And document it we must, because in addition to the removal of words now considered too “woke” to be published, entire government websites are being gutted or disappearing entirely. This should concern every US-American, regardless of political party or ideology. When I say the government is erasing our history, that “our” applies to all of us.
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last week i wrote the wikipedia article on Tenrei Ōta, a Japanese physician and inventor of one of the first intrauterine devices
The world's richest man has joined a growing chorus of right-wing voices attacking Wikipedia as part of an intensifying campaign against free and open access information.
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Community memory
Happy Labor Day. I wrote a Wikipedia article about the gay, anarchist, anti-profit publishing collective Come!Unity Press after stumbling across a poster they printed in 1971.
I'd come across some photos of these while looking for public domain photos of computers a couple weeks ago, and was disappointed at the time that I couldn't find a better photo than ones like this on Wikimedia Commons (derived from a scan of a 1974 newsletter):
Soulellis’ talk, however, features a much better photo of this very same terminal at Leopold's Records in Berkeley, CA, likely taken at the same time based on the outfit of the person featured in both shots!
The talk, which focuses on community and archives and collaborative art and resistance, has some really interesting throughlines with some of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
The Signal Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture published an interview with an early member of the C!UP collective in issue 5. You can borrow a copy for free from the Internet Archive. I was curious how the anarchists went from operating a printing press for a group of Quakers in exchange for free rent to running the whole shop. Turns out it came down to conflicts over topics including their nudism and a "political prisoner" (kitten) named Kropotkin. Signal recounts the story.
There’s another story from an early member of the collective to be found in the comments of a site called The People’s Graphic Design Archive: “They liked th[e rainbow ink] effect so much that they charged extra to print plain black ink”.
It means always questioning. More than that: it means always deeply examining the less visible ideologies that lurk behind the design systems that govern how we live and communicate. For me this also means working with archives as *time machines,* and dialing back through history to see how others have resisted and persisted by making public against the grain, by “performing publishing” in their lives. What can we learn from their ongoing struggles for liberation, through their acts of making public?
![Wikipedia article: Splooting is lying in a spread-eagled, prone posture. It is typically performed by four-legged mammals such as dogs and squirrels when they wish to relax or cool down. It may also be known as frogging or pancaking. [Image] Example of a splooting English Bulldog](https://storage.mollywhite.net/micro/731add121a8f005ee523_Screenshot-2025-01-12-at-5.23.28---PM.png)
