Author: John Barker
UP FOR GRABS: Richard Barbrook’s Imaginary Futures, From Thinking Machines to the Global Village
The imaginary future is invariably a claim to the present by its dominant political and economic class. In the case of Cold War America, there was an urgency to its creation, because although it was outdoing the USSR in all conventional economic and productive indices, the distorted Marxist veneer maintained in Moscow had a stronger […]
Author: John Barker
RESPONSE TO THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY by John Barker
I’m in broad agreement with the argument of ‘The Californian Ideology’ and its attack on that ideology in which “the ahistorical dogmas of neo-liberalism are beefed up with added techno-determinism.” The argument does have a weakness in the alternatives it presents: – an idealistic view of the French Minitel system of which there is evidence […]
Within this MySpace version of the electronic agora, cybernetic communism was mainstream and unexceptional. What had once been a revolutionary dream was now an enjoyable part of everyday life.