Digital productivism: New participatory mass culture

New media art and activist organizations, such as FutureEverything in Manchester, Bootlab in Berlin, and the Waag Society in Amsterdam, sound a strikingly Productivist tone in their avowals to employ digital technology to turn consumers into producers, availing mass participation for social innovation. As such practices seek to reconstruct the public sphere, the question remains whether this access to information and the technological means of its production actually redistribute ownership of knowledge, labour and experience, or whether such projects further institutionalize an ideal bourgeois public sphere by creating a mere semblance of cultural participation.