Post #837784

2026-01-27 10:13 UTC

trying to get as much info as possible for this mildly niche and recent topic obsession of mine - pls give me any book recommendations for tech history during and post- eastern bloc.. ideally about diy tech, #piracy, folk culture, #self-hosting collectives and laws &amp; regulations around technology use in countries that were aligned with the soviet union ??

Replies (4)

@tunera@mastodon.design 2026-01-27 10:25

@anmeisel hello! Not directly about tech, but this might be of your interest: a history of Russian and Eastern European zines (the main article is translated into English). Information about the topic was scarce, but it was all gathered together from various interviews and online sources. https://www.monmagan.com/fanzines/pez/pez13/

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@lukasfx@chaos.social 2026-01-27 10:43

@anmeisel there is this exhibition currently in Berlin: https://monoskop.org/EastUnBloc

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@foyglgezang@social.tchncs.de 2026-01-27 10:48

@anmeisel An exhibition running at Berlin nGbK until mid February has this very topic, some documentation is at https://monoskop.org/EastUnBloc - maybe you find something new there. Regarding GDR policy I do not vibe with this study by Barkleit - https://hait.tu-dresden.de/dok/bst/Heft_29_Barkleit.pdf - but it has a nice photo of an 80s DEC CVAX processor engraved with a message in Russian from the MfS archives.

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@brassicaknuckles@mastodon.social 2026-02-04 21:32

@anmeisel Not eastern bloc / soviet union, but I really enjoyed How Music Got Free when I read it some years ago. Pretty specific to music piracy, but interesting as a piece of niche history, also goes into the invention of the MP3 which is pretty neat.

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