Capitalism's 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 it's 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.
About the Author
Trebor Scholz works both collaboratively and individually as an artist, writer, activist, and organizer. He is the founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (IDC), and is professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the SUNY Buffalo.
Geert Lovink, a Dutch media theorist living in Australia, is author of Dark Fiber, Uncanny Networks and My First Recession. He is a member of the Adilkno collective (Cracking the Movement, The Media Archive) and co-founder of internet projects such as The Digital City, Nettime, Fibreculture and Incommunicado. He is founder and director of the Institute of Network Cultures.
