The Uncensored Library: Virality, Truth and the Evasion of Censorship

Holden Bigg

How do we think about digital buildings? In this paper, I examine the way that digital spaces frame experience and the way that architecture defines the networks that digital buildings travel through, using the Uncensored Library as a case study. The library is a Minecraft map developed by Reporters Without Borders in conjunction with Blockworks in order to evade governmental censorship and promote journalism in countries with restricted media. Bringing together theoretical perspectives from digital anthropology, STS and the anthropology of infrastructure, this article assesses the material, the symbolic, and the spectacular as intrinsic aspects of the library’s form, which shape the networks through which it travels. Rather than reducing digital spaces to the people that inhabit them, I call for an interrogation of the real-world effects that digital spaces have. Ultimately, I argue that digital architecture should be taken seriously as a topic of academic inquiry, and that more research should be done on the way that digital buildings frame experience, both on and offline.

The sun was beginning to fall, and the sky was fading to a deep apricot as I scurried from the entrance hall across the great glass floor on towards the left wing of the building complex. Beneath the glass was a huge atlas, and the luminescent slogan #truthfindsaway beaming out. In the left wing, candles placed high on imposing columns guided my walk towards a room bearing the Russian flag. In the room was a pool of water. A slow piano tune drifted through the air as I flew to the back of the room, revealing that within the water lay a great octopus, thrashing its tentacles, surrounded by submerged binary code. This is the Uncensored Library, a Minecraft project developed by Reporters Without Borders, in conjunction with BlockWorks. First released in 2009, Minecraft has an active global player base exceeding 112 million (Chen, 2020). The game started life as a small independent project from developer Mojang, but has since been bought by Microsoft. Minecraft’s popularity has exploded, in part owing to the modulations that players can add onto the base game, and in part owing to its virality on YouTube. The game’s creative mode is akin to Lego, with players using blocks to build structures, artworks, and even cities, and often posting them online. 

The Uncensored Library is an attempt by Reporters Without Borders to utilise Minecraft’s capabilities in order to evade governmental censorship, and promote journalism to young players in countries with restricted media. Utilising the capacity to create books in the game, the original version of the library contained texts from journalists and news outlets censored in Egypt, Russia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico. More recently, texts from journalists in Brazil, and some on COVID-19 misinformation have been added in newly developed areas of the building. Examples of the texts include articles from grani.ru, which has been blocked since 2014 in Russia. The Vietnamese section features the works of Nguyen Van Dai, who lives in exile from Vietnam. The Saudi Arabian section includes the work of Jamal Khashoggi, killed by the government in 2018. Similarly, the Mexican wing features pictures, and works of journalists murdered for their attempts to shine light on corruption in the country. As of March 2020, the Uncensored Library map had been downloaded over 23,000 times globally, and the official server had been explored by 17,000 unique visitors across 30,000 sessions (Natterer, 2020).

The Uncensored Library presents an interesting challenge to traditional explorations of the built environment. Housed in a virtual space, the library is not tethered to any exterior building but rather exists without a material manifestation. This essay explores the question ‘how does digital architecture frame experience, and how does architecture shape the networks that digital buildings travel through’. While anthropological explorations of video games are not new, they have largely focused on community building and participation in digital spaces (Boellstorff, 2015), without interrogating the built environments that define people’s experiences within those spaces. In order to answer the research question, I break my research down into three objectives. I firstly want to explore the material infrastructures that define the building. Exploring censorship as a material part of the internet’s structure enables an analysis of the internet that does not fall into techno-utopian or techno-pessimistic reifications of the capacities of technology. I then want to explore the symbolic nature of the library’s architecture, examining its neoclassical style, and Reporters Without Borders’ claims that the library contains ‘truth’. Finally, I examine the library’s spectacular elements. The monumental nature of the library, and the artworks in each exhibition space promote the spread of the library through affinity spaces, and circumvent censorship. My findings are based on numerous visits to the library, and observations of the conversations that people had there, which informed my research.

The Materiality of Digital Things

One of the most frequently observed truisms about the digital in social sciences, in recent years, is that it is material. When Miller and Horst (2012) staked their claim for an emergent and methodologically distinct digital anthropology, they argued that three aspects of material culture were essential to understand how digital technologies operate. “First, there is the materiality of digital infrastructure. Second, there is the materiality of digital content, and third there is the materiality of digital context” (p25). Pink, Ardevol and Lanzeni (2016) draw on Miller and Horst’s work to develop the field of digital materiality. Their work focuses on “research/knowing, making/doing and intervention/designing in a world where the digital and the material are not separate but entangled elements of the same processes, activities and intentionalities” (p1). Critically, they explore digital materiality as an aspect of design anthropology, architecture, and digital anthropology. There are two aspects of their argument that are essential for my research. Firstly, that “technologies are always ‘used’ by people whom we refer to as everyday designers rather than simply ‘users’” (p15).

Exploring technologies in use firstly escapes the critique of technological determinism, by demonstrating ethnographically how technologies are used. Equally, it enables an exploration of Minecraft not simply as a game, but rather as a digital technology, or platform, that can be subverted and reappropriated. Secondly, Pink et al. argue that, drawing from architectural studies, “the concept of digital materiality has come to stand for a particular set of practices involving digital design” (p7). Willmann et al (2013) argue that “a digital materiality is emerging, where the interplay between data and material is seen… as an interdependent structuring of architecture and its material manifestations” (p1). I seek to demonstrate that digital materiality in architecture does not depend on material manifestations. Through the example of the Uncensored Library, I emphasise that buildings matter and have meaning even if only instantiated in a digital world. The materialism underpinning digital anthropology serves to critique this divide between the digital and material in architecture, and demonstrates the need for a reconsideration of digital architecture as a fertile ground for academic inquiry.

Miller and Horst’s (2012) assertion that digital infrastructure is material has proved a fertile ground for further research. Star and Ruhleder (1996) stated, some twenty-five years ago that infrastructure becomes visible upon breakdown, and that attentiveness to these moments of rupture reveals what is normally invisible. More recently, researchers have used this attentiveness as a methodology, in order to explore how infrastructures operate in everyday conditions. Starostielski’s ‘The Undersea Network’ (2015) reveals the fibre-optic cables that “transport 99 percent of all transoceanic digital communications” (p1), and through this revealing, elucidates the “historiographic practice that tends to narrate a transcendence of geographic specificity, a movement from fixity to fluidity, and ultimately a transition from wires to wireless structures” (p7). Paying attention to this submerged infrastructure brings to the fore the geographies that cable communications are built on, and rejects the notion of a wireless, dematerialised engagement with the internet. The anthropology of infrastructure provides a useful frame for my analysis because it situates the Uncensored Library as neither wholly on or offline, but rather materially embedded in the world. Paying attention to infrastructures enables a deeper and richer exploration of the multiple places and spaces that digital files travel to, and the way that they travel.

The internet has long been theorised as either a liberatory technology (Diamond, 2006), or as a tool used by authoritarian governments to extend their control over people’s lives (Morozov, 2011). In the majority of these theorisations, technologies and the internet become reified as determining the nature of people’s existence online. The Uncensored Library demands that we resist any oversimplified techno-pessimistic or techno-utopian account of the internet, because intrinsic to its function is the assertion that the internet is both a tool for censorship, hence its existence, and a means of evading that censorship. An infrastructural approach is useful to explore this messy assemblage. Dourish (2015) focuses on the materiality of Internet routing, and “the protocols and mechanisms that… allow digital data to traverse a complex, heterogeneous, and dynamic Internet” (p184), and in so doing, examines “the relationship between infrastructure and experience, with attention to the processes by which digital experiences are produced” (p185).

One of the defining features of the Internet is its amorphous topology. The Internet allows connections to be formed between any two points of a network, “resulting in a loosely structured pattern of interconnections” (p199). Internet technology therefore provides a way for data to move across networks, and potentially across long distances. Dourish brings forward the Exterior Gateway Protocol, which communicates information about the routing of one network to the router of another. This protocol “is designed specifically to connect autonomous systems” (p195), and is based on “the idea that access to each autonomous system will be brokered by one or a small number of authoritative gateways” (p199). This is significant because it demonstrates that there are “material consequences of the relationship between infrastructure and protocol” (p200) which result in an Internet that is potentially subject to control. Internet service providers can trace the networks that information is transmitted across based on the centralised communication that is required by Exterior Gateway Protocol. Whilst the Internet in theory is based on peer-to-peer decentralised routing, in actuality, due to the materiality of protocol and routing, packets are directed largely through centralised, controllable gateways. One of the main systems of control available to internet service providers is the firewall.

The Material and Social Function of the Firewall

Firewalls operate at the boundary between the local network and the wider internet. Noonan and Dubrawsky (2006) demonstrate the multiple and diverse forms a firewall can take. Firewalls “screen Internet access for your internal resources, essentially protecting the Internet from your systems, while at the same time enabling you to restrict and filter the kinds of Internet-based traffic that will be allowed from your internal resources” (Noonan and Dubrawsky, Chapter 9). While there are multiple forms that firewalls can take, I will use the single firewall system as a template for the way that content can be censored and restricted. It is important to note that “a firewall should no longer be considered a device, but a system of devices that work in concert to control the flow of traffic into and out of a protected network” (Noonan and Dubrawsky, Chapter 9).

At the outermost layer of the system is an external router, which screens traffic and permits only whitelisted traffic to access the system. Beyond the external router are intrusion detection and prevention systems, which send alarms when they detect non-permitted traffic. These systems also enable traffic to be further scrutinised, and assessed by internet service providers. Beyond this is the firewall itself, which connects the Internet, internal network, and a demilitarized zone, which is a subnetwork to which external networks attempting to access files are directed. Finally, there is another layer of filtering between the internal network and the firewall itself. Therefore, at the boundary point between networks, systems of control and supervision are present. The firewall, as a system of technologies, operates to screen and control bidirectional traffic between networks. However, exploring firewalls as simply technical objects without exploring the social function that they also play ignores the sociotechnical contexts in which firewalls are embedded.

In ‘Censored’, Roberts (2018) explores the implementation, and implications of the Chinese government’s so-called ‘Great Firewall’. Roberts argues that traditional concepts of censorship that completely control information “seem silly when you consider that every second millions of Internet users around the world are sending one another instant messages” (p1). While firewalls operate to block access to sites and prevent the spread of information “The Great Firewall… can be circumvented by savvy Internet users by downloading a Virtual Private Network (VPN)” (p2). Erwin et al (1998) provide a primer in how VPNs operate. Rather than accessing the internet through a firewall, VPNs simulate a private network over a public network. They use virtual connections, which are “temporary connections that have no real physical presence, but consist of packets routed over various machines on the Internet on an ad hoc basis” (Erwin et al, Introduction). VPNs therefore work to circumvent censorship by providing alternative virtual networks that are not routed through firewalls but exist as packets routed through various machines on a peer-to-peer basis.

Censorship, Roberts (2018) argues, should be thought of as “a tax on information, forcing users to pay money or spend more time if they want to access the censored material” (p2). The firewall itself, blocking information, exists within a framework, whereby the mechanisms of friction and flooding are also key. Friction “diverts citizens’ attention by imposing barriers to information access” (p6), and flooding is “information coordinated as distraction, propaganda or confusion” (p6). These techniques serve significantly, to segment the population, driving “a wedge between the elite and the masses” (p8), as well as significantly reducing the majority of users’ consumption of political information through filtering, impediments, and misinformation. Whilst the ecology that Roberts sketches is specific to China, she argues that “China’s censorship system has become the model for many authoritarian regimes” (p7), as a system to divert populations and reduce the spread of information detrimental to authoritarian regimes.

The Uncensored Library as Server and as Building

The Uncensored Library exists in this complex network of material and virtual infrastructures. The library itself exists in two forms, firstly as a Minecraft map file to be downloaded from the uncensored library’s website, and secondly as a Minecraft server itself, accessible via direct connection within Minecraft’s multiplayer menu, with the address visit.uncensoredlibrary. Reporters Without Borders, in a press release, argue that Minecraft represents an excellent vehicle to evade censorship, stating that “even where almost all media is blocked or controlled, the world’s most successful computer game is still accessible. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) uses this loophole to bypass internet censorship to bring back the truth – within Minecraft” (RSF, 2020). The infrastructure of the internet enables the transfer of the map because of its digital replicability.

While firewalls can be implemented to restrict traffic from uncensoredlibrary.com, the map, once downloaded can be freely viewed and transferred between peers. One of the ‘senior creatives’ behind the project argues that short of banning Minecraft entirely, it is hard to dismantle the server, because “we’ve made the world downloadable, [and so] technically anyone can take it and reupload it” (Natterer, 2020). Creating a server in Minecraft is relatively easy, and can be done with limited knowledge. This means that potentially more ‘savvy Internet users’ could use a VPN to download the Uncensored Library map and make it available to their peers. While firewalls can screen and filter packets and block websites, screening a Minecraft server shared between friends is more difficult, as the censored information is not represented within the packet information, but is only accessible within the map itself. The Uncensored Library demonstrates the material nature of censorship. Rather than an abstract law, it is embedded in networks that span the globe. Interrogating first the nature of censorship enables an exploration of the built environment of the map that does not assert a material/virtual divide, but rather explores virtual space as built upon, and in communication with, material networks.

Having established the sociopolitical and material realities that define the Uncensored Library’s functions, we can turn to its architectural form. The Uncensored Library is defined by two key concepts: truth and virality. These concepts are materialised in the form of the library and are essential to understand the networks in which the library is embedded. The first, then, truth. The library is designed in “a neoclassical architectural style. Derived from the traditions of ancient Roman and Greek architecture, neoclassicism is a style often used in the design of public buildings around the world such as museums, galleries, and libraries. It is an architectural style that is often used to represent culture and knowledge. BlockWorks used this style to design a building that represents freedom of knowledge and the power that truth has over oppressive government authorities and regimes” (RSF, 2020). Neoclassical architecture flourished in the 18th Century, and is tethered to the social developments of the period. During the late 17th century, ecclesiastical authority and the divine right of kings were weakened by the onset of what Israel (2001) terms ‘the crisis of the European mind’ (p19). Israel argues that “before 1650, science and philosophy… were of little immediate concern to rulers and ruling élites” (p24), as these activities were practiced under ecclesiastical supervision, and thus peripheral to government. However, “after 1650, everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was questioned in the light of philosophical reason and frequently challenged by startlingly different concepts generated by… what may still usefully be termed the scientific revolution” (p4).

Shapin and Schafer, in ‘Leviathan and the Air-Pump’ (1985) examine the foundation of the experimental method in the late 17th century, and its roots in natural philosophy. They explore Robert Boyle’s methods, which “have a canonical character in science texts, in science pedagogy and in the academic discipline of the history of science” (p3-4) as the basis of modern scientific knowledge production. Boyle sought to demonstrate that facts were outside the remit of human action, and were in fact resultant of the natural world, which gave his experimental method intellectual weight, as “to shift the agency onto natural reality is to stipulate the grounds for universal and irrevocable consent” (p23). This scientific method was one of the key elements of Enlightenment thinking, which transformed British and European society from one governed by ecclesiastical logic to one based on the concept of reason. Haraway, in ‘Situated Knowledges’ (1988) demonstrates the persuasive nature of scientific thinking.

Haraway argues that scientific knowledge-claims are granted power through this doctrine of objectivity, and “a conquering gaze from nowhere” (p581) that enables the splitting of subjects and objects, and totalising claims. While Haraway is arguing that it is necessary to move beyond this objectivist mode of thinking through what she terms situated knowledges, the Uncensored Library draws on the natural philosophy of an exterior world of truth that is interpretable to develop its truth claims. The hashtag corresponding to its release, #truthfindsaway, demonstrates that the work housed in the library should be seen as factual. The Uncensored Library combines a neoclassical architectural style with a media campaign focused on truth to assert its value as a space which rejects censorship by instead producing in game books that contain truth, mirroring the experimental method of Boyle by presenting the truth as exterior and objectified, housed in the articles of the library. Architecture, in this example, operates on a symbolic level. It has significant meaning, and is intrinsic to the message of the digital space. Taking digital architecture seriously demands exploring the logics that define buildings such as this, and their purpose. 

The second key concept that defines the architectural form of the Uncensored Library is its virality. This is formed in part by the spectacle of the building. The library is composed of over 12.5 million blocks, and its dome is nearly 300 metres wide, which would make it the second largest in the world (RSF, 2020). Walking through the cavernous halls and across the great glass floor under the dome, I was in awe of the amount of time it must have taken to create, and the quiet, reverent atmosphere that it engendered. On the Multiplayer server, users often commented on the power of the building, and that it made them feel they were in the presence of great knowledge. The building functions simultaneously as a library containing censored documents, and a quasi-exhibition space. In each of the countries’ rooms, there is a large piece of artwork that dominates the space. These works usually materialise a critique of censorship, or demonstrate the importance of truth. For example, in the Vietnam room, there is ‘The Labyrinth of Truth’. This labyrinth materialises censorship, by actualising the challenge of finding ‘truth’. At the centre of the labyrinth are articles from Nguyen Van Dai, whose critiques of the government led to his exile in Germany. Rather than simply explicating the message of truth, however, these art pieces work to expose the Uncensored Library to as many people as possible, through the affinity spaces created by Minecraft players.

Pellicone and Ahn (2018) draw on Gee (2004) to develop an affinity space theory. Affinity spaces, they argue, are “places (physical, digital or hybrid) where people interact with each other, relating to a common endeavour and only secondarily (if at all) relating through shared culture, gender and ethnicity (p442). Affinity spaces have flourished with the capacity of the Internet to enable non-geographical bonds based on shared interests with people across the world. Through a connective ethnography with a child called Ben, they demonstrate that ‘play’ on Minecraft is enacted across several technologies (p440), and across multiple sites. Ben hosts a server, and much of his play on Minecraft is focused on implementing player-designed modifications (p447). Ben also records his gameplay to YouTube, and described “his desire to become a ‘famous YouTuber’” (p448).

On the Multiplayer Uncensored Library server, many people stated that they had seen the library on YouTube, and just had to see it for themselves. Inputting ‘Uncensored Library’ into YouTube reveals that many famous Minecraft YouTubers have uploaded videos of themselves exploring the library, some of which have millions of views (Maron, 2020). The architecture, and use of space in the library is therefore intrinsic to its purpose in spreading the Uncensored Library through the affinity spaces that gamers interact with. The architecture of the Uncensored Library works to spread virally through these alternative and non-geographic spaces, and demonstrates that rather than just gloss, digital spaces and should their architectural stylings have real world effects.

Conclusion

Exploring the library first, as a digital file, interrogating the infrastructures that it works against, and that it travels through, and then as an architectural digital building enables an understanding of how digital experiences are not confined to simply virtual spaces, but have ramifications and impacts beyond. In this essay I have sought to stake the claim for taking digital architecture seriously as a topic of academic inquiry. An in-depth interrogation of the Uncensored Library has demonstrated the way that its architecture, and use of space is intrinsic to its function, and the message it is trying to convey. Rather than reducing digital spaces to the people that inhabit them, instead I call for an interrogation of the real-world effects that digital spaces have. In this essay, I first drew on Dourish (2015), and Noonan and Dubrawksy (2006) to draw focus to the complex material entanglements of the Internet, and to demonstrate that censorship is not imposed upon it, but is rather an aspect of its function. I then used Roberts (2018) to demonstrate the social function of censorship, beyond technology.

This material infrastructure is key to understanding the alternate social spaces, both in person, and online that the Uncensored Library moves within. Having established the material context, I explored the library itself. Drawing from 17th and 18th Century architectural stylings, the library manifests its truth claims through the building’s fabric, linking it to natural philosophy that presents truth as exterior to human interpretations. Finally, I drew on Pellicone and Ahn (2018) to explore the affinity spaces of Minecraft. The architecture of the building enables it to transmit through these spaces, and have an impact globally, evading censorship across countries. The Uncensored Library is a fertile ground for research, and other angles of inquiry could focus on neoclassical architecture’s resurgence in far-right politics, or the logic of truth as inherently liberatory. This essay explores Minecraft, censorship and the library itself, but more broadly it demonstrates the importance of taking digital spaces seriously, and suggests that digital architecture is as an interesting avenue of academic exploration.

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