The Netocracts

History is always written from the perspective of the ruling or rising elite at the time of writing. Concepts like The Stone Age, The Bronze Age, etc. were of course unknown during the stone age and the bronze age. They were invented in the 1800s to make sense of a development that seemed to reach its climax with industrialisation...

The Internet has evolved as a free environment for information interaction under informal but strict technological, programmatic, and organizational control methods. This resulted in a paradoxical situation. The key areas of life of any state, have largely moved to the Internet. At the same time, the Internet, unlike the physical reality, does not recognize the post-Westphalian principles of international law. This book deals with the risks and challenges that ensued from this situation.

In the late 1990’s, Swedish social theorists Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist started working on a radical new theory, since referred to as The Netocracy Hypothesis. At this early stage Bard & Söderqvist foresaw that the control of the internet would be the subject of the main power struggle for the next century.

A book that dares to describe individualism as a religion and paint a reality that is primarily virtual, rather than physical. While the authors don’t mind challenging the reader’s view of the self and the world, their main intention is to induce passive receivers of the future to become more active participants. Engaging observations and perceptive interpretations of contemporary society.

"Wikiworld" explores a revolution in the world of education. The way we learn is changing: institutionalised learning is transforming into new forms of critical learning and open collaboration. This book offers a historical and political framework to think about the future of learning and educational media.The authors provide an overview of the use of new technologies and learning practices, and assess how the changing nature of education can lead to a more socially just future. At the same time, they place their analysis of education within a wider social and economic framework of contemporary capitalism.

When the foundations of society goes through revolutionary changes, caused by new communication technologies, there will be consequences. The old political conflicts and the old political ideologies disappear, replaced by new patterns that initially will be difficult to discern and to interpret...

Throughout his many writings, Michael Novak, one of the leading Catholic social theorists of our times, has urged us to adopt a tripartite system of democratic capitalism including a market economy, a democratic polity, and a moral-cultural system that would nourish the values and virtues on which free societies depend. Three in One introduces the reader to Novak's portrait of democratic capitalism.

The Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. is the most famous and perhaps most nearly perfect example of direct democracy. Covering the period 403-322 B.C., Mogens Herman Hansen focuses on the crucial last thirty years, which coincided with the political career of Demosthenes. Hansen distinguishes between the city's seven political institutions: the Assembly, the nomothetai, the People's Court, the boards of magistrates, the Council of Five Hundred, the Areopagos, and ho boulomenos. He discusses how Athenians conceived liberty both as the ability to participate in the decision-making process and as the right to live without oppression from the state or other citizens. Equality was conceived of as an equality not of nature but of opportunity.

Shiach examines the ways in which labour was experienced and represented between 1890 and 1930. There is a critical tradition in literary and historical studies that sees the impact of modernity on human labour in terms of intensification and alienation. Shiach, however, explores a series of efforts to articulate the relations between labour and selfhood within modernism. Through readings of Sylvia Pankhurst and D. H. Lawrence, Shiach shows how labour underpins the political and textual innovations of the period. This study will be of interest to literary and cultural scholars alike.