Description

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.
” ‘Thank you for your cooperation’ is what we are usually told after being coerced into doing something. ‘Free’ is a word that usually starts abject phrases like ‘free markets’ or ‘free sample.’ Yet in coupling these two troubled words together, Lovink and Scholz open up a whole new
terrain for reality hacking. Under this banner they have assembled a top mob who make their own rules and show you how to live by your own rules too. Essential reading for all the artists of making the impossible possible.” — McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory