The Gas Lamp Brought Networked Collective Life

Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1995) argues that one of the most important transformations of networked urban life came with the rise of the gas lamp. The introduction of gas ended the autonomy of oil lamps and candles whereby each household effectively supplied its own energy needs. Gas represented the industrialization of light, transforming households into nodes of a centralized power source, linking the domestic and intimate to larger structures of capital and the state. In this way, Schivelbusch...

 Piracy Preserves Data and Media that Otherwise Wouldn't b...

In Nigeria as elsewhere, piracy creates new kinds of archives inconceivable outside of this mode of media reproduction. In markets specializing in wholesale tape duplication, sellers have sprung up specializing in the storage and preservation of different music forms. These sellers maintain substantial archives of Indian film songs, traditional Hausa singers such as Mamman Shata and Musa ‘Dan Kwairo, and new music forms such as bandiri, a religious music that takes tunes from Hindi films an...