The Imprint
Unruly Chain
Books that ask difficult questions about technology, organizations, science, and human possibility.
Our publishing program
Original books.
Recovered arguments.
Unruly Chain is an independent publishing imprint. We publish original books and Unruly Editions: significant public-domain works with new forewords, annotations, and afterwords.
The catalog is not organized around a single subject. It is organized around a kind of question: the ones that cut across disciplines and do not resolve into comfortable answers.
Explore the books →Our editorial position
Agreement is not a condition.
Unruly Chain seeks out alternative positions and is not afraid of anyone else’s ideas. We publish works worth examining, including works whose conclusions we dispute. We value negative results in scientific literature because knowing what failed helps knowledge advance. Agreement is not a condition of publication.
Some chains hold us back. This one pulls ideas forward.
Publication
Publishing should mean published.
Unruly Chain is selective before publication. After publication, the relationship changes. A published edition becomes part of the historical record, and we will not remove it because it becomes controversial, inconvenient, unfashionable, costly, or dangerous to defend.
Corrections, annotations, responses, new editions, and changed minds remain possible. Erasure does not.
The permanent record
The edition remains.
Unruly Chain will permanently record each published edition through decentralized technology intended to preserve both the work and the integrity of its publication record.
This permanence does not give Unruly Chain perpetual ownership of an author's work or control over future editions. It preserves the edition that actually entered the world.
Read the Unruly Publication Covenant →