net critique blog by Geert Lovink
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 INC Team, 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, [...]
By Barbara Dubbeldam, February 21, 2020
Become part of a semi-private, highly exclusive, time-released publishing experiment. Read along while we publish the results of this two-year research project! Be the first to read about our urgent publishing adventures, exclusively available as e-mail. Every week between March and May you will receive a fresh chapter in your mailbox.* Sign up here. * [...]
By Miriam Rasch, February 11, 2020
Last month INC proudly published Sepp Eckenhaussen’s Scenes of Independence: Cultural Ruptures in Zagreb (1991-2019) as the third edition of the Deep Pockets series. It tells the story of ‘independent culture’ in Zagreb in a way that is both theoretical, practical, and personal. Below you can read an excerpt. To get a free download or [...]
By Geert Lovink, January 24, 2020
The Data Prevention Manifesto by the Plumbing Birds The privacy discourse sputtered out of steam. This has lead to the current stalemate: we know we’re observed, traced and tracked, but pretend it’s not happening or nothing to fret about. The question is not when the repressed will return but how? Hackers, have been proclaiming that privacy has been [...]
