Autonomous Systems

A press is a machine for repeating something exactly. Movable type, the litho stone, the laser drum — every one of them an apparatus for taking a decision made once and reproducing it without further thought. The decision is human; the repetition is mechanical. Anonymous Press asked a blunter question. What if the machine made the decision too?

The argument

Hand a system three jobs and watch where the author goes. Let the system retrieve the images, set the type, and bind the page. Leave a human exactly one lever: the words. What remains of design when every visual choice has been delegated in advance, identically, to a process that has no eye and no preference?

The answer the project discovered is that the word becomes the whole of the work. With the visual surface locked, the person at the keyboard cannot art-direct, cannot nudge a margin, cannot choose between two pictures. They can only name a subject and accept what naming returns. Design collapses into writing. The brief shrinks to a single field. And the smallest possible instruction — one phrase — turns out to carry the entire freight of intention.

Having little control over the visual side of the publication, the users are forced to utilize language as their only design tool. The process thus moves into the realm of literature, where a narrator tells a story and leaves its visual representation to evolve independently in the imagination of his reader.

Three parties, no author

An autonomous system does not abolish authorship so much as scatter it. Three parties make every Anonymous Press book, and none of them can claim it alone.

The user supplies the language. This is the only act of will in the chain, and it is genuinely consequential: "the sublime" and "phallic vegetables" send the machine down very different corridors. The algorithm supplies the form. It retrieves what it ranks as most relevant and lays it down without hesitation or taste, which is to say it answers honestly and stupidly at once. The reader supplies the meaning. The book arrives as a set of choices made by two parties who never met, and it stays inert until someone opens it and decides what those choices were trying to say.

No link in that chain is the author. The user never touched a picture. The algorithm never understood a word. The reader was handed a finished object and asked to account for it. Authorship is real here; it simply has no single address.

Why surrender control

There is a discipline in giving up the eye. A designer's instinct is to intervene — to fix the kerning, to swap the weak image, to make it nicer. Autonomy forbids all of it, and in forbidding it, exposes something. When you can no longer improve the surface, you are forced to ask what the surface was ever for. The project's wager is that most of what we call taste is decoration laid over a decision that the words had already made.

This is not a complaint about designers. It is a relocation of the job. The interesting work moves upstream: into the design of the system, the choice of constraints, the framing of what the machine is allowed to do and to whom it answers. To build an autonomous press is still to design — only now you design the rules, not the page, and then you step out of the room.

The honest machine

The system has no opinions, and that is its integrity. Ask it for an idea and it returns the internet's consensus picture of that idea, ranked by whatever "relevance" meant on the day you asked. The result is often funny, occasionally beautiful, sometimes troubling — and always a faithful core sample of how the network imagined a word at a moment in time. Run the same word a year later and the book is different, because the consensus has moved. The library, read in sequence, is a record of a machine telling the truth about what it found.

That is the quiet provocation underneath the joke. A press that makes its own decisions does not make them out of nothing. It makes them out of us — out of what we uploaded, tagged, linked, and clicked. The autonomy is real, but it is autonomy fed entirely on human exhaust. The machine decides; we are what it decides with.

A note on where this came from

This text restates the thinking behind Autonomous Systems, the founding argument of Anonymous Press, originated by Karolis Kosas in 2013. The original platform built the case in working code: type a word, receive a book. This page is a continuation of that argument, not a substitute for it. The idea was prophetic when it was made and has only become more legible since. We keep it in print.