Many technologies and practices that define the Internet today date back to the 1990s - such as user-generated content, participatory platforms and social media. Indeed, many early ideas about the future of the Internet have been implemented, albeit without fulfilling the envisioned political utopias. By tracing back the technotopian vision, Clemens Apprich develops a media genealogical perspecive that helps us to better understand how digital networks have transformed over the last 30 years and therefore to think beyond the current state of our socio-technical reality. This highly original book informs our understanding of new forms of media and social practices, such that have become part of our everyday culture. Apprich revisits a critical time when the Internet was not yet an everyday reality, but when its potential was already understood and fiercely debated. The historical context of net cultures provides the basis from which the author critically engages with current debates about the weal and woe of the Internet and challenges today's predominant network model.

How do "human" prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them? How do "human" prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them? To answer this question, this book investigates a fundamental axiom in computer science: pattern discrimination. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter-that is, to discriminate-signals from noise, patterns become a highly political issue. Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation, such as class, race, and gender, through defaults and paradigmatic assumptions about the homophilic nature of connection. Instead of providing a more "objective" basis of decision making, machine-learning algorithms deepen bias and further inscribe inequality into media. Yet pattern discrimination is an essential part of human-and nonhuman-cognition. Bringing together media thinkers and artists from the United States and Germany, this volume asks the urgent questions: How can we discriminate without being discriminatory? How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs? How can we queer homophilic tendencies within digital cultures?

Edited by Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Anthony Iles and Oliver Lerone Schultz Felix Guattari's visionary term 'post-media', coined in 1990, heralded a break with mass media's production of conformity and the dawn of a new age of media from below. Understanding how digital convergence was remaking television, film, radio, print and telecommunications into new, hybrid forms, he advocated the production of 'enunciative assemblages' that break with the manufacture of normative subjectivities. In this anthology, historical texts are brought together with newly commissioned ones to explore the shifting ideas, speculative horizons and practices associated with post- media. In particular, the book seeks to explore what post- media practice might be in light of the commodification and homogenisation of digital networks in the age of Web 2.0, e-shopping and mass surveillance. With texts by: Adilkno, Clemens Apprich, Brian Holmes, Alejo Duque, Felipe Fonseca, Gary Genosko, Michael Goddard, Felix Guattari, Cadence Kinsey, Oliver Lerone Schultz, Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits, and Howard Slater Part of the PML Books series. A collaboration between Mute & the Post-Media Lab

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

In less than two decades, digital networks have moved from providing a macro background environment - actively accessible by only a small coterie of scientists, experts, and state or corporate agents - to pervading and augmenting our lives at an increasingly micrological level. As our world is plugged into the matrix, we know from direct experience that the pace of change is feverish, the scope infinite and the effects in need of constant reckoning. The Post-Media Lab offers a space in which to examine, reflect and operate upon the networked, mediatised society from an unhurried perspective. We seek to slow down the machinic pace of 'cybertime' just enough to allow for a different tempo of thought to engage and encompass it. Through a programme of four bi-annual residency cycles spanning 2012 and 2013, the Lab has provided participants (artists, technologists, film-makers, activists, cultural/media theorists) with the practical and intellectual support and resources to build real-world, aesthetic, technical or theoretical assemblages which operate acutely on the interface between digital networks and social and political life.

Many technologies and practices that define the Internet today date back to the 1990s - such as user-generated content, participatory platforms and social media. Indeed, many early ideas about the future of the Internet have been implemented, albeit without fulfilling the envisioned political utopias. By tracing back the technotopian vision, Clemens Apprich develops a media genealogical perspecive that helps us to better understand how digital networks have transformed over the last 30 years and therefore to think beyond the current state of our socio-technical reality. This highly original book informs our understanding of new forms of media and social practices, such that have become part of our everyday culture. Apprich revisits a critical time when the Internet was not yet an everyday reality, but when its potential was already understood and fiercely debated. The historical context of net cultures provides the basis from which the author critically engages with current debates about the weal and woe of the Internet and challenges today's predominant network model.

In this volume, passionate texts from the last decade by artist and theory collective Claire Fontaine are brought together with an extended concluding essay and foreword. Moving across militant, aesthetic and poetic registers these texts consider what resistance might look like in the age of human capital, where all dimensions of the self are infiltrated and conscripted by capital in its pursuit of value. Their answer is the human strike - a strike against the demands on the self imposed by power - in the interest of 'changing ourselves', becoming who we want to become. This strike has been happening all along, throughout history, but has today reached a peak of political consciousness. This book was commissioned to accompany the Post-Media Lab's 'The Subsumption of Sociality' research theme. Published by Mute Books and Post-Media Lab