Last weekend I went to Edinburgh Radical Book Fair with a friend and had a wonderful time. I was having a crap time before going and being there and seeing so much hope and energy for change made my spirit much better.

It was good to see so many interesting books covering intersectional topics and cutting through so many hard challenges we face as a society.

My favourite section was the anarchism corner I found tucked away with so many delightful little books. My mischievous grin could probably be seen from Glasgow as I browsed them all. In the end I grabbed three books.

I’m very keen on reading them all. I started with After The Internet by Tiziana Terranova and am already in love with it even though I am barelly into the book.

From the back blurb:

The internet is no more. If it still exists, it does so only as a residual technology, still effective in the present but less intelligible as such. After nearly two decades and a couple of financial crises, it has become the almost imperceptible background of today’s Corporate Platform Complex (CPC) — a pervasive planetary technological infrastructure that meshes communication with computation. In the essays collected in this book, Tiziana Terranova bears witness to this monstrous transformation.

After the Internet is neither an apocalyptic lamentation nor a melancholic “rise and fall” story of betrayed great expectations. On the contrary, it looks within the folds of the recent past to unfold the potential futurities that the post-digital computational present still entails.

This page was so good I wanted to highlight it all:

(the internet) It continues to exist, but interstitially, in ways that are almost hardly ever perceptible to those large and powerful entities that have overtaken it. Standards and protocols developed as part of the project of creating the internet as a public and open network still operate, but they are increasingly buried under a thick layer of corporate ones. The internet’s own native subcultures, such as those that formed in the 1980s and 1990s, have gone underground, assembling in the so-called dark web, in IRC chats, in some forums, in pirate file-sharing networks, in websites with no social plugins, in mesh networks and wikis, and maybe also in the chaotic informational milieus of some secure, encrypted, open source messaging apps.

Reaching out with their data-mining tentacles, the new owners of the digital world have, as Marxists might say, subsumed the internet, that is, transmuted, encompassed, incorporated it, but not necessarily beaten or dissolved it. As a subsumed entity, the internet is not so much dead as undead, a ghostly presence haunting the Corporate Platform Complex with the specters of past hopes and potentials. Thus, whereby the CPC displays an increasing concentration of control, the specter of the internet persists as a much more muted, but perceptible aspiration towards an unprecedented distribution of the power to know, understand, coordinate and decide.

Makes me want to dive again into decentralisation technologies and do some good FOSS work.