In a world marked by disintegration, collapse, and radical shifts in meaning, the act of publishing has emerged not merely as a dissemination of information but as a profound philosophical, technological, and anthropological gesture — one that holds the potential to shape realities, forge solidarities, and sketch the outlines of futures not yet realized. Publishing, as both process and proposition, is a form of world-making.

As Federico Campagna (2024) suggests in Otherworlds, the Mediterranean imagination, forged in the crucible of migration, collapse, and re-invention, has long demonstrated that “it is the ability to set sail for other worlds which prevails” (p. 287). Publishing can be understood as one such vessel — a navigational act toward other epistemologies, alternative futures, and shared imaginaries.

From the perspective of design, publishing is a site of negotiation between form and meaning. As Bruno Munari (2008) argued, design is “planning with a purpose” (p. 32), and to publish is to plan publicness: a strategic intervention in the circulation of ideas, values, and visions. The typographer and the editor are not passive intermediaries but co-authors in the act of making visible — shaping how knowledge enters the world.

Anthropologically, publishing emerges as a ritualistic practice that mediates between private cognition and collective understanding. Tim Ingold (2013) has described making as a process of correspondence — an ongoing negotiation with materials, contexts, and histories. To publish is to correspond with the social, the technological, and the political. It is not simply to communicate but to commune.

Technologically, the history of publishing mirrors the history of our tools and infrastructures. From the printing press to digital platforms, every technical leap has carried with it a reconfiguration of the public sphere. As McLuhan (1962) famously claimed, “the medium is the message” (p. 23) — and today, that message is entangled with questions of algorithmic visibility, data extractivism, and platform monopolies. Publishing becomes a battleground where autonomy, authorship, and access are constantly contested.

Philosophically, we can follow Hannah Arendt’s (1958) insistence on the importance of public space for action and speech in The Human Condition. Publishing, in this light, becomes the architectural act of building such space — of making room for the appearance of voices that otherwise remain unheard. It is an ethical commitment to presence and plurality.

In a time when the idea of the “public” is under pressure — fragmented, surveilled, and often co-opted — rethinking publishing as a verb that denotes the making public of what matters becomes urgent. As designers, artists, writers, and thinkers, our task is not only to critique the conditions of today but to actively prototype the discourses of tomorrow.

In this spirit, the future of publishing lies not only in innovation but in imagination — in crafting formats, languages, and gestures that restore our capacity to dream, dissent, and desire otherwise. It is, ultimately, about constructing other worlds.

Publishing as World-Making

Publishing is not neutral. It selects, frames, and amplifies certain voices while excluding others. In this way, it participates in what Donna Haraway (1988) calls situated knowledge — knowledge that is always partial, embodied, and political. Every editorial decision, from the choice of typeface to the mode of distribution, reinforces a worldview.

One clear example is the work of the South as a State of Mind journal, based in Athens, Greece. Originally founded as an independent cultural magazine, it later became the publishing platform for documenta 14. Through its editorial choices — bilingual editions, critical voices from the Global South, and thematic issues around displacement and resistance — the publication reoriented dominant narratives of contemporary art, making visible perspectives long excluded from the Euro-American canon.

Design as Editorial Gesture

Designers are not mere stylists — they are co-publishers. The typographic voice, material form, and spatial rhythm of a publication determine how its content is experienced. As Johanna Drucker (2009) argues, “graphic forms are not neutral containers but active producers of meaning” (p. 2).

A striking example is Pasticcio Quartz, a hybrid zine/artbook by Sarah Fishburn and Angela Cartwright. Combining collage, hand-lettering, and experimental layouts, the publication refuses traditional linearity. Its design invites associative reading — encouraging the reader to forge personal pathways through the content, an editorial gesture that mirrors the thematic focus on creative play and self-expression.

In contemporary digital design, platforms like Are.na allow users to publish without hierarchy — creating “blocks” of linked media, thoughts, and texts. The platform itself functions as an ongoing, collective editorial process, where the act of curating becomes synonymous with the act of thinking.

Publishing as Technological Resistance

In an era of algorithmic feeds and proprietary formats, to publish independently is a form of resistance. The resurgence of risograph printing, small presses, and zine cultures is not merely nostalgic — it is political. These modes foreground tactility, slowness, and community over scale, speed, and data capture.

Take for instance the Temporary Services collective in Chicago. Their ongoing Self-Reliance Library features low-cost publications on anarchism, mutual aid, and prison abolition. Distributed via pop-up libraries and downloadable PDFs, the project undermines traditional models of intellectual property and instead prioritises access, reuse, and relevance to marginalised communities.

The Anthropology of Publishing

From an anthropological perspective, publishing can be read as ritual: a way of marking importance, transmitting values, and reinforcing collective memory. It is an act of cultural inscription. This becomes evident in the practice of community-led publishing among Indigenous groups.

For example, the Sámi Art & Activism publications from Sápmi (Northern Scandinavia) blend poetry, protest, and documentation in trilingual editions (Sámi, English, and Scandinavian). These books do more than inform — they preserve language, perform sovereignty, and enact epistemic justice (Kuokkanen, 2007).

The Future Is a Format

Every format — whether codex, scroll, zine, website, podcast, or database — contains assumptions about reading, cognition, temporality, and even truth. To reinvent publishing is to reinvent our relationship to time, knowledge, and community.

Consider Version, a project by the design studio Common Interest that explores speculative publishing through AR (augmented reality) and voice interface. Here, publications don’t sit still — they respond to presence, evolve through interaction, and adapt to context. Publishing becomes alive.

Similarly, initiatives like Distributed Web of Care by Taeyoon Choi envision protocols and publishing tools that resist centralisation. They suggest that the future of publishing might not be a product but a relationship — maintained over time, through trust, care, and collective authorship.

To Make Public Is to Care

To publish is to take a stand — to say this matters. In doing so, we participate in the slow, deliberate construction of a public that does not yet exist. One that is plural, provisional, and possible.

In the face of collapse, publishing offers an ethics of continuity — a fragile but persistent effort to say: we were here, we thought this, we dream otherwise.

Publishing as Ongoing Relationship

To think of publishing not as a product, but as a relationship, is to shift focus from the object to the process — from the printed page to the constellation of interactions that sustain it. In this view, the act of making public becomes less about distribution and more about connection: between author and reader, editor and community, medium and message, present and future.

This relational model echoes what María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) describes as matters of care — practices that do not aim for efficiency or scalability, but for attentiveness, reciprocity, and maintenance. Publishing, under this lens, becomes an ecology of care. Each edition, each dialogue, each reprint or re-reading becomes a reaffirmation of shared concern and co-presence.

One compelling example is the Rising Majority Reader series, a collaboration between writers, activists, and grassroots organisations in the US. Rather than producing static texts, the project generates evolving editorial conversations, shaped by workshops, feedback, and local needs. Each edition is not definitive but provisional, open to revision and re-contextualisation. Publishing becomes not the final act, but a moment in an ongoing dialogue.

Similarly, projects like The Syllabus, curated weekly by a network of researchers and thinkers, propose editorial curation as an act of long-term trust. It is not just about aggregating “content,” but about cultivating a relationship with readers who come to expect a certain editorial integrity, sensibility, and horizon. The value is not in the object, but in the continuity.

This vision challenges the dominant publishing economy, which treats books and media as commodities to be launched, marketed, and quickly consumed. In contrast, relational publishing resists obsolescence. It acknowledges that meaning is not fixed at the point of publication, but grows over time — through conversation, critique, translation, and re-use.

As Sarah Ahmed (2017) reminds us, “a feminist memory is one that is created by the labour of making things available, of sharing stories and struggles.” In this sense, publishing is not a solitary act but a collective responsibility — a way of keeping certain knowledges alive, visible, and transmissible. A format of care.

Thus, the future of publishing may be less about innovation in tools and more about re-imagining the terms of relation: How do we publish with, not for? How do we sustain attention beyond the launch? How do we design publications not as endpoints but as invitations to participate?

Publishing, then, becomes a living structure — relational, evolving, vulnerable — held together by the invisible work of listening, responding, and showing up.

Publishing as Collective Responsibility and Relational Care

Publishing, when stripped of its commercial-industrial logic, reveals itself as an essentially communal act — not only in the sense of collaboration between authors, editors, and readers, but as a shared responsibility toward knowledge, memory, and the future. To publish is to care.

It is to keep certain knowledges alive and resist forgetting — especially of those voices and experiences historically marginalized. Publishing makes public what power often prefers to keep hidden, becoming a tool of epistemic justice (Santos, 2016). More than a gesture of visibility, it is a commitment to the ongoing relevance and livability of what is shared.

This process is inherently collective. Knowledge does not arise in isolation, nor does it survive in silence. It is woven across generations, circulates in networks, and is embodied in situated practices. Publishing mediates between times, epistemologies, and worlds — between what is and what could be.

Projects like Decolonising Design exemplify this ethos. Run by researchers and designers from the Global South, the platform foregrounds design as both cultural practice and structure of power. Its open, working essays embrace provisionality and invite dialogue rather than assert finality. Similarly, FemTechNet reimagines publication as a feminist and pedagogical process — producing wikis, bibliographies, and decentralized curricula that privilege co-authorship, intersectionality, and distributed agency.

This vision resists the myth of the singular author and the closed book. Publishing, instead of concluding a work, becomes a continuous act of relation and transformation. As Glissant (1997) reminds us, knowledge often lives in relational opacity — in encounters that do not seek to erase difference, but sustain it.

Publishing, then, becomes an emotional and political infrastructure. It builds solidarities, preserves memory, and allows fragile futures — still emerging — to remain within reach. It is a form of ethical maintenance, one that insists on the potential of shared imagination.

To publish is not merely to release something into the world, but to take responsibility for its afterlife: Who will care for this? Who will carry it forward? Who might be transformed by it?

In a world defined by extractive logics, speed, and systemic forgetting, publishing as relational care offers a counter-gesture — a slow, sustained practice of making space for the not-yet. It is not just about content, but about connection. Not just about information, but about relation.

To publish, in this light, is to hold open the possibility of another world.

Holding Space for the Not-Yet — Publishing as Resistance through Care and Alterity

In an age defined by extractive logics, accelerating circulation, and systemic forgetting, the act of publishing — when reframed through care — becomes a radical countergesture. It invites us to slow down, to attend, and to hold space for knowledges, voices, and futures that have not yet fully emerged, or that have been continuously erased.

To publish as care is to move away from a productivist logic — where value is measured in visibility, metrics, and marketability — and toward a practice of attentive maintenance, as theorized by María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). In her words, “care is everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible” (p. 3). Applied to publishing, this implies that our editorial and curatorial decisions carry ethical weight — they participate in shaping what is livable, and for whom.

This logic of care resists the commodification of attention, a central mechanism of digital capitalism, as diagnosed by Jonathan Crary in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013). In a world where continuous exposure and instant availability are demanded of both content and people, publishing with care becomes an act of refusal — a temporal and ethical divergence from immediacy and extractivism.

Publishing as care also asks us to engage with alterity — not only to include “other voices,” but to recognize the other as irreducible. As Emmanuel Levinas (1969) argued, true ethics begins with the face of the other, in their vulnerability and unknowability. A publication that acknowledges alterity doesn’t flatten voices into digestible narratives. It allows opacity, ambiguity, contradiction. As Glissant (1997) insists, “opacity is not lack of transparency; it is the right to difference without fear.”

From this perspective, publishing becomes a form of hosting — a term explored by feminist scholar Sara Ahmed (2000), who notes that to host is to make space, but also to be transformed by the guest. The ethics of publishing-as-hosting requires us to decenter authority, open up editorial processes, and allow for forms of co-authorship that destabilize the editor as gatekeeper.

Contemporary experiments in collective publishing reflect this shift. The Pirate Care project, for example, brings together activists, artists, and scholars who document informal and insurgent care infrastructures — from refugee support networks to feminist health collectives — through open-source, collaboratively written tools. Their publications are structured not only around what is said, but how it is shared: through wikified formats, collective editing, and community feedback loops.

Likewise, The Funambulist, edited by Léopold Lambert, is a platform committed to publishing architecture and politics in relation to colonisation, incarceration, and resistance. Each issue is guest-curated, decentralising authorship and redirecting editorial power to those directly affected by the structures discussed. It’s not just a magazine — it’s a space of epistemic solidarity.

In this framework, publishing becomes a gesture of holding space for the not-yet: for knowledge that is still forming, for voices that have been silenced, for futures that are fragile but possible. It is an act of collective listening and imagining. It is not just about recording the world as it is, but about making it otherwise.

Tools for Convivial Publishing — Illich, Maldonado, and the Ethics of Editorial Design

In Tools for Conviviality (1973), Ivan Illich outlines a vision of technology not as an engine of domination or alienation, but as a possible ground for convivial life — a life grounded in mutual aid, autonomy, and interdependence. For Illich, tools (and by extension, systems such as publishing) should not outgrow the scale of the human; they must remain accessible, adaptable, and empowering. A convivial tool is one that “fosters the autonomy and creativity of those who use it” (Illich, 1973, p. 21).

Applied to publishing, this principle becomes a clear critique of centralized, corporatized editorial systems — the kind that strip away community agency and impose extractive metrics of success. A convivial publishing practice, by contrast, would prioritize access over scale, process over product, relation over reach.

It is in this context that small press, zine, and decentralized editorial movements can be read as not merely nostalgic or marginal, but as epistemological alternatives. They embody what Illich called “counterproductivity” — a refusal to let tools (or media) escape the control of the community.

This aligns strongly with Tomás Maldonado’s concern, especially in Design, Nature, and Revolution (1972), with the entanglements between design, ecology, and ethics. Maldonado warned against the unchecked faith in technological progress and called for critical design that is historically aware, materially responsible, and ethically situated. Publishing, when understood through Maldonado’s lens, becomes a design act — not only in terms of form and legibility, but of social consequence.

Maldonado argued that design must consider not only the object, but its lifeworld — its conditions of production, its use, its discard, and its symbolic weight. A book, in this sense, is not neutral. Its design can invite or exclude, clarify or mystify, sustain or exhaust. A critical publishing practice thus engages in what we might call editorial ecology — a deep awareness of the relationships between knowledge, medium, and environment.

Combining Illich and Maldonado, we can begin to imagine publishing not as an industrial pipeline or a self-branding platform, but as a shared tool for autonomy and care. A public technology rooted in modesty, accessibility, and mutual learning.

Projects such as Papelitos (Argentina), Stolen Books (Portugal), or Common Notions (US) exemplify this. Their publications are not just about circulating ideas, but about building editorial ecologies: open workshops, iterative editions, reader annotations, shared archives. They resonate with what Illich calls the vernacular domain — the space of informal, community-based production, where knowledge is embedded in relationships rather than extracted from them.

As we confront ecological collapse, epistemic injustice, and the alienation of digital hyper-productivity, the need for convivial publishing tools becomes urgent. We need publishing infrastructures that support slow knowledge, situated voices, and co-authorship across difference. We need systems that are designed — not only graphically, but ethically.

Publishing, then, becomes not a conveyor belt of information, but a site of design for conviviality: a shared, cared-for space where knowledge is not consumed but cultivated — and where the act of making public is also the act of making possible.

Publishing Between Magic and Machine — Toward a Cosmotechnics of Care

Across the preceding chapters, we have traced a path where publishing emerges not as a solitary act of dissemination, nor as a neutral tool of information transfer, but as a situated, ethical and imaginative practice — one that holds space for fragile futures, sustains shared knowledges, and resists the logic of extraction and erasure. It is, fundamentally, a relational act: of care, of hosting, of co-presence across difference and time.

To conclude, let us now imagine a strategy for publishing grounded in the metaphysical proposition advanced by Federico Campagna: that every world is built upon a metaphysical infrastructure — a cosmology that defines what is real, what is possible, what is sayable.

In Technic and Magic (2018), Campagna draws a radical distinction between two metaphysical orientations. On one hand, the technological metaphysics of modernity: a world governed by certainty, utility, repetition, and legibility — the kind of world that feeds both post-humanist rationalism and ultra-capitalist accelerationism. On the other hand, the magical metaphysics he proposes: a world governed by possibility, ineffability, symbolism, and the sacred unknown. A world where reality is not fixed but narrated, and narration is an act of world-building.

In this light, publishing must choose: will it remain an extension of Technic — a machine of visibility, regulation, and control? Or can it become a tool of Magic — a poetic, symbolic, and political practice for composing other realities?

This is not a call for nostalgia, nor for irrationalism. It is a call for a cosmotechnics (Hui, 2016): a reweaving of worldviews and techniques, where publishing becomes a tool not for replicating the world-as-it-is, but for inviting the world-as-it-could-be. In opposition to the hyper-legibility of algorithmic culture — where meaning is reduced to data, and identity to traceable patterns — magical publishing reclaims the opacity of the text, the slowness of the ritual, the intimacy of shared reading.

Against the post-humanist fantasy of seamless mind-machine integration — in which the “human” is overcome by optimisation — publishing insists on the value of the imperfect, the situated, the embodied. It sustains the voices that falter, the knowledges that don’t scale, the stories that don’t sell.

In contrast with ultra-capitalist logics of attention-extraction and platform monopolisation, this vision of publishing turns back to the commons: not as a nostalgic return to pre-modern forms, but as a forward-looking infrastructure for shared authorship, shared maintenance, and shared world-building.

Therefore, the future of publishing might not lie in product innovation, but in metaphysical divergence.

To publish in this sense is not to announce, but to enchant.

Not to clarify, but to invoke.

Not to dominate the future, but to hold space for the not-yet.

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