A semi-virtual roundtable to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Manuel Castells' The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Castells, Professor of Sociology at the UOC, gave the opening lecture.

Die Student:innen des Studiengangs "Kultur der Metropole" der HafenCity Universität in Hamburg hatten mich zu einem Gastvortrag zur Digitalisierung und Stadt eingeladen. Während des Vortrags haben sie gemeinsam diese Mindmap erstellt. Ein sehr schönes Verfahren des gemeinsamen Notierens.

We are very happy to publication of our book "Aesthetics of the Commons"

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art in the post-digital has the possibility to not only conceive or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. The underlying social imaginaries ascribe a new role to art in society and they envision an idea of culture beyond the individual and its possessions.

ABSTRACT

Commons are holistic social institutions to govern the (re)production of resources, articulated through interrelated legal, socio-cultural, economic and institutional dimensions. They represent a comprehensive and radical approach to organise collective action, placing it “beyond market and state” (Bollier & Helfrich, 2012). They form a third way of organising society and the economy that differs from both market-based approaches, with their orientation toward prices, and from bureaucratic forms of organisation, with their orientation toward hierarchies and commands. This governance model has been applied to tangible and intangible resources, to local initiatives (garden, educational material), and to resources governed by global politics (climate, internet infrastructure).

Digital commons are a subset of the commons, where the resources are data, information, culture and knowledge which are created and/or maintained online. The notion of the digital commons is an important concept for countering legal enclosure and fostering equitable access to these resources. This article presents the history of the movement of the digital commons, from free software, free culture, and public domain works, to open data and open access to science. It then analyses its foundational dimensions (licensing, authorship, peer production, governance) and finally studies newer forms of the digital commons, urban democratic participation and data commons.

Full text open access. Dulong de Rosnay, M. & Stalder, F. (2020). Digital commons. Internet Policy Review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1530

Zwei sehr schöne Maps meines Buches "Kultur der Digitalität sind mir zu Gesicht gekommen!

Die erste von Adriano Montefusco, via miro.com. Die zweite von Vinzenz Rast, handgezeichnet!

Danke. Definitiv übersichtlicher und leserlicher als mein Mindmap. pic.twitter.com/LSQhgwvlS6

Federici, Silvia (2018): Re-enchanting the world: feminism and the politics of the commons (foreword by Peter Linebaugh), Kairos, Oakland, CA: PM Press.

This book is a collection of essays by Federici, with a new forward by Linebaugh. The majority of the essays is from the last 10 years, but a few date back to the early 1990s. The early essays have a new introduction to provide context and perspective.

In the following, I will not to review the essays per se, but read them with a focus on the definition of the commons itself and the role digital technology plays in creating new commons. This is slightly unfair because both of these issues are not really her concerns, but coming to terms with the role of technology strikes me as critical in any discussion of contemporary issues.

These are notes for a talk I gave a few years ago (can't remember the exact occasion). I came across them now, and I think they are still valid and relevant.

Hannah Höch. Untitled (From an Ethnographic Museum), 1930 (detail)

Definition:
Assemblage culture is based on the use of (parts of) pre-existing (material or informational) cultural objects in the creation of new cultural objects. Assemblage culture is an umbrella term incorporating numerous media-specific practices such as quoting, sampling, (re)mixing, montage, collage, editing.

1. Assemblage culture emerges when a society becomes saturated by media objects. Saturation means that these objects become widely and easily available to a wide range of users.
   Historical sequence:
   printed text (quotations in scientific culture, 17th century)
   printed images (early collages, late 19th century)
   recorded audio (musique concrète, mid 20th century)
   moving images (found footage film, mid 20th century)
   computer code (free/open source software, 1980s)
   modifiable genes (?) (early 21th century)
2. Every cultural work contains elements taken from other works. Digitization makes the processes of assemblage – mostly implicit (by way of reference) in analog media – explicit (by way of insertion and transformation), putting it at the center of cultural production. Quoting and referencing in (scientific) texts made this practice explicit already in pre-digital form, reflecting the ease of separating content from its carrier in print culture.
3. The meta-medium networked computer brings all media to the point of saturation, thus creating the material basis for the expansion of assemblage culture.
   

This is the short (I know!) version of a paper, written for the "25 Years of Network Society" Workshop, organized by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. href="https://doi.org/10.1177/000276422210927">Official Version published in American Behavioral Scientist, May 2022

I want to return to Castells’s analysis of the breakdown of Soviet statism. Today, the question of systemic breakdown is worth revisiting because from the theoretical structure of Castells’s account, a sharper perspective on our contemporary crisis, this time of liberal democracy, might be developed.

This might be counter-intuitive as the late Soviet Union seems far away from our current techno-capitalist world. One was a sclerotic system, closed, rigid, opaque and inflexible to the point of crumbling when attempting to reform itself, the other one prides itself of its transparency and its innovation capacity. Indeed, supposedly radical innovation, “disruption”, has become a ubiquitous and largely positive term in the business literature, a mantra in the popular, Silicon Valley-inspired discourse on the relation between technology and society, and a trope even in critical activist cultures. But underneath these obvious differences, there are systemic blockages that share certain similarities.

Limits to complexity: systemic blockages in the Soviet ‘statism’

1/ So, I read @adriandaub “What Tech Calls Thinking”, a book I was predisposed to like, not just because I’m interesting in the topic (a cultural critique of tech), but also it caters directly to people like me who believe in the value of higher eduction and critical thinking pic.twitter.com/zJ4F6Bzrs3