An alternative citation system that tracks the life and soul of an idea, instead of its location.

At UFP, we find that the traditional citational system measures stock, not flow.

When we say stock, we mean it measures accumulation. Such as: accumulating prestige through citation metrics, and the publish-or-perish culture that values quantity over quality. Or: accumulating citations from fellow elites in the same epistemic communities.

The paywall bolted onto the cognitive tech is itself stockpiling, too: the knowledge sits vault-like behind subscriptions, and there’s no genuine way to reach it without an institutional log-in or a subsidy from a government, a foundation, or a third-party organisation. The design of the ecology and its web of allies itself fosters institutional dependency. The same critique holds for academia’s touted liberatory model that is Open Access (OA). It lends the impression of being “open” and free for the reader — but the fee did not really vanish, someone else just happened to foot the bill.

The things inside the citation are crated in an inventory, instead of released into mass circulation. Even that would be defensible if the keepers of the inventory did something with what they hold; more often, the holdings bend to the lowest common denominator — the easiest thing to do with an idea being nothing at all.

Ours measures flow. It follows the afterlife of an idea once it's out in the world: where has it travelled? What emotional charge has it accrued? What intellectual provocation has it generated — and where?

From low-density strings to high-density objects.

Low-density technology tells us very little about what really matters about a work. Names, dates and page numbers do matter — they are the foot soldiers of intellectual property regimes. They offer attribution, priority, and credit where it is due — a standardisation that lets the discursive terrain operate on a shared base.

But those are property questions, rather than knowledge questions. A record built to answer them can tell you who owns an idea, not whether it lived loudly, quietly, or with revolutionary power. When property provenance is the only string of data that’s kept, ownership of an idea becomes the measure of significance.

Other kinds of information make a better metric for the life of an idea: how far it travelled, say, or whether a climate policy solution designed in Cambridge, UK was adopted in Nairobi, Kenya.

Tracking those is what makes ours a high-density object: it compresses whole worlds into a tight string of glyphs. Working prototypes of the metrics and the glyph system already exist.

Proposed for fifteen years.
Not deployed at scale.

The hope of citation reform isn’t a new dream. Its electric sheep have been the subject of many grassroots efforts led by brilliant independent artists and scholars since the 2010s, or arguably earlier. Yet despite efforts, the wider system has taken up almost none of them as there’s no perceived incentive for the industry to do so.

As a result, efforts to reform citation have sat in the intellectual imagination as “art” or performance art; dreams that don’t get to materialise because their political economy doesn’t fit the mainstream, are relegated to constructs of imagination only.

UFP has taken up the mantle to both gather these reformative forces, whilst building our own creative technology that governs the knowledge artefacts we accession.

From 2027, every UFP publication carries this format as default; the system will also be available for licensing by artistic institutions, presses, and archives.