Felix Stalder, Digital Culture

Review by Prof. Dr. Benjamin Raue

For Felix Stalder, the “enormous multiplication of cultural possibilities” (p. 10) is an expression of the culture of digitality. He takes his readers on a short journey through time, stringing the various digital, cultural forms of expression onto a string of pearls just under 280 pages long. The shitstorm against a working paper on the “acceptance of sexual diversity” presented by the Ministry of Culture of the state of Baden-Württemberg in 2013 (p. 10) finds its place in the work, as does the study on the political economy of monopolies by Fritz Machlup (p. 24), the limited product-oriented design of Nike flagship stores (p. 63), the price of storage space (in 1980, storing 1 GB of data cost more than $400,000, 30 years later only ten cents, p. 172), but of course also Google (pp. 106, 108, 178, 182, 187, 199, 219, among others), the British Secret Service and the NSA (pp. 213, 233), Conchita Wurst (pp. 7, 99), Gutenberg’s letterpress printing (p. 102), the European digital library Europeana (pp. 106 f.), Wikipedia (pp. 245, 263, among others), Pirate Bay and kino.to (pp. 110 f.), the Communist Manifesto (p. 132), Star Wars (p. 162), CC licences (pp. 261, 264), GNU licences (p. 89, among others), Facebook (pp. 216, 220, 231, 240, among others).

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