This volume investigates our dissonant and exuberant existences online. As social media users we know we're under surveillance, yet we continue to click, like, love and share ourselves online as if nothing was. So, how do we overcome the current online identity regime? Can we overthrow the rule of Narcissus and destroy the planetary middle class subject? In this catalogue of strategies, the reader will find stories on hacker groups, gaming platforms in the occupied territories, art objects, selfies, augmented reality, Gen Z autoethnographies, love and life. The authors of this anthology believe we cannot simply put vanity aside and a rational analysis of platform capitalism is not going to convince the youngs on TikTok nor liberate us from Zuckerbergian indentured servitude. Do we really need to wade through the subjective mud and 'learn more' about online aesthetics? The answer is yes. Writing by Wendy Chun, Franco Berardi "BIFO", Julia Preisker, Katherine Behar, Rebecca Stein, Fabio Cristiano, Emilio Distretti, Natalie Bookchin, Ana Peraica, Mitra Azar, Donatella Della Ratta, Gabriella Coleman, Marco Deseriis, Alberto Micali, Daniel de Zeeuw, Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Jodi Dean.

When everything is destined to be designed, design disappears into the everyday. We simply do not see it anymore because it is everywhere. This is the vanishing act of design. At this moment, design registers its redundancy: our products, environments and services have been comprehensively improved. Everything has been designed to perfection and is under a permanent upgrade regime. Within such a paradigm, design is taken over by the capitalist logic of reproduction. But this does not come without conflicts, struggles and tensions. The most obvious of these, is that design is constantly being replaced. Our dispense culture prompts a yearning for longevity. The compulsion to delete brings alive a desire to retrieve objects, ideas and experiences that refuse to become obsolete. Society is growing more aware of sustainability and alert to the depletion of this world. For the ambitious designer, it is time to take the next step: designing the future with a more holistic consideration and approach. The book is a critical look at the design world with its various design disciplines and how these have developed in the past 10 years. Made in China, Designed in California, Criticised in Europe is for professional designers that care about design, the environment and how we live.

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app. Sad by Design offers a critical analysis of the growing social media controversies such as fake news, toxic viral memes and online addiction. The failed search for a grand design has resulted in depoliticised internet studies unable to generate either radical critique or a search for alternatives. Geert Lovink calls for us to embrace the engineered intimacy of social media, messenger apps and selfies, because boredom is the first stage of overcoming 'platform nihilism'. Then, after the haze, we can organise to disrupt the data extraction industries at their core.

In Zero Comments, internationally renowned media theorist and 'net critic' Geert Lovink upgrades worn out concepts about the Internet and interrogates the latest hype surrounding blogs and social network sites. In this third volume of his studies into critical Internet culture, following the influential Dark Fiber and My First Recession, Lovink develops a 'general theory of blogging.' Unlike most critiques of blogging, Lovink is not focusing here on the dynamics between bloggers and the mainstream news media, but rather unpacking the ways that blogs exhibit a 'nihilist impulse' to empty out established meaning structures. Blogs, Lovink argues, are bringing about the decay of traditional broadcast media, and they are driven by an in-crowd dynamic in which social ranking is a primary concern. The lowest rung of the new Internet hierarchy are those blogs and sites that receive no user feedback or 'zero comments'.

Lovink explores other important changes to Internet culture, as well, including the silent globalization of the Net in which the West is no longer the main influence behind new media culture, as countries like India, China and Brazil expand their influence. Zero Comments also looks forward to speculate on the Net impact of organized networks, free cooperation and distributed aesthetics.

"Reformatting Politics" examines the ways in which new information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being used by civil society organizations (CSOs) to achieve their aims through activities and networks that cross national borders. These new ICTs--the internet, mobile phones, satellite radio and television--have allowed these civil society organizations to form extensive networks linking the local and the global in new ways and to flourish internationally in ways that were not possible without them.
The book consists of four sections containing essays by some of the top scholars and activists working at the intersections of networked societies, civil society organizations, and information technology. The book also includes a section that takes a critical look at the UN World Summit of Information Society and the role that global governance has played and will play in the use and dissemination of these new technologies. Finally, the book aims to influence this important and emerging field of inquiry by posing a set of questions and directions for future research. In sum, "Reformatting Politic"s is a fresh look at the way critical network practice through the use of information technology is reformatting the terms and terrains of global politics.

Capitalisms got a mad crush on collaboration--witness all the new
business models based on collaboration studies and expensive corporate groupware, or the billions spent on YouTube -- but beneath all the flirtation, capitalism needs to stay in control. As long as the process of collaboration is controlled by external interests, the relationship will always be one of forced cooperation. And though its way more challenging (for the participants and in terms of resistance), free cooperation will always be a lot sexier than forced cooperation.
Inspired by the collaborative models of the open-source software movement, Rosa Luxemburg Award-winning German writer Christoph Spehr, Howard Rheingold, Brian Holmes and the editors critique both the received capitalist and socialist methods of social integration, and elaborate a practical vision for a third alternative, one that promises to surmount the problems of inequality on the one hand and the lack of individual freedoms on the other. Part utopian intervention, part radical polemic and activist manual, "The Art of Free Cooperation" also includes a DVD with additional texts, highlights from an international Free Cooperation conference, and a feature-length film collage, narrated by Tony Conrad, illustrating the principles of Free Cooperation through the visual
language of science fiction.

In Zero Comments, internationally renowned media theorist and 'net critic' Geert Lovink upgrades worn out concepts about the Internet and interrogates the latest hype surrounding blogs and social network sites. In this third volume of his studies into critical Internet culture, following the influential Dark Fiber and My First Recession, Lovink develops a 'general theory of blogging.' Unlike most critiques of blogging, Lovink is not focusing here on the dynamics between bloggers and the mainstream news media, but rather unpacking the ways that blogs exhibit a 'nihilist impulse' to empty out established meaning structures. Blogs, Lovink argues, are bringing about the decay of traditional broadcast media, and they are driven by an in-crowd dynamic in which social ranking is a primary concern. The lowest rung of the new Internet hierarchy are those blogs and sites that receive no user feedback or 'zero comments'.

Lovink explores other important changes to Internet culture, as well, including the silent globalization of the Net in which the West is no longer the main influence behind new media culture, as countries like India, China and Brazil expand their influence. Zero Comments also looks forward to speculate on the Net impact of organized networks, free cooperation and distributed aesthetics.

This volume investigates our dissonant and exuberant existences online. As social media users we know we're under surveillance, yet we continue to click, like, love and share ourselves online as if nothing was. So, how do we overcome the current online identity regime? Can we overthrow the rule of Narcissus and destroy the planetary middle class subject? In this catalogue of strategies, the reader will find stories on hacker groups, gaming platforms in the occupied territories, art objects, selfies, augmented reality, Gen Z autoethnographies, love and life. The authors of this anthology believe we cannot simply put vanity aside and a rational analysis of platform capitalism is not going to convince the youngs on TikTok nor liberate us from Zuckerbergian indentured servitude. Do we really need to wade through the subjective mud and 'learn more' about online aesthetics? The answer is yes. Writing by Wendy Chun, Franco Berardi "BIFO", Julia Preisker, Katherine Behar, Rebecca Stein, Fabio Cristiano, Emilio Distretti, Natalie Bookchin, Ana Peraica, Mitra Azar, Donatella Della Ratta, Gabriella Coleman, Marco Deseriis, Alberto Micali, Daniel de Zeeuw, Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Jodi Dean.

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app. Sad by Design offers a critical analysis of the growing social media controversies such as fake news, toxic viral memes and online addiction. The failed search for a grand design has resulted in depoliticised internet studies unable to generate either radical critique or a search for alternatives. Geert Lovink calls for us to embrace the engineered intimacy of social media, messenger apps and selfies, because boredom is the first stage of overcoming 'platform nihilism'. Then, after the haze, we can organise to disrupt the data extraction industries at their core.