Posts By: sebastian olma

In the Name of Coworking: How Digital Taylorism is Killing Serendipity

By sebastian olma, November 25, 2014

1. The Travels and Aberrations of Serendipity When I started to think about the book to which this blog serves as a preliminary publishing vehicle and testing ground for ideas, I thought I could use the notion of serendipity as a conceptual counterweight to the vacuous notion of creativity as it is currently used in [...]

Never Mind the Sharing Economy: Here’s Platform Capitalism

By sebastian olma, October 16, 2014

1. A Backlash Against Sharing? Lately, the so-called “sharing economy” has been all over the news. Under flashy headlines such as “Sharing is the New Owning” it is heralded as the solution to the current financial crisis, the path toward a more sustainable economy or even the harbinger of a post-capitalist society. And while the [...]

Creative Industries from Gold to Lead: A Review of Robert Hewison’s “Cultural Capital”

By sebastian olma, October 3, 2014

      278 pages ISBN 978-1-78168-591-4 UK Publisher: Verso £14.99 1. Where have all the Critics gone? Since their inception in the late 1990s by Tony Blair’s New Labour government, creative industries policies have spread throughout the continent. The creative industries approach is increasingly becoming a mainstream tool for policy makers at all levels, [...]

Rethinking Social Innovation between Invention and Imitation

By sebastian olma, August 18, 2014

1. Social Innovation: In Search of a Definition ‘Social innovation’ is a bit of a  puzzle. As one of the currently fashionable policy ‘trends’, it emerged out of the conviction that the great challenges our societies are facing today require new methods and strategies. Over the course of the last decade, the field of practices [...]

Erich Honecker & the Internet of Things. A Comment on Jeremy Rifkin’s “The Zero Marginal Cost Society”

By sebastian olma, July 18, 2014

“The capitalist era is passing… not quickly but inevitably.” Thus reads the opening sentence of Jeremy Rifkin’s new book The Zero Marginal Cost Society. It’s not, indeed, a blockbuster title but that doesn’t mean that this would be one of Rifkin’s minor books. In fact, what the American Business School Academic and head of the [...]

Of Thumbs and Heads: A Comment on Michel Serres’ “Petite Poucette”

By sebastian olma, July 12, 2014

Michel Serres’ Petite Poucette, is a strange little book. Written as a “love letter to the networked generation,” it celebrates the digital savviness of his grand children and their peers. Petit Poucette is the fairly tale character known in the English speaking world as little Tom Thumb. The title is thus a pun on the [...]

Save the Date! MyCreativity Sweatshop: Reality Check on the Creative Industries

By sebastian olma, July 11, 2014

On November 20th/21st  2014, the Institute of Network Cultures organizes the MyCreativity Sweatshop @Trouw in Amsterdam. It’s going to be a conference and alter-creativity summit. With Talks, Discussions, Art & Design Lab, Workshops and Performances Speakers include: Robert Hewison (GB, DEMOS, author of Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain) Mark Fisher (GB, [...]

What Design Can Do – A Report from Weimar

By sebastian olma, July 4, 2014

Last weekend, I went to the Digital Bauhaus Summit in Weimar, organized by Berlin’s Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, a network of writers, designers and consultants who over the years have significantly shaped the discussion on digital culture, creative industries and design in Germany. The purpose of the summit was to explore contemporary theory and practice of [...]

Unwrapping the social fabric of time

By sebastian olma, June 25, 2014

by Hartmut Wilkening Review of Sarah Sharma (2014) In the Meantime: Time and Cultural Politics, Duke. Why is the assumption that we are living in fast times so easily accepted, so little discussed? How is it possible that most discourses on 24/7, accelerated society and fast capital end up confirming speedup as the reality?, author [...]