Richard Barbrook

Richard Barbrook was educated at Cambridge, Essex and Kent universities. During the early-1980s, he was involved in pirate and community radio broadcasting. He helped to set up Spectrum Radio, a multi-lingual station operating in London, and published extensively on radio issues. In the late-1980s and early-1990s, Richard worked for a research institute at the University of Westminster on media regulation within the EU. Some of this research was later published in Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity (Pluto Press, London 1995). Between 1995 and 2005, Richard was coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster and course leader of its MA in Hypermedia Studies. In 1997, he was one of the founders of cybersalon.org and is now one of the directors of the Cybersalon trust. At present, Richard is a senior lecturer at the School of Media, Art & Design at the University of Westminster.

In 1995, in collaboration with Andy Cameron, Richard wrote "The Californian Ideology" which was a pioneering critique of the neo-liberal politics of Wired magazine. In the late-1990s and early-2000s, he published a series of articles exploring the impact of the sharing of information over the Net, including "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy", "Cyber-communism" and "The Regulation of Liberty". Later he wrote Imaginary Futures, a book about how ideas from the 1950s and 1960s shape the early-twenty-first century conception of artificial intelligence and the information society. He helped to set up the Creative Workers in a World City group and wrote its first publication: The Class of the New (OpenMute, London 2006). He is now engaged in further research projects in this area with other members of the CWWC group.

Works

Books

• Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity, London: Pluto Press, 1995.
• The Class of the New, London: OpenMute, 2006. [1]
• Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village, London: Pluto Press, 2007, 334 pp. [2]
• Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism, Minor Compositions, 2014, 444 pp.

Articles

• with Andy Cameron, "The Californian Ideology", Mute 1:3 (1995); revised, Science as Culture 6:1 (1996), pp 44-72. [3]
  • "Die kalifornische Ideologie", trans. Florian Rötzer, Telepolis, 5 Feb 1997. (German)
  • "L'idéologie californienne", trans. Pierre Blouin, Hermès. (French)
  • "Californian Ideology: Il dogma liberista della classe virtuale", Derive Approdi. (Italian)
  • "A kaliforniai ideológia", trans. Anna Lengyel, in Buldózer. Médiaelméleti antológia, ed. János Sugár, 1997. (Hungarian)
• "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy", First Monday 3:12 (7 Dec 1998).
• "Cyber-Communism: How the Americans are Superseding Capitalism in Cyberspace", Nettime, 6 Sep 1999. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Response: Ted Byfield.
• "The Regulation of Liberty".
• "Hypermedia Freedom".
• "FAQ Digital Work"
• "Giving is Receiving"
• More

Interviews

• Willem van Weelden, "An Interview with Richard Barbrook and Mark Dery", Nettime, Sep 1996.

Links

• http://www.imaginaryfutures.net