“A Theory of Power”
by Jason GodeskySince Jeff’s gone ahead and announced it (with promises of details to follow), I suppose that I, too, can point to the new, wiki-fied “Theory of Power.” This is something that Jeff emailed me about a couple months ago, and I’ve been turning over in my head how to approach it technically ever since. For now, we’re running on MediaWiki–just like Wikipedia or the Cyclopaedia. Probably next weekend (after Anthropikon), I’ll be hacking that up for some special functionality, but it’s enough to make a start.
Jeff wrote this for the about page:
A Theory of Power is an experiment in online media. It has no discrete ownership, authorship, or direction. It is “becoming manifesto”, “becoming rhizome”, in the spirit of Giles Delueze–that is, it is an emergent phenomena, a dynamic, collaborative work that is what it is about. It “is” the constitution of rhizome–both in the sense that it is a work of theory about the structure of rhizome, and in the sense that it is also a synchronistic example of the constitutional nature of rhizome.
He’s also made the book available as a PDF file, and the old, HTML version is still available, too. Of course, you can always buy the book like I did, but whatever avenue you prefer, just make sure you read it. A Theory of Power is a very short read, and yet, an incredible important work. You won’t find many books with better marginal returns than this!
