net critique blog by Geert Lovink
By Agnieszka Wodzińska, January 21, 2021
Among many online subcultures and communities, there is an online space which rejects Internet-era aesthetics in exchange for the soft glow and calm reminiscent of romantic paintings. Rustic picnics, flowing garments, embroidery tutorials and tours of cosy homes await on the cottagecore tag on TikTok, the uber-popular social media app that lets users edit, share, [...]
By Eleni Maragkou, January 11, 2021
In the aftermath of the chaotic coup-that-wasn’t incited by a Brady Bunch of QAnon conspiracists, Proud Boys, and everyday American Trumpists on January 6, 2021, their newfound home, alternative (read: white supremacist-friendly) social platform Parler is in trouble. Amazon has dropped the controversial platform from its AWS hosting service starting Sunday night, January 10. Apple [...]
By Chloë Arkenbout, December 15, 2020
Lives of Data maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This [...]
By Geert Lovink, December 12, 2020
https://impakt.nl/events/2021/presentation/disrupt-reflect/ Disrupt & Reflect: Launch web-project with Geert Lovink 4 February 2021, 19:30 — 21:00 CET The online event is free, register through the ticket link. You are invited for an evening of stress and relaxation: the launch of our newest web-project Disrupt & Reflect, with a live presentation and Q&A with theorist, activist and [...]
By Eleni Maragkou, December 8, 2020
Here’s a conversation starter: “What do you do?” “I research conspiracy theories.” This response is usually met with varied forms of excitement and curiosity: “Oh, sick, I love conspiracy theories!”, “Like what, 9/11? You know, I think it was an inside job”, “You know, I think this corona stuff is made up by [insert global [...]
By Chloë Arkenbout, December 1, 2020
Bernard Stiegler’s unexpected passing away in August 2020 left many things unfinished. His philosophical work, that had started by a seminal theory of technics as memory and evolved towards an interrogation of the automatic society, now examined from the perspective of anthropic and neganthropic tendencies of the world marked by pervasive AI, ultraliberalism and climate [...]
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 [...]
