Adrian Johns
Current Research
In 2010 I completed a big book on
the history of piracy - the intellectual-property kind, not the seaborne
(although they are, it turns out, related). It extends from the Renaissance to
the present, and from early printed books to digital movies. The book is
entitled Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, and appeared from the University of
Chicago Press. You can find the Press’s website for it here,
and Amazon’s here.
There is a Bibliography online here.
I
also recently published Death of a pirate: British Broadcasting and the
Origins of the Information Age (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). The book
focuses on a shooting in 1960s Britain that brought to a head the challenge of
pirate radio stations to the public broadcasting monopoly held by the BBC. From
this starting-point it expands to address the politics of broadcasting,
culture, and public authority that lay behind the incident. It also outlines
the role of pirate media in the emergence of neoliberalism, with connections to
today’s digital culture. The press’s site is here, and
Amazon’s is here.
Future
projects:
I have a range of projects in the planning
stage, and it is not yet clear which of them will be pursued in earnest. For
example:
The
Intellectual Property Defense Industry.
This would take off from the last chapter of Piracy, which argued that what is distinctive about today’s IP
world is the emergence of a coherence global industry devoted to policing
intellectual property. We know almost nothing about this industry – its size,
scope, culture, and history. This project would seek to remedy that by
providing an in-depth account, including close-quarters studies of IP police in
action.
The Science of Reading. This would look at how experimental
scientists have tried to understand what happens when we read, starting with
the early psychology laboratories in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century and
extending into the present. The story relates to how Americans have been taught
to read for generations, and to the design of information systems in the modern
day (among other things).
Pharmacopoeias: print, authenticity, and
modernity. A project on
half a millennium of efforts to police the identity of substances (medicaments,
foods, colors, etc.) by deploying the power of print. The hypothesis is that
pharmacopoeias, the genre of works that sought to guarantee substances by
fixing their formulae in print, pose a fundamental problem about modernity
itself. They have never really worked, except through the mediation of powerful
but inscrutable policing practices. Their history enables us to see both where
the power of print really resides and how the stability of both texts and
substances came to be taken for granted in modern society.
A
Historical Anthropology of Scientific Reading. This would be a large-scale project to provide a taxonomy
of reading practices in the sciences at the current moment of their
transformation. It would be designed to furnish the first overall
classification of these reading practices, and also to explain how they arose
historically. Realistically, the project would be beyond any one investigator,
so I envisage it as a long-term collective endeavor.
Mr Smith goes to Tokyo. A project on Erasmus Peshine
Smith, an American political economist, lawyer, and (at one point) natural
scientist who was recruited by the Meiji Emperor of Japan to become his advisor
on trade and foreign affairs in the 1870s. Living in the imperial quarters at a
time when other Westerners were largely restricted to Yokohama, Smith had
unique access to the emperor’s household, and seems to have used it to advise
policies in radical opposition to those preferred by Washington and London. The
result was a scandal with repercussions that extended to the bases of
colonialism, the slave trade, and economic liberalism. Smith’s private papers
have survived unseen, and I hope to use them to tell this story for the first
time.