Urgent Aphorisms: Notes on Organized Networks for the Connected Multitudes

The topic of ‘organized networks’ still occupies me, ever since I developed this concept around 2005 together with my friend Ned Rossiter. We have written a third text about ‘orgnets’, which I posted on my pages site here. It’s for a SAGE anthology, edited by Mark Deuze. It also ran on nettime. During WinterCamp, early March in Amsterdam, we sat together and then the rest followed smoothly online since then. The WinterCamp event itself was, amongst many things, an exercise in how to organize networks. As an avid fan of the aphorism genre I strongly believe in ‘condensed texts’ and have the naive hope that current manifestations of the short writing, such as on Twitter, social networking sites and on mobile phone will, in a wild dialectical turn, transform into a critical and reflexive txt culture. All my favorite thinkers, from Baudrillard to Adorno, Canetti to Cioran wrote aphorism and we have to keep this genre alive. It’s so tempting to describe Twitter as the latest sign of the Downfall of Civilization. One of the strategies to go against the current is to compose beautiful snippets, not designed for communication.

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