Tuesday, 17 June 2025, time TBC

Secession, Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Wien, Austria

The Rise of the Network Commons: A History of Community Infrastructure

Authored by Armin Medosch.

Edited by Volker Grassmuck & Adam Burns.

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures as PDF, epub and print on demand.

We hope you will join us to celebrate the launch of Armin’s book.

We are working on the details and will update you as we have them.

Technopolitics Group.

The Rise of the Network Commons

The book in your hands is a message in a bottle that has washed ashore ten years after it was sent. Armin Medosch began documenting self-managed local networking initiatives with his book Freie Netze, published in 2004 (German only). He iteratively developed The Rise of the Network Commons in draft chapters published on his website The Next Layer before his untimely death in 2017.

The Rise of the Network Commons is a cultural history of wireless community network projects that spread from their origins in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Copenhagen to Spain, Greece, North and South America, and Africa. The movement drew together a panoply of technical, social, and artistic hackers in the development of new computational and social technologies. Medosch develops a twofold thesis: that involving non-experts in building a network commons has a profound emancipatory effect on the participants, while also contributing to a radical democratisation of technology. In community, we begin to shape future technologies to serve local needs rather than commercial interests. Only growing in relevance since it was written, The Rise of the Network Commons reminds us how we build the data/information/knowledge commons – by becoming sovereign neighbours of practice and expertise.

Armin Medosch (1962–2017) was an Austrian media artist, journalist, curator, theorist, critic, and a pioneer of internet culture in Europe. As art activist, he co-initiated the transformation of the ship MS Stubnitz, a former GDR deep-sea fishing vessel, into a floating art space. He co-edited Telepolis, the first exclusively online magazine published in Germany. In 1998 in London, together with Manu Luksch, Medosch co-curated Art Servers Unlimited – a pioneering conference of initiatives that explored the ‘creative, experimental, non-commercial, socio-cultural, artistic, critical uses of the Net’, including the provisioning of Internet access and bursaries and spaces for working and meeting. He would later contribute several texts to Ambient Information Systems, the 2009 volume that collected the work of Luksch, Mukul Patel and collaborators in the 2000s network culture and activism scene. Medosch was awarded an MA in Interactive Digital Media from the University of Sussex and a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, and continued to publish, teach and research into his last days.

Further Locations and Dates:

Berlin: 31 May 2025, 19:00-20:00 Freifunk Wireless Community Weekend at c-base

London: 13 June 2025, Hermitage Community Moorings, 16 Wapping High Street London E1W 1NG

Linz: Stadtwerkstatt date tbc

Thanks to:

Volker Grassmuck and Adam Burns for initiating the completion of Armin’s publication.

Geert Lovink, Ruben Stoffelen and Katja van Stiphout at Institute of Network Cultures.