Meatspace Press is a publishing project co-founded by Mark Graham and Joe Shaw. The name comes from the cyberpunk slang for the opposite of cyberspace: real life. In practice, we believe in no such binaries. The digital is material, real life is digital, and everything is meatspace.
The project came about as a way to communicate and distribute ideas related to our research to broader audiences. A lot of academic research remains behind a wall of dense text and closed journals, that are rarely going to connect to people beyond university circles. With that in mind, we started with the classic format of the pamphlet and a Do-It-Yourself ethic, and produced two short pamphlets on themes of digital technology, labour and society (see: Publications). In 2019 we published our first full-sized book project: How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. Amidst the beginning of the recent pandemic, we published our second: Data Justice and COVID-19: global perspectives. The third book is out now: Fake AI. The fourth book is coming soon…
In time, it is our hope that the Meatspace Press project will provide accessible introductions to important issues of technology and society for people of diverse backgrounds. Whilst this will always be a very challenging objective, our first five publications have already been the starting point for conversations in classrooms, bars, cafés, taxis, barbershops and homes. All of our publications are Open Access and freely available to download with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and we issue DOIs for each and every one.
You may also support our work through purchasing any of our publications in paperback, ebook, and pdf formats from our shop, not to mention artwork and illustrations from the designers we work with.
The project is still young, but we are very grateful for support from a range of individuals and organisations that include (alphabetically): the Alan Turing Institute, the European Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the Global Data Justice project at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Maynooth University, the Mozilla Foundation, openpolis.it, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.
Our publications have also been featured in a variety of venues, including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), the LSE Review of Books, Neural, New Internationalist, New Scientist, Red Pepper, and Wired magazine.
If you have a proposal for a book, pamphlet, or some other type of publication project, please go here.
Meatspace Press is a signatory to the Fairwork Pledge as a way of signalling the company’s commitment to a fairer platform economy.