Two caricatures of top-hatted millionaires whose bodies are bulging money-sacks. Their heads have been replaced with potatoes. The potatoes' eyes have been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' They stand in a potato field filled with stoop laborers. The sky is a 'code waterfall' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

For the last few years, in the time between Christmas and New Year, I’ve created a collage using issues of The Guardian Weekly and any other magazines I’ve found (example). Cory Doctorow, who makes everyone feel like an underperformer, creates one every day.

Thankfully, he also believes in open working and sharing, meaning we all get to use them under a permissive license) (in this case, CC BY-SA). He’s also collated his favourites into a limited-edition book. Because of course he has.

_ Canny Valley_ collects 80 of the best collages I’ve made for my Pluralistic newsletter, where I publish 5-6 essays every week, usually headed by a strange, humorous and/or grotesque image made up of public domain sources and Creative Commons works.

These images are made from open access sources, and they are themselves open access, licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike, which means you can take them, remix them, even sell them, all without my permission.

I never thought I’d become a visual artist, but as I’ve grappled with the daily challenge of figuring out how to illustrate my furious editorials about contemporary techno-politics, especially “enshittification,” I’ve discovered a deep satisfaction from my deep dives into historical archives of illustration, and, of course, the remixing that comes afterward.

Source: Pluralistic

Image: CC BY-SA Cory Doctorow