Richard Barbrook

The Californian Ideology

Winner of the MEA's 2008 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology.'A compelling, authoritative, and painstakingly documented narrative, Imaginary Futures traces the emergence of the computer era in the context of desperately competing ideologies, economics, and empires. This is a work of passionate and persuasive scholarship by a contemporary social theorist at the top of his game.'Douglas Rushkoff, author, Coercion, Media Virus, Get Back in the Box.'Imaginary Futures gives insight into how the dominant utopias of today were shaped in the time of the Cold War and served the ideological needs of the elites. While the Cold War West had a much better present, it was the Soviet East which had a vision of the future. The invention of a Western utopia became an important factor in the struggle for global power.'Boris Kagarlitsky, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Comparative Political Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences -- The future is now--Richard Barbrook argues that, at the height of the Cold War, the Americans invented a truly revolutionary tool: the Internet. Yet, for all of its libertarian potential, hi-tech science soon became a tool of geopolitical dominance. The rest of the world was expected to follow America's path into the networked future. Today, we're still told that the Net is creating the information society. Barbrook shows how we can reclaim its revolutionary purpose: how the DIY ethic of the internet can help people shape information technologies in their own interest and reinvent their own, improved visions of the future.

From Thinking Machines to the Global Village

Imaginary Futures

Why should radicals be interested in playing wargames? Surely the Left can have no interest in such militarist fantasies? Yet, Guy Debord - the leader of the Situationist International - placed such importance on his invention of The Game of War described it as his most significant of his accomplishment. Intrigued by this claim, a multinational group of artists, activists and academics formed Class Wargames to investigate the political and strategic lessons that could be learnt from playing his ludic experiment. While the ideas of the Situationists continue to be highly influential in the development of subversive art and politics, relatively little attention has been paid to their strategic orientation. Determined to correct this deficiency, Class Wargames is committed to exploring how Debord used the metaphor of the Napoleonic battlefield to propagate a Situationist analysis of modern culture and politics. Inspired by his example its members have also hacked other military simulations: H.G. Wells' Little Wars; Chris Peers' Reds versus Reds and Richard Borg's Commands & Colors. Playing wargames is not a diversion from politics: it is the training ground of tomorrow's communist insurgents. Fusing together historical research on avant-garde artists, political revolutionaries and military theorists with narratives of five years of public performances, Class Wargames provides a strategic and tactical manual for subverting the economic, political and ideological hierarchies of early-21st century neoliberal capitalism. The knowledge required to create a truly human civilisation is there to be discovered on the game board!

Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism

Class Wargames

Most people believe that the freedom of the media is an essential prerequisite of a modern democracy. Yet there is also a growing conviction that the media are turning democratic politics into a branch of show business. Contemporary politics have been trivialised into a series of sound-bites and photo opportunities, and the 'classical' role of the media as a forum for rational debate between rival ideas has been traded for media controlled by collective institutions and management hierarchies.In Media Freedom, Richard Barbrook explores this transition from popular participation to corporate centralisation, focusing on the history of the French media as a model to determine why the spread of the media to all sections of the population has resulted in the exclusion of most people from its production.Barbrook traces the origin of media freedom as a positive right, explores the proliferation of an increasingly global media and examines the re-emergence of self-produced media through computer networks and community broadcasting. Media Freedom is an innovative approach to media studies, challenging the apolitical stance of the discipline and offering a fresh understanding of the current debates about media and freedom.

Richard Barbrook

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