Author: Richard Barbrook
ANARCHISM
The 1872 Hague Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association
The split in the First International:
British, German & Dutch Sections v. Swiss, Spanish & Italian Sections
Socialism v. Anarchism
Karl Marx v. Mikhail Bakunin
mass party v. revolutionary conspiracy
democratic republic v. local communes
working class v. peasants, students & bandits
organised labour v. spontaneous uprisings
Bakuninists’ forerunners of anarchism:
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
Imaginary Futures Author at Creative Cities Symposium in Vienna
Dr Richard Barbrook will be giving a talk entitled ‘Creative Labour and Proletarian Playtime’ at the ORF Symposium on Creative Cities on the afternoon of Tuesday 31st March at RadioKulturhaus, Großer Sendesaal, Argentinierstraße 30a, 1040 Wien, Austria.
For more details, check out the ORF website.
Author: Richard Barbrook
imaginary futures at the Radiator Festival
Dr Richard Barbrook will speaking about Imaginary Futures at the 4th Radiator Festival - “Exploits in the Wireless City” - on Thursday afternoon on 15th March at the Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham, England. For further details, see the Radiator festival website.
Author: Richard Barbrook
Imaginary Futures at St. Petersburg Art Academy
Dr. Richard Barbrook will speaking about Imaginary Futures as part of a Digital Artisans’ Evening at the ProArte Institute in the Peter & Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg on Wednesday 26th November. For further details, see the ProArte Institute’s website: http://www.proarte.ru
Author: Richard Barbrook
imaginary Futures at Cold War Culture conference
Dr. Richard Barbrook will be appearing at the Cold War Culture conference which takes place at the Victoria & Albert museum in London on Friday 21st - Saturday 22nd November. This major conference brings together some of the most exciting thinkers on art, design and architecture in the post-1945 period to reflect on the ways […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
CREATIVE CITY THESES
1) We Must Invent New Futures
The information society has arrived – and the McLuhanist prophecy of the network utopia has been disappointed. The critical analysis of the creative city provides an opportunity to devise new futures to guide our actions in the present.
2) The New Class of the New
Like their forebears who moved from artisan […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
KAUTSKY IN CAMBRIDGE
“How was the conference?”, Simon Schaffer asked. “Very interesting”, I replied. “The Autonomists have finally come out of the closet as reformists!” At the opening session of the Immaterial Labour conference in Cambridge, Andrea Fumagalli had told us that Toni Negri and the other gurus of the movement now advocated a commendably pragmatic political programme: […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
Imaginary Futures wins 2008 Marshall McLuhan Award
The Media Ecology Association (MEA) has selected Richard Barbrook’s Imaginary Futures: from thinking machines to the global village as the winner of the 2008 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology.
Past recipients of this award include Francis Fukuyama, Doug Rushkoff and Neil Postman.
The official presentation of the award will […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
World Ex-Position ‘08
Fahim Amir has posted a review of the World Ex-Position ‘08 which took place on 26th April-15th May 2008 in Vienna, Austria. He concludes his Mute article with this observation on Richard Barbrook’s talk about Imaginary Futures at the festival:
“His politically apt and historically well informed argument presents a strong antidote to the […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
New reviews of Imaginary Futures
Two reviews of Imaginary Futures were published in December 2007:
John Barker’s Up For Grabs in Science as Culture, Number 4, Volume 16, 2007, pages 481-488.
“By giving us the history of intellectuals thriving on an ahistorical view of the world, and what this view leads to, [Barbrook] has given depth to the critique that began with […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
Author to Participate in performance of Guy Debord’s The Game of War - 23rd October 2007
CLASS WARGAMES PRESENTS GUY DEBORD’S THE GAME OF WAR
Tuesday 23rd October 2007 at 6.00pm
01zero-one
Westminster Kingsway College
Soho Centre
Peter Street
London
W1F 0HS
(01zero-one’s main entrance is on Hopkins Street)
Class Wargames
The Game
Class Wargames will play Guy Debord’s The Game of War using a replica of his original 1977 design for the board game.
“Politics is a continuation of war by […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
Cronopis Associats Interview
Andrés Lomeña of Cronopis Associats interviewed Richard Barbrook on 13th September 2007.
Question 1
AL: Franco Bifo Berardi criticises your The Holy Fools. In his opinion, you simplify the rhizomatic thought of Deleuze and Guattari, making equal it to technonomadism and The Californian Ideology. Berardi argues that the state cannot solve the self-organisational structure of the Net. […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
NEW YORK PROPHECIES: THE IMAGINARY FUTURE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Future Is What It Used To Be
‘Biological intelligence is fixed, because it is an old, mature paradigm, but the new paradigm of non-biological computation and intelligence is growing exponentially. The crossover will be in the 2020s and after that, at least from a hardware perspective, non-biological computation will dominate…’
Kurzweil 2004, p. 3.
At the […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
Virtual Dreams, Real Politics
‘What are we fighting Communism for? We are the most Communist people in world history.’
- Marshall McLuhan, 1969.
In 1961, at its 22nd Congress, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union formally adopted the goal of spreading the benefits of computerisation across the whole economy. Over the next two decades, the information technologies […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE HI-TECH GIFT ECONOMY by Richard Barbrook
Abstract
During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE::CYBER.COM/MUNIST::MANIFESTO by Richard Barbrook
A spectre is haunting the Net: the spectre of communism. Whatever their professed political beliefs, every user dreams of the digital transcendence of capitalism. Yet, at the same time, even the most dedicated leftist can no longer truly believe in communism. The horrors of totalitarianism have discredited its promises of social emancipation. Seizing this opportunity, […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
CYBER-COMMUNISM by Richard Barbrook
HOW THE AMERICANS ARE SUPERSEDING CAPITALISM IN CYBERSPACE
‘…is the impact of the …information revolution on capitalism not the ultimate exemplification of… Marx’s thesis that: “at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces come into conflict with the existing relations of production…”? …does the prospect of the… “global village” not signal the end […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE REGULATION OF LIBERTY by Richard Barbrook
The State In Cyberspace
The rapid expansion of e-commerce depends upon effective legal regulation of the Net. As in the rest of the economy, courts and police are needed to enforce the ‘rules of the game’ within on-line marketplaces. Theft remains theft even when committed with the latest technology. Since the Net encourages its own forms […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
CULTURAL BABBAGE BOOK REVIEW by Richard Barbrook
Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention edited by Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, Faber and Faber, London, pp 290.
This book is a collection of essays inspired by Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine - a never-completed Victorian mechanical calculator which is often claimed as the ancestor of the modern PC. In London’s Science Museum, a working version […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
HYPERMEDIA FREEDOM by Richard Barbrook
Turn On, Log In and Drop Out!
As with any other law, the Telecommunications Reform Act will face the problem of enforcement. The “War on Drugs” hasn’t stopped Americans from voraciously consuming billions of dollars of illegal chemicals every year. There must be similar doubts about the practicality of the censorship measures in the new Act. […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE HOLY FOOLS (MUTE MIX) by Richard Barbrook
The Lost Utopia
The Net is haunted by the disappointed hopes of the Sixties. Because this new technology symbolises another period of rapid change, many contemporary commentators look back to the stalled revolution of thirty years ago to explain what is happening now. Most famously, the founders of Wired appropriated New Left rhetoric to promote their […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE HOLY FOOLS (LONG MIX) by Richard Barbrook
THE HOLY FOOLS
a critique of the avant-garde
in the age of the Net
1: The Lost Utopia
The Net is haunted by the disappointed hopes of the Sixties. Because this new technology symbolises another period of rapid change, many contemporary commentators look back to the stalled revolution of thirty years ago to explain what is happening now. For […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF MEDIA FREEDOM by Richard Barbrook
Nowadays, almost everybody believes that the freedom of the media is an essential prerequisite of a modern democracy. Yet, at the same time, many people are also convinced that the media are turning democratic politics into a branch of show business. Instead of rational debate between rival ideas, contemporary politics have been trivialised into a […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
MEDIA FREEDOM: FROM GUTENBERG TO CYBERSPACE by Richard Barbrook
Introduction
Nowadays, almost everybody believes that media freedom is an essential prerequisite of a modern democracy. When an authoritarian regime is overthrown, the first act of the new democratic government is usually the abandonment of direct controls by the state over the media. With the worldwide spread of political democracy, credible politicians can no longer advocate […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: DIGITAL WORK by Richard Barbrook
* How does digital work differ from its analogue forms?
Increasingly people would like to enjoy the dignity of artisan labour without losing the material benefits of Fordism. Over the past two centuries, industrialisation has slowly replaced skilled craft labour with repetitive factory and office work. In the Fordist factory, even the pace of working can […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE NAPSTERISATION OF EVERYTHING by Richard Barbrook
Review of John Alderman, Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the battle for the future of music, Fourth Estate, London 2001.
“They just don’t get it.” During the dotcom boom of the late-1990s, this catch phrase was a popular way of dismissing anyone who expressed doubts about the world-historical significance of the Net. How could someone be […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
NEVER MIND THE CYBERBOLLOCKS… by Richard Barbrook
After the Wall
As this century draws to its close, the rapid development of the Net has rekindled a sense of optimism within the developed world. For almost two decades, we have been facing a failure of imagination and creativity. Despite the end of the Cold War, Western societies haven’t even been able to protect their existing […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
PINNOCHIO THEORY by Richard Barbrook
Review of Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control: the New Biology of Machines, social systems and the economic world.
At the end of the twentieth century, the USA finds itself the winner of the Cold War, but the loser of the subsequent peace. On one side, America’s hundred year superiority in industrial manufacturing has been overturned by […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
REVIEWING REWIRED by Richard Barbrook
Review of David Hudson in association with eLine Productions, Rewired: a brief (and opinionated) net history, Macmillan Technical Publishing, Indianapolis IA 1997, pp. 327, US$ 29.99.
The publication of Rewired represents a new phenomenon: the book-of-the-web-site. Successful films and TV series have long been repackaged into books. Now, for the first time, popular web sites are […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
GIVING IS RECEIVING by Richard Barbrook
One of the most striking features of the Net is the ubiquity of its hi-tech version of the gift economy. When you go on-line, most information is available for free. Other users are happy to share music, movies and software with you. People spend hours building websites which they don’t charge you for visiting. You […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE DIGITAL ECONOMY by Richard Barbrook
Commodities or Gifts?
The Net is now the iconic technology of our age. From California, Wired magazine has achieved global notoriety through its claims that the Net will create the sort of free market capitalism until now only found in neo-classical economics textbooks. Everyone will be able to buy and sell in cyberspace without restrictions. States […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY by Richard Barbrook
An Analysis of On-Line Representation
The Limits of Representation
At the end of the twentieth century, the advocates of liberal democracy are faced with a strange paradox. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, its ideological ascendancy across the world has never been more complete. Yet, at the same time, voters within the industrialised countries are increasingly […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE SACRED CYBORG by Richard Barbrook
The Search for Meaning
‘Religion is a dream, in which our own conceptions and emotions appear to us as separate existences, beings out of ourselves.’ - Ludwig Feurbach, The Essence of Christianity.
During the Cold War, we were told that we had a stark choice between two incompatible ideologies: liberal democracy or totalitarian socialism. However, as the […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE MEMESIS CRITIQUE by Richard Barbrook
A critique of the Memesis statement of Ars Electronica ‘96
ASSERTION 1
>The human being, characterized by a remarkable ability to process information…
In the first subclause of the opening sentence, the human ability to communicate complex thoughts to each other is elevated above all other aspects of our existence. Although expressed in computer jargon, this separation of […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
A REVIEW OF PIERRE LÉVY’S COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE by Richard Barbrook
A review of Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, Plenum, New York, $27.95, ISBN 0306456354.
The Net has become our symbol for the future. Like clocks, steam engines and nuclear power for earlier generations, we use this icon of technology to imagine what will result from our current period of rapid social change. […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
MARXISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS by Richard Barbrook
It is the opening plenary of an academic conference on Marxism and the Visual Arts being held at a magnificent lecture theatre in University College London. After the organisers have had their say, the chair proudly announces: “…the next speaker is Nicos Hadjinicolaou – the author of The History of Art and the Class Struggle […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
CHOICE OR PARTICIPATION? by Richard Barbrook
An Analysis of British Radio in the 1990s
Radio in the Recession
In January 1991, the Bristol radio station For The People (FTP) was relaunched as Galaxy. Instead of a name promising community service, the Bristol station now shares the same trademark as a chocolate bar. This change in image symbolised the final stage in the corporate takeover of the […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
MISTRANSLATIONS: LIPIETZ IN LONDON AND PARIS by Richard Barbrook
Introduction
The latest buzzword on the British Left [in 1990] is post-Fordism. This a theory which is being used to justify the ‘New Times’ politics promoted by Marxism Today. This article examines the origins of this concept in the French Regulation School of political economy. In particular, it looks at the work of one of this […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
BROADCASTING AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN IRELAND by Richard Barbrook
Broadcasting was Invented in Ireland
On Tuesday, 25th April 1916, a transmitter from the School of Wireless Telegraphy in Dublin started sending messages across the airwaves. The morse code signals announced to the world that a combined force of armed nationalists and socialists were occupying central Dublin and had proclaimed an Irish Republic, independent from the […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
DIGITAL RHYTHMS by Richard Barbrook
Amongst all the different forms of mass culture, music is the most personal and emotional. Almost everyone can identify certain songs with particular moments in their life. The rites of passage from childhood to adulthood usually involve joining a musical subculture. We fall in and out love to the accompaniment of the latest hits. In […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
AMERICAN THEORIES OF MEDIA DEREGULATION by Richard Barbrook
‘Television is nothing more than a toaster with pictures’ - Mark Fowler 1981
The mass media in contemporary Western Europe has been undergoing a period of profound transformation. For some, this involves a ‘paradigm shift’ from public service to free market broadcasting. (Hoffman‑Riem 1986: 126‑9) After the Second World War, most national broadcasting systems were organised […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
THE POLICEMAN OF THE ETHER by Richard Barbrook
An Analysis of State Regulation and Intervention in American and British Radio Broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s
Under the Thatcher government, the mass media has not been often at the centre of political debate. Despite lobbying from right‑wing think‑tanks and commercial interests, present policies are marked more by confusion and paralysis than by ‘the resolute […]
Author: Richard Barbrook
F.M. Fatale by Richard Barbrook
Pirate Radio in 1980s London
It is 1 a.m. on a hot Saturday night at London’s King’s Cross station. Outside there is a traffic jam like the middle of a weekday rush hour. The northbound road is partially blocked by people dancing in the street. House music is being pumped out by a very loud car […]
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.