hydrarchist writes, this review as published in the second edition of the Make World Magazine. "For many years, Geert Lovink has carried out his work as net-critic
wandering across the territories where the net meets the economy,
politics, social action and art. Years of fast writing on mailing lists,
analysis, polemics, replies and reports have been collected and
elaborated in a way that maintains the rap-style of e-mail debates:
short sentences, ironic slogans, cuts and returns, allusions, cita-tions...
but what emerges from this mosaic is a coherent overall
view on the first decade of digital society.
Dark Fiber
Franco Bifo Berardi
This book is the first complete investigation of
global netculture, an analysis of the evolution
and involution of the web during the first decade
of its mass expansion. But Lovink goes beyond a
sociological, economic and anthropological survey.
Many of the essays in the book outline the
theoretical positions of various agents in the cyber-
cultural scene: Wired's libertarian ideology,
its economistic and neoliberal involution, and the
radical pessimism of European philosophers.
Outside of such confrontation, Geert's position is
that of a radical and pragmatic Northern-Europe-an
intellectual close to autonomist and cyber-punk
movements, who has animated the cyber-cultural
scene for a decade with his polymorphous activity as writer and moderator of
connective environments such as nettime.org,
and as organiser of international meetings.
