Richard Barbrook: Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (2007)

“Cooperative creativity and participatory democracy should be extended from the virtual world into all areas of life. This time, the new stage of growth must be a new civilisation.

Richard Barbrook traces the early days of the Internet, beginning from a pivotal point at the 1964 World’s Fair, in what critics are saying is the most well-researched and original account of cybertechnology among contemporary works. He demonstrates how business and ideological leaders put forth a carefully orchestrated vision of an imaginary future, where robots would do the washing up, go to the office and think for us. With America at the forefront of these promises, Barbrook shows how ideological forces joined to develop new information technologies during the Cold War era and how what they created historically has shaped the modern Internet, with intended political consequences.

Crucially, he argues that had the past been different, our technological and political present would not be what it is today. Barbrook’s conclusions about the modern state of the Internet, puts forward a call for action in how the world’s most important tool of revolutionary politics should be approached.”

Key terms: Fordism, W.W. Rostow, Marxism, cybernetic, Bell commission, artificial intelligence, gift economy, Stalinist, Maoist, Cold War game, Trotskyist, information society, laissez-faire liberalism, soft power, Hard power, American empire, Tet Offensive, Unisphere, grand narrative, Cold War Left

Publisher Pluto, 2007
ISBN 0745326609, 9780745326603
334 pages

Book website
Video introduction
Publisher

PDF, PDF (13 MB, updated on 2012-7-15)

Oleg Kireev: Media-Activist Cookbook (2006) [Russian]

The publication introduces to the Russian audience topics of tactical media and communicates experience of groups and movements, such as telestreet, Paper Tiger TV, Digital City, The Yes Men, Kein Mensch ist illegal, Critical Art Ensemble; experiences of flashmob, culture jamming, campaigning. It also digs into the history of pirate radios, videoactivism and free software movement. Specifically to Russia, it investigates topics of political technologies (as used in political campaigns and media), and traces the domestic history of free communication in samizdat.

Five translated articles appear in the appendix: David Garcia’s and Geert Lovink’s “ABC of tactical media”, Matteo Pasquinelli’s “Urban Television Manifesto”, “On the use of tactical media in the orange revolution” (by the Ukrainian portal Zaraz. org), Geert Lovink’s “Theory of mixing” and Konrad Becker’s “Freedom of expression and new technologies”.

Publisher Ultra.Culture, Moscow-Yekaterinburg, 2006
Anti-copyright

author (Russian)

PDF (updated on 2013-5-29)

Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker: The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007)

“The network has become the core organizational structure for postmodern politics, culture, and life, replacing the modern era’s hierarchical systems. From peer-to-peer file sharing and massive multiplayer online games to contagion vectors of digital or biological viruses and global affiliations of terrorist organizations, the network form has become so invasive that nearly every aspect of contemporary society can be located within it.

Borrowing their title from the hacker term for a program that takes advantage of a flaw in a network system, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker challenge the widespread assumption that networks are inherently egalitarian. Instead, they contend that there exist new modes of control entirely native to networks, modes that are at once highly centralized and dispersed, corporate and subversive.

In this provocative book-length essay, Galloway and Thacker argue that a whole new topology must be invented to resist and reshape the network form, one that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network is in relation to hierarchy.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816650446, 9780816650446
196 pages

Reviews: Daniel Gilfillan, Nathaniel Tkacz.

PDF (updated on 2012-7-8)