Richard Barbrook with Andy Cameron: The Internet Revolution: From Dot-com Capitalism to Cybernetic Communism (2015)

“Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s The Californian Ideology, originally published in 1995 by Mute magazine and the nettime mailinglist, is the iconic text of the first wave of Net criticism. The internet might have fundamentally changed in the last two decades, but their demolition of the neoliberal orthodoxies of Silicon Valley remains shocking and provocative. They question the cult of the dot-com entrepreneur, challenging the theory of technological determinism and refuting the myths of American history. Denounced as the work of ‘looney lefties’ by Silicon Valley’s boosters when it first appeared, The Californian Ideology has since been vindicated by the corporate take-over of the Net and the exposure of the NSA’s mass surveillance programmes.

Published in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com bubble, Richard Barbrook’s Cyber-Communism offers an alternative vision of the shape of things to come, inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s paradoxical ‘thought probes’. With the Californian Ideology growing stronger, the Net was celebrated as the mechanical perfection of neoliberal economics. Barbrook shows how this futurist prophecy is borrowed from America’s defunct Cold War enemy: Stalinist Russia. Technological progress was the catalyst of social transformation. With copyright weakening, intellectual commodities were mutating into gifts. Invented in capitalist America, the Net in the late-1990s had become the first working model of communism in human history.

In an introduction written specially for this 20th anniversary edition, Richard Barbrook takes a fresh look at the hippie capitalists who shaped Silicon Valley and explains how their influence continues to this day. These thought probes are still relevant in understanding the contradictory impact of ubiquitous social media within the modern world. As McLuhan had insisted, theoretical provocation creates political understanding.”

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, Oct 2015
Network Notebooks series, 10
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
ISBN 9789492302014
51 pages

Replies to ‘The Californian Ideology’ published in Mute 4 (Spring 1996): Introduction, Louis Rossetto (Wired’s editor-in-chief), Franco (Bifo) Berardi, Celia Pearce.

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transversal, 06/14: Insurrection of the Published (2014) [DE, EN, ES]

“The publishing industry is in a fundamental crisis. In its final hours it is beginning to lash out, but only hits itself. As much as academic apparatuses and cultural industries wrestle with conformity, the traditional forms of knowledge production remain just as incompatible with the new media conditions as with future emancipatory concatenations of writing, translating and publicly negotiating publications. “The Insurrection of the Published” emerges in these concatenations beyond the domestication of styles, forms and formats, beyond valorization and self-valorization, beyond the hegemonic mechanisms of exclusion like peer reviews, impact factors, ranking, and rigid copyright regimes.”

With contributions by EIPCP, Isabell Lorey, Otto Penz, Gerald Raunig, Birgit Sauer, Ruth Sonderegger, Stevphen Shukaitis, Traficantes de Sueños, Felix Stalder, and an Anonymous Iranian Collective.

Aufstand der Verlegten / Insurrection of the Published / Insurrección de los editados
Publisher EIPCP, Vienna, 2014
Copyleft
ISSN 1811-1696

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Mark Wigley: Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998)

“From 1956 to 1974, the artist Constant Nieuwenhuys worked on a radical proposal for a future architecture. All traces of traditional buildings and social institutions would be abandoned. Everyone would drift through vast labyrinthine interiors and continuously reconstruct the spaces around them to satisfy any desire or stimulate new ones. Architecture becomes a pulsating display of group psychology. This monograph provides the first complete record of the project and includes a selection of texts by Constant and Guy Debord. Published on the occasion of the New Babylon retrospective at Witte de With, Rotterdam, in 1998.”

Publisher Witte de With, and 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998
ISBN 9064503435, 9789064503436
256 pages

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