Via: Felix Stalder

[This is the opening essay of a new book of mine, called "Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks" which was published in English and Serbian by the lovely people of kuda.org, late last year. It is being distributed by Revolver, Archiv fuer aktuelle Kunst. Hard copies are available from the distributor (http://revolver-books.de/w3NoM.php?nodeId=675) and a pdf with the english portion of the book can be downloaded via my website (http://felix.openflows.org/pdf/Notebook_eng.pdf). Felix]


The Stuff of Culture

Today, we are confronted with a strange, hard-to-categorize question: what is culture made out of? Our answer, I am convinced, will have a profound impact not just on future culture, with a capital C, but on the entire the social reality of the emerging network societies. Today, culture, understood broadly as a system of meaning articulated through symbols, can no longer be separated from the (informational) economy, or, thanks to genetic engineering, from life itself. [More....]