INC Reader #18

⚠︎ Due to an overwhelming number of orders in the first two days of release, free copies of the book are no longer available. The book is now available via print-on-demand, thank you for all the support <3.

This Can’t be the Place: Alternative Theories of the Internet

Edited by August Kaasa Sundgaard & Ruben Stoffelen

What defines this era of the internet? A sense of doom, maybe – technofascism and brutality, a loss of control, an inability to grasp what we’re entangled in. And yet, we attempt to make sense of our precarious positions, to wrap our heads around the place we’ve ended up in. It feels like discourse is always attempting to catch up. There’s an acute desire to untangle the complexities of the contemporary internet, but the deeper you go, the more lost you seem to get. Nothing seems to accelerate more rapidly than the internet, and to write about something that is in constant flux feels contradictory – is writing not an act of crystallization, after all?

This book is a collection of essays that were previously published under the Longform series for the Institute of Network Cultures between the years of 2020-2025. They are formally adventurous, theoretically rigorous, and collectively tracing the shape of an internet that has changed almost beyond recognition in five years.

Editors: August Kaasa Sundgaard & Ruben Stoffelen

Editorial Assistance: Klaudia Orczykowska, Chloë Arkenbout, Tommaso Campagna, Sepp Eckenhaussen, Geert Lovink

Design: Klaudia Orczykowska

Printer: GPS Group

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2026.

ISBN: 9789083672120

Contact: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA)
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

Order a copy or download this publication at: www.networkcultures.org/publication2025.

This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-sa/4.0./

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