This text riffs on the theme of revolutions thereby referring less to the political act of one class wrestling power from another one but rather to cycical motions caused by the interplay of industrial, scientific, cultural and political motive forces. This approach challenges the prevailing viewpoint according to which class struggle has been replaced by media technologies as the subject of history in technologically advanced free-market democracies. Instead, it tries to develop a more complex understanding of the forces that shape history by working out the dialectical relationship between technological rationality as a means of power and domination and as a means of human emancipation at the same time.

The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge, by Francois Lyotard, first published in French in 1979, was not the first book to carry the word postmodern in its title, but probably one of the most influential ones in the long term, with both its warnings and sometimes its overly optimistic assumptions about the future of knowledge in a computerised society. Reading it now what is perplexing is the rather one-sided reception it has got. While Lyotard's critique of meta-narratives and the proposed switch to language games has characterised the postmodern debate, his ambiguity about the development of science and the university under the condition of neoliberalism appears to have been given much less consideration by his followers.

Die sogenannte Heidelberger Erklärung und die Kampagne namhafter deutschsprachiger Medien gegen Open Access und Google Books verrät nicht nur ihre Arroganz und Borniertheit gegenüber neuen Formen der Produktion und Dissemination von Kultur und Wissen, sondern offenbart auch anti-liberale, autoritäre Züge - die bürgerlichen Medien haben ihre liberalen Wurzeln wohl vergessen oder verdrängt. Die "intellektuelle Finsternis", die von FAZ und Die Zeit auf Grund der "unheimlichen Kräfte" des Internet befürchtet wird, ist bereits da und von ihnen selbst mitverschuldet. Was jedoch wirklich gebraucht wird, anstatt drakonischer Urteile und Netzsperren, sind neue Wege der Vergütung kultureller Produktion, die an den etablierten, im Niedergang befindlichen Instanzen vorbei gehen.