The techno-utopian left also had its conciliatory and social democratic version. Looking back, it feels a bit embarrassing, but it was not uncommon to idealise the figure of the hacker as an ‘aggiornamento’, an updated version of the professional Leninist revolutionary. The antagonistic social movements wanted to see in free culture an innovative and communicatively sexier way of non-commercial collaboration than traditional cooperativism. It is hard to get a sense today of the discursive centrality of technology debates among the political left at the time. I remember very well something he said in his conference and which, since then, I have often quoted and paraphrased: “Not everyone experiences the possibility of modifying the drivers of their printer as an emancipatory conquest.” Free culture, Lovink explained to us, should be something more ambitious, exciting and politically complex than free software and open access in their blunter, more technocratic versions.
I had read his first book translated into Spanish, Fibra oscura (Dark Fiber), a collection of essays that defended the critical potential of free culture on the Internet from an anti-utopian perspective-an unusual position in those days. I met Geert Lovink at a meeting on free culture at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, just a few months before the financial crash of 2008. The Spanish edition has a preface written by theorist César Rendueles, which I am offering here in an English translation:įoreword –Internet and the Palaces of the People by César Rendueles More details on this and other related events soon.
I will present the book on June 8, 2023, at CCCB, in dialogue with Joana Moll. I am proud to announce the Spanish translation of Stuck on the Platform, translated by Matheus Calderón Torres and published by Bellaterra Edicions in Barcelona.
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