Reviews

Posthuman studios has always been confident in how they sell their books: they licensed Eclipse Phase with Creative Commons, meaning that the files are free to legally share with others. You get everything free, and they hope that it turns into you buying their books. It’s a tactic used by some other book publishers that are convinced that the problem today is not to get buying customers, it’s to find customers in the first place. In role-playing games the challenge is still to stand out from the shadow of Dungeons & Dragons. Even if your game is not about killing orcs and stealing their stuff, you still have to convince people that whatever you’re offering is preferable to that. Giving away your books and then hoping that the people playing the game also want to buy them is a possible approach, one that seems to be working for Eclipse Phase, which is now in its second edition. ...

I attempt to review Revolution in the Age of Social Media (2014) and Twitter and Tear Gas (2017) side-by-side. When the Egyptian revolution of 2011 happened, it was – among with a few other revolutions – framed as a “Twitter revolution” or a “Facebook uprising.” Especially Western media focused on the role of technology in these revolutions, conveying the narrative of new technology ousting old autocrats and ushering in democracy. Critics like Evgeny Morozov soon countered, pointing out the obvious simplicity of this explanation. Terms like “slacktivism” or “clicktivism” were coined to explain the new forms of digital resistance, showing its supposed futility. ...