net critique blog by Geert Lovink
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 [...]
By INC Team, March 23, 2025
In Becoming the Product: The Critical Internet Researcher as a Virtual Intellectual, the evolution of critical internet research takes center stage. By examining the pioneering work of early net critic Geert Lovink and the influencer-style approach of internet theorist Joshua Citarella (@joshuacitarella), as well as the practices of Alex Quicho (@amfq) and Sophie Public (@publig.enemy), [...]
By Aleksy Domke, March 16, 2025
COPIUM A week after I finished writing the first blog posting You Were Farming Rice, Now You’re Farming Clicks, discussing the incoming C-wave and China’s growing influence, Biden signed a law effectively banning TikTok in the U.S. What followed became the biggest clutch of my creative career, securing a seat in the based department just [...]
By Geert Lovink, March 1, 2025
Photographic images and memes seem largely irrelevant regarding their ways of circulation and their relationships with reality, with a contrast between referential and indexical, ambiguous and unambiguous. However, to what extent can memes learn from photography? What about the other way around? Photography, whether digital or analogue, retains its powerful function as a medium for [...]
