Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century by Alessandro Ludovico

Publications such as books and newspapers are often considered trustworthy, informative texts, yet automated “bot” accounts on social media are rarely imbued with such trust. For Alessandro Ludovico, a more expansive interpretation of publishing is needed to understand how all of these media forms deliver information using varied senses and modalities. These dimensions are essential for understanding and designing trustworthy interpretations of publications.

The book includes a foreword by Nick Montfort, which is followed by an introduction to relevant terminology, context, and goals for the six subsequent chapters. The introduction also describes a lengthy appendix, which curates an annotated bibliography of experimental publication data. Tactical Publishing highlights Ludovico’s considerable skill as both media theorist and bibliographer.

Chapter 1, “The Realm of the Senses,” conceives publications through interactions of media and sense data. By separating digital and analog publications into dimensions of touch, smell, hearing, and sight, reading becomes more than merely visualizing words. Different media afford different ways in which sense organs are involved in the reading process. For example, printed pages’ smells are often indicators of age, storage, and many other qualities that we regularly interpret. Contrariwise, digital publications’ smells are reduced to computing devices upon which we read, such as an e-reader, speaking more to technological choices than the publication itself. Building from these notions of senses as interactive ways in which we interpret publications, Ludovico privileges the relations between agentic perceptions of publications as a relational unit more so than the medium and content of the publication itself. This lends itself to later theoretical choices in politicizing publications.

Chapter 2, “Nonhuman Writing,” starts with the combinatorial and computational logic of machine writing. This is followed by a select historical survey of nonhuman writing, such as the computational writing experiment Tape Mark 1 by writer and artist Nanni Balestrini. Using a program developed on an IBM 7070, Balestrini aimed to create new poetry by combining three poets’ work with semiologist Umberto Eco’s and musician Luciano Berio’s help. The chapter also describes the Oulipo writing process adopted by several experimental authors using combinatorial writing practices. This leads to the question of trustworthiness of “creative” and technological outputs, exemplified by Tweetbots. Tweetbots are mostly software generated outputs that use Twitter’s API to produce algorithmic tweets. With Tape Mark 1 and Tweetbots, “authorship” through a combined human-machine agency comes into question as a dimension of trust.

Chapter 3, “Activist Post-Truth Publishing,” follows the epistemic issues introduced in the previous chapter. Trust makes us reckon with the publication world we have found ourselves in. This extends to “manipulative” publishing, focusing on manipulated photographs. Yet these publications gain their trust through “plausibility” and the “imagination” provided by the manipulated reality. This trust is described through reorganization of collections of books’ pages as published art, the political history of newspaper fakes from World War II onward, and issues of authorship in potentially infinite digital realms of remix media and deepfakes. These developments of media co-opting information manipulations challenge our expectation of “truth” and require new ways to validate truth-value.

Chapter 4, “Endlessness: The Digital Publishing Paradigm,” focuses on digital developments. Ludovico argues that the digital information realm provides an infinite media publication that we can surmise is not a collectively common information experience as much as a common media experience. He shows how we got to this infinity by showing how publications were designed for the protoinfinite. Infinite social media feeds were predated by technologies such as Fiske reading machines. He reduces these infinites through our cognitive limitations of space, time, and memory in infinite publication. This leads us to the issue of recording and remembering. How might one represent an archive of the endless?

Chapter 5, “Libraries as Cultural Guerrillas,” follows Umberto Eco’s proposal of “semiological guerrilla warfare.” Ludovico meets this challenge by arguing that libraries are architectural monuments of publication curation and extends this to unauthorized distribution platforms such as Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, and PirateBay as guerrilla libraries. Ideologically, he situates the principles laid out by Aaron Swartz as those of a self-styled custodian of guerrilla open access. Another place he points to is the experiential “weight” of printing the internet. Experiencing the thousands of words of the internet organized onto paper gives an idea of the size of the information and an organization that is particularly abstract and distributed online. Here, examples of creative designs such as libraries as DIY projects, personal use, or distributed networks of information allow reimagination of publication organizations to meet otherwise obscured interests or knowledge.

Chapter 6, “How We Should Publish in the Twenty-First Century,” outlines some final notes on new ecological contexts of publishing. In most cases, he points to a return to analog media as a solution for representations to develop collective trust in digital publication. This enables ecologies of space and time, machines, distributions, and forces, compelling us to interpret and to collectively negotiate through stable representative examples of publications.

In total, Tactical Publishing is a unique, mostly North American and European archival insight into what publication historically has been and could be. It is also an inspiring guide for reflection on our endless feeds of information in the digital by reimagining it through more tangible, tactile media forms. At times, what Ludovico writes is stylistically winding, obscure, or loosely collaged and is implicitly focused within culturally Western, postmodernist notions of trust, knowledge, and empiricism. While this might be seen as situated or limited in its interpretability, it does not undermine the core arguments. This is a book that should be taken seriously by anyone who is interested in how we can make archival sense of potentially infinite combinatorial meanings offered by contemporary computational models such as OpenAI’s large language models.