Otto Von Busch, Karl Palmas: Abstract Hacktivism: The Making of a Hacker Culture (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, design, hacktivism, innovation, politics, technology
In recent years, designers, activists and businesspeople have started to navigate their social worlds on the basis of concepts derived from the world of computers and new media technologies. According to Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas, this represents a fundamental cultural shift. The conceptual models of modern social thought, as well as the ones emanating from the 1968 revolts, are being usurped by a new worldview. Using thinkers such as Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda as a point of departure, the authors expand upon the idea that everyday technologies are profoundly interconnected with dominant modes of thought.
In the nineteenth century, the motor replaced the clockwork as the universal model of knowledge. In a similar vein, new media technologies are currently replacing the motor as the dominant ‘conceptual technology’ of contemporary social thought. This development, von Busch and Palmas argue, has yielded new ways of construing politics, activism and innovation.
The authors embark on different routes to explore this shift. Otto von Busch relates the practice of hacking to phenomena such as shopdropping, craftivism, fan fiction, liberation theology, and Spanish social movement YOMANGO. Karl Palmas examines how publications like Adbusters Magazine, as well as business theorists, have adopted a computer-inspired worldview, linking this development to the dot.com boom of the late 1990s. Hence, the text is written for designers and activists, as well as for the general reader interested in cultural studies.
Publisher Openmute, 2006
London and Istanbul
ISBN 0955479622, 9780955479625
Length 132 pages
copyleft by the authors
Turbulence journal 1-5 (2007-2009)
Filed under journal | Tags: · activism, capitalism, climate crisis, neoliberalism, networks, politics
Turbulence is a journal/newspaper that we hope will become an ongoing space in which to think through, debate and articulate the political, social, economic and cultural theories of our movements, as well as the networks of diverse practices and alternatives that surround them.
What would it mean to win?
Turbulence 1, 2007
The Turbulence collective produced 7,000 copies of a free 32-page newspaper distributed at the camps, blockades and alternative summits that made up the mobilisation against the G8 summit in Heiligendamm in June 2007. The theme of the 14 articles from individuals and groups from across the world tackled the difficult question of ‘What would it mean to win?’.
PDF (original tabloid format, 289 x 380mm)
PDF (journal format, 152 x 229mm)
Move into the light?
Turbulence 3, December 2007
6,000 copies were printed in English, with a further 4,000 in German.
PDF (A6 booklet)
PDF (German version)
Who can save us from the future?
Turbulence 4, Summer 2008
Today, the very act of thinking about the future has become a problem. What both capitalism and ‘really existing socialism’ had in common was the belief in a future where infinite happiness would spring from the infinite expansion of production: sacrifices made in the present could always be justified in terms of a brighter future. And now? The socialist future has been dead since the fall of the Berlin wall. After that we seemed to live in a world where only the capitalist future existed (even when it was under attack). But now this future, too, is having its obituaries composed, and impending doom is the talk of the town. The ‘crisis of the future’ – that is, of our capacity to think about the future – is born out of these twin deaths: today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
And Now for Something Completely Different?
Turbulence 5, December 2009
Until recently, anyone who suggested nationalising the banks would have been derided as a ‘quack’ and a ‘crank’, as lacking the most basic understanding of the functioning of a ‘complex, globalised world’. The grip of ‘orthodoxy’ disqualified the idea, and many more, without the need even to offer a counter-argument.
And yet, in this time of intersecting crises, when it seems like everything could, and should, have changed, it paradoxically feels as though very little has. Individuals and companies have hunkered down to try and ride out the crisis. Nationalisations and government spending have been used to prevent change, not initiate it. Anger and protest have erupted around different aspects of the crises, but no common or consistent reaction has seemed able to cohere. We appear unable to move on.
For many years, social movements could meet and recognise one another on the common ground of rejecting neoliberalism, society’s old middle ground – those discources and practices that defined the centre of the political field. The crisis of the middle has meant a crumbling of the common.
And what now? Will neoliberalism continue to stumble on without direction, zombie-like? Or, is it time for something completely different?
Comment (0)Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri: Commonwealth (2009) [English/German]
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, commons, globalisation, governance, politics, revolution
When Empire appeared in 2000, it defined the political and economic challenges of the era of globalization and, thrillingly, found in them possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Now, with Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution for our common wealth.
Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.”
Though this book functions as an extension and a completion of a sustained line of Hardt and Negri’s thought, it also stands alone and is entirely accessible to readers who are not familiar with the previous works. It is certain to appeal to, challenge, and enrich the thinking of anyone interested in questions of politics and globalization.
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2009
ISBN 0674035119, 9780674035119
330 pages
PDF [English] (updated on 2012-7-27)
PDF [German] (added on 2012-7-27)