net critique blog by Geert Lovink
By Morgane Billuart, September 16, 2021
Passive income. Not to dream of labor. Retiring at 30. Drop-shipping. E-commerce. Digital products. You’ve probably already heard of these words, terms, life goals. They have been referred to quite a lot over the past years, marketed as one of the many fast and concrete strategies to generate money and expand your wealth. To me, [...]
By Geert Lovink, July 27, 2021
I click on a weblink that prompts me to join a room. The room is dark and drenched in a purple hue: blue and red hexagonal tiles rotate along the perimeter. Large text reads “WELCOME TO THE WWWUNDERKAMMER.” Up ahead is a massive VR headset with portals in the place of apps revealing a map [...]
By Agnieszka Wodzińska, July 19, 2021
Theory on Demand #41 Pandemic Exchange How Artists Experience the COVID-19 Crisis Edited by Josephine Bosma News reports on the Covid-19 pandemic seldom include how the virus and the societal lockdowns affect artists. A lively circuit of cultural events, meetings, and exhibitions has come to an almost complete stop, leaving artists often not just with [...]
By Klara Debeljak, July 13, 2021
During the first lockdown in March 2020, my whole family freaked out. We thought it was the end of the world. My brother traveled home to Europe from California where he was studying and for the first days, he wore a mask that I had never seen before. It was shaped like a bird’s beak, [...]
By Geert Lovink, July 1, 2021
In this blog series I explore a burgeoning intimate surveillance culture in neighbourhoods across the world. At the core of this research is a flourishing network of surveillance technologies produced by Silicon Valley and perfectly tailored to a vigilant and paranoid home-owner. This matters. Because being watched by the state is one thing, but being [...]
By Geert Lovink, June 29, 2021
Thinking about the current state of platforms, I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s articulation of capitalist realism, the idea that we don’t imagine or build alternatives to capitalism because we can no longer envision a world without it. Big tech, in a few short years, has managed to instill within the public a similar state of [...]
By Geert Lovink, June 24, 2021
Graag nodigen we je uit voor het symposium CODE NL-D, over het terugwinnen van onze digital agency: https://impakt.nl/code-nld/ Het symposium vindt online plaats deze zaterdag middag 26 juni 2021 van 14:00 – 17:30 uur. Connected Digital Europe (CODE) NL-D is een samenwerking tussen IMPAKT [Centrum voor Mediacultuur], (NL) en School of Machines, Making & Make-believe [...]
By Maurice Dharampal, June 17, 2021
In early May 2021, the internet lost a controversial yet vital part of its history. Seemingly out of the blue, video hosting platform LiveLeak shut down. It was a staple website for gore content, especially among millennials or other early internet users, and for its information transparency and unrestricted censorship to citizen journalists, whistleblowers and [...]
By Geert Lovink, June 14, 2021
Initiated by Ellen Rutten at University of Amsterdam and colleagues from Italy and Germany I contributed to the open letter below, signed by Olga Tokarczuk, Judith Butler, Boris Groys, Saskia Sassen, Eva Illouz, Slavoj Zizek and many others: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/open-letter-we-need-new-university-eastern-europe. – With the climate of repression reaching fever pitch in Belarus and Russia, European institutions need [...]
Instagram’s Like Hiding Saga is a PR Stunt: What Facebook’s Darling Hopes You’ll Forget About Social Media Metrics By Ben Grosser In the spring of 2019 Instagram announced to the world that it was going to test the hiding of visible “like” counts within its interface. In the words of Instagram Head Adam Mosseri, he [...]
