It was almost the year 1984 and the world of personal computing was barely breaking into the consumer market at a mainstream level. In imagining and projecting Apple as a revolutionary force resisting an imagined tyrannical corporate monopoly that hypnotized and brainwashed consumers through mind-control, Steve Jobs’ creative team released an advertisement inspired by Orwell’s dystopian novel. The famous “1984 Apple Ad” was launched on December 31, 1983—exactly one day before that literarily symbolic year. In the ad, as the first of its kind, the symbolic figure of the “Big Brother”—with an all-seeing eye and absolute dominion over the masses—is seen preaching to an absorbed choir dressed in spiritless hues of blue-gray. Meanwhile, a woman athlete (Anya Major) in vibrant athletic wear is chased by armed cybertroopers as she runs across the hall towards the “Big Blue” display from where a projection of the Big Brother-ly figure emits hypnotic words about conformity and order. With a sledgehammer gripped tightly in her hands, the woman athlete rotates to gather momentum and force, lobbing the projectile-hammer at the “Big Blue” screen before the guards can reach her. The big blue screen shatters instantly as the image of the authoritarian Big Brother figure decomposes into explosive light of a nuclear magnitude, setting the spellbound masses free through an instant flash that awakens them from their collective hypnosis. 

By the 1980s, the television set had already been dismissed as the “idiot box,” so the ad made perfect sense when it was launched on the last day of 1983 to end “mindlessness.” The term “idiot box” originates from military endurance trials on soldiers as study subjects in Arizona’s desert-like conditions during the 1950s and also in reference to Air Force pilots put to work on basic level flight simulators poorly resembling actual cockpits. As such, in the technological context of that era, Apple’s now classic ad appeared as an act of defiance and resistance in of itself, symbolically presented to a wider audience, especially when it was aired throughout the U.S. during the national broadcast of the Super Bowl on January 22, 1984. For years it was speculated that since the color scheme that visually dominated the set of the ad was blue, Apple was going head-to-head against the corporate market hegemony of IBM, a company popularly nicknamed “Big Blue.” These speculations were later refuted by the creators of the ad themselves (Macworld, January 2004), but in another first for Apple, a subculture of advertisements where tech companies would take jabs at each other through elaborately scripted ad campaigns began to flourish, much like “diss tracks” and “industry beefs” between competing hip hop artists. 

As of today, such ads are more commonplace. However, in what concerns creative innovation and originality, Apple in many aspects retained its identity through the decades that followed in all areas, from technological innovation, hardware and software development, user experience, interface design, cutting-edge research and marketing and advertising, among other key areas of focus. All such accolades and benchmarks notwithstanding, what became ironically evident was that Apple, to a certain extent, ended up parodying itself through that early 1984 ad. Perhaps it was inevitable once sales soared, turning the Cupertino-based company into the 3.448 trillion dollar corporation it has become as of August 2024. The cycle of unintended yet eerie self-parody, in my view, culminated with the suicide of Chinese poet and factory worker Xu Lizhi—who as an employee of Foxconn, a major supplier to Apple—left behind a collection of poems, published in a collection of essays titled “Dead Generations.”

Nearly a year before his suicide (on September 30, 2014), Xu Lizhi had written the following poem dated December 19, 2013: 

I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron (我咽下一枚铁做的月亮)

I swallowed a moon made of iron
They refer to it as a nail
I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents
Youth stooped at machines die before their time
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust
I can’t swallow any more
All that I’ve swallowed is now gushing out of my throat
Unfurling on the land of my ancestors
Into a disgraceful poem.

The imagery within these verses parallels the claustrophobic “industrial setting” of the Apple 1984 ad in its blue-greyish deteriorating hues, creating a link that intersects the dimension of the dystopian fictional space of the ad with the harsh reality of industrial labor presented in Xu Lizhi’s poetry. Foxconn as a major provider to Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others, had not been alien to worker suicides. In fact, there had been more than 25 such suicides starting June 18, 2007, when a 19-year-old young woman with the last name “Hou” hung herself in the bathroom of the factory’s dormitory. According to reports, the exact cause of her death was still being disputed when it was reported in the Southern Metropolis Daily. 

With the suicide of poet-by-night and factory-worker-by-day, Xu Lizhi, at his young age of 24 and the poems he left behind to express his alienated experience of labor, the poetic text as an art form acquired a generative power to mobilize debate, prompt introspection and incite dissent leading to a conversation at a global level. Such conversations were spearheaded mainly by American news outlets who saw this as an opportunity to problematize tragic events within China. Meanwhile, the more pressing issue of gun violence and school shootings that was closer to the American homeland would continue to be problematized in the media without rendering any concrete resolutions. A few months prior, a mass shooting at Virginia Tech (April 16, 2007) had tragically taken the lives of 33 people including the perpetrator).

The Foxconn suicides, with 14 of them resulting in 2010 itself, reveal a complex reality that in the context of Apple’s 1984 ad, with its dark and dystopian reality, unfolding a sinister self-parody of ironic yet tragic proportions. The 1984 world that Apple tried to avert becomes manifest in the verses of a factory worker turned poet who left behind poems with equally dark imagery in the telling of his experience. The Foxconn suicides are enclosed within a greater complexity that was discussed in an article written by Scott W. Berg titled “The Human Cost of an iPhone” (Washington Post) in which he reviews Joshua B. Freeman’s academic work, in particular Freeman’s seminal book Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. 

While much critique is offered on the subject, it is also argued in the same article that “with more than 1 million employees, the suicide rate was far below that of China — or the United States — as a whole.” With suicide as a major concern among young people in the United States, a report from July 2006 states that the suicide rate among university students is about 7.5 out of 100,000 students (a rate that does not account for off-campus suicides). Another report by the US National Institutes of Health states that suicide “accounted for 2,381 deaths in 2006 among 18-22 year olds and is the secon-leading cause of death among college-aged young adults in the United States, with approximately 1,11 suicides occurring each year among college students” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009).

In retrospect, one could argue from the Foxconn suicides that the grim reality of Apple’s 1984 classic ad, sans the glorified act of liberation portrayed as a Disneyesque ending, leaped out of the frame to haunt some of those at the bottom of the offshore Apple production ladder. The type of media attention that the Foxconn suicides received (with mental health not being at the center of the conversation) is yet to be fully seen when one comes to research on cobalt mining in the Congo and lithium mining in Africa.  Furthermore, it took the verses of a poet factory worker and the agential power of his poetic craft to raise awareness in a posthumous manner. 

During the initial writing of this piece (February 2019), an opposite story had already emerged to reflect the other side of the coin: the story of how Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese giant Alibaba Group, who failed his university entrance exams thrice, applied to thirty different jobs and was accepted at none. After being rejected by Harvard University’s admissions office ten times, he then established and led his company past the $500 billion net worth mark at the peak of its success. All this while remaining in the top 10 most valuable firms of the last few years, a list dominated by eight American companies and the other Chinese giant, Tencent, creator of the WeChat mega app and other notable products of mass use.

Tragedy notwithstanding, the world enjoys stories of success and rise to fame and soon forgets the all-too-real stories of decay and death in the pursuit of subsistence and basic livelihood. As of September 2019, there were at least seventeen films, documentaries and theatrical plays about Steve Jobs in circulation, all about his rambunctious and obsessive micromanaging personality glorified to a cult stature and dramatized for screen-appeal. In the case of his Apple Corporation, the company deserves much credit since its inception, having maintained its stories of success active, especially upon the launch of the Macintosh, with the company’s attention to clear and distinctive design principles, particularly after taking Xerox Labs’ GUI (graphic user interface) technology and turning it into something users all over the world would come to appreciate. 

The company also innovated what today is called UX (user experience) and of course retained its patents on hardware and software throughout to gain a clear edge on the computing, gadget and tech markets. In the process, Apple acquired a distinctive brand identity with its signature design, software and hardware development and most importantly, its aesthetic appeal that has remained unmatched and fallen prey to imitations. In conjunction, all these elements apparent in their product range have translated to centralized control over each of their products in each life cycle and upon every new release. Many have recently heard about how updating iOS to 10.2.1 and 11.2 on your older iPhone slows it down drastically. Over time, that control further translated to power and with power came authority, exemplified best when the Cupertino-based company, along with a few others, decided to adopt the practice of placing stickers on the internal hardware components of their products such that if such stickers were removed by consumers, the product warranty would stand null and void (Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, 1975).

Such a policy then became a matter of contention among hardware connoisseurs, particularly for those who would rather have upgraded hardware components such as RAM and hard disks by themselves rather than heading to an Apple Care center where extra expenses could be incurred depending on the nature of the problem to be troubleshot. Along with that came the possibility of simply being cornered into paying a higher price for an upgrade through Apple, instead of doing such upgrades independently at a local computer hardware shop around the corner. Nonetheless, the practice turned into a standard as other computer manufacturers followed suit. 

As a result, a new debate on proprietorship emerged with more tech savvy users raising the point that as proprietors of a product they should have complete ownership rights over their products, rights such as upgrading, and replacing and extending the components of the products they owned. These types of restrictive practices made policy by manufacturers became commonplace in other industries, notably the car industry, and in particular Tesla, which developed a parallel branding strategy based on exclusivity (even though it has been reported that Elon Musk has released his company’s patents to the public, which in any case will not affect the company’s control over its own products).

It was through this history of branding and product development that the terms “Mac user vs. PC user” came to acquire a symbolic and definitive meaning. Since the 1980s, the rest of the computer hardware industry developed a level of generic freedom grounded in early PC Kits. With specific and specialized knowledge, one could acquire multiple compatible components from multiple sources to assemble a PC (personal computer). The hardware architecture developed in the era allowed for interchangeability and greater compatibility such that it lent more power to the tech-savvy consumer. More specifically, such an approach created an open assembly market scenario, where hardware components could be acquired from multiple sources and then incorporated into a customized personal computing solution, i.e. the assembled PC. 

The clear advantage resulted in greater performance at a reduced price as well as more control over the product, along with a greater lifespan due to a wider possibility for upgrades and replacements through newer components as technology improved, leading to a scaling down in production cost and ultimately sales price. As such, since an early stage in personal computing, the debate that still remains relevant is one over the control of knowledge and with that the power and scope of one’s ownership rights for any product purchased.

Eventually, the advent of the internet created a broader exchange of knowledge, where a variety of groups and communities started forming and promoting a free flow of information on skill and expertise development. As of the last few years, that phenomenon has been taken over by a wide array of tutorials, tech channels on social media, instructional videos, tech reviews, how-to’s and DIYs (Do It Yourself). In the field of education, the culmination of such technological practices and trends led to the emergence of online education platforms with a countless variety of online courses from prestigious universities (under the banner of Open University and Open Course systems). Ideally, the internet was intended to create vast conversations on specialized topics with great detail and specificity. However, on the contrary, much of the internet remains controlled by the big giants like Facebook, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Tencent and several others. Added to that, the fact that data and its traffic is controlled and monitored to a great extent has further brought us to a technocratic era where personal information has become a site of scrutiny and vulnerability.

It is within this particular context that Open Source as a movement has interjected throughout in the regulation of information, or rather against the regulation of information by a specific authority, and against the control by means of appropriation of knowledge that the Open-Source Software movement (along with the Creative Commons) seeks to keep open under a commons, and for a greater good for everyone willing to access and engage with such resources. If one recalls the early 2000s, it was Facebook that created its entire platform on Open Source technology, utilizing software solutions readily available for extension, modification and re-adaptation; with web development platforms such as the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP) stack. From a consumer and market perspective, the world of technology, and more precisely the world of the internet and software development, works quite differently than other markets, sectors and industries. 

I trace the roots of the Open Source and Creative Commons back to the 70s when young people at the innovative edge of technological development in the domain of personal computing would gather around in computer clubs to share their knowledge as enthusiasts turned specialists and innovators. In actual manufacturing and product development history, it was Henry Ford who fought off a monopoly (on a gasoline engine) by the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers (ALAM) in 1911 that popularized “open collaboration in the automotive industry.” From a corporate and proprietary perspective, by the 1950s and 60s, computer manufacturers bundled hardware with software and accessible source code.  By 1969, the big blue giant that was IBM was forced to unbundle hardware from software, resulting in less chances of monopoly with a more open and diverse market suited for newcomers and startups (U.S. vs.I.B.M.). 

By the 1970s, with Silicon Valley right next door, for teenagers like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, showcasing their hardware and software projects at the Homebrew Computer Club would have become routine. Prior to that, Wozniak had already acquired infamous hacker status with his phreaking projects, when he tapped into his local area telephonic systems to make long distance calls for free, eventually selling a device called a “Blue Box” to his schoolmates, and of course under the rebellious influence of the other Steve. Needless to say, many such innovations came from government programs and military technological research that was then released to the general public for commercial use in a variety of consumer markets, dating as far back as the end of the Spanish-American war (when the Americans first showcased the wireless telegraph).

It was at this particular time in the early 70s that the two Steves went from experimenting with “Blueboxes” to using Intel Corporation’s Altair 8800 microprocessor kit (which would be much like the present-day Arduino or the Raspberry DIY kits). From there, Wozniak went on to create his own microprocessor design that would be brought to fruition in 1976 when Jobs sold his car and Woz his programmable calculator to establish Apple Inc. By the next year, the Apple II would be ready, combining since the company’s core beginning the dynamic genius of Wozniak the engineer and Jobs the CEO with robust engineering, a clear design aesthetic and a marketing plan that would set their company at a $1 billion valuation upon going public by 1980. 

Behind the accelerated growth within less than half a century, from a garage lab and a home office to a mega-corporate park at the center of Silicon Valley, Apple’s rise reflected at first the willingness of two young boys to form a community in which their combined brilliance led them to pursue the path of proprietary design and a brand image that has been maintained since the beginning of their enterprise dedicated to uncompromising quality. Contrary to this proprietary approach, was the rest of the computer hardware (and soon after software) world, where generic parts could be assembled to build a customized solution, with the freedom to operate, pull off the hood, dig in with a screwdriver, and learn how a personal computer works, how to break it and anger one’s parents, and then of course how to repair it and become an expert in computer hardware assembly, repair, troubleshooting and upgrade. One presumes, from personal experience, that such a subculture led many kids to becoming the go-to computer hardware troubleshooting experts in their neighborhoods. 

From early on, Apple maintained its distinctive proprietary approach, producing state-of-the-art devices that, for the avid power user, presented a labyrinth of challenges to disassemble or upgrade or even hack considering the Mac OS’s UNIX-based roots and robust shell programming. Both the Steves did not essentially come up with such an approach, but rather inherited their company’s charter and practice from the big corporations that were already operating for profit in that age. It could be easily argued that for Apple to produce its distinctive quality and standard in hardware and software, it would require a strict and controlled protocol of proprietorship. Nonetheless, those who took an alternative route helped establish a generic or standalone market of hardware parts and customized hardware solutions beyond the appropriation of corporate giants like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Gateway and several others who emerged to create that “industry beef” between “Mac vs. PC.” 

In the competition for proprietary and branded development of personal computers in the “Mac vs. PC” world, it became a common practice for companies to then to place “WARRANTY VOID IF REMOVED” stickers on certain removable parts like RAM chips, processors, fans, video cards and hard disks. This obviously was not a minor issue in 2018 since the American FTC (Federal Trade Commission) had to intervene to protect the consumers’ right to use third party service providers or simply to implement Do-it-Yourself fixes and upgrades. Clearly, the “I break it, I fix it” motto was not rational enough as a motivating factor in consumer psychology research during the initial stages of the product life cycle for any of the major companies. 

In a traditionally patriarchal society, that motto of  “I break it, I fix it” was the lifeblood of men, while companies like IKEA took that behavioral pattern to the next level with “I buy it, I assemble it, because I was raised with jigsaw puzzles, Legos and color books as toys.” Of course, the Kashmiri equivalent from “the good old days” would be the haggur/haggud (toy wooden cart), the gullel (the slingshot), the girkiyn (the dreidel?) and meaczi baane (earthen cookware) among several other makeshift toys children would build for themselves, particularly in rural villages. Now, we have mobile phones, iPads, and 24/7 cartoon channels instead.

How all this relates to the raison d‘etre of an online journal dedicated to creating cultural connections with different communities, and in particular Kashmir, a war-struck place in the Himalayas, with the greater world beyond conflicted nuclearized nation states will become all too clear. As a first intuitive point, the entire debate around owning a personal computer and having the right to program it, modify it, alter it, fix it, and upgrade it on the simple basis of being its proprietor is crucial. This debate is essential to understanding the relative freedom of developing knowledge, passing it on, or employing it for self-growth. In this case, it also pertains to the growth of others, whether they are like oneself or not. In this mode, the development and transmission of knowledge is similar to the control one has over the soil one was born to, especially in modernizing histories where states operate like monopolizing corporations that operate on individuals, collectives and a variety of resources and assets based on set interests and visions. 

To give another parallel yet not entirely equivalent example, if one were to own entire collections of novels that one had read with close attention, having sufficiently developed one’s own writing skills, at a point in time it would not be too out of the ordinary to write a long-form fictional text of one’s own. Similarly, a scholar studying poetry routinely and even religiously would not find themselves unfamiliar to the thought of writing a book of poems of their own. The power to create and exercise our creativity is apparently at odds with the larger world that sees such a possibility as a threat, because “God forbid” such creative agency come with transformative power of its own, whether in individual or collective domains.

The aforementioned example may not be precise enough and may create a false equivalency if we take into consideration yet another example; that of Argentine author Pablo Katchadjian, who took literary legend Jorge Luis Borges’ famous short story The Aleph of 4000 words and fed it another 5000 words of his own to come up with a derivate he titled El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph). The Fattened Aleph worked as what in the music industry we would call an “extended re-mix.” However, in the larger world of contemporary art-making, since there are no equivalencies between genres, art forms and art practices, Katchadjian faced a serious lawsuit by Maria Kodama, Borges’ widow and head of estate, in a benchmark trial that threatened The Fattened Aleph’s writer with intellectual theft and even jail-time on the grounds of plagiarism. 

At the center of this Argentine controversy is perhaps the idea that Borges’ The Aleph is a product. A text is a proprietary commodity in the publishing market, complete with copyright and licensing restrictions. One cannot simply employ it to produce a derivative work. Unlike in the contemporary art world, where one might take a widely recognized work of art and, through a series of creative alterations, produce another work. In the art world, these alterations could result in a work that parodies, pays tribute to, inverts the meaning of, re-contextualizes, contemporizes, or rescues the original from mass oblivion. However, such creative liberties are not admissable in The Aleph under current copyright laws. Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres (Ingres’s Violin) photograph heavily inspired by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ 1808 painting La Grande Baigneuse comes to mind along with photographic remakes of famous works compiled in a book from the BOOOOOOM Remake Project (in collaboration with Adobe, the widely known design software corporation). Oddly, an original print of Le Violon d’Ingres (Ingres’s Violin) sold for $12.4 million dollars becoming the most expensive photograph at a Christie’s auction (on May 14, 2022).

Now, going back to the origins of Open Source from a hardware geek’s perspective, where teens in their garages would be found (dis)assembling electronic equipment with a Phillips screwdriver in hand, the need to share and exhibit “something cool and new” had since a beginning been the driving force behind what created an information technology revolution to an impressive extent. There were distinctions between the “Open Source” and the “Free Software” movements that led to several debates and discussions about concrete definitions and motives. Both movements at the core reflected one essential quality: a sense of ethics driven by a need to share knowledge with the rest of the world, all based on a core skill set (expert-level programming) and a core language (the programming language). In that context, people who day in and day out expressed themselves primarily in a programming language, through lines and lines of code, eventually exercised a freedom of expression—an expression of free speech materializing in the form of elaborate source code packages that when compiled produced software accessible to everyone.

To contextualize the importance of Open Source at a mass scale, consider the fact that (as of 2024) 70.83% of the world uses Google’s Android operating system for mobiles, a project developed from Linux, the most popular Open Source operating system with multiple popular distributions. Linux as an Open Source solution happens to power 96.3% of the top one million domains (websites) ranked by Alexa (W3Cook) and 70% of the top ten million domains (dotcoms) running on the internet, while Windows hosts the remaining 1.9% of such (top one million) websites. A 2015 Black Duck Software survey in collaboration with Northbridge, two of the biggest companies that study and evaluate the growth and expansion of Open Source revealed that “78 percent of companies run open-source software.” According to a March 2024 article from Harvard Business School’s magazine, 96 percent of commercial programs include some code created, tinkered with, or distributed for free by public-facing tech forums.”

The Open Source movement, originating in the 1950s and evolving through subsequent decades, stands as a radical departure from the conventional, top-down models of knowledge production and dissemination. Unlike traditional systems where access to knowledge, and the power to create, are often mediated and facilitated by one’s background, social and financial status, or institutional affiliation, Open Source invites participation from anyone equipped with the skill and desire to contribute. This inclusivity is not merely coincidental but is intrinsic to the movement itself, embodying a commitment to valuing contributions solely based on their merit, regardless of the contributor’s identity. In this way, Open Source cultivates a community where ideas are exchanged freely, much like a rhizome—a root structure that expands horizontally, connecting various nodes without a singular dominant point of origin (as Deleuze would have explained).

This rhizomatic structure of Open Source serves as a metaphor for how knowledge should ideally be disseminated in a more just and equitable world. Just as the rhizome grows and spreads without a central hierarchy, the knowledge produced by Open Source communities proliferates through decentralized networks. Each contribution, whether it be a line of code or a conceptual breakthrough, becomes a node in this vast network, valuable in its own right and capable of generating further innovation. This decentralized approach ensures that no single entity or individual can monopolize the creation or distribution of knowledge, thereby democratizing the process and making it more accessible to all.

The implications of such a model are profound, particularly when viewed within the context of global connectivity and the internet’s potential to unite diverse and distant communities. Open Source has already demonstrated how collaboration across borders, cultures, and languages can lead to the development of resilient and universally applicable technologies. The success of projects like Linux, which powers a significant portion of the world’s digital infrastructure, exemplifies what can be achieved when contributions are assessed on their intrinsic value rather than the identity of the contributor. This is particularly important in the imposed and shifting redefinitions of what it means to be human by states and corporations in the face of war and extermination—when a message is more likely to survive than the messenger. Inversely, within the fragile and mortal human world, it is the message that then actually facilitates focus on the messenger and their identity. In this light, Open Source can be perceived as a prototypical framework for a more inclusive and equitable approach to knowledge dissemination, one that emphasizes collective progress over individual gain—and beyond the collective greed of a select privileged few. In this sense, Open Source is permeated by an anti-imperialist and de-colonial ideological motif if considered from a political angle with aspirations for democratization—even if considered as an untenable ideal.  

For a journal like Inverse, dedicated to forging cultural connections with communities as diverse and complex as those in Kashmir and the diaspora, an Open Source ideology presents a compelling framework for engagement. Just as the Open Source movement has dismantled barriers within the tech world, enabling collaboration on a global scale, it can inspire new ways of thinking about cultural exchange and the sharing of knowledge. By embracing the principles of openness, inclusiveness, and merit-based contribution, the journal can play a role in bridging the gap between isolated communities and the broader world, fostering a dialogue that is both transformative and empowering. In this respect, the Open Source movement is not just a technical phenomenon but a social one, with the potential to redefine how we approach knowledge, culture, and our collective future. An added feature of the Open Source world is that it is rhizomatic and so the notions of center and periphery are blurred depending on the locus of enunciation of those who participate in its forum.

Inverse Journal was established as an a-hierarchical space grounded in inclusiveness at multiple levels with the primary mission of inverting hierarchies within both Kashmiri and global societies applied to the sharing and transmission of knowledge. The journal publishes writers, thinkers, poets, academics, and intellectuals of all ages, of varied backgrounds and different levels of experience and seniority. Based respectively on their journey towards knowledge, learning and various forms of expression, the project remains egalitarian.

Inverse Journal took form as a non-commercial and Creative Commons-driven online publication that publishes original writing, yet further, one deeply driven by the cause of spreading knowledge. As such, we have come to publish important writings licensed under the Creative Commons to facilitate greater access to a world of ideas from various academic spaces that provide such licenses for republishing content in the same spirit.

A very commonly cited quote from Mikhail Bakhtin’s thesis entitled Rabelais and His World served as the core inspiration in conceptualizing the journal as an a-hierarchical space at the service of a community driven by readers and contributors from diverse backgrounds, locations and origins. The journal was established to encourage an equal space for learning and knowledge acquisition and intent upon erasing notions of rank, seniority, class, caste, gender, and other parameters that structure divisions in society through the transmission of knowledge.

In promoting the learning and sharing of ideas, the notion of “suspension of all hierarchical precedence” and, in turn, the subsequent inversion of hierarchy, forged the journal’s mission as an open forum for engagement with contemporary culture from multiple spaces. The idea for that forum suspended from established norms of hierarchy and in pursuit of equal access to a contribution and engagement was inspired from the emergence of the Open Source software movement. In the journal’s conceptualization, such a forum was interpreted as a perpetual carnival that is defined as temporary in Bakhtin’s thesis as follows:

“The suspension of all hierarchical precedence during carnival time was of particular significance. Rank was especially evident during official feasts; everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling… and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a consecration of inequality. On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age. The hierarchical background and the extreme corporative and caste divisions of the medieval social order were exceptionally strong. Therefore, such free, familiar contacts were deeply felt and formed an essential element of the carnival spirit. People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations. These truly human relations were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced. The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience, unique of its kind.”

– Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World

The establishment of Inverse Journal as an a-hierarchical space was driven by a commitment to inclusiveness and the inversion of entrenched hierarchies within multiple societies. This mission aligns closely with the core principles of the Open Source movement, which similarly seeks to democratize access to knowledge and creation. Just as Open Source invites contributions from individuals irrespective of their background, rank, or seniority, Inverse Journal aims to continue developing a platform where writers, thinkers, and creators from all walks of life can share their insights and ideas within a common space. This egalitarian approach is not just a theoretical aspiration but a practical reality within the journal, where the merit of a contribution is the sole criterion for its publication.

The idea of an a-hierarchical space within Inverse Journal is deeply inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival, as elaborated in Rabelais and His World. In carnival, Bakhtin observed a temporary suspension of all hierarchical structures, where people from various strata of society could engage freely with one another, unburdened by the usual constraints of rank, class, gender, or occupation, albeit within the temporary space of the carnival and the rituals of inversion that it potentiated during its celebration. This suspension of hierarchy allowed for the emergence of what Bakhtin described as “truly human relations,” where the utopian ideal of equality could be experienced, if only briefly. 

Inverse Journal, while not limited to the temporality of the Bakhtinian carnival, embodies this spirit of equality and open engagement, creating a perpetual space for the inversion of societal structures through the free exchange of ideas and knowledge. Much like the Open Source movement, which disrupts traditional hierarchies in the world of software and technology by prioritizing communal effort and shared progress, Inverse Journal seeks to foster a similar disruption in the realm of knowledge dissemination. By adopting a Creative Commons-driven model and encouraging original contributions from diverse voices, the journal perpetuates a kind of intellectual carnival—where the barriers of caste, class, gender, and professional rank are set aside, allowing for a more authentic and human exchange of ideas.

Ironically, the innovators behind the internet had thought thoroughly about its potential in providing universal access to information, with pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee who took the “decision to release the source code for free—to make the Web an open and democratic platform for all.” Along with him, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn had also considered the repercussions of what the World Wide Web could become if such technology were to go into the wrong hands. In conversation with Vanity Fair, Berners-Lee recalls with great dismay the Cambridge Analytica case where the data of 80 million users was exposed to the firm that led Donald Trump’s campaign. 

In making the source code for the Web as an Open Source offering, Berners-Lee had wanted to avoid the vortex of licensing, patents, fees, royalties and other measures of proprietary control in order to assure that the Web grew and became freely accessible to humankind’s pursuit of knowledge. Such a decision allowed all sorts of individuals and enterprises to build on top of it as a new era of software and hardware development bloomed. Berners-Lee commented that, in releasing the source code of the Web to the public, the “spirit there was very decentralized. The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission”…“That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost” (Vanity Fair, 2018). However, with the emergence and monopolizing practices of big tech firms who collect vast amounts of data in exchange for their services, a type of imposed centralization has come to the fore over a few decades. Such a re-centralization that puts vast amounts of power in the hands of a few tech firms “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human” (Vanity Fair, 2018).

Given his disenchantment with how the Web turned out, with growing corporate and state control, and with the emergence of fake news and mass surveillance, Tim Berners-Lee set out to create another project (in 2016) that would fine-tune and course-correct what was beyond his control with the rise of the World Wide Web. With support from MIT, Oxford, and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, the project is called Solid and aims to realize “Tim’s original vision for the Web as a medium for the secure, decentralized exchange of public and private data.” Through decentralization, it ensures true data ownership for its users and steers completely away from such data ownership being controlled by other entities, be they organizations, corporations or states.

In a world increasingly defined by data, algorithms, and the quantification of human experience, the arts serve as a vital counterbalance. They resist the reduction of human beings (by corporations, regulatory organizations and states) to mere datasets, refusing to be containerized or confined by the rigid structures of digital systems. While algorithms may predict behaviors or preferences, they cannot constrict the many ways that different art forms can shift from repositories of communication. As we stand at the crossroads of technology and humanity, it becomes evident that literature, music, and art transcend the physical and digital confines we often impose upon them. These forms of expression are inherently medium-agnostic. They exist as much in the pages of a book or the notes of a song as they do in our memories and in spoken word across vast oral traditions—since the emergence of the first languages and of storytelling and ultimately in what we will carry forth when the world comes to an end.

Inverse Journal, and in particular its mode of operation and organizational structure, is heavily influenced by the ideas that brought about the Open Source and the custom built home PC. At the journal, I have directly supported customization and freedom of content, working directly with our contributors to determine how to best present their publications. Since its inception in 2019, the journal has had the advantage of becoming a space where contributors get to work directly with me. From the backend, the journal has been operating in all aspects through a one-person team and as a result, the frequency of publishing content has suffered all sorts of delays and irregularity. As a result, it became a necessity to make sure that the journal prospers and evolves as it has from the frontend, where we find an operation that is community-driven (like the Open Source) with greater empowerment and control given to the 145 contributors (as of August 2024) who come from 20 different countries. 

The basic principle of an a-hierarchical community-driven space was well-received by all sorts of veteran writers, academics, thinkers, artists and creatives, who have supported the idea of a non-hierarchy based model where people of all backgrounds get to contribute to the space. It is perhaps because of this feature that we have reached 471,798 unique readers from 205 territories and countries—from February 2019 till this August 2024. Given these humble figures, the journal’s ethos grounded in an Open Source mindset and driven by Bakhtin’s writing on the carnival has remained intact when looking at the numbers and figures from the frontend of things. As of August 2014, in this next phase of our evolution and growth, I hope to see that same collaborative and team-based approach by cultivating an editorial team and also seeking the support of multiple advisors on our editorial board.

I must emphasize that the journal appeals to writers, poets, academics, thinkers, artists, and creatives from all backgrounds and ages who share a common thread: an unshakable, quixotic passion for their craft. This passion transcends borders, drawing together a diverse community of individuals driven by a deep love for what they do, regardless of the recognition they may or may not receive. We take immense pride in engaging with contributors who embody this spirit. Many of them continue to create and innovate purely out of love for their art, not for accolades or external validation. Their dedication is a testament to the authenticity of their work, and it is this authenticity that resonates deeply within the pages of our journal. It also reflects their humility while being exceptional and unique at what they do.

In this regard, the journal has seen many rewards, with the writings of our contributors in Inverse Journal being cited or mentioned in works produced by professionals at institutions and publications such as:

The Global Freedom of Expression Institute at Columbia University
The India Forum: A Journal-Magazine on Contemporary Issues
The London School of Economics and Political Science
The News Minute
The Phoenix Daily
The Polis Project
The Practical Nomad
The Sociological Review
The University of New Mexico
The University of Warwick
The Wire
Trinity College Dublin
University of California-Berkeley
University of Colorado
University of Colorado Law Review
University of Connecticut
University of Kwanzulu-Natal
University of Leeds
University of the Highlands and Islands
University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies
University of Westminster
Vivekananda College
Watermark Press
Wikipedia
Xi’an Shiyou University
Yaqeen Institute of Islamic Research

At the time of creation of this list, I still had not compiled an actual list of books that have cited the works of Inverse Journal’s contributors and hope to present another editorial note about the impact that the work by our contributors and the dedicated web development and maintenace efforts have had in garnering the attention of researchers, academics, writers, journalists and other professionals citing the content published within this journal.

In what remains of this year, I look forward to greater growth in the platform and a more dedicated approach supported by an editorial team and a board of advisors on the managerial backend of the journal. Our ultimate goal is to cultivate a strong team so that Inverse Journal at an editorial level can reflect the diversity of engagement we have found in contributors from 20 countries and territories and readers from 205 countries and territories. As we progress towards this goal, I look forward to sharing more ideas with the Inverse Journal community of readers, contributors, directors and editorial staff.

The views expressed in this editorial note are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Inverse Journal’s directors and editors.