COD./COL.: a zine against the monopolistic power of Big Tech

The digital—in the singular—is a space insofar as it makes it possible to establish relations between different places by connecting them and rendering them commensurable. At its inception, the Web embodied a utopia of this kind: that of a network designed to maximize the sharing of knowledge, the exchange of ideas, open discussion, free access, and the dissemination of reflections and analyses.

This promise has gradually been overshadowed by the grip of a handful of large corporations, reducing the Web to a space that is indeed horizontal, homogeneous, and quantifiable, but one structured according to a liberal paradigm rooted in market logics. This dominance has taken several forms: the hegemony of search engines whose impoverished indexing practices constrain discoverability; recommendation algorithms; the extraction of data for commercial purposes under the guise of promises of radical productivity; and the imposition of HTML5 at the expense of XHTML. These are all ways in which we—as research communities—are subjected to the structures of the Web without participating in their construction. Since the rise of conversational agents, this dispossession has intensified: the massive production of content generated by language models, themselves trained in an increasingly autophagic manner, is drowning out scholarly production, while research publications are becoming the raw material for a handful of proprietary applications whose sole horizon is profit. Market logics thus orient the digital toward a world of personal-data capture and capitalist productivity. Rather than being the protagonists in shaping the digital space we inhabit, we have become its puppets.

This situation raises questions about the habitability of the digital—of this digital in the singular—particularly in relation to research. What is to be done? A radical response would be to leave this space, to leave the Web, and to seek out more discreet, peripheral, situated places. Places that are less visible, less mainstream, where small collectives might re-form around genuinely shared values and worldviews. Our proposal is therefore to shift from a unified digital space toward digital places: plural and situated.

As Jean-Guy Meunier, among others, has taught us, the digital is first and foremost a question of models and modelling. The task is not, in the first instance, to count, but to model: to describe a situation, a context, a concept, or an idea. One might say that we need to tell before we count. The functional, mathematical, and computable model is never unique; it rests upon a representational, or conceptual, model—a worldview, a narrative, an interpretation. And there is an inexhaustible multiplicity of possible models. A multiplicity of places, therefore, each with its own values, characteristics, and local specificities.

To inhabit digital places means, first and foremost, to work toward establishing one’s own home, one’s own house, or one’s own cave.

To put this hypothesis to the test, we propose producing a multiformat zine, distributed through protocols other than HTTP alone (RSS, SMTP, FTP, hand-to-hand distribution, etc.), from an anti-essentialist perspective that refuses to reduce dissemination to the Web, or even to the digital itself, moving as readily through paper as through cables. The aim is to document this exploration in order to develop a broader reflection on the conditions that make the digital inhabitable for research communities.

Issues

Technical challenges

The technical dimension of the project lies in experimenting with multimodal and multiformat publishing workflows, followed by the dissemination of the resulting materials.

Research activities

Deliverables

A zine (frequency to be determined)

Findings and partial conclusions

Un premier zine en septembre 2026 : https://zine.ecrituresnumeriques.ca/1/zine1.html

People