Digital Folklore released online as a free PDF

We are very proud to share the news that “Digital Folkore”, edited by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied and designed by Manuel Bürger, is finally released online as a free PDF via the dat:// protocol! The book is accessible via the P2P browser Beaker. Links and instructions are provided on https://digitalfolklore.org/.

Olia Lialina, professor for New Media at Merz Akademie, comments: “One day there will be Digital Folklore 2 or Digital Folklore Reloaded, but in the meantime we release a PDF of the book. Why on dat://? The original intention of digital folklore research and the book was to praise the amateurs who made computers and the web their own, and created rich vernacular cultures. Ten years later we still believe in user agency, in the power of peers to work, build, and exist outside of centralized services and walled gardens. We see it happening on dat://. So we put the pages of Digital Folklore into your hands, onto your computers. Yours, Olia, Dragan, Manuel and Merz Akademie ”