SCALEPUBLISHING Knowledge for a world of limited resources

Restoring SCALE 2019: weeklies, Qi Hardware, and a runway to the pandemic

We are republishing the 2019 SCALE weekly season—weeks 5–21 from the surviving editorial mirror—with open PDFs, full word-of-the-week essays, complete curated link rivers from the original YAML indexes, and backdated release posts (plus this overview).

Browse weeks and PDFs: SCALE 2019 weekly season — the canonical index (weeks 5–21, gap notice for weeks 1–4, announcement links).

Historical hosts and community

The 2019 program shipped from scale.qihardware.org (also cited as scalepublishing.com in later eras). Readers gathered on Telegram at t.me/qihardware—the live channel for hardware, software, and crypto link curation that fed each weekly PDF.

Note: The Telegram channel is not preserved in the Internet Archive; the Wayback link above is for URL consistency only. Live community history from 2019 exists in mirrors (YAML, PDFs, posts) and participant memory—not in archived chat logs.

That lineage belongs to the wider Qi Hardware story on Wikipedia: from Qi Hardware through Canaan Creative (mining hardware), Linzhi.io (ASIC / Ethereum mining era), to today's Phi and the Fabricatorz network—one continuous thread of open-hardware and publishing experiment, not a single brand rename.

People and context (2018–2020 runway)

Jon Phillips — co-founder of SCALE (2004), Open Clip Art Library, and later Phi / Fabricatorz; editorial voice in late 2019 weeks.

Clément Renaud — researcher and writer; lead threads such as Computer Rights (Week 7) and Shenzhen reportage (Week 21).

Fabricatorz Foundation — hosts infrastructure and cultural technology work that connects SCALE's archive to present publishing.

A personal timeline on the season

The 2019 weeklies sit on a dense world timeline:

  • Birth of Li Li Phillips — family milestone amid the editorial calendar.
  • Hong Kong protests (2019) — global news echoing through curated links and correspondence.
  • Toward the pandemic — the season ends in June 2019 (Week 21); within months the hardware/crypto/link-sharing culture SCALE documented would meet COVID-19, border closures, and a different internet—setting up later SCALE work such as (UN)LOCKED: Memories of Wuhan (2021).

We restore these files so that timeline stays readable: not only PDFs, but why each week was assembled.

Editorial format (what we rebuilt)

  1. Word of the week — Chinese character prompt + essay (when present in YAML).
  2. Curated links — full links and week_links sections from the indexes (broken localhost URLs replaced with orl / archive targets where possible).
  3. Friday PDF — offline reading ritual described in Week 5's launch copy.
  4. Backdated posts — sixteen historical announcements (Barry Threw et al.) plus Week 21 release note.

Each week page was rebuilt from the surviving 2019 editorial mirror (indexes, link rivers, and PDFs). Corrections welcome: up@scalepublishing.com.