net critique blog by Geert Lovink
By Chloë Arkenbout, November 13, 2020
As they metastasized from the digital periphery to the mainstream, memes have seethed with mutant energy. From now on, any historical event will be haunted by its memetic double — just as any pandemic will have its own infodemic that will recursively act upon it — issuing in the kinds of cross-contamination that Baudrillard already [...]
By Marijn Bril, November 12, 2020
My book Satellite Lifelines: Media, Art, Migration and the Crisis of Hospitality in Divided Cities just launched and can be found online (info below). Hospitality is central to the question of political frontiers where admittance and refusal across state borders may be a matter of life or death, and also touches on the fundamental ethical [...]
By Chloë Arkenbout, November 9, 2020
‘The future was yesterday, when we were inseparable from computers and smartphones, for better or for worse. Even when we would have preferred to do without them, because we knew they could prove to be our worst enemies. The global surveillance scandals of the Internet were just the tip of a icebergs, mass manipulation was [...]
By Chloë Arkenbout, November 2, 2020
When web developer Joel Galvez quit Facebook, he realized he had no accessible overview of events anymore – ‘newsletters and Instagram are just not the same, they give glimpses, but they don’t tell you what you could do this Saturday’. That’s why he started his project Public Data for Public Events (publicdata.events), a simple, low-tech, FLOSS [...]
By Geert Lovink, October 30, 2020
Leiden University Center for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) and the Institute for Science in Society of the Radboud University of Nijmegen welcome all interested persons to a symposium on Bernard Stiegler’s work on 3-4 December 2020. Bernard Stiegler’s unexpected passing away in August 2020 left many things unfinished. His philosophical work, that had started by a [...]
By Chloë Arkenbout, October 30, 2020
On the 9th of November, our friends from the Centre for Digital Inquiry, Warwick’s hub for critical digital research, organize a public talk about their ‘COVID-19 App Store and Data Flow Ecologies’ project. Apps have emerged as a key part of the response to COVID-19 around the world. Initial research and critical assessments of COVID-19 [...]
By Marijn Bril, October 27, 2020
What does it mean to infiltrate the other side of the argument? The Fetish for the Image and the Digital Ethnographer Coming from the field of design, my online feeds and timelines are flooded in aesthetics. Even after carefully picking accounts to follow and pages to like, the aestheticized image keeps on slipping [...]
By Geert Lovink, October 23, 2020
Hello world! My name is Karina Zavidova, I am a designer, an independent researcher and a migrant in the Netherlands. I am currently conducting a survey on the working conditions of non-EU citizens in the Dutch arts & culture sector. My definition of ‘cultural work’ in this survey is intentionally broad. I have been researching [...]
By Eleni Maragkou, October 22, 2020
“Baker’s first extensive translation to English provides us with a much-needed intervention for re-imagining social thought and visual media, at a time when sociology tends to be reduced to an analysis of ‘big data’, and the pedagogical powers of the image are reduced to data visualization and infographics.” From the book’s back cover. Ulus Baker [...]
By Chloë Arkenbout, October 8, 2020
Budapest University of Theatre and Film Arts students have not only occupied their university, they have now redesigned the university completely and started new ways of teaching with their ‘experimental teaching republic’. Earlier this October, nearly 100 students occupied their university after the right-wing national government of prime minister Viktor Orband transferred ownership of the [...]