Richard Barbrook

University of Westminster · Department of Politics and International Relations

During the late-1990s dotcom boom, experts claimed that the net was a global electronic marketplace where every piece of information would be a commodity. Yet, one of the most striking features of the net is the ubiquity of its hi-tech version of the gift economy. Information is for sharing not for selling. We contribute our time and effort to the...

At the beginning of the 21st century, artificial intelligence remains the dominant ideological manifestation of the promise of computing. The credibility of this imaginary future depends upon forgetting its embarrassing history. Looking back at how earlier versions of the prophecy were repeatedly discredited encourages deep scepticism about its con...

16 commissioned artworks by Alex Veness to accompany text by Richard Barbrook, coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster. In the book: "Imaginary Futures From Thinking Machines to the Global Village". About the book This book is a history of the future. It shows how our contemporary understanding of the Net is s...

Winner of the MEA's 2008 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology.'A compelling, authoritative, and painstakingly documented narrative, Imaginary Futures traces the emergence of the computer era in the context of desperately competing ideologies, economics, and empires. This is a work of passionate and persuasive sc...

In the modern world, our understanding of the present is often shaped by science fiction fantasies about what is to come. Ironically, the most influential of these visions of the future are already decades old. We are already living in the times when they were supposed to have come true. In this article, the author analyses the origins and evolutio...

This paper is included in the First Monday Special Issue #3: Internet banking, e-money, and Internet gift economies, published in December 2005. Special Issue editor Mark A. Fox asked authors to submit additional comments regarding their articles. How has the hi-tech gift economy evolved since 1998, when the paper was written? This article was a pr...

During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarchoc...

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines by Kevin Kelly. London: Fourth Estate, 1994, 666 pages, hb £16.99, pb £8.99.

Selling the Sixties: Pirates and Pop. Music Radio, by Robert Chapman, London: Routlcdge, 1992, 295 pages, pb£12.

On 12 July 1989, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) announced that the Greater London FM licence would go to London Jazz Radio (LJR). This franchise was allocated as part of the expansion of commercial radio in Britain. As in most other countries, the British state owns the electromagnetic spectrum. This allows the government to choose wh...