Navsuv. The Bi-Weekly Summary

The Bi-Weekly Summary | 25.Aug–07.Sep.2025

Guerrilla Predicates, Degrowth Infrastructures, and Literocentric Traps

What happens when metadata refuses obedience, when libraries stop chasing accumulation, and when catalogues reveal their literocentric skeletons? The past two weeks I wrote along these fault lines, looking for cracks where insurgency, ecology, and critique can take root.

In RDF Guerrilla Tactics I treated the Resource Description Framework not as a neutral syntax but as a battlefield. By inventing predicates like mem:refusal or rit:smellProfile, RDF becomes an insurgent language: compliant enough to be machine-readable, yet carrying worlds the system was never meant to host. To hack a triple is not sabotage but care: an insistence that smell, silence, and absence also count as knowledge.

From there, the question of infrastructures expanded. In From Growth to Degrowth, I argued that LIS can no longer measure itself by meters of shelving or terabytes of storage. Climate collapse demands other logics: sufficiency instead of accumulation, repair over replacement, resilience beyond expansion. Future Spaces, the parallel chronicle, imagined what this might look like: seed libraries as biodiversity archives, solar-powered repositories as nodes of autonomy, small and local forms replacing extractive monuments. Here the library is not neutral ground but an ecological and political actor.

Finally, in Metadata for the Written Word, I returned to the scaffolding of catalogues themselves. MARC, Dewey, LCC —all born in literocentric eras— continue to force every knowledge form into the mold of the page. Oral traditions, yoik, griot repertoires, ritual silences: all flattened into bibliographic shadows. To name this exclusion is to admit that cataloguing is political. To move beyond it is to imagine metadata built not from books, but from voices, rhythms, gestures, and pauses.

Together, these writings sketch a horizon where refusal is encoded, libraries degrow into sufficiency, and literocentrism is finally unmasked. The infrastructures of memory —RDF graphs, shelving systems, metadata schemas— are not passive containers. They are terrains of struggle, always already political. To engage them critically is to reimagine them otherwise: insurgent, ecological, plural.

Navsuv offers a biweekly synthesis of my work: blog posts, critical notes, articles, archival documents, and other materials. It's not just a summary — it's an editorial thread tracing how each piece fits into a shifting landscape of memory, critique, and resistance.

The name comes from the language of the Sivdara, a fictional people from a broader personal project I'm developing: a continent imagined as a space to explore knowledge, memory, and the tension between presence and erasure. In their tongue, navsuv names the rope-and-straw suspension bridges used to cross the naroow valleys, up in the mountains — ephemeral yet enduring paths stretched between worlds. Like this section.