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

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(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