P2P Book of the Year 2013
2013
Swarmwise. By Rick Falkvinge. 2013
URL = http://falkvinge.net/files/2013/04/Swarmwise-2013-by-Rick-Falkvinge-v1-Final-2013Jul18.pdf pdf]
Biohackers. The Politics of Open Science. Alessandro Delfanti. Pluto Press, 2013.
URL = http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745332802
a book about Open Source in Genomics, not only the diybio movement but more in general how open science culture and practices interact with today's innovation and market system.
Hacking Your Education. Dale Stephens. Penguin, 2013
[edit]Description
'Hacking Your Education is a practical guide to adapting Homeschooling and Unschooling principles for college age learners. In the book, Dale helps people learn how to challenge themselves when college is not meeting their needs. From practical tips for newcomers, such as how to form peer accountability and study groups, to advice on how to find experienced mentors and turn your knowledge and networking directly into a paying job, Dale provides a framework for success outside the traditional college system. I highly recommend you read this book if you are thinking about going to college or are teaching someone who is considering heading in that direction." (http://www.uncollege.org/blog/2012/12/12/free-pre-release-copy-of-hacking-you-education/)
Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives. Unlike Us Reader #3. Institute for Network Cultures, 2013
URL = http://www.networkcultures.org/unlikeus
[edit]Description
"The Unlike Us Reader offers a critical examination of social media, bringing together theoretical essays, personal discussions, and artistic manifestos. How can we understand the social media we use everyday, or consciously choose not to use? We know very well that monopolies control social media, but what are the alternatives? While Facebook continues to increase its user population and combines loose privacy restrictions with control over data, many researchers, programmers, and activists turn towards designing a decentralized future. Through understanding the big networks from within, be it by philosophy or art, new perspectives emerge.
The Making Of The Indebted Man. Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. By Maurizio Lazzarato. Semiotexte, 2013.
URL = http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/making-indebted-man-0
[edit]Description
The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of this book, sharpens mechanisms of exploitation and domination indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, between retirees and welfare recipients. They are all “debtors,” guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor.
Report/Book: Digital Public Spaces. Ed. by Drew Hemment, Rachel Cooper et al. FutureEverything, 2013
URL = http://futureeverything.org/publications/digital-public-spaces/
[edit]Description
"This publication gathers a range of short explorations of the idea of the Digital Public Space. The central vision of the Digital Public Space is to give everyone everywhere unrestricted access to an open resource of culture and knowledge. This vision has emerged from ideas around building platforms for engagement around cultural archives to become something wider, which this publication is seeking to hone and explore.
This is the first publication to look at the emergence of the Digital Public Space. Contributors include some of the people who are working to make the Digital Public Space happen.
- Book: The Open Book. Ed. by Jussi Nissilä, Kaitlyn Braybrooke et al. Reaktio, 2013.
URL = http://theopenbook.org.uk/
The Open Book has been built by The Finnish Institute in London and the Open Knowledge Foundation in honour of the first Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki. It is the third book in the Reaktio series.
[edit]Description
"From makerspaces to data wrangling schools to archives, the digital is being remixed by the open – and it is changing society as we know it. New concepts about public information, transparency and the Commons are combining in unprecedented ways, resulting in a breadth of transformative collaborations across the globe.
The Open Book explores the social and technological manifestations of this emergent movement for the first time. It features 25 in-depth thought pieces written by pioneers of openness around the world from London to São Paulo, including the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Rufus Pollock, the Free Software Foundation’s Karsten Gerloff, Open Data Manchester’s Julian Tate, IBM’s Ville Peltola, the Centre for Sustainable Communications’ Jorge Luis Zapico, The Guardian’s Simon Rogers, the Open Hardware Summit’s Catarina Mota, Open Design Now‘s Peter Troxler and the Harvard Berkman Centre for Internet & Society’s Mayo Fuster Morell.
Book and PhD: Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking. Tatiana Bazzichelli. PhD Dissertation Department of Aesthetics and Communication. Faculty of Arts Aarhus University. 2013
First published in 2013 by Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, Helsingforsgade 14, DK-8200 Aarhus N, Denmark. www.digital-aestetik.dk PhD Dissertation: Tatiana Bazzichelli – Aarhus University, 2011. Supervisor: Søren Pold, Aarhus University, Denmark. Co-supervisor: Fred Turner, Stanford University, California. Examining committee: Franco Berardi, Geoff Cox, Olga Goriunova.
Factories Of Knowledge, Industries Of Creativity. By Gerald Raunig. MIT Press, 2013.
URL = http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/factories-knowledge-industries-creativity
[edit]Overview
"What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads and the working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to be sought in what may be the last places where they are possible: the university and the art world. Gerald Raunig’s new book analyzes the potential that cognitive and creative labor has in these two arenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “modulation” as the market-driven imperative for the constant transformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance.
Looking at recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democracia real YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessment of the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, he asserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience."
The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World. Marina Gorbis. Free Press, 2013.
[edit]Description
"Large corporations, big governments, and other centralized organizations have long determined and dominated the way we work, access healthcare, get an education, feed ourselves, and generally go about our lives. The economist Ronald Coase, in his famous 1937 paper “The Nature of the Firm,” provided an economic explanation for this: Organizations lowered transaction costs, making the provision of goods and services cheap, efficient, and reliable. Today, this organizational advantage is rapidly disappearing. The Internet is lowering transaction costs—costs of connection, coordination, and trade—and pointing to a future that increasingly favors distributed sources and social solutions to some of our most immediate needs and our most intractable problems.
Water Governance for 21st Century. Lessons from Water Trading in the U.S. and Australia. by Shiney Varghese. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 2013.
[edit]Review
by Ana Micka:
"Water Governance for 21st Century, by Shiney Varghese at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, makes a compelling case urging advcates and policy makers to advance an approach combining the commons framework and the Public Trust Doctrine principles. Shiney notes that the tendency of recent trends to rely on market and rights–based policies has exaccerbated the failures in water governance. These approaches do not “solve problems such as poor management, existing over-allocation or failing water governance.”
= a digital cultural theory online journal and a book
URL = http://www.cyborgsubjects.org amazon
Contents [hide]
1 The Book
1.1 Context
1.2 Contents
2 Author Bios
[edit]The Book
[edit]Context
Excerpted from the preface, by Bonni Rambatan and Jacob Johanssen:
"In 2010, we set out to create a platform for two things we love and value: freedom of critical thought and digital culture. We wanted to create something that would testify of something major of our contemporary age. Having grown up with the Internet, we, the unknown digital kids, hoped to create a website that would be different from traditional academia: Cyborg Subjects was born. The major idea behind it was not only to freely publish articles that dealt with a broad range of themes and debates of the zeitgeist but to create a transparent and lively debate. We wanted to have an open review system where everything would be published and everyone could add their 2 virtual cents to an essay or artwork. This was an attack on the monopoly publishers in academia.
This anthology is a compilation of essays published in the online journal “Cyborg Subjects: Discourses on Digital Culture” circa 2010-2012. The journal started out as an experiment: curated works—artistic or essay—submitted to us via e-mail were posted online, free for anyone to review (with comments) and/or adapt (by creating new posts linking back to the original article).
Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. By Ethan Zuckerman. Norton, 2013
[edit]Description
Publisher summary:
"In Rewire, media scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman explains why the technological ability to communicate with someone does not inevitably lead to increased human connection. At the most basic level, our human tendency to “flock together” means that most of our interactions, online or off, are with a small set of people with whom we have much in common. In examining this fundamental tendency, Zuckerman draws on his own work as well as the latest research in psychology and sociology to consider technology’s role in disconnecting ourselves from the rest of the world.
For those who seek a wider picture—a picture now critical for survival in an age of global economic crises and pandemics—Zuckerman highlights the challenges, and the headway already made, in truly connecting people across cultures.
Other Languages
Societing Reloaded. Pubblici produttivi e innovazione sociale. Curated by Adam Arvidsson and Alex Giordano. EGEA, 2013
URL = http://www.ibs.it/code/9788823833401/societing-reloaded-pubblici.html
(with contributions from Salvatore Iaconesi, Penelope Di Pixel, Michel Bauwens, Bertram Niessen and others)
2012
Open Field: Conversations on the Commons. Edited by Sarah Schultz and Sarah Peters. Contributions by Susannah Bielak, Steve Dietz, Stephen Duncombe et al. Walker Art Center, 2012
"an absorbing collection from many authors exploring issues of the arts, the commons, public space and community co-creation, which is especially about the relationship between commons and museums, and the complications of institutional forays into social practice."
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. OR Books, New York, 2012,
[edit]Review
By Cryptome:
"This is a highly informative book, perhaps the best published on the substance of WikiLeaks, its technology, philosophy, origin and purpose, rooted in the Cypherpunks resistance to authority through encryption and anonymizing technology. The trenchant and salient, wide-ranging discussion among Assange, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn and Zimmermann, is derived from a four-part RT series with additional editorial material and a summarizing prologue by Assange, "A Call to Cryptographic Arms."
Open Utopia. Thomas More & Stephen Duncombe. Autonomiedia, 2012
URL = http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=487
[edit]Description
"Open Utopia is the first complete English language edition of Thomas More’s Utopia that honors the primary precept of Utopia itself: that all property is common property. Open Utopia, licensed under Creative Commons, is free to copy, to share, to use. But Utopia is more than the story of a far-off land with no private property. It is a text that instructs us how to approach texts, be they literary or political, in an open manner: open to criticism, open to participation, and open to re-creation. Utopia is no-place, and therefore it is up to all of us to imagine it." (http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=487)
"Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link" by Bernard Lietaer, Christian Arnsperger, Sally Goerner and Stefan Brunnhuber. Triarchy Press, 2012
URL = http://www.triarchypress.com/pages/Money-and-Sustainability.htm
A report from the Club of Rome to Finance Watch and the World Business Academy
The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. By Scott E. Page. Princeton University Press, 2012.
URL = http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8353.html
[edit]Description
"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
Bob McChesney. Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Away from Democracy.
[edit]Description
1. Author's description:
"The book is a political economic examination of the digital revolution based upon 15 years of research. The book provides considerable detail but also an overarching analysis and argument, so it is intended for anyone concerned with the Internet. It is the capstone of my career.
Michael Delli Carpini, Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said: “Digital Disconnect makes a convincing case that one can only understand the Internet and related communication technologies through the lens of political economy, and that the capitalist political economy in which they are currently embedded in the United States is anathema to a truly democratic information environment.”
Strength in Numbers: The Political Power of Weak Interests, by Gunnar Trumbull. Harvard University Press , 2012.
URL =
"This book makes a bold and startling claim: diffuse interests, rather than concentrated interests, dominate the making of public policy in the advanced democracies. (Pepper D. Culpepper, European University Institute )"