We are living through an intensification of citizens’, and non-citizens’, visibility to capital. Database convergence, states of emergency and points-based immigration systems destroy the legal and informational grey zones in which the poor shelter and organise.

As black economies and shadow sectors are exposed to the light of networked information in the interests of population management, border enforcement, welfare clamp-downs and, above all, profit, what are the risks and advantages of visibility? What do (political and artistic) representation and rights have to offer the illegal and ‘invisible?’

Featuring articles by Anthony Davies, Paul Helliwell, Howard Slater and Peter Suchin,and a special section on climate change andcapital with texts by Will Barnes, James Woudhuysen, Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young, Kate Rich, George Caffentzis, Anthony Iles, Chris Wright and Samantha Alvarez

In recent years, designers, activists and businesspeople have started to navigate their social worlds on the basis of concepts derived from the world of computers and new media technologies. According to Otto von Busch and Karl Palmås, this represents a fundamental cultural shift. The conceptual models of modern social thought, as well as the ones emanating from the 1968 revolts, are being usurped by a new worldview. Using thinkers such as Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda as a point of departure, the authors expand upon the idea that everyday technologies are profoundly interconnected with dominant modes of thought. In the nineteenth century, the motor replaced the clockwork as the universal model of knowledge. In a similar vein, new media technologies are currently replacing the motor as the dominant 'conceptual technology' of contemporary social thought. This development, von Busch and Palmås argue, has yielded new ways of construing politics, activism and innovation. The authors embark on different routes to explore this shift. Otto von Busch relates the practice of hacking to phenomena such as shopdropping, craftivism, fan fiction, liberation theology, and Spanish social movement YOMANGO. Karl Palmås examines how publications like Adbusters Magazine, as well as business theorists, have adopted a computer-inspired worldview, linking this development to the dot.com boom of the late 1990s. Hence, the text is written for designers and activists, as well as for the general reader interested in cultural studies.

Web 2.0’s democratisation of media produces a wealth of new perspectives. Those formerly excluded from the public sphere have the chance to make their voices heard. But this wave of participation is as important for busines as it is for the newly included. Mute's Web 2.0 special uncovers the work in social networking and the centralisation of the means of sharing

Texts by Giorgio Agostoni, Olga Goriunova, Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick and Angela Mitropoulos

According to UN research data, by 2030 half of the world's population will be living in slums. Meanwhile, in Durban's Kennedy Road settlement  residents risk arrest and police violence in their struggle for toilets and drinking water. The statistics are not supposed to talk back.

This issue of Mute, largely sparked by Mike Davis’ claim that in the megaslums Muhammad and the Holy Ghost have superceded Marx, considers another view of the world’s burgeoning ‘naked cities’. Where the populace are refugees without rights or basic amenities, are new forms of political action emerging?

Since the advent of multiculturalism in the 1970s, the redefinition of race in cultural terms has gone hand in hand with an official discourse of respect for cultural difference and diversity. Today, in the wake of 9/11, the rhetoric of tolerance is visibly breaking down. As state policy shifts from the celebration of difference to an anxious call for assimilation, the racial other (whether citizen or immigrant) is under renewed pressure to integrate herself into society.

In this issue of Mute, contributors read the crisis of multiculturalism – political, scientific and social – as both a neoliberal offensive and a challenge to rethink the relationship between particular identities and universal rights, evolutionary science and biopower.

Texts by: George Caffentzis, Matthew Hyland, Daniel Jewesbury, Marek Kohn, Eric Krebbers, Hari Kunzru, Melancholic Troglodytes, Angela Mitropoulos, Luciana Parisi, Benedict Seymour

A struggle is ensuing to produce and protect what is being called the Knowledge Commons in defiance of the latter day regime of enclosures around knowledge and informational goods.
As with the pre-capitalist common lands on which the majority of people subsisted, the idea is that we can build a resource, a life source, of intellectual wealth to sustain people within informatic capitalism.
But this endeavour is not without political, tactical and philosophical problems. In this first issue of the new format Mute, we  foreground the antagonisms which the Knowledge Commons throw up.

Texts by: Gregor Claude, Yves Degoyon, Martin Hardie, Benjamin Mako Hill, Jaromil, Yuwei Lin, Peter Linebaugh, Aymeric Mansoux, Agnese Trocchi, RampArt Hacklab, Palle Torsson, James Wallbank, Steve Wright, Simon Yuill and Soenke Zehle

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This Reader collects together texts on Precariousness that first appeared in Mute magazine issues 29 (January 2005) and 28 (August 2004) with writing on the politics of precarity from a number of other sources.
The intention is to present in one small volume a selection of texts which address the problems and potentials of the concept of precarious labour. This Reader reflects something of the current discussion and debate around social precariousness, precarious work, precarious life, and the struggles against this condition.
Mute would like to thank the following authors and publications for allowing us to reproduce their texts:

Including: Anthony Davies on art, corporations and activism, Simon Pope on locative media, Gregory Sholette on the art group REPOhistory and gentrification in Manhattan, Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture, JJ King on the future of WIPO, Mark Crinson on art and urban history, Christian Nold on Jodi's solo show at FACT, Ben Watson on David Toop, Hari Kunzru on Gustav Metzger, Mattin on the politics of musical improvisation, Tim Savage on Donna Haraway's Companion Species Manifesto, Anja Büchele and Matthew Hyland on poet Susan Howe, Armin Medosch on ISEA, artist’s project by Zeigam Azizov, and much more!!!