Theory/Philosophy

From the publisher: This book takes an inventory of the art of collaborative practice, surveys the landscape of new, cooperation-enhancing technologies, and renders the inner workings of cooperative processes as a new model for social movements. Civic participation is on the decline, but, online, more people work together than ever before. Activists contribute citizen journalism. New media artists create social online tools and urge others to participate. Knowledge collectives gather information in large, open repositories. Free culture — with all its file-sharing applications — is blossoming. Contributors Howard Rheingold, Christoph Spehr, Brian Holmes, Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz link the debates about web-based, cooperation-enhancing technologies to the broader world of political activism.

A Thousand Plateaus is the seminal collaborative project between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two of the most innovative and radical thinkers from modern France. It's hard for me to properly describe this book, because working with and through it is a personal labor of love. I have never encountered a nonfiction text, a work of philosophy (more or less) so wide-ranging, touching upon so many aspects of life, thought, experience and the world. Their goal you might say is to replace the model of organization we might say dominates structures in the West, a hierarchical structure based upon binary oppositions. They want to replace it with a model they call rhizomatic. A "rhizome" in their use is a manner of attachment, bridging heterogeneous things around a shared act of creation or construction.