Monoskop and UbuWeb are tactics for intervening in three kinds of practices, those of the art-world, of publishing and of scholarship. They respond to the current institutional, technical and political-economic constraints of all three. As it says in the Communist Manifesto, the forces for social change are those that ask the property question. While détournement was a sufficient answer to that question in the era of the culture industries, they try to formulate, in their modest way, a suitable tactic for answering the property question in the era of the vulture industries.
This takes the form of moving from data to metadata, expressed in the form of the move from writing to publishing, from art-making to curating, from research to archiving. Another way of thinking this, suggested by Hiroki Azuma would be the move from narrative to database. The object of critical attention acquires a third dimension, a kind of informational depth. The objects before us are not just a text or an image but databases of potential texts and images, with metadata attached.
— McKenzie Wark, “Metadata Punk”, Tomislav Medak, McKenzie Wark, Paul Otlet, Marcell Mars & Manar Zarroug,2015.bib⁄‘Public Library’.Multimedijalni institut & WHW., 111–20.