Anthony Iles reviews Republicart's issue on precarious labour

II The revolution shall not be criticised?
In response to ISEA98 Micz Flor, organiser of Revolting temporary media laboratory, asks "why now, why revolution?" Is the current popularity of the term and its associated icons anything more than Middle Youth talking to itself in the latest of a long line of fashionable lingos?

IV Net.Politics Q&A

Jerrel is about to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. It's the special she's been waiting for all her young life - the day on which she joins the Hive, in body as much as in spirit. This is more than your average holy communion for young Jerrel - a surgically facilitated rite of passage from which there's no turning back. A short story by David McKee

Peer-to-peer networks may have given media owners a nasty (and much bemoaned) headache, but they’ve done little to address the crucial issue of media independence. Fileshare systems, which enable massive, distributed, networked sharing activity, offer unrivalled opportunities for short circuiting the intellectual property regimes that control the media industry.

This summer, the Bootlab collective hijacked the net’s new networking protocol for their Juni Radio experiment. The hope is to turn what looks like becoming a corporate hustle into a community radio tool. Darius James joined the merry pranksters

After emigrating from Prague in 1940, Vilem Flusser lived in Brazil for most of his life. The first of his work to be translated into English was that written between 1980-90. Perhaps as a result of his distance from Europe, Flusser’s theory of communication is largely untainted by the structuralist approaches of continental philosophy.

 During the DEAF evening programme curated and hosted by Sadie Plant, artist Brian Duffy showed us the secret, electronically musical, lives of toys he’d purchased for a pound or less at car boot sales and flea markets in and around Birmingham.

With a ludic theme and international roster, Berlin’s Transmediale festival played a global game. As visitor to and participant in the event, artist Bea Gibson found her close-up view of the proceedings left her more enervated than enthused

>> Transmediale Lounge

The recent revelation of certain dogs' ability to predict their masters' epileptic seizures is certainly good news for sufferers. Melanie Gilligan looks at the implications for cognitive science and our understanding of the complex interactions between biological 'networks'.

Dan Brickley, Jo Walsh, Earle Martin and Simon Kent explore a nearby parallel universe where information exchange makes sense (see pdf version here)

A Day in the Life

Two years after its launch, They Rule – a map of corporate America – is a web project with a large following. Its popularity even extends to the rarefied echelons of the art world, as demonstrated by its inclusion in this year’s Whitney Biennial.

In anticipation of the European Social Forum – which will have taken place by the time this issue of Mute comes out – JJ King unravels the political and structural genealogies of organisers and participants as they align with more and less statist forms.

I met Manuel Castells for a Radio 4 discussion of this book. I found him to be a courteous, charming and commendably down-to-earth representative of the ‘digitally correct’, but his argument failed to convince me.

YOU ARE HERE is aimed at networking digital media practitioners based in the East End of London and profiling their work internationally.