Matteo Pasquinelli: Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008)

“After a decade of digital fetishism, the spectres of the financial and energy crisis have also affected new media culture and brought into question the autonomy of networks. Yet activism and the art world still celebrate Creative Commons and the ‘creative cities’ as the new ideals for the Internet generation. Unmasking the animal spirits of the commons, Matteo Pasquinelli identifies the key social conflicts and business models at work behind the rhetoric of Free Culture. The corporate parasite infiltrating file-sharing networks, the hydra of gentrification in ‘creative cities’ such as Berlin and the bicephalous nature of the Internet with its pornographic underworld are three untold dimensions of contemporary ‘politics of the common’. Against the latent puritanism of authors like Baudrillard and Žižek, constantly quoted by both artists and activists, Animal Spirits draws a conceptual ‘book of beasts’. In a world system shaped by a turbulent stock market, Pasquinelli unleashes a politically incorrect grammar for the coming generation of the new commons.”

Published by NAi Publishers, Rotterdam / Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, December 2008.
ISBN 9056626639, 9789056626631
240 pages

Reviews: Luciana Parisi (Mute, 2009), Willem van Weelden (Open, 2009), Jussi Parikka (Leonardo, 2009), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

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