Clash of Fundamentalisms

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In this timely and important book, Tariq Ali puts the events of September 11 into sweeping historical perspective. As we have come to expect from him, he is lucid, eloquent, literary, and painfully honest, as he dissects both Islamic and Western fundamentalism.

The aerial attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, a global spectacle of unprecedented dimensions, generated an enormous volume of commentary. The inviolability of the American mainland, breached for the first time since 1812, led to extravagant proclamations by the pundits. It was a new world-historical turning point. The 21st century, once greeted triumphally as marking the dawn of a worldwide neoliberal civilization, suddenly became menaced. The choice presented from the White House and its supporters was to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against terrorism or be damned.

Tariq Ali challenges these assumptions, arguing instead that what we have experienced is the return of History in a horrific form, with religious symbols playing a part on both sides: ‘Allah’s revenge,’ ‘God is on Our Side’ and ‘God Bless America.’

The visible violence of September 11 was the response to the invisible violence that has been inflicted on countries like Afghanistan,...

Public Netbase: Non Stop Future

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Public Netbase: Non Stop Future
New Practices in Art and Media
Edited by Konrad Becker, Branca Curcic, Zoran Pantelic, Felix Stalder, & Martin Wassermair
New information technologies have become ubiquitous and thoroughly established in our everyday lives. This marks the end of a period of intense experimentation and speculations related to the introduction of global communication systems more than a decade ago. Artists and cultural workers were the first to explore their liberatory dimensions and to apply their emancipatory potentials. These early pioneers developed a range of interdisciplinary models and practices in order to expand the scope of social participation in information society cultures. Initiatives like the radical Viennese mediaculture institution Public Netbase became important nodes in a global network dedicated to critical art, culture and science based on new media practices.

A virtual world is possible, but never without real spaces and tangible social interaction. This publication is both a review of the pioneer days from the perspective of Public Netbase as well as an outlook into the future of art and culture in digital networks....

Panegyric

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Panegyric
Volumes 1 & 2
Guy Debord
Guy Debord, as founding and pivotal figure of the Situationist International, pursued one of the 20th century’s most arch and exciting assaults on modern life. His 1967 Society of the Spectacle (followed, twenty years later, by Comments on the Society of the Spectacle) was a fierce critique of late-capitalist culture and became the signal text for those involved in the political events of May 1968 and beyond.

Panegyric is Debord’s audacious autobiography, and here for the first time in English is the second, beautifully illustrated volume published together with the spare and classical text of the first. A rare combination of poetry and precision, it tells of something even rarer: a life that refused to adjust to the dominant malignancies of its time.
Synopsis:
Panegyric is Debord’s autobiography; here for the first time in English is the second volume, published together with the spare text of the first....

Dead Cities

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Dead Cities
A Natural History
Mike Davis

An urban theorist explores the combat zone that is contemporary urban America. Using environmental science as his frame of understanding, Davis examines themes of urban life today—white flight, deindustrialization, housing and job segregation and discrimination—and looks at areas he calls “national sacrifice zones,” military landscapes that warfare simulation and arms production have rendered uninhabitable.

Villains Of All Nations

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Villains of All Nations
Atlantic Pirates In The Golden Age
Marcus Rediker

Villains of All Nations is a people’s history of piracy—a history that emphasizes how common seamen who turned pirate built for themselves a multicultural, democratic and egalitarian society. This vivid social history of Atlantic piracy focuses on its colorful Golden Age, from 1716 to 1726, the age of the dreaded black flag, the Jolly Roger, as well as swashbuckling figures such as Edward Teach, better known, of course, as Blackbeard. These “outcasts of all nations” imagined—and succeeded in forging—a better world than they had found on the merchant and naval ships on which they had previously worked: they democratically elected their officers, divided their booty in egalitarian way, and fought against the common vicious abuse of sailors. The historical truth about what pirates actually did proves more compelling than the romantic fiction that has grown up around them.
“No one who is interested in the history of the eighteenth century can afford to ignore this book.”...

The Art of Free Cooperation

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The Art of Free Cooperation
Edited by Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz

This book takes an inventory of the art of collaborative practice, surveys the landscape of new, cooperation-enhancing technologies, and renders the inner workings of cooperative processes as a new model for social movements. Civic participation is on the decline, but, online, more people work together than ever before. Activists contribute citizen journalism. New media artists create social online tools and urge others to participate. Knowledge collectives gather information in large, open repositories. Free culture — with all its file-sharing applications — is blossoming. Contributors Howard Rheingold, Christoph Spehr, Brian Holmes, Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz link the debates about web-based, cooperation-enhancing technologies to the broader world of political activism.

This book and its accompanying DVD emerge out of intensive debates at the Free Cooperation conference in 2004 at the State University of New York at Buffalo facilitated by Scholz and Lovink.
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