I am blogging from Utrecht at the traditional public PhD...

PhD: Bastard Culture! by Mirko Tobias Schaefer

By Geert Lovink, December 2, 2008

I am blogging from Utrecht at the traditional public PhD defence of German media scientist Mirko Tobias Schaefer. The finishing of a new media theory dissertation in the Netherlands is still a rare case so a few of showed up (like Florian Cramer and Hajo from Worm, also Rotterdam). As far as I understood Schaefer [...]

On Friday October 17 2008 US Internet governance expert Milton...

TU Delft Inaugural Speech of xs4all Professor Milton Mueller

By Geert Lovink, October 22, 2008

On Friday October 17 2008 US Internet governance expert Milton Mueller held his inaugural speech as XS4all Professor at Technical University Delft (The Netherlands). I took the train from Amsterdam to attend the event. The text will be available in a little while, as a booklet, and hopefully online as well, but I will give [...]

A Critique of Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet–and...

Zittrain’s Foundational Myth of the Open Internet

By Geert Lovink, October 12, 2008

A Critique of Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet–and How to Stop It, Yale University Press, 2008 Jonathan Zittrain‘s Future of the Internet is based on a myth. Zittrain needs a foundational myth of the Internet in order to praise it’s past openness and warn for a future lockdown of PCs and mobile phones. [...]

Jeffrey Juris wrote an excellent insiders story about the ‘other...

Interview with Jeffrey Juris, author of Networking Futures

By Geert Lovink, October 10, 2008

Jeffrey Juris wrote an excellent insiders story about the ‘other globalization’ movement. Networking Futures, The Movements Against Corporate Globalization (Duke University Press, 2008) is an anthropological account that starts with the Seattle protests, late 1999, against the WTO and takes the reader to places of protest such as Prague, Barcelona and Genoa. You can read [...]

In Paris I got a copy of Sens Public Cahier...

French translation of ‘Nihilist Blogging’ essay out

By Geert Lovink, October 2, 2008

In Paris I got a copy of Sens Public Cahier 7/8 entitled L’Internet entre savoirs, espaces publics et monopoles from the Sens Public editor Gérard Wormser. It’s a great contribution, in French, to critical Internet theory from a humanities perspective. My essay in French got the title Blogging, l’impact nihiliste. The publication brings together the [...]

The workshop on Sunday morning of the Eurozine conference in...

Eurozine Sunday Morning Conversations on Digital Publishing

By Geert Lovink, October 1, 2008

The workshop on Sunday morning of the Eurozine conference in Paris that I took part in dealt with digital publishing — between cultural and academic practices. Several projects were presented: Cairn is a French-Belgian company, launched in 2005, a private-public partnership, an initiative from the publishing world that is focussing on French online content. The [...]

This weekend I am blogging in Paris where I spoke...

Report from the Paris Eurozine Conference on Multilingualism

By Geert Lovink, September 29, 2008

This weekend I am blogging in Paris where I spoke at the “Multilingualism – Migration, Territories, Europe” conference, organized by the Eurozine network of European cultural magazines. It is in fact the 21st European Meeting of Cultural Journals, a 25 years old network run by a ten years old organization, Eurozine, that organizes content exchange [...]

By Geert Lovink “Software is a heap of trouble.” Scott...

Interview with Scott Rosenberg about Dreaming in Code

By Geert Lovink, September 25, 2008

By Geert Lovink “Software is a heap of trouble.” Scott Rosenberg Scott Rosenberg has written an excellent book on software and open source culture called “Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and one Quest for Transcendent Software”. In it he writes: “Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating [...]

Here at Net Critique I published some notes on an...

Expanded ‘Society of the Query’ Essay in Eurozine

By Geert Lovink, September 10, 2008

Here at Net Critique I published some notes on an interview book by the late Joseph Weizenbaum called Society of the Query. I expanded the essay and it was published in the festive 20 years German Lettre International issue that came out in June. Now, a few months later, the online magazine Eurozine has published [...]

A few weeks ago I read Christopher Kelty’s book on...

Interview with Christopher Kelty: On the Culture of Free Software

By Geert Lovink, August 22, 2008

A few weeks ago I read Christopher Kelty’s book on free software. I have just finished an email interview with the writer who I met twice, in 2001, when he was doing his field work for this study, at Wizard of OS 2 in Berlin, and a free software conference in Cambridge (UK), at least, [...]