what my life has cost so far divided up into periods of time based and how much I either earned or what was paid for me to live and learn. These become my base values, the initial investment, on top of which I can begin adding the intangible (knowledge, personality, skills which are very hard to put a price on) I gained from these experiences and tangible assets (possessions/inventory, both internally – i.e. blood and externally – i.e. computer) that I acquired or continually produce. This gives me a starting point to know what my production costs are so I can determine an honest price for my services.

The cost of my education, how much I received after my father passed and how much I earned in France and Germany (to answer your question: France was significantly less since I worked for an ex-partner and didn’t receive a salary but also didn’t pay rent) I knew already. What I didn’t know and never thought to ask before was how much I cost my parents, purely financially, from conception to the age of 18. I asked my mother and she came back to me with this number with inflation figured in. I’ve since set aside shares for her.

It is an interesting perspective to now have. Often we think about what we don’t have or aren’t receiving. By calculating how much money has gone into my existence as input I then took a look at what my output has been, what I’ve actually done with that, and I wasn’t terribly impressed. In capitalism individuals are meant to consume as much input as possible, while corporations can’t survive unless their output is both useful and greater than their input, which needs to be relevant and not wasteful of time or money.

Could you explain us the purpose of the DOME app? How does it insure that your own information remains your property?

The philosopher John Locke stated that a person’s natural and inalienable rights are “life, liberty, and property”: that “everyone is entitled to live once they are created”, that “everyone is entitled to do anything they want to so long as it doesn’t conflict with the first right” and that “everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain so long as it doesn’t conflict with the first two rights”. Today, I believe that the data a person creates should be considered their property: it has a monetary value in the economic system that our lives are structured around. So I see data as a resource that people create and that is currently being exploited.

Right now, as a hyper-connected network society, each person creates a trail of data that is being used and profited on mostly for advertising purposes. People are now referred to as consumers and statistics and government and Industry pay substantial sums for our information.

So as a form of protest and in an effort to revolt against this, I am using subversive tactics to reclaim what I feel should be a person’s rights by incorporating my identity and creating DOME (Database of Me) as a way to take ownership and control of my property. Now that I am a corporation any data that I create that is linked to my name, IP address and appearance is copyrighted or trademarked and therefore subject to litigation if used without my permission…think of how Getty gets the rights to images and if you use it without their permission or having paid you get a fine. So any photo I take, any email I write, any call, text, web search, cctv footage of me that is stored on someone else’s, company’s or government’s sever does not have the right to be there or to be used, sold, leased or traded.

DOME’s function, in its simplest form, is an app that acts as a firewall between you and other servers. You use all of the same services, apps and interfaces you do today but you also have your own server and the app operates quietly in the background of any device you use, making two copies of the data you transmit. One hard copy goes to your database, the other is encrypted and goes to its intended destination but can’t be used beyond that. In DOME’s complete form it is a customisable app that still does what the simpler form does but with its own applications so that a person can communicate, share photos, socialise, navigate, search for information, and record external sensors such as biosignals. So people would need to have their own server or a data locker on a shared server and download the app on their computers and phones.

[…]

Given the growing market for information if people have ownership and control of their data they should be the ones compensated for it, not other companies. So beyond any success with DOME I have the intention to build a Platform, or try to work with others who are heading in this direction as well, as a cooperative Data Broker. People would use DOME and have an overview of their information as a data portfolio from which they could choose, if they want, to send as packaged data sets to the Platform as an investment for a known purpose. The Platform would then combine different people’s information, as this increases the value of the data, and then sell it to the approved markets. Those that contribute their information would then get a return on their investment. This is not necessarily the best solution, it is only a fairer alternative to the system that is in place now.

[…]

Could you describe to us the kind of services you are offering for free or those you are offering in exchange of money?

It really depends on who is asking and what they are asking for and is also affected by supply and demand. My services are categorised under mental, physical or biological, under which are combinations of features such as problem solving, compassion, strength, coordination, heat, and bodily functions. So when I offer something for free it’s because I produce it anyway and have no use for it myself and there is no demand, so it’s waste. If there starts to be a demand then it’s no longer waste but a byproduct which I can sell. If there’s something that is going to require depleting a resource, which would be measured by time, money and energy spent, in order to do it; such as consoling a friend and trying to help him through his problems for a few hours, then it will either be an exchange or invoiced. For example if this friend who often asks to meet to talk about his relationship problems is also there for me when I need consoling or help then it’s an exchange. But if he is never there for me when I need it, then I would send him an invoice.

Another example compared to how we are used to working now would be if a firm or company wants me for some mental services, say creativity and knowledge, then it would be similar to acquiring a consultant, but I would calculate my price based on what the knowledge cost to produce (education and experience) and calculate in my overhead costs, what I lost in time and energy against what I may have gained in value such as enjoyment or if I learned something new. If I there was value I gained I would deduct that from the price.

This may seem ridiculous but in an extreme form of capitalism each person would need to have a complete way to measure the value of their life and the quality of their knowledge, skills, health and relationships to increase efficiency.

Oh! i just saw you’re offering free urine! Is it ironic or would the urine be of any use to the buyer?

It’s both! There’s irony in the whole project, I’ve just dealt with it very pragmatically. We are bound to our bodies, some ways it’s an extension of our mind, in other ways it operates without us even having to think about it, in either case you are in it for as long as you live, or as long as it keeps up. It is 100% yours but there are external factors such as laws and taboos that condition you to use your bodies and the valuable things they do in very specific and deemed acceptable ways. Companies on the other hand don’t work this way. As I described above in how a waste might turn into a profitable byproduct, it depends on supply and demand.

So if you look at the body as equipment with quite mechanical operations, it produces things like urine systematically. As I am just starting I don’t have any customers. So I am copying how businesses give free promotions to attract potential buyers. In my research I came across people that were looking to buy urine for drug tests. There is also the potential to sell to labs of companies that are developing bio-fuel cells to power phones. Who knows who else might want it.

As there’s a pretty steady supply, which can be increased to an extent, if there started to be a demand that was more than I could supply then I could increase the price. If the demand is equal to the supply then I would price it based on what I saw people would pay and keep it competitive to bottled synthetic urine, yes there is such a thing. I could also increase my profit margin by only drinking tap water.

So, there’s irony on several levels: to illustrate the exploitative aspect of capitalism on resources and what this looks like at the extreme level of and by the individual; the ways in which we are conditioned to use our bodies and what we are ‘allowed’ to do with them; and the fact that you can potentially sell anything as long as there’s a willing buyer.

There is also another level of sincerity, in that the more manual your work is the less you are paid. When times are really tough, women in particular have had to resort to selling their bodies for money, with sex, pulling teeth, hair. I saw many people online looking to sell their kidney to help a friend in financial need. I also went to start a clinical drug trial and found that there are many healthy and educated young people who are now doing this for additional income. In face of an increasingly specialised workforce and automation of manual jobs people have to be resourceful and will have to look at what they have and what they can offer to live from.

Do you have a marketing plan that will ensure that people are eager to get those services and that you will make a profit rapidly?

I do have a marketing strategy as it was part of the business plan. My initial customers or users of my services will be everyone I engage with and know now. For example, if you wanted to interview me after the launch you would have to go through my website, check my calendar and block my time with the type service you want. You can then check my progress with the tracking page to make sure I’m doing what you asked of me. It would probably be an exchange as you are promoting me and helping me reach a wider audience, which would increase the value of me as a company and therefore effect my share price, creating profit for the shareholders.

My shares will be vested over 3 years, which means that I can’t sell them and I will not pay dividends until all production and overhead costs are covered. Until then all the money that comes in will be reinvested into the company until it is stable and making a profit.

My website will be monetised on the use and tracking page with banner ads to click on displaying things I own and want to sell, services I’m promoting and other people’s services. That will be similar to the way Google AdSense works with affiliate marketing but instead of products and companies it will be with people I know are looking for work or have just done something that’s available to the public, such as an exhibition or a book.

I plan to create some revenue also from endorsements to promote events I might attend, clothes I might wear, restaurants I might eat at and products I might use. This is to reflect how celebrities and athletes are used to influence the public and how product placement only happens when it has been paid to be seen. However, as normal people, we actually buy things and become walking billboards if logos or the brand’s identity are obvious.

Finally, there is the profitable but time consuming endeavor of pursuing intellectual property infringements. The profit of this will depend on whether my lawyer will charge me fees or if he will take a percentage from cases won.

In the video you present yourself dressed as a businessman. Why not highlight the fact that you’re a woman?

This project takes its stance in criticism to the capitalist system of which I can not think of a more iconic image than the man’s business suit. When you see a man in a business suit you know his job is to make money. I wanted to highlight that I am reappropriating the Capitalist’s role and strategy by embodying this uniform. There is a very schizophrenic nature to this project and through it I must play many different roles and not all of them will fit. The clips in the back are used to represent this and indicate that I am making this role fit me and not the other way around.

I think that it is still obvious in the video that I am a woman. If I had accentuated this fact by dressing up in a female business outfit or a sexy dress then I still would still be playing a role. Actually, over the course of this project so far the fact that I am a woman has already come in the way a few times and with people I considered friends. One wanted to help with contextualising the philosophical nature of the project. Our communications became muddy because he developed feelings, which was uncomfortable to say the least. Then he became greedy after speaking with people about the project and aggressively stated that he deserved a large proportion of shares. And finally, he was dishonest about how he used money I gave him to set up the my server. The second set-back, which was directly because I am a woman, was with a friend that I pitched to as a potential investor, since he’s squandering lots of money to build a spaceship so he can go to the moon in a few years. At first he was very interested, up until the point that he realised I was not going to sleep with him.