Welcome to the fourth special issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine, Urgent Publishing Debris. In May 2019, the Making Public: Urgent Publishing Conference took place. Among others, it asked the following questions:
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-"How to realize sustainable, high-quality alternatives within this domain of post-digital publishing?"
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-"How can designers, developers, artists, writers and publishers intervene in the public debate and counter misinformation in a meaningful and relevant way?"
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-"What are new publishing strategies for our current media landscape?"
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-"How to design for urgency without succumbing to an accelerated hype cycle?"
The presentations, debates and conversations have all been officially documented in blogposts on the Institute of Network Cultures website, videos and pictures. But what about the notes, the pictures, the recordings and the tweets of the conference's visitors? What do they have to tell us about how each person experienced the conference? This special issue aims to provide new readings of the event by creating remixes of the official archival sources with the 'unofficial' debris circulating around it.
In order to facilitate the navigation between articles, making connections visible where they might have only been implicit, the editors have decided to define eleven overarching topics (Social/Community, Activism, Post-truth, New forms, Authorship/Makers, Speed, Positioning, Locality, Relationality, Authoritarianism, Parasite). Each of the topics was attributed a colour and the source material is highlighted accordingly.
Furthermore, each remix has a dispersed editors' note, wherein each editor reflects in more detail on the program, how it connects to the conference's topic and how it might answer any of the aforementioned questions.
The Making Public project was supported by Regieorgaan SIA (Taskforce for Applied Research), which is part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
We would also like to thank everyone who made this issue possible with their contributions.
This issue of the Pervasive Labour Union zine is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.31.