Digital Solidarity
By Felix Stalder
Series editors: Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Anthony Iles & Oliver Lerone Schultz
Published in association with Post-Media Lab Books
Buy on Amazon UK £4.25 and other regions, Super Saving free shipping.
(Winter, 2013. ISBN 978-1-906496-92-0; eBook ISBN 978-1-906496-93-7)
Felix Stalder’s extended essay, Digital Solidarity, responds to the wave of new forms of networked organisation emerging from and colliding with the global economic crisis of 2008. Across the globe, voluntary association, participatory decision-making and the sharing of resources, all widely adopted online, are being translated into new forms of social space. This movement operates in the breach between accelerating technical innovation, on the one hand, and the crises of institutions which organise, or increasingly restrain society on the other. Through an inventory of social forms – commons, assemblies, swarms and weak networks – the essay outlines how far we have already left McLuhan’s ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ behind. In his cautiously optimistic account, Stalder reminds us that the struggles over where we will arrive are only just beginning.
Today, we are entering into a new constellation,
a new galaxy and the reformulation of solidarity in a
myriad of ways [...] There are new institutional
and cultural forms emerging to support such complex
webs of interaction and production, often based on the
notion of a shared resource, a commons, and focused on
the particular requirements necessary to develop and
protect that one resource. They offer a chance to remake
society in a particular way, through reinventing social
solidarity and democracy, be it in the digital networks
of informational cooperation or in the common
appropriation of physical spaces.
– Felix Stalder, Digital Solidarity
Other books by Felix Stalder
Vergessene Zukunft (Forgotten Future), Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa
By Clemens Apprich & Felix Stalder
“The refreshing perspective of this anthology reveals an
alternative interpretation of Internet culture beyond the
well-known, mythologising narrative of techno-libertarianism..”
– Martin Schmitt, sehepunkte, 13/5 (2013)
Cultures and Ethics of Sharing / Kulturen und Ethiken des Teilens
Edited by Wolfgang Sützl, Felix Stalder, Ronald Maier, Theo Hug
“This is a volume of essays about sharing. Few people could have predicted that practices of sharing would gain such prominence in contemporary society. It is, arguably, one of the most unexpected developments of the early 21st century. ”
– From the Introduction
Manuel Castells: The Theory of the Network Society
By Felix Stalder
“This book is a very beautiful model of how one mind engages with another: Felix Stalder has seized the essence of Manuel Castells′s work and its immense relevance to our time. Daring to be positively critical, Stalder enlarges and also defines Castells′s arguments. Thus the book multiplies Castells by Stalder and the result is an instant expansion of the mind of the reader.”
– Derrick DeKerckhove, University of Toronto