Elizabeth Losh: Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (2009)

Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government—even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and videos. In Virtualpolitik, Elizabeth Losh closely examines the government’s digital rhetoric in such cases and its dual role as media-maker and regulator. Looking beyond the usual focus on interfaces, operations, and procedures, Losh analyzes the ideologies revealed in government’s digital discourse, its anxieties about new online practices, and what happens when officially sanctioned material is parodied, remixed, or recontextualized by users.

Losh reports on a video game that panicked the House Intelligence Committee, pedagogic and therapeutic digital products aimed at American soldiers, government Web sites in the weeks and months following 9/11, PowerPoint presentations by government officials and gadflies, e-mail as a channel for whistleblowing, digital satire of surveillance practices, national digital libraries, and computer-based training for health professionals.

Losh concludes that the government’s virtualpolitik—its digital realpolitik aimed at preserving its own power—is focused on regulation, casting as criminal such common online activities as file sharing, videogame play, and social networking. This policy approach, she warns, indefinitely postpones building effective institutions for electronic governance, ignores constituents’ need to shape electronic identities to suit their personal politics, and misses an opportunity to learn how citizens can have meaningful interaction with the virtual manifestations of the state.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262123045, 9780262123044
416 pages

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Douglas Rushkoff: Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (2009)

In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.

This fascinating journey, from the late Middle Ages to today, reveals the roots of our debacle. From the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self; from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking; from the birth of the modern, self-interested individual to his exploitation through the false ideal of the single-family home; from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of MySpace–the corporation has infiltrated all aspects of our daily lives. Life Inc. exposes why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business.

Most of all, Life Inc. shows how the current financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reverse this six-hundred-year-old trend and to begin to create, invest, and transact directly rather than outsource all this activity to institutions that exist solely for their own sakes.

Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living–the operating system on which we are now running our social software–was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.

Rushkoff illuminates both how we’ve become disconnected from our world and how we can reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and, mostly, to one another. As the speculative economy collapses under its own weight, Life Inc. shows us how to build a real and human-scaled society to take its place.

Publisher Random House, 2009
ISBN 1400066891, 9781400066896
Length 274 pages

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Stian Rødven Eide (ed.): Free Beer 1.0 (2009)

FREE BEER (version 1.0) is a collection of texts written by speakers at FSCONS 2008 (Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit) and based on their respective talks. FREE BEER is based on classic communication technology, but with added hypertext protocols for a natural energy boost.

FSCONS is a meeting place for social change, focused on the future of free software and free society. The growing speed of new and innovative changes taking place within digital culture, as well as the pressing need for members of a marginalized society to gain access to important, updated information without financial or governmental barriers

The authors of FREE BEER are Rasmus Fleischer, Jeremiah Foster, Stefan Larsson, Mike Linksvayer, Smári McCarthy, Henrik Moltke, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, Denis Jaromil Rojo, Johan Söderberg, Victor Stone and Ville Sundell.

The entire book is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, version 2.5. This licence gives everyone the right to share, modify and even make money from the book, as long as it happens under the same licence.

Of course, FREE BEER is also a beer. You can find out more about the beer in the interview on page 57.

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