Review of The Internet Revolution: From Dot-com Capitalism to Cybernetic Communism (2015)

Text

Andy Cameron (writer), Richard Barbrook (writer).

Read in 2017.

A collection of two essays with a foreword on the collection as a view from the past.

“The Californian Ideology” (first version 1995) treats the hypocritical or naïve blend of hippie and yuppie attitudes in Silicon Valley, and “Cyber-communism: How the Americans Are Superseding Capitalism in Cyberspace” (1999?) treats the Internet as a decentralized carrier of non-commercial academic “shareware” attitudes to the masses for rational economic reasons.

Pretty much the combination of tired Marxist tropes, snark and non-technical vagueness I expected. I read reams of similar stuff to research William Gibson novels for freshman year of university.

text non-fiction series