Up For Grabs

摘要

The imaginary future is invariably a claim to the present by its dominant political and economic class. In the case of Cold War America, there was an urgency to its creation, because although it was outdoing the USSR in all conventional economic and productive indices, the distorted Marxist veneer maintained in Moscow had a stronger rhetorical vision of the future which, in the end, it claimed, would win out: history was on its side. The creation of such an American version of an 'imaginary future', spurred on also by short lived moments when the Soviets were ahead, or appeared to be ahead in certain modernist technologies—the first satellite in space, and then the possibility of a communist cybernetics—is what Richard Barbrook describes in this book. It is an account which exhaustively pulls out the ideological and fetishistic dynamics from under the flim-flam of its promoters, but also describes how the development of the Internet and its world-wide-web has ironically emerged as a tool with liberatory possibilities.