http://www.metamute.org

Mute is an online magazine dedicated to exploring culture and politics after the net. Mute combines quarterly issues dedicated to specific topics (Precarious Labour, The Knowledge Commons, etc) with regularly updated articles and reviews.The site also features ongoing coverage of relevant news and events contributed by ourselves and our readers.As well as the online magazine,Mute also publishes a quarterly book (aka Mute Vol. 2) which features selections from current issues together with other online content, specially commissioned and copublished projects, and relevant historical material. Finally, Mute is also an online multi-media resource, with a Public Library where readers can contribute reviews as well as upload media files which flesh out and diversify media history and other of Mute's perennial concerns.

Mute magazine was founded in 1994 to discuss the interrelationship of art and new technologies when the World Wide Web was newborn. But its coverage has expanded to engage with the broader implications of this shift. Mute's investigation of the social, economic, political and cultural formations of ‘network societies' maintains an accent on the relationship between technology and the production of new social relations.At the same time, the magazine's remit has grown broader and now includes analyses of geopolitics, culture and contemporary labour that, while necessarily inflected by contemporary developments in technology, go far beyond this.While Mute was born out of a culture that celebrated the democratising potential of new media, it becomes ever more apparent that we need to critically engage with the ways in which new media also reproduce and extend capitalist social relations. Finally, Mute hopes to stimulate approaches to art and politics that challenge the orthodoxies of both the constituted left and ‘critical' new media culture.

Mute published 'Ceci n'est pas un magazine', a series of mini-manifestoes and progress reports outlining our own plans for a long-term participative publishing model. Part 1 was published in issue 19 (2001), part 2 ('The Magazine that Mistook its Reader for a Hat') in issue 25 (2002/3), and further associated documents have accompanied the recent overhaul of Metamute, all of which are available here. What's documented in these files is one path from traditional top-down publishing (albeit that of small magazine) into the uncharted realms of interactivity. In fits and starts, it portrays Mute's vision of diversification, as we attempt to deal with the promise of new media through the provision of tools, editorial content and peer to peer structures. We now find ourselves a hybrid publication attempting to fuse bottom-up content generation with conventional editorial practices of selection, commissioning and editing.