Joasia Krysa, editor
This is the third book in the DATA Browser series of critical texts that explore issues at the intersection of culture and technology.

The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents, including technological networks and software. This upgraded 'operating system' of art presents new possibilities of online curating that is collective and distributed — even to the extreme of a self-organising system that curates itself. The curator is part of this entire system but not central to it.

The subtitle of the book makes reference to the essay 'The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems' (1988), in which Bill Nichols considered how cybernetics transformed cultural production. He emphasised the shift from mechanical reproduction (symbolised by the camera) to that of cybernetic systems (symbolised by the computer) in relation to the political economy, and pointed to contradictory tendencies inherent in these systems: 'the negative, currently dominant, tendency toward control, and the positive, more latent potential toward collectivity'. The book continues this general line of inquiry in relation to curating, and extends it by considering how power relations and control are expressed in the context of network systems and immateriality.

In relation to network systems, the emphasis remains on the democratic potential of technological change but also the emergence of what appears as more intensive forms of control. Can the same be said of curating in the context of distributed forms? If so, what does this imply for software curating beyond the rhetoric of free software and open systems?

Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa, editors

Social change does not simply result from resistance to the existing set of conditions but from adapting and transforming the technical apparatus itself. Walter Benjamin, in his 1934 essay "The Author as Producer," recommends that the "cultural producer" intervene in the production process in the manner of an engineer. The term "engineer" is to be taken broadly to refer to technical and cultural activity, through the application of knowledge for the management, control, and use of power. To act as an engineer in this sense is to use power productively to bring about change and for public utility. This collection of essays and examples of contemporary cultural practices asks if this general line of thinking retains relevance for cultural production at this point in time -- when activities of production, consumption and circulation operate through complex global networks served by information technologies.

Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, and Anya Lewin, editors

The interaction between culture and economy was famously explored by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer by the term Kulturindustrie (The Culture Industry) to describe the production of mass culture and power relations between capitalist producers and mass consumers. Their account is a bleak one, but one that appears to hold continuing relevance, despite being written in 1944. Today, the pervasiveness of network technologies has contributed to the further erosion of the rigid boundaries between high art, mass culture and the economy, resulting in new kinds of cultural production charged with contradictions. On the one hand, the culture industry appears to allow for resistant strategies using digital technologies, but on the other it operates in the service of capital in ever more complex ways. This publication, the first in the DATA browser series, uses the concept of the culture industry as a point of departure, and tests its currency under new conditions.

Soon after the Zapatistas emerged into public view in January, 1994, Subcomandante Marcos replied to a letter from a young girl in Mexico City with a tale of a tobacco-stealing beetle who was angry about the recent military invasion and the threat of so many soldiers’ boots to such small creatures as himself. The beetle, Don Durito de la Lacondon, tells Marcos that he is “studying neoliberalism and its strategy of domination for Latin America” in order to discover how long the Zapatista struggle, and by extension his own, would last. This marks the beginning of a long series of letters and communiqués between Marcos and Don Durito, a correspondence shared with various national newspapers and magazines, inventively explaining the shifting politics of the Zapatista struggle and their history as an organization and movement.

The Durito stories are some of the most literary and complex Zapatista communiqués. Their narratives combine political critique, satire, historical debate, literary seduction, and poetry, and regularly change register from elevated theoretical language to popular Mexican word play or albures, indigenous and foreign languages, archaic and peninsular Spanish, and Caló (a hybrid language spoken along the U.S.-Mexico border). While other Marcos collections have excerpted these stories from the communiqués in which they originally appeared, Conversations With Durito contextualizes each one within the original communiqué, presenting them not simply as stories, but as documents of particular moments in the Zapatista struggle. To further this understanding, the communiqués are supplemented with a lengthy historical overview, brief introductions to each story, integrated footnotes and bibliographic resources, all adding critical political, historical, and cultural information to this vital and contemporary literature of resistance.

Anarchitexts brings together a global mix of voices from the new “underground”: engaged artists intervening in local struggles on the streets, media producers promoting technologies based on sharing and cooperation rather than privatization and competition, activists participating in global networks built through electronic democracies and decentralized forms of cooperation, and extraordinary people creating an alternative society through their everyday practices. As a matter of principle Anarchitexts reflects the first-hand perspective of those involved at the point of production, not distanced reflections by critics, specialists, or armchair theorists.

The conjunction of Friedrich Nietzsche and anarchism will sound like an audacious proposal to many, especially those who still associate Nietzsche with fascism, and anarchism with a simplistic notion of class struggle. However, anarchism — the project which aims at the abolition of all forms of power, control and coercion — should be free to appropriate the work of one of the greatest iconoclasts of all time. Although Nietzsche was rather harsh on his anarchist contemporaries, he nevertheless in some respects shared with them a vision of the total transformation of life. The notion of a transvaluation of all values clearly remains not merely compatible with, but an integral component of the anarchist project, and the idea of philosophy with a hammer underlies the anarchist commitment to radical social transformation. I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite! examines the historical, political and philosophical linkages between Nietzsche’s transgressive thought and the transformative political vision of anarchism.

Caliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization.