Felix Stalder's extended essay, Digital Solidarity, takes it's point of departure from the waves of new forms of networked political organisation which have met the onset of the global economic crisis of 2008. Following Karl Marx, Stalder lays out how in the current period there are emergent contradictions between applied innovation and technical progress and the economic institutions whch organise or restrain this progress. The contradictions between forces of production and relations of production are placed in a context in which we have left McLuhan's Gutenburg Galaxy behind for good and the struggles over where we will arrive are only just beginnning. A co-publication of Mute Books & the Post-Media Lab
Felix Stalder is a lecturer in the theory of the media society at the Zurich University of Arts. He is the founder of Openflows, long-time moderator of the nettime mailing list, and a board member of the Institute for New Cultural Technologies in Vienna.