Richard Barbrook is a senior lecturer in the school of social sciences, humanities and languages at the University of Westminster, London. Among his writings are (with Andy Cameron) The Californian Ideology (1995) and The Class of the New (OpenMute, 2006). His most recent book is Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (Pluto Press, 2007); the book's website is here.

Recent articles

The net embodies the information society long imagined by knowledge elites in east and west, so why is utopia no closer? Richard Barbrook dissects the influence of cold-war-era technological fantasies on the internet age, and looks beyond to a human-centred politics that keeps the future open.

The visions of artificial intelligence and the information society are premised on an ever-arriving, ever-receding future that evades their true origin, argues Richard Barbrook.

The polarity between anarchy and oligarchy deforms Siva Vaidhayanathan’s vision of the future of the net. Beneath the rhetoric, he and Bill Thompson share a belief in the net's democratic potential. But Siva does point to a real danger: that state and commodifying forces will undermine the liberating ‘gift economy' that lies at the heart of the net.