Richard Barbrook with Andy Cameron The Internet Revolution: From Dot-com Capitalism to Cybernetic Communism Raccolta di due saggi degli anni '90 - THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron - CYBER-COMMUNISM: HOW THE AMERICANS ARE SUPERSEDING CAPITALISM IN CYBERSPACE Richard Barbrook <http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/no-10-the-internet-revolution-fr...> Con una interessante introduzione: By reading this book, you are travelling back to a very different time when the Net was still a magical technology. At the beginning of the 1990s, France was the only country on the planet where people outside the academy had easy access to computer-mediated communications. By distributing the terminals of its Minitel system for free, the nationalised telephone company had created the infrastructure for a multiplicity of online services. [...] On that spring evening, Andy now had another brilliant idea: ‘Why don’t we both write an article exposing the follies of Wired magazine? If nothing else, it would be our manifesto for the Hypermedia Research Centre which differentiates us from the West Coast neoliberals!’ Over the next few weeks, with the aid of plenty of beer and weed, we worked hard on creating the opening essay of this pamphlet. [...] The two essays from the 1990s in this book are a small contribution to formulating the escape from our contemporary predicament. Today, for many of its formr enthusiasts, the utopian promises of the information society have been fatally betrayed by the corporatisation and militarisation of the Net. However, although The Californian Ideology anticipated their critical attitude to Silicon Valley hype, Andy and I also emphasised that there was nothing inevitable about the ascendency of hi-tech neoliberalism. In its conclusion, our article pointed out that the Minitel system was built upon a different political economy than its American rival. Contradicting Wired magazine’s horror at the leading role of a state-owned telecommunications monopoly, the French version of packetswitched networking was able to commodify all of its online services by delivering them through premium phone lines. Ironically, as my Cyber-communism piece celebrated, it is the made-in-the-USA internet which has always had difficulties in applying the dogmas of bourgeois economics within its virtual world. User-generated content and open source software are the creations of voluntary labour. A.