The Anarchist in the Coffee House: a Brief Consideration of Local Culture, the Free Culture Movement, and Prospects for a Global Public Sphere

The global network-of-networks that President George W. Bush calls “the Internets” represents the first major communicative revolution since the publication in 1962 of Jürgen Habermas’ influential historical work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In that work Habermas describes a moment in the social and political history of Europe in which a rising bourgeoisie was able to gather in salons and cafes to discuss matters of public concern. The public sphere represented a set of sites and conventions in the eighteenth century in which (almost exclusively male) members of the bourgeoisie could forge a third space to mediate between domestic concerns and matters of state. It was a social phenomenon enabled by a communicative revolution: the spread of literacy and the rise of cheap printing in Europe. Habermas asserts that such a space did not exist in Europe in a strong form before the eighteenth century and that by the end of the nineteenth century, it quickly underwent some profound changes. The democratic revolutions in the