net critique blog by Geert Lovink
By Tommaso Campagna, May 12, 2025
[Repost, original event page here ] Girl Online 🎀 Symposihmm #1 Performing as a girl online can be a powerful way to subvert the algorithm. And thanks to the whiplash of the girlboss epidemic, a meeker and cute self-image is now taking hold. Trends like girl math, babygirl, and girl dinner reflect a tendency across genders to self-infantilise, a growing resistance [...]
By Sepp Eckenhaussen, May 6, 2025
Reworking the Situationist heritage and applying it to our time, many of the approaches presented here extend beyond the city and physical environments into the virtual dimensions of digital socialities, identifying new forces of power and potential sources of emancipation. At a time when it has become fashionable to celebrate the looming apocalypse as post- [...]
By Klara Debeljak, April 29, 2025
12th of March, 2025 Finished watching the film No Other Land and it’s raining outside. It is a documentary on the destruction of the occupied West Bank villages of Masafer Yatta. The documentary—a collaboration between Palestinian Basel Andra and Israeli Yuval Abraham—was conspicuously awarded an Oscar earlier this year. It depicts the undying strength and perseverance [...]
By Klaudia Orczykowska, April 22, 2025
“I at once grew closer to it and more skeptical of it.”–Mike Pepi I’m trying to make sense of the complex systems that accompany my experience of reality–everyday & everywhere–and I mean two things in particular: internet and my (human) (sub- and conscious) mind. In an age dominated by digital platforms, we find ourselves [...]
By Eke Rebergen, April 15, 2025
The work in the current exhibition ‘We Work Like Peasants While AI is Out There Painting and Writing Poetry’ at POST Nijmegen (NL) is hopeful. The hope is, according to Lieke Wouters’ introduction in the accompanying brochure, that we might all become Luddites. “Ever since the Luddite uprising was put down in 1810s, working people [...]
By Peter Lunenfeld, April 10, 2025
Los Angeles, April 9, 2025 Dear Geert, Writing to friends in Europe to explain what’s going on in the United States in the Spring of 2025 is like taking notes on a mental patient to feed to an AI therapist. One can’t capture everything, and there’s no certainty that any diagnoses will be either forthcoming [...]
By Lina Deng, April 10, 2025
Socialism with hyperreal characteristics. The traditional urban-rural dichotomy is disrupted by a four-decade modernisation speedrun. Custom Doraemon Tesla parked up beside caged chickens. Temporal collapse. Cousin purchases cucumber lays with Weixin’s biometric palm scanning after haggling with elderly farmers for produce by the roadside. IP is rendered obsolete. Chinese aunties sporting Kuromi x Balenciaga pyjamas [...]
By Geert Lovink, March 31, 2025
Casa Della Memoria, Servigliano, Italy, Come Closer, Listen | Vieni Più Vicino, Ascolta, April 12 & 13 @6:30pm – Join the live stream here (but register first): www.movingkinshipeurope.com. A Feminist Fusion of Performance, Participation, and Activism with a relaxed performance & installation on 12 April & a full performance & installation on 13 April. Moving [...]
By August Kaasa Sundgaard, March 25, 2025
Insatiable. Technology had become a sun around which all life orbited, pulling everyone into its gravitational field. The draw towards scrolling became all too strong. While computation was once thought of as something separate, confined to discrete machines and local networks, it had since metastasized into the stack. This totalizing planetary infrastructure stretched from [...]
By Peter Lunenfeld, March 24, 2025
Los Angeles, March 24, 2025 Dear Geert, Greetings from the Formerly United States of America. It’s almost impossible to understand what’s going on day to day here, and to explain it to old friends in Europe harder still, but I’ll try. We are not even ten weeks in, but Trump’s resurgent administration has drawn from [...]
