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.

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures as pdf and print on demand

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