Bookness in the Arts (for Valiz, written in 2022)

By Geert Lovink, May 17, 2025

(I noticed that I never put this text on my own blog. I wrote it for the twenty years Valiz anniversary publication, Future Books(s), Sharing Ideas on Books and (Art) Publishing, edited by Pia Pol andf Astrid Vorstermans, Amsterdam, June 2023, p. 232-239. Thanks a lot for all the comments of Sepp Eckenhaussen, Silvio Lorusso [...]

Sad by Design – Interview with Geert Lovink by Adam Sudewo

By Geert Lovink, April 5, 2025

(originally posted here) Adam Sudewo: In Sad by Design (2019), you argue that sadness on social media is not accidental but deliberately designed. Can you elaborate on how sadness is embedded in platform design? Geert Lovink: Like always, with the emergence of a strong concept such as ‘sad by design, ‘ sources appeared fist, around [...]

Join the Exodus from WhatsApp to Signal – Interview with Geert Lovink (in Dutch/English)

By Geert Lovink, March 13, 2025

Last week Sija van den Beukel of the University of Amsterdam internal news site (and former print magazine) Folia made a short interview with me about WhatsApp and the growing movement to migrate to Signal. Here is the shortened English version. The original version in Dutch that I edited and extended (but wasn’t published), you [...]

MELENCOLIC MEDLEY by Brigitta Muntendorf and Ensemble Modern with Geert Lovink, now on Vinyl

By Geert Lovink, February 26, 2025

On March 21, 2025, Ensemble Modern and Brigitta Muntendorf release the vinyl album ›MELENCOLIC MEDLEY‹ on Ensemble Modern Media: a post-digital medley based on the musical theatre show ›MELENCOLIA‹, featuring the media theorist Geert Lovink performing his own spoken texts. In 2022, the trans-digital musical theatre show ›MELENCOLIA – a Show against the Indifference of [...]

Join Global Switch Day on February 1st 2025

By Geert Lovink, January 30, 2025

@INC it’s been Global Switch Day every day, ever since we launched the Unlike Us network on social media monopolies and their alternatives, back in 2011 😉 and the related, now famous INC reader from 2013. I hate the ‘I told you so’ attitude but the prehistory of the social media alternatives is an interesting [...]

What’s Social Networking Today?

By Geert Lovink, November 3, 2024

(This is my contribution to From Net, City, World to Cloud, Market, Sea – Metaphors of the Internet, edited by Zentrum für Netzkunst (Tereza Havlíková, Julia Kochanek and Anneliese Ostertag). The book is published by Distanz Verlag in Berlin, more information here). Awareness about the the productive link between metaphors and computer networks goes back [...]

The Missing Free Software in the Principles of Perma-Hybridity

By Giuseppe Aceto, August 25, 2024

Geert Lovink’s Principles of Perma-Hybridity is packed-full with concepts I want to explore to a deeper level despite already resonating with my understanding and experience. However, I felt alternatives to platforms were missing. Self-managed federated social media deserve a mention as a practical and functioning example of reaction to the algorithmic management of technically-mediated human [...]

Principles of Perma-Hybridity

By Geert Lovink, August 24, 2024

(written for the NoSchoolNevers publication The Internet of Dead Things) “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of monsters appear.” Antonio Gramsci “The real power of a neganthropic and anti-anthropic institution comes from its energetic potential, which it [...]

On Twitter, Musk and the Need for European Social Media Sovereignty

By Geert Lovink, August 10, 2024

Interview with Geert Lovink for the German Telepolis Online Magazine by Claudia Wangerin August 7, 2024 (Deutsche Fassung hier) q: First of all, let’s talk about Internet and other addictions. It has been known for centuries that too much alcohol is harmful but many people still get addicted to it. Around 2.6 million people worldwide [...]

Jake Saliger’s Uncomfortable Truth: How Close is ‘Positivity Culture’ to Delusion and Denial?

By Geert Lovink, August 3, 2024

This is a rewrite of Jake Saliger’s blogposting Uncomfortable Truth: How Close is ‘Positivity Culture’ to Delusion and Denial? While many celebrate appropriation as Kulturideal, yet it’s not done to actually alter texts of others. It’s considered plagiarism – and we have machines for that. However, what happens you do this out in the open and [...]