Publishing the Unpublishable

Or Why There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

“In today’s academic publishing circus, ‘service’ and ‘free contributions’ are just sleazy terms for fleecing scholars in the name of altruism.”

Lanfranco Aceti

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes the cost of operating within academic publishing and the ideas of ‘free contribution’ and ‘service to the academic community.’ These terms have become synonyms of neo-slavery for neo-serfs in a context in which non-profit academic publishing and non-profit academia have transitioned into a thriving, exploitative corporate industry.

The inherited frameworks of service and support within academic communities have been transformed into institutionalized, unreasonable demands within a transactional educational framework: students as consumers and customers on one side, the university/publisher as corporate dominus on the other. This relationship excludes artists, professors, authors, editors, and reviewers from monetary compensation for the time and work they deliver for free to the publishing industry and to academic institutions.

How does a publication exist in the interstitial spaces of these processes of exploitation? What are the ethical obligations of corporate publishing to keep ‘free’ content Open Access (OA), while at the same time fulfilling a mission to give visibility to an area, the interdisciplinary field of art and humanities, constantly struggling for funding and for visibility? Is it possible to receive both acknowledgment and monetary compensation and avoid falling into the cracks of institutional taxonomic contempt?

LEA (Leonardo Electronic Almanac) is but one such publication, entirely managed by volunteers, which faced the demands of ever more tiresome customers who, without paying any of the necessary dues either in kind or in cash, expected a platinum corporate service. While demands rose, there was no contribution or support for the services rendered by the people who volunteered (worked for free) to enshrine in the history of art, through a publishing project such as LEA, aesthetic undertakings, social activities, and academic thinking that would otherwise be silenced, left at the margins, or simply lost.

KEYWORDS: Exploitation, Academia, Publishing, Free Lunch, Art, Open Access

Introduction: Should We Have Been All Plumbers?

This essay was inspired by ten years of volunteering for the Leonardo/ISAST – MIT Press project as Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA). It was sparked by an accusation of neo-slavery when I was trying to create an opportunity for exchange between institutions in Europe and in the US. I wanted to set up a framework that allowed one or two students to volunteer for two months in Europe during my visiting professorship, whom I could then hire if conditions changed (‘if conditions changed’ was a hint dropped to signify ‘if I am able to get the financial support necessary’). One must also not forget the US visa process, which would have been far too costly, complex, and byzantine to overcome for a one-year research internship. The structure I envisaged was put in place in order to: a) create an initial soft academic international exchange to be expanded at a later date; b) navigate carefully through the complexity of three different institutional bureaucracies; and c) allow enough time to develop and generate opportunities for research funds and financial collaborations between some of the best institutional settings in the world.

The description I wrote to announce the volunteering opportunity was posted on an online board by a colleague, to reach as many students as possible. It was met with the criticism of two students, which was not just vociferously stated but problematic in its delivery, its method, and its content. Volunteering was presented as another form of exploitation and, of course, somehow I was the one gaining from this process. Not satisfied by my lack of engagement (I have always been told that it is better to let ethical fascists vent unopposed), they decided to email one of the institutions involved directly. The result was, first, the end of that particular venture and, second, a setback for a publication constituted entirely of volunteers, which had for years served the academic and artistic community it tried to represent by providing opportunities and outlets where there were none, a free service (with all of its problems, but nevertheless free), and a rigorous structure for the content published.

What I had continued to ignore, and actively fight against, was the idea that a new generation had been shaped by the very policies it claimed to fight, and was happy to exist within an exploitative system as long as it was allowed to criticize without action.

It also confirmed, in many ways, my personal ability not necessarily to alter systems but to penetrate them and slowly carve out spaces to be used by ‘disruptors’ in order to operate according to ‘alternative models.’

It was in this context that one had to wonder what a university or a non-profit publisher was, what audience it served, and what policies it expressed in order to serve the demands of that audience. Jeffrey J. Williams’s answer is blunt:

“It expresses the policies of neoliberalism, repealing the policies of the New Deal and Great Society, shifting the university from being a public entitlement like high school to more of a pay-as-you-go, privatized service.” [1]

Since a crisis is a moment of reflection, I realized that there was something wrong not just with the system itself but also with my insistence on wanting to realize a common process of engagement with a view to the long term, when both parties (exploiter and exploited) were content to operate and exist within the policies of neoliberalism.

I had to acknowledge that the system and the people within it increasingly favored individual and short-term approaches that did not, and were not supposed to, create collegiality, a shared commitment, or a collective interest. I also had to understand that there was not a large appetite for an integration between disciplines, scholars, and students that was focused on the development of outputs. Everyone expected to exploit these synergies solely to their own advantage, even if it meant the collapse of the entire operation.

My annoyance, a British understatement to signify a rather strong anger, came from the fact that I had been volunteering for years for LEA and that, had I been paid according to Glassdoor’s rates for a comparable position, I would have received a median salary of $85,601 a year. The lower end of the scale tipped at $52,000 and the higher end at $120,000, also according to Glassdoor. [2]

Time, effort, and resources, which I had drawn upon to revive and sustain the publication, were to be considered an extra, and they amounted to a hefty sum: around $10,000 a year in travel and accommodation.

In the end, my efforts over ten years could be placed between $520,000 (at the lower rate) and $856,010 (at the median), excluding the $100,000 in travel and accommodation. This was the price of my volunteering at that particular moment in time. My contribution to the ‘community’ stood at that level. If we really wanted to be careful and count the hours I spent doing this as a second job, on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays (which in Europe are supposed to be paid as overtime), the figure would be higher still; for the sake of this narrative I will stick to $856,010. Both amounts made me reflect and left me astonished. This was an inordinate amount of money! It was also an inordinate amount of time, which had the nature and the demands of a second full-time job.

If I actually had received that money I could buy a Porsche.

It was money that the academic/publishing industry did not have to pay, and time that I had freely given to render visible contributions to the field of interdisciplinary arts.

“Some plumbers charge a flat-rate service call plus an hourly rate for their labor. The plumber may be able to break down their labor rate into quarter-hours. The average hourly rate ranges from $45 to $150.” [3]

It was for these reasons that I decided to alter the structure of LEA and to clarify, once and for all, the financial nature of the journal/publication series and the process linked to it, in an age in which, within the humanities, exploitation by the neoliberal corporate industry clothed as non-profit was rampant.

This essay also served another function: to clarify how the journal worked and the thinking behind this shift. It explained to writers and contributors what to expect if they decided to engage with LEA, and how to operate and behave.

It was a shift that I hoped would ensure a different approach to publishing and negate the exploitative nature of academia and the academic publishing industry. It was an editorial exploration of post-capitalist publishing and of the ways and methods to get around exploitation, if any actually existed.

“As of 2015, the academic publishing market that Elsevier leads has an annual revenue of $25.2 billion. According to its 2013 financials Elsevier had a higher percentage of profit than Apple, Inc.” [4]

The price of ‘open access’ has since been set by the publishers themselves. In 2021, Nature began charging authors €9,500 (about $11,500) to make a single article open access. [5] None of that money paid the author, the reviewers, or the academic editors.

From January 2019, everyone who worked on an article or a publication of LEA was to be paid at a plumber’s rate, $100 an hour, for all new incoming projects. [6]

No Longer Exploiting

In order not to exploit, an entity had to work out the maths of the process. What did it mean to pay everyone, and was it really possible?

There were two options when it came to exchange: a) one that is linked to money, and b) one that is linked to personal passions and freely exchanged labor.

What was not possible was to ask for a free exchange framework (not paying any money) while demanding and pretending to be a service based on a paid contractual assumption. One cannot be a customer if one is not paying for services or goods. [7]

Therefore, from January 1, 2019, the tenth anniversary of my tenure at LEA, there would be two options.

Option 1: Work = Money

The first option was a paid contractual one, which entailed the payment of everyone working on an essay or volume, so that no accusation of exploitation could be levied against the publication itself or any of its members. Every essay proposed to LEA under the contractual terms would require financial support of $4,200 from the author and their institution. This would allow the authors to be customers, to be paid $1,000 themselves, to pay everyone who worked on their articles, and to have certain privileges: e.g. the demand to have the work delivered on time and according to schedule.

Work = Money would not, however, allow unreasonable demands: e.g. a sloppy article that required a rewrite saddling an editor with an inordinate amount of work. The work would be strictly controlled by time limits and by the amount of money to be paid to the editors. Articles that required extensive rewrites would require more hours of editorial labor and therefore larger sums, charged in advance to the authors and their institutions before the article could proceed.

LEA would have been the only publication I knew of that paid its three blind reviewers (selected by the publication) and two friendly reviewers (suggested by the author). The reviewing system would become fairer and more varied, offering authors reviewers who were familiar with their work and could knowledgeably comment upon it and strengthen it with more honest, engaged, and open critiques than what had become rather superficial commentaries. [8]

I also decided to pay the same hourly amount for labor regardless of the task assigned: editing, marketing, or administration. Whoever worked in marketing or administration (students or professionals) would be paid a fair wage for a job well done. This was an egalitarian approach which, in times of inequality, spoke volumes.

It was also a way to generate a sense of responsibility in staff and volunteers. If there was no work, there was no money, no credit, no reference. It eliminated having to engage with so-called volunteers who disappeared after training, or hung on delivering work poorly done while demanding the highest possible level of recognition.

Option 2: Volunteer or Go!

The second option was based on people volunteering their time and labor. Time is an incredibly precious commodity and as such should not be freely given. One can only try to imagine what it would cost to buy back time: it is an impossibility. It was for this reason that courtesy towards the editors and the publication, when they volunteered their time, was not just expected but demanded.

Volume editors and authors who could not afford to pay were asked to volunteer an equivalent amount of time, labor, or opportunities to the life of the publication. They would have to convince the current editors and the Editor in Chief of the value of their proposed publication, and of why and how it would directly benefit LEA.

Authors were also expected to facilitate the work of the editors, readily comply with editorial processes, and assist in the collegial promotion of single essays, volumes, or scholarly events linked to the publication. They were to engage with each other to support their colleagues in developing the essays that would be compiled in the collection, and understand the complexity of editorial work and the amount of labor it entailed. It was a communal approach to production, in which shared effort allowed the realization of a project within existing frameworks—academic publishing frameworks in this particular case.

These two approaches had their own pros and cons; nevertheless, they opened access to a more varied range of members of the community, who could still find an opportunity to publish interesting work without the financial burden.

The table below shows the breakdown of costs for a single essay, in order to keep each article open access and pay those who work tirelessly on these publications. Volumes were compilations of essays, and the cost was simply multiplied by the number of essays in a volume.

Role	Hours	Rate	Total
Editor 1	3	$100	$300
Editor 2	3	$100	$300
Editor 3	3	$100	$300
Reviewer 1	2	$100	$200
Reviewer 2	2	$100	$200
Reviewer 3	2	$100	$200
Reviewer 4	2	$100	$200
Reviewer 5	2	$100	$200
Designer	3	$100	$300
Marketing & Management	5	$100	$500
Administrator	5	$100	$500
Total per essay	32		$3,200 + VAT

The table does not include the cost of paying the writer, although it shows the overall cost of producing a single essay.

Paying writers was a further complex issue that required in-depth analysis. Nevertheless, after careful thought as Editor in Chief of LEA, I decided to ask authors to demand $1,000 + VAT from their university for their writing. This was a little less than what I was paid at Sabancı University, Istanbul, every time I published in an international academic journal. The complete total for the publication of an essay, including the writer, would then be $4,200 + VAT.

The payment of the writer should be a responsibility of the university as well as of the publisher. The issue was that, in an age in which academics had no research hours and were overwhelmed by administrative, teaching, and research duties (e.g. grant writing), and by service [9] to the university and its community of customers, it was the university that benefited from free writing far more than an academic publisher in the humanities like LEA did.

This was a conundrum for which a solution was difficult to find. Nevertheless, in order to bring to light the exploitative nature of this process and the abuse of cultural producers, particularly within the humanities, I decided that LEA would ask each author either to ask to be paid or to submit a letter signed by their department chair stating that “the university is unwilling to pay the writer and that the writer accepts to waive the corresponding fee without holding LEA responsible for the nature of these exploitative frameworks and processes.”

I clearly understood that the initiative was a palliative; nevertheless, my hope was that it would generate discussion within departments and universities on the role of research and research writing in academic institutions. It would also provide the journal with a record of letters that crystallize the abusive and exploitative nature of twenty-first-century academia and academic publishing in the humanities. These letters could have been collected and published as an LEA volume, for future generations to draw their own conclusions on the nature of academic and editorial work in this day and age.

The maths were simple: $3,200 + VAT × 100 essays = $320,000. This was the monetary value of the production of 100 articles.

Over ten years, LEA’s fifteen volumes contained 12, 26, 19, 14, 23, 15, 19, 26, 17, 11, 16, 25, 6, 15, and 22 articles: 266 in all.

$3,200 × 266 articles = $851,200. This was the cost/value, in monetary terms, of what LEA produced over ten years.

If all the people at LEA had been paid for their work over the years, the total would be $851,200; if I had been paid for mine, $856,010 (at zero interest). If we had all been paid, the Editor in Chief and the staff, the amount earned would be $851,200 + $856,010 = $1,707,210.

The Porsche 918 Spyder in the image below cost $845,000. With the money LEA was supposed to pay its collaborators for every article, or with my never-paid salary, we could have bought at least one. If all had been paid, we could have bought two of these beauties and still had $17,210 in change to celebrate.

Why did I choose a Porsche as a comparison? Because of an email, one of the two I received complaining about my proposed two-month unpaid internship. These emails made me realize that I had perhaps been unclear about both goals and expectations, and that my ethical approach was perhaps faulty. I was focused on opening doors, granting access, and developing opportunities, all based on my own experience of volunteering for many years to build a career, in a context in which volunteering was the only way up for someone without connections. I had not realized that expectations had changed, conditions had been altered, and demands were different. My demand had always been to be given access to resources and the possibility of proving myself. The new demands were more articulated and went to the very core: my time, my work, my money, and my fun. It was an equation in which the amount of work had to be the least possible, and fun and money were the highest priority.

“Mr. Aceti have a warm welcome in [our city and our university].

I dont know exactly your expacations about [our country], [our country’s] Students and programmers when it comes to their social and economic situation, but maybe you should lower them a bit. Most of the people here (still) deal with inherent necessities of capitalism which means: You need to SELL labor to buy food and pay your monthly rent. We live neither from air nor love, food is not for free and cannot be picked from trees. I guess you know that. Why should ANY programmer work for free? What do you think a craftsman is doing after you tell him he should do some renovation work at your house for free? Right, he will pack his gear and leave. Why should artists and creatives should react differently?

Thats worse than feudalism! programmers would may get no money but a place to sleep and at least a warm meal per day. Here I get nothing.

If you have no budget to pay proper wages you should also have no intern. (Same reason I have no Porsche. Because I have no money for that. No money no funny. Very easy)

Have a nice day,

[signed, which I appreciated very much and was grateful for]

PS: your homepage says you are known for your SOCIAL ACTIVISM. haha. great.”

In many ways, it was not a reprehensible demand if addressed against the corporate-state capitalist frameworks of exploitation. The problem was that, although there was some merit, the person to whom this email was directed, the writer’s lack of knowledge and understanding, and the number of assumptions made were all problematic. They could only be framed within the climate of social tension of those years, which created a Kantian a priori of self-righteousness: the impression that an articulated argument or a complex structure could be addressed in simplistic terms, and that ignorance could be excused by pretending to sit on the higher moral ground, or by conquering it with verbal violence.

There was no interest in understanding what the possibilities of the unpaid internship were and what gains could be had, if any. The approach was simply to shoot the messenger and be damned. In all honesty, I did not find this approach too problematic, since I recognized it and had adopted it myself out of frustration, anger, and disappointment. Nevertheless, I have always tried, not always succeeding, to direct my anger toward situations and not people, and to see whether there was a middle ground to be found before engaging in personal attacks.

Since I tend to have a constructively critical approach, and I was inspired by the critiques, I decided to revise the way LEA operates, keeping in mind that all had to be paid for their time. Justice and equality, if they are to be applied, have to be applied equally to all parties involved.

The new contractual framework applied to all those who demanded contractual relations. It was a different story for those volumes in which everyone decided that the collaborative effort has to be shared by the authors, the editors, the administrators, and the volunteers, all together, to make the project see the light of day.

A Lesson to Be Taught and One to Be Learned

As I mulled over the emails I had received, I realized that two strands characterized them: the first, anger at being abused (a concept I was rather familiar with, together with many other editors saddled with total rewrites of papers by authors who couldn’t give a damn about their own scholarship and expected someone else to do all of the work); the second, a hostility towards anyone who was not like-minded.

I have always found communities incredibly problematic. I am not really much of a joiner. I don’t think I have ever been able to resolve negative experiential issues with the word ‘community.’ These issues compounded over the years and, for a variety of personal and societal reasons, continued to make me perceive the community, and all of its manifestations, as a dangerous locus. In my mind—since I side with Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Giovanni Verga, Grazia Deledda, and Luigi Pirandello—communities are dangerous, homogeneous, fascistic, and violent. I don’t think that there is any escaping from the perverse and homogenizing nature of community.

The collapse of the state and the return to ‘civility’ happen necessarily via the fascistic violence of the community, which, enshrined in a super-community, takes over all other groups and modi cogitandi in order to generate a common destiny, a common history, a common ground, and a common identity. Corporate identity is nothing other than a fascistic framework with a corporate twist, just as academic culture is nothing more than the appropriation and adoption of a fascistic operational system borrowed from the corporate world.

The idea that we are not all the same, that we do not necessarily share the same values, that we have different modi operandi and modi cogitandi, no longer seemed to sink into people’s minds when the self was the only, or the principal, parameter of engagement.

What my critics could not know was that the international collaboration was still being negotiated: it would not have been professional towards the partners to announce publicly opportunities that were still being developed and agreed upon. Perhaps I should have been more transparent. I recognize that today’s demands are different, and they should be: compensation for labor is a rightful expectation. Yet the refusal even to attempt a conversation, the immediate leap to condemnation, spoke to the very dangers of community that I had long observed.

These emails gave me the opportunity to reflect carefully and attentively on a variety of issues and to re-analyze in depth the way in which LEA was structured, but also my own ethical, social, and personal thinking. What are the values that we propagate? Are we contributing to the fascistic structures of this system? How do we implement radical change, and how do we generate alternatives?

The honest answer to the second question was yes. Every volume edited for free, every rewrite absorbed in silence, every year of unpaid editorship kept the system running. I was not only a victim of the Castle; I was also one of the people who showed up for bureaucratic duty. The saddest part was that I did it in the name of a notion of community which, like a unicorn, never existed.

The emails had a positive impact on my own thinking and, I believe, on the restructuring of LEA. [10] This was possible not because of the validity of the arguments put forward but in spite of the fact that they were poorly made and visually limited. Had I been grading them, I would have given them an F. The comments had a positive impact because they fell on the fertile ground of a mind willing to analyze and explore the issues that were brought up.

Had I wanted to criticize the exploitative nature of the internship I was proposing, this is the email I would have written:

Subject: A Proposal for a Neo-Serf’s Apprenticeship

Dear Professor Aceti,

I am so delighted to welcome you to our school, and I eagerly anticipate the wonderful opportunities you will bring to exploit—pardon, mentor—students such as myself.

Thus far, I have not yet experienced the advanced forms of capitalistic exploitation that are customary in the United States. However, I sincerely hope that my European training in miserization and pauperization will sufficiently qualify me for the chance to work with—or perhaps even be exploited by—you. Given your critical writings on neo-serfs, I take great pride in having already become one myself and am eager to deepen my understanding of this post-postcapitalist condition under your esteemed guidance.

I have heard that you neither eat nor sleep and are capable of working without pause, a feat of legendary endurance. I aspire to learn these and other valuable skills from you, to help me succeed in acquiring unpaid internships and cultivating my career as a professional neo-serf.

Please do not mistake my tone for hostility or bitterness. I am currently working hard to eliminate sarcasm from my professional communications and remain hopeful that under your tutelage, I will learn to engage in pleasantries devoid of rancor. Perhaps we could further this conversation over a drink. In fact, as a testament to my dedication to a career in the arts, I will work an extra shift this weekend to ensure that I can host you and show you a good time in our city, so that we may discuss the finer points of exploitation with mutual candor.

Yours sincerely,

Lanfranco Aceti

While being sarcastic and ferociously criticizing the person on the other side, I would have left the possibility open for a dialogue of sorts, in order perhaps to discover and understand more.

I owe this mindset to Professor Krzysztof Wodiczko, a great artist and mentor whom I profoundly admired for his candor and frankness, as well as for his ability to get into a heated argument without holding a grudge. Years ago, he allowed me to be at the CAVS (the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT) as an unpaid artist/researcher while I was completing my Ph.D. at Central Saint Martins, and he offered me his knowledge, for free, helping me to further my career.

That arrangement was unpaid, and it was not exploitation. This was the model I had in mind when I offered the internship: access and mentorship in exchange for time, and a job at the end if the money arrived. What I had failed to see was that such arrangements had become rare, and that most unpaid positions now offered the labor without the mentor. An internship that cannot pay has to give real mentorship and a clear structure in return; otherwise it is simply free labor.

While I learned some lessons from these rather poorly crafted emails and memes (I expect and demand a certain wit from an artist, and pride in visualizing their thoughts via a meme), I hope that I was able—although my pessimistic nature highly doubts it—to teach at least two important lessons.

The first lesson is that an argument can be made in an intelligent manner, and not with the banality, the obviousness, and the laziness of stereotypes and clichés.

The second lesson is that silence—I was silent on this topic for almost a year—does not necessarily mean surrender. It was not passivity: it was the time it took to look at the frameworks behind the criticism, rather than answer the criticism itself.

Value for Money

The previous analysis tried to offer an explanation of the publishing structures of the time and to base them on actual numbers: was it possible to quantify the value of what had been produced by LEA or any other humanities publication? The maths of a monetary scale were rather simple, although this measuring system was rather limited, since it did not take into account the actual work that went into developing and structuring the publications, or the networking efforts (with real financial costs) that were made to ensure the realization and cultivation of partnerships and collaborations.

These amounts of extra work and extra costs were shouldered by institutions that were able to see and understand the importance of keeping and developing an open access journal as a platform for the contemporary arts outside the remits of traditional contemporary corporate art and aesthetics.

These institutions were few and far between, and they existed in a situation of financial security or social commitment that went beyond the transactional nature of educational services and academic corporate frameworks. Here I have to thank, above all, Professor Mehmet Baç, the former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at Sabancı University, together with Haluk Bal, the General Secretary at Sabancı University, and Professor Meltem Müftüler-Baç. They believed in and supported the LEA project with deeds and not just with words, ensuring during my tenure at Sabancı University that the publication would raise its international profile.

It was becoming increasingly uncommon to find such institutions and, therefore, projects and initiatives like LEA existed as interstitial spaces, exposed in their fragility and dependent upon the effort of the people who volunteered their time and work to keep them alive.

The lack of institutional support from a university automatically signified harsher conditions for the existence and survival of the publication. Nevertheless, the lack of financial support did not stop such a university from using any outputs to beef up, for free, its scholarly achievements.

A further example of this approach was the way in which universities shifted the cost of labor onto others by adopting contemporary digital corporate forms of exploitation. By creating a platform for visibility, for example, they obliged editors and authors (scholars, in most cases) to add a further step to their work: uploading to the platform, creating metadata, and ensuring each article’s conformity to its standards. This was the subject of an email exchange, which I reproduce below with names omitted.

Hi X,

I really don’t remember discussing this. We spoke of the fact that you would have a dedicated person and that this person would be doing the upload with the Y’s publications that we needed to catch up with as well as the new ones—this is something I clearly remember.

I am not sure I can commit to this since it means to add further work to my load and shift it away from Z University. The big question with this approach will become: why to do it then? It doesn’t seem that there is a mutually beneficial structure in place. I am happy to do the work or to have someone to do the work if they are paid.

Platforms have become sites of exploitation of labor shifting down working hours and financial responsibilities from institutions to individuals and communities. I am very wary of engaging with these and facilitating forms of post-capitalism in corporate education.

To give an answer in one way or another I would have to look at the platform and see what it entails from a work upload perspective. If it is a question of half hour or one hour tops per an issue of 20 essays – then it is not particularly burdensome. Anything more than that, in my opinion, should be paid for.

With all my very best as always,

L

It was for this reason that acknowledgments, as a result of dialogue and understanding, became important. Moreover, it was fundamental to be able to relate constructively to the people who made these ‘alternative’ interstitial spaces possible, within which one might appear, be noticed, network, or exist.

Consequences: Intended and Unintended

The intended consequences that this new approach was meant to achieve were three.

The first was to speed up the publication process by ensuring that submitted articles conformed to the in-house style and required little editing of grammar. The editors would thus be able to concentrate on the structure of the submission and provide conceptual editorial advice, rather than engage in a rewrite to ensure proper grammar and conformity to the in-house style (the Chicago Manual of Style for notes and bibliography). The more work an article required, the more it would cost the author: a disincentive to bad writing. This monetary ‘structure,’ together with the immediate publication of the article, was meant to: a) avoid sloppy writing; and b) make visible the amount of work that went into each single one of LEA’s articles and essays.

The second was that editors and reviewers would engage more willingly with LEA, since their work would be financially rewarded, or they would at least know that under this editorship they were not abused. This would allow LEA’s material to be prioritized over that of competing publications. The level of engagement of the editors would also be qualitatively better since, once the frameworks of exploitation had been eliminated, their work would receive the financial recognition and consideration it actually required, and they would be bound to dedicate the time necessary to achieve the quality required for editing or reviewing. Each article would also list its assigned reviewers publicly (with the exception of the blind reviewers), showcasing the work of reviewers who in the current academic system donate their time for free and are literally invisible.

The third, and perhaps the most important, was that no one would feel used and abused, either via the contractual or the volunteer framework. This would allow for a customer-based relationship whenever the people who worked on articles/essays were paid, or a volunteer-based relationship in which the exchange of time and labor replaced money for the realization of a project in which everyone was invested. In the latter case, the project had to solicit the interest of editors and reviewers willing to donate their time and efforts, in collaboration with the authors, to the realization of the article/essay.

The predictable unintended consequence was that authors unable to raise enough money for the contractual option would have to persuade the editors, through the validity of the project, to invest time and labor in it. This might adversely affect young students and academics; on the other hand, having enforced an egalitarian framework, as some people had vociferously asked, it was my obligation to ensure fairness for all parties. The new framework placed a burden on students and young scholars, who would have to pitch their ideas to editors and collaborators at LEA. They would have to address the question that they themselves most often ask, and to which their prospective collaborators, whose free labor they were now pleading for, would also want an answer: What’s in it for me?

Had this new approach resolved all problems? Of course not. Several things remained pending: e.g. my volunteer relationship with Leonardo/MIT Press, about which I had not complained, screaming bloody murder, over all those years, while trying to push forward and enlarge a space for international collaborations, documentation, and archives.

Nevertheless, the vociferous complaints at the origin of this essay showed me that sometimes it perhaps pays to raise one’s voice and oblige the other party to reconsider the way in which they operate, rather than work on assumptions safely based on customary practices.

LEA was an experimental journal and, as such—at least in the eyes of the author of this essay—should have continued to experiment, by offering space to alternative practices but also by adopting innovative approaches that responded to the challenges of the twenty-first-century art and academic landscape.

The episode also showed me—not that I had any doubt of it—the tenuous relationship between the academic volunteer and the publisher: a relationship outside legal contractual frameworks that can be severed at any time, for any reason.

“‘Academic publishing is the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher has no idea how much anything costs.’ Nosek finds this whole system is designed to maximize the amount of profit. ‘I, as the researcher, produce the scholarship and I want it to have the biggest impact possible and so what I care about is the prestige of the journal and how many people read it. Once it is finally accepted, since it is so hard to get acceptances, I am so delighted that I will sign anything — send me a form and I will sign it. I have no idea I have signed over my copyright or what implications that has — nor do I care, because it has no impact on me. The reward is the publication.’” [11]

As far as precariousness and corporate abuse go, this was one structured at the highest level, via a series of consolidated needs and branding necessities that existed solely within the real or perceived need that ‘one has to be published,’ or has to have a prestigious editorial role, either for one’s own career or for the realization of a social-ethical purpose.

The argument that ‘I have personally benefited from my volunteering activities and therefore I have been repaid for my time’ does not hold very much water. Firstly, because I did not actually benefit much from it, since it was not decisive in securing jobs; and secondly, because it is the same argument by which every author who volunteered their time is said to have benefited from being published. This leads to the ultimate conclusion that we should all be volunteering and working for free for the corporate non-profit publishers and academia.

In reality, the benefits were minute and did not create a direct economic or social advantage. They might satisfy the need to realize an ideal, or the incremental development of a personal journey, but they did not translate into Porsche-money, pension funds, or extra vacation days on tropical islands.

The ones who benefited from this system were the publishing and academic industries, which received for free something they would otherwise have had to pay for.

To Conclude: Give Me My Porsche!

Perhaps we can start to reconsider the way in which these institutions work by doing very simple things: e.g. stop reviewing for free. Or simply by asking ourselves and the institutions a very simple question that my students, directly or indirectly, kept asking me: What’s in it for me?

Societal conflicts were increasing, pitting a post-postmodern approach against an advanced capitalism never willing to consider the reasons for a resistance to, or a reframing of, its exploitative operational frameworks. The participants, or neo-serfs, existed in these digital frameworks by showing a divided front and a divisive impulse to entrench isolation, and continued to exercise criticism while never attempting—or only failing in their attempts—to rescue social structures of participation and engagement that, if not necessarily ‘commune’ or ‘commonist,’ could nevertheless provide visibility to invisible research and ostracized thinking outside neoliberal frameworks. There was, therefore, a need to ask even more profound questions of ourselves and others, questions that do not let platitudes and tropes override the complexity of reality.

I could not resist, since we are talking of platitudes and tropes, using one by Tyra Banks and responding meme for meme to the student who provided a pixelated and recycled image as an expression of outrage. “Be all you can be, not bitch all you can bitch” is a wonderful quote to reflect upon when one can’t be bothered to make an argument in an intelligent, rigorous, and visually strong manner. [12]

More importantly, it is necessary to remember that a dialogue is not a shutting or shooting down of the other but an exchange which, no matter how difficult and problematic, should and must lead us to a renewed understanding of ourselves, of the project we are working on, and of the others we are engaging with. Shooting people down, verbally or physically, and shutting them down, emboldened by our own sense of self-inflated righteousness and confirmed by our soliloquies with like-minded individuals, are at the very core of divided societies that have forgotten the nature of dialogue and fallen prey to fascistic behaviors through self-referential digital communities.

It was not my intention to write this rather long response, which became an essay; but, engrossed in the analysis of what happened, how it developed, and the behavior of the people involved in what was an incredibly minute incident, I could not refrain from extrapolating, constructing, and connecting a series of reflections that link the particular to the universal and vice versa. The grand-scale events of the twentieth century—two world wars, and then postmodernity, whose vampire capitalism broke the collective into disempowered individuals to be exploited—eroded notions of society and, with them, the very basic notions of citizenship and social solidarity. Academia and the related not-for-profit publishing industry, and its meaning of enlightened discourse, fell prey to a consumeristic approach aimed at the exploitation of knowledge for a job. This was happening in a context in which digital frameworks shifted labor downwards to the many and revenues upwards to the few. It is a parasitic system that, not unlike Kafka’s The Castle, exists on the basis of people willing to toil, willing to submit, willing to enforce frameworks of exploitation in the name of others or in their own name. The Castle would not function if people did not show up for their bureaucratic duty, feeding their delusions of hope for a better day and the selfish and reassuring act of feathering their own nest, well hidden behind the excuse of some higher call which, instead, reveals the nature of humanity in the twenty-first century and the role that knowledge plays in it.

I had written as much, a few months earlier, to an international academic publisher, after more than a year of wrangling:

Dear X,

For the past year or so I have gone along with the project obtorto collo (for those not familiar with Latin: rather unwillingly). This was the result of a promise I had made to Z more than the result of my enthusiasm for this volume. As the trilogy/trinity of volumes developed my interest increasingly diminished due to the nature of the content.

My first problem is one of time: in order to dedicate my unpaid time to a volume, mainly if not wholly, based on economic considerations is something, I am afraid, I am not interested in. There is nothing more precious than time in this world and to throw it away in order to reinforce or participate in capitalistic exploitative frameworks, which carry the promise of the unattainable land of Prester John, would be pathetic particularly at my age.

My second problem is one of hypocrisy: I am incredibly irritated by the half-way and half-wit attempt to insert color and gender in a volume by simply asking to one or two colleagues to lend themselves as fig leaves for an editorial process which does not tackle the underlining problems of race, gender, minority issues, censorship, class issues, and etc in the volumes themselves or in one of the volumes. You asked for a rethink—in response I gave a well thought out and rather necessary address of all that has been, is wrong, and will be wrong with the current trajectory of New Media (the word art is something I find increasingly difficult to subjugate and enslave to this category). The language I used for the ‘subtitles’ comes directly from the activism of the 1970s’ and the Viennese Actionists—starting with the SCUM manifesto as a choice to deny current forms of fascistic censorship paying lip service to so-called liberal ideals. Also, I can assure you that there would be many academics from Harvard, MIT, Goldsmiths, the RCA, and etc. (since I spoke with them informally) who would be willing to participate in a real critique of contemporary new media structures. I also wished that in the editorial comments the editor/s did not assume that I was a white man, but realized that my academic background is steeped in social activism that walks the walks and not just talks the talks and stems from me being a minority.

The third and final problem is the acronym: XXXX. A dear friend of mine at Harvard referred to it as: “An ENEMA without the comedy factor.” This is an operation that I believe desperately needs to address the fascistic contextual undertone of its existence as well as the history of the material it is exploring. Not to do so it would be to collude with that same fascism. I have just asked to my students here in the US to stand on the right side of history, beyond the labels of Left and Right, because History will call upon them to explain their pusillanimity.

Dear X, I really appreciate your balanced English tone in trying to rain in a project that in your opinion is gone crazy. In my case that madness was a deliberate choice in order to show to the editors the real challenges that exist in discussing New Media. Also, an encyclopedia is imperialistic, fascistic, and colonialist in nature due to its attempt to taxonomize complex realities.

Z, thank you so much for letting me push this volume in this direction and to allow me to show what my voice really is. One thing that I asked since the beginning was to have editorial freedom in exchange for my time: unfortunately, it does not seem possible in this context. You have the previous outline we made together that you can continue to use, please consider it a gift of my time to you and feel free to use it. Regarding the new outline, as discussed, I consider it my property and it is my intention to publish it as a book that I will call ENEMA. Not sure if you know but intellectuals during fascism where purged in case of ‘Entartete Gedanken’ with castor oil.

Z, it was really fun to explore this direction together and thanks so much for indulging me: I had a smashing time doing it.

In conclusion, I bow to all of you, drop the mike, and let the curtains close.

Wishing you all a smashing economic success with the 3 volumes.

With all my best,

Lanfranco [13]

Knowledge, as a commodity of the twenty-first century, has been enslaved and is carried and paraded around like a cheapened, useless, and diseased whore, to be sold to whomever is willing to pay for it. Both sellers and buyers participate in this process and are equally responsible, when all that we are taught to know and understand is, as Oscar Wilde put it, “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” [14]

It was for this reason that I decided to strive for the publishing value and no longer for the price. By pricing LEA’s effort, which appeared counterintuitive and contradictory, the effect I hoped to achieve was to make people understand and appreciate the value of the publication, the work that it entailed, and the strength and moral fiber of the people who worked on and supported it with their time, talent, and labor.

Coda, 2024

When I revisited this essay in 2024, I was acutely aware of the significant changes that had taken place since its inception in 2018. The years in between, marked by a global pandemic, two wars, and numerous international crises, profoundly altered my perspective on scholarly engagement and publishing. The fee structure was due to start in January 2019; then the pandemic arrived, I decided it was no longer worth the effort, and LEA, as far as I know, is now effectively closed. These developments made it abundantly clear that I could no longer sustain my volunteering involvement with LEA, Leonardo/ISAST, and MIT Press. My decision to sever these ties after fifteen years arose from a longstanding commitment to end my participation in unpaid labor and forms of financial abuse, despite my natural inclination to offer advice and volunteer contributions. The threshold of exploitation had been crossed, and my intellectual labor deserved fair compensation.

My frustration with cultivating a publishing environment that disproportionately benefited others led me to reassess my scholarly approach. While I continued to produce essays and chapters for editorial houses as part of my scholarly obligations—contributions that remained unpaid—I became increasingly attuned to the imbalances inherent in the publishing process: the exploitation on the side of publishers and the burdens placed on those submitting work. This redirected my efforts toward self-sustaining platforms. I now have the tools, the capabilities, and the motivation to publish my work independently, free from the constraints imposed by traditional publishing, and to prioritize the ideas that I believe are truly worth documenting and sharing.

This transition represents a commitment to intellectual engagement untethered from arbitrary academic metrics that often fail to measure impact or significance, and away from toxic digital communities that increasingly represent the worst instincts of mankind. It led me to develop a new platform—Observations, Creations, and Reflections (OCR)—an independent archive of my writings, where this essay is now published.

This change in focus also symbolized a broader realization: my time is my own, to be allocated as I see fit. I can now write with a renewed sense of purpose, in a format that is both open and independent, ensuring that my work is not only archived but also publicly available, and that it can bring me any eventual financial rewards. This decision echoed what I said during a presentation at KHM in Cologne, where I had been invited by Professor Mischa Kuball: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

In closing, I owe a curious debt of gratitude to the two poorly written, angry emails and pixelated memes that prompted me to re-evaluate my voluntary enslavement to the academic publishing industry. As I move forward, I do so fully in control of how, where, and to whom I offer my labor.

NOTES

[1] Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Academic Devolution,” Dissent 56, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 113.

[2] Glassdoor, salary data for a comparable position, accessed March 9, 2019.

[3] “What Is the Average Cost to Hire a Plumber?” Improvenet, accessed March 9, 2019, https://www.improvenet.com/r/costs-and-prices/plumber-cost.

[4] Jason Schmitt, “Can’t Disrupt This: Elsevier and the 25.2 Billion Dollar a Year Academic Publishing Business,” Medium, December 22, 2015, https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier-and-the-25-2-billion-dollar-a-year-academic-publishing-business-aa3b9618d40a.

[5] “Nature Journals Debut Open Access Models,” Physics Today, November 2020. The €9,500 charge took effect in January 2021 for Nature and the Nature research journals.

[6] I chose a plumber’s hourly rate because plumbers did not have to invest as much money in their careers and student loans as academics do. It is a way to highlight, should it be necessary, how poorly intellectual and cultural work is paid. The $100 rounds up the midpoint of the $45–$150 range ($97.50).

[7] Lanfranco Aceti, “But I Can’t Help Myself,” public lecture, KHM (Academy of Media Arts), Cologne, June 11, 2018.

[8] On the role of reviews and their value, it is customary to cite Albert Einstein’s rejection of the peer-review process after his experience with Physical Review, its editor John Tate, and the anonymous reviewer Howard Percy Robertson. I find that the experience is more complex, and that there is a need to stress the importance of direct, face-to-face engagement over anonymous critique, to allow the development of an argument and the discussion and clarification of fine points. This is an argument to be developed in a separate paper on what peer review is like in the twenty-first century and what it should be like. Albert Einstein, quoted in Daniel Kennefick, “Controversies in the History of the Radiation Reaction Problem in General Relativity,” in The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity, eds. Hubert Goenner et al. (New York: Springer, 1999), 207–209.

[9] Service to the academic community has become a disguise for the word slavery. Since the market is skewed, particularly in the humanities, in favor of academic institutions, the word service has been used to place an inordinate amount of work on academics in order for them to deliver happy learning and fanciful ‘educational’ experiences in a cost-cutting environment.

[10] This remained to be seen, since people at MIT Press might have found this article too critical of their operations and more or less gently shown me the door. As much as they feared and loathed having any young person upset or levying charges of abuse, they appeared to be much less concerned with their academic staff and collaborators which—and the which is used to signify objecthood and not personhood—they believed, and knew, they could replace at will.

[11] Schmitt, “Can’t Disrupt This.” The quotation is from Brian Nosek, as reported by Schmitt.

[12] Eren Orbey, “The Enduring Miracle of Tyra Banks on ‘America’s Next Top Model’,” New Yorker, January 16, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/the-enduring-miracle-of-tyra-banks-on-americas-next-top-model.

[13] This was my response to an international academic publisher after more than a year of wrangling. After the initial promise of editorial freedom revealed itself to be moot, I decided to make my position clear, move on, and start working on a volume entitled ENEMA: Encyclopedia of New Experimentations in Media Art.

[14] I. Glenn Cohen, “The Price of Everything, the Value of Nothing: Reframing the Commodification Debate,” Harvard Law Review 117, no. 2 (2003): 689–710.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aceti, Lanfranco. “But I Can’t Help Myself.” Public lecture, KHM (Academy of Media Arts), Cologne, June 11, 2018.

Cohen, I. Glenn. “The Price of Everything, the Value of Nothing: Reframing the Commodification Debate.” Harvard Law Review 117, no. 2 (2003): 689–710.

Glassdoor. Salary data for a comparable position. Accessed March 9, 2019.

Improvenet. “What Is the Average Cost to Hire a Plumber?” Accessed March 9, 2019. https://www.improvenet.com/r/costs-and-prices/plumber-cost.

Kennefick, Daniel. “Controversies in the History of the Radiation Reaction Problem in General Relativity.” In The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity, edited by Hubert Goenner et al., 207–234. New York: Springer, 1999.

“Nature Journals Debut Open Access Models.” Physics Today, November 2020.

Orbey, Eren. “The Enduring Miracle of Tyra Banks on ‘America’s Next Top Model’.” New Yorker, January 16, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/the-enduring-miracle-of-tyra-banks-on-americas-next-top-model.

Schmitt, Jason. “Can’t Disrupt This: Elsevier and the 25.2 Billion Dollar a Year Academic Publishing Business.” Medium, December 22, 2015. https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier-and-the-25-2-billion-dollar-a-year-academic-publishing-business-aa3b9618d40a.

Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Academic Devolution.” Dissent 56, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 113–117.

IMAGES

Image Cover: Lanfranco Aceti, Band Aid, 2018. Photographic print on fine art paper, 67 × 100 cm.

Image 1: Lanfranco Aceti, What You Owe Me, 2018. Meme. Dimensions variable. Photograph: VIP Motors, https://vipmotors.ae.

Image 2: Lanfranco Aceti, Me!… Me!… aka The Apotheosis of Idiocy, 2018. Meme with a still from The Simpsons Movie (2007). Dimensions variable. Source: topsimages.com, accessed September 10, 2018.

Image 3: Lanfranco Aceti, Whose Work?, 2024. Meme with documentation of Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Vehicle, 1988–89, Fifth Avenue, New York, 1988. Dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź.

Image 4: Lanfranco Aceti, I Am Coming for Your Ass, 2013. Print on poster paper, from a series of posters. Pictured: curator Artemis Potamianou, Athens.

Image 5: Lanfranco Aceti, Me!… Me!… Bitch All that You Can Bitch, 2018. Meme. Dimensions variable. Inspired by Tyra Banks.

EDITIONS

First published online: Leonardo Electronic Almanac, August 15, 2018
Revised online edition: OCR, 2026
DOI: —
Kindle edition: —
Paperback edition: —
ISBN: —

CITATION

CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE

Lanfranco Aceti, Publishing the Unpublishable: Or Why There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (London, New York, and Rome: OCR/Passero Productions, 2026).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This essay was realized with the support of very few people, and the condemnation of the majority. I wish to thank Sheena Calvert and Tom Corby for their encouragement during a dinner meeting at Central Saint Martins, and Hannah Lammin, who, with Sheena, saw an unpublishable version of this essay and generously offered advice and feedback for free. Saint Martins was my alma mater, before its many transformations, not all for the better, under the aegis of ‘let’s keep up with the times.’ I remember the motto on the door of the old building in Holborn that used to greet me every morning and that has now disappeared: Labor Omnia Vincit. Perhaps the motto should be slightly altered for the contemporary landscape of international academia and art, to a more apt Stupidity Wins It All (Stultitia Omnia Vincit).