Manu Luksch

@manuluksch.com

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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.