Taking issue with the argument that, after decentralisation, control is embodied within the protocols of networks, Harry Halpin gives a historical account of the all-too-human actors vying for power over the net. Not technical standards but immaterial aristocrats rule cyberspace and their seats of power are vulnerable to revolutionary attack

To celebrate Mayday and in anticipation of the leftist ‘danse macabre’ which the anniversary of May ’68 once again promises to be, Mute offers a skeleton for the soixante-huitard feast: Here, Paul Helliwell exhumes the Althusserian preconditions of Jacques Ranciere’s insistently superficial aesthetic politics, and questions whether a notion of the hidden might not still have something decisive to show us


‘There is no science… but of the hidden’ – a phrase by Bachelard taken up by the Althusserians.
– Jacques Rancière from ‘The Janus-Face of Politicised Art’[1]

Is a rabble run media becoming a possibility? And are artists in the vanguard or blocking the way? The AV media arts festival in the North-East of England last month suggested the ambivalence of artistic interventions into state and corporate broadcasting. Report by Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater

Is a rabble run media becoming a possibility, and are artists leading – or blocking – the way? The AV media arts festival in the North East of England last month suggested the ambivalence of artistic interventions into state and corporate broadcasting, report Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater

The computer, it has been argued, inspired a wave of post-war 'imaginary futures', from ecstatic fantasies of time and space travel to fears of mankind's extinction. Yet, prior technological developments were similarly animated by fantasies and anxieties about the transformation of human capacities. Here Iain Boal brings three critical histories of modernity's futuramas firmly back down to earth

'Green capitalism': a new paradigm of sustainable production or a license to shut down plants and print money? James Heartfield looks at the case of influential pioneer in increasing profits by cutting output, Enron

This year’s Transmediale festival in Berlin was themed around the conceptual term ‘Conspire’. Here, Marina Vishmidt reviews its multiple presentations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ collaborative truth production, and queries some suspicious absences

We Are Bad's invectives against sport as class-cleansing and social engineering have been appearing on and around the fence of the London Olympic site over the past couple of months. Mute presents the first in a series of specially commissioned posters, made available here in hi-res for home printing

The BBC's Live Sites 2012 program is set to roll out 60 big screens in urban centres around the UK by 2012. Considering the vague agenda currently guiding their use, Richard Wright asks whether these big screens will ever open themselves to creative use or simply remain giant TVs controlled by giants