net critique blog by Geert Lovink
By Silvio Lorusso, April 13, 2020
by Silvio Lorusso and Geert Lovink During these long days, thinking is hard. Coronavirus updates come from every milieu: friends, family, work, governments, finance, the economy at large. None of them can be ignored. Remember, we used to complain about information overload. What about now? Now that we’re uninterruptedly tuned to different sources, from apps, [...]
By Donatella Della Ratta, April 9, 2020
On March 5, 2020, the Italian government ordered a lockdown for all schools. A few days later, now a month ago (feels like ages), on March 9, all Italian cities, and all of us, human beings, were placed on a strict lockdown due to the coronavirus crisis. No more going out, no more walking, no [...]
By Barbara Dubbeldam, April 3, 2020
INC is proud to announce the publication of The Arab Archive, edited by Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle. As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency. The capacities of the [...]
By Geert Lovink, March 25, 2020
It’s early morning and the Italian news is dramatic. The Corona virus hits Northern Italy with a magnitude comparable to China. My mother and my grandmother are there, alone. Confined at home, scared and victims of a wretched television that shows sensationalist news about Corona-virus. Numbers are growing at a rapid pace. Young individuals are [...]
Letters from the Volcano is an experimental zine conceived by Franco “Bifo” Berardi and developed by Mitra Azar, Hugo Sir, and a small group of agitators from the four corners of the world. LAVA emerged from a desire to understand the recent wave of social movements starting in autumn of 2019. These movements involved a [...]
By admin, March 14, 2020
We are reposting this anonymous open letter meant to address Dutch cultural organisations, institutions of education and research, and government bodies. Its goal is to raise concerns regarding freelance and remote work during the COVID-19 emergency. Feel free to circulate, appropriate and adapt this text. Here’s the source: https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/N+YV5BXQdELU0Z2RZLIuwLkH3My2GNNk9SsdwJ51Gd0/ We are freelancers working in schools, [...]
By Miriam Rasch, March 13, 2020
Listen to “Eurozine Podcast Part II: Local journalism in the digital age” on Spreaker. Globalization was supposed to connect people, but instead ended up connecting the powerful. Local news is rapidly disappearing and leaving crucial stories unreported, communities unrepresented and disconnected, a side-effect of digitalization and the ownership concentration in media markets. But local and [...]
By Sepp Eckenhaussen, March 9, 2020
In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be [...]
By Geert Lovink, February 26, 2020
Dear friends, I’d like to share with you the English translation of our position paper Disintossichiamoci–Sapere per il Futuro, published a week ago on the largest academic discussion website in Italy, that quikly exceeded 1000 subscriptions from all areas of the country and from all disciplines. Also some foreign colleagues gave us their valuable support. [...]
By Geert Lovink, February 24, 2020
Europe is Not a Data Grossraum by Pit Schultz (@pitsch) Apart from outdated spatial metaphors, the sectorization of data economies points to the risk of the emergence of monopoly platforms. There is a danger of “natural” sectorwize monopolies, which, thanks to telecommunication-driven 5G infrastructure (EdgeML, IoT), allows vertical integration and the centralization of value chains, [...]
