Farewell Lecture of Geert Lovink, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), September 3, 2026
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The stagnation of the platform has brought us back to the military origin of the internet. Innocent data extractivism has been pushed aside by former libertarian tech bros who side with Trump, ICE, and the US military. In the meantime, what happens when mindless and distracted users remain stuck, with no end in sight? The destruction of attention starts to hurt, with platforms turning into structural violence.
In the early days, the internet’s power was still situated inside social networks, better known as communities. Websites were homepages, shops, or squares, not integral facilitators. In the late 1990s, the term ‘e-commerce’ already meant it could facilitate your trade, not just sell my own stuff. After the dotcom crash, the emphasis shifted from access and participation to revenue. A decade later, all the protocol struggles around decentralization were lost. The platform had subsumed the internet and transformed it into a centralized meta-market aimed at optimizing the extraction of centralized data flows.
Digital platforms allow different hardware and software to interact via communication protocols to facilitate an infinite number of users. This cost-free, infinite scalability enables hyper-growth in a short time. When ‘plaformization’ is fueled by venture capital, a monopoly status can be reached almost overnight, causing a lock-in effect for users. Competition isn’t between platforms; it happens on the platform itself. The ‘smooth’ and frictionless experience starts to cause dependency, anxiety, and depression. From here on, there’s no way to escape the avalanche of fake news and slop. Am I bored and losing direction in life? Or am I just optimizing lost time? What happens when ‘change’ gets stalled and flips into regression? On the menu today are dog-piling, flaming, and doxing as entries; a rug-pull, a bank-app scan, or a ransomware attack as the main course; and a classic virus as dessert.
Despite the urgency of the Platform Question, we cannot address the problem head-on. Until recently, invisible platform facilitators appeared as pure ideology. Not only did leading players quickly become too large to handle for local players, but platforms turned out to dissolve into thin air, hiding inside a technical stack, becoming an ecology, a non-accountable sphere, much like the air we breathe and do not notice. Both users and experts find it hard to explain where platforms begin and end. As politicians are unwilling and incapable of breaking up Big Tech, the internal hyper-growth mechanism keeps generating new market behemoths. The platform condition is classified as intolerable, unlivable, incurable, and unbearable. There’s disgust, translating into a disdain for the topic itself. A cynical reason emerges: everyone agrees on the power of the platform, yet no one’s willing to leave.
The platform exists to do what it does. They do not shine, to put it into the words of the late Dutch architecture theorist Maurice Nio. No higher goal or problem needs resolving. Once you’ve created a profile and clicked on something, the endless scroll takes over. From the moment you’ve signed up, the platform presents itself as a self-evident totality, a service that was, is, and will always be—ready to lure you into transactions. Now that you’re part of the flow, any attention hook can pull you away. You no longer have the tiring obligation to build a social network. Just start swiping, and the suggestions will appear automatically. As the chat goes on forever and the flirtation goes nowhere, kids need to be picked up. A friend is in trouble at work; he apps; parents call; a package wasn’t delivered; neighbors weren’t home. The train got delayed, the Uber was late, and the café wasn’t open. Should I bring the Parmigiano? I text. Life was way more complex in the past. Or the opposite? I get confused, distracted, and I can’t think about it right now.
Platform dependency is such that there’s literally nowhere else to go. Why haven’t you moved from Instagram in the same way as you once left MySpace or Tumblr? It’s unthinkable to delete WhatsApp, ignore YouTube, and forget one’s Google password. That’s platform power. Instead of legalistic regulatory impulses or ‘European’ offline romanticism, I propose dropping the platform altogether, reclaiming the speculative media imagination: build new communities and focus on the tasks ahead. Why and what to communicate? Instead of dreaming of digital totalities, start using the media you’ve created as tools, not as environments that cannot be turned off.
In my latest book, Platform Brutality (Valiz. 2025), I describe the latest stage: the violent turn in internet culture. The inconvenient thesis is that instead of being portrayed as a machine of endless facilitation, the internet has hit a historic wall and, in response, reacts with its inner destructive energy. As planetary machines in a murderously frenzied state, platforms are at full capacity for mobilizing resources. Loaded with potentiality, the platform used to present itself as a never-ending thin layer on which the techno-social acts itself out. But this image can no longer be maintained. As a vast plain lacking depth, it facilitates a never-ending one-dimensional trip that is impossible to quit. For us, lost subjects endlessly toiling inside this limited universe, digital reason struggles to explain the matter.
“What do you want: implosion or explosion?” as the Dude asks in a meme. Italian theorist Franco Berardi calls the next brutalist stage a “chaotic war of all against all,” driven by dementia and “the automation of linguistic behavior, existential paths and expectations. Chaos and the automaton develop and grow in a violent symbiotic relationship.” When the liberal data grab in the background hampers, structural violence hits the surface. Platform brutality ultimately turns into real violence. In a recent case study, I used Elon Musk’s DOGE department to discuss mass deletion as an example of platform brutality. Deletion is a form of abstract violence, committed from a distance. The public gesture of canceling individuals or attacking individuals and groups is often only stage one in a process leading up to eradication. Deletion is the technical manifestation of a cold act, not just a moral condemnation.
Along the lines of Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1969), technological violence DOGE-style can also be interpreted as a sign that Silicon Valley’s power is waning. As Arendt writes: “Power and violence are opposites. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy. Violence can destroy power; it’s incapable of creating it.” Following her argument, we could say that violence is not a display of tech power but arises from its moment of impotence. Big Tech hegemony evaporates when soft power no longer works. We see platforms moving beyond optimization and openly committing to forms of structural violence. The Trump-Musk DOGE saga showed that the Californian Ideology, once defined by Barbrook and Cameron—and uncontested for three decades—has lost its hegemony and is showing its brutal side. DOGE and Palantir stand for the transition to Californian Violence. “We delete you” will be the next battle cry in the years to come.
Platform dependency is such that there’s literally nowhere else to go. Why haven’t ou moved from Instagram in the same way as you once left MySpace or Tumblr? It’s unthinkable to delete WhatsApp, ignore YouTube, and forget one’s Google password. That’s platform power. Instead of legalistic regulatory impulses or ‘European’ offline romanticism, I propose dropping the platform altogether, reclaiming the speculative media imagination: build new communities and focus on the tasks ahead. Why and what to communicate? Instead of dreaming of digital totalities, start using the media you’ve created as tools, not as environments that cannot be turned off.
This is the moment to turn our attention to alternative strategies that, let’s be honest, have remained marginal over the past decade. Big Tech criticism and the work on tech alternatives have not been rewarded, neither by the public nor by research grants, let alone policy. We’re still stuck on the platform. Exodus can only be a distant dream. We’ll try it here, nonetheless. What comes next after we break away from the platform logic? As there’s an urgent need to act and coordinate social movements, I will skip the critique of offline romanticism here and point you to my upcoming interview with Carolyn Strauss, the editor of the Valiz Slow Technology Reader. Instead, I want to argue in defense of media.
I made a slide in 2017 while teaching at the European Graduate School with three key concepts: Media Network Platform. In both daily life and scholarly language, the terms media, network and platform have become interchangeable. Is this what was once meant by the term convergence? Whereas television, newspapers, and smartphones were easily identifiable as distinct material carriers with their own hardware, protocols, delivery systems, and content, social media blurs media boundaries into one fuzzy online experience. To summarize it in one sentence: we share media on platforms through networks. Each of these three concepts has been a grande idée that burst into everyday language in a particular era. While the 1980s were the golden era of media, and networks dominated the nineties and the noughties, we’re now well into the platform age. Ever since Trump, we’re aware of just how easy it is for one-liners on X to become headline news, after which they enter ‘mainstream media’ and then turn into government policy, all in a matter of hours.
The world we’re living in is accelerating and disorienting. The effect of this on society is regression and stagnation (culminating in the current techno-feudalism debate). In my own biography, I have gone from speculative and tactical media via email list communities such as nettime, syndicate, and fibreculture to the critique of platform capitalism and our search for alternatives. However, I do not see this as a chronological progression. Essentially, media, networks, and platforms are large-scale infrastructural, techno-social configurations. Instead of historizing, we should mobilize the collective imagination and rearrange the dynamics between the three.
In Stuck on the Platform (Valiz, 2022), I discussed a fourth concept that can be seen as a Hegelian synthesizing force, an expression of totality: the stack. This overall concept that presents itself as layers or a system of related entities (depending on the visualization) brings it all together, from the users and the content they produce to the 5G towers, fiber-optic cables, and data centers. The element I added here is our activism, of designers, hackers, artists and critics: the stacktivism (exemplified by Waag’s public stack proposal). It is from the angle of stacktivism that I propose to unfold a renaissance of ‘new’ media. While platform power will remain strong, decentralized networks are an element of a distant past, and the Media Question is an intriguing one to return to. Media have definite ‘container’ quality and do not just beg to be filled with content. There is a freedom to design that platforms lack. Media can take infinite forms. Media embody both power and counter-power. Media lack the stack’s claim to totality, with all its layers. While infrastructure is static and solid, media have to remain fluid. The messenger can get lost. Even when media broadcast propaganda, the message may get lost. There’s always distortion on the line.
While networks can be reduced to technical infrastructure on the one hand and informal exchanges between users on the other, media are multi-faceted content and delivery systems. Against the wave of nihilist slop, it is time to launch a renaissance of the media imaginary as part of a larger refusal of Big Tech. With so much tech, why aren’t there any ‘new’ media today? The answer may be that resistance, refusal, and the resulting futility are the road less traveled.
Interactive multimedia died over a decade ago. With the omnipresence of the digital, the importance of ‘media’ declined. The Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk is no longer the ideal. New forms will have to stay away from grand claims and will avoid power. You can, but you won’t. Take my own Werdegang: going from alternative and sovereign to tactical and streaming media, all these minor media practices lost significance in the face of platform power. Nothing can scale that fast, reach that many, or make users so dependent in such a short time as digital platforms. Thinking, again, about media, we’re entering an ever-changing process of metamorphosis. Essential forms of aesthetics may have to survive in the Dark Forest.
Over two decades, the once-decentralized internet of communities that used mailing lists, Usenet groups, forums, chatrooms, personal homepages, and blogs has been reduced to a handful of corporate apps dominated by short videos. As networks gave way to platforms, the status of media as a concept began to waver. Now that traditional news media, both public and private, have also become dependent on Silicon Valley infrastructure and lost their monopoly on content—and authority- the idea of media itself has lost its authority. Already in 2012 I asked, “What’s the social in the social media?” These days, socials are equal to algorithms and doomscrolling. The possibility that the techno-social realm can be reclaimed and designed for the online billions seems all but distant.
Next. Are “social media” media in the first place? If we see the internet as the medium to end all media, we understand why there is so much sentiment of the End. If there are no longer publishers, editors, journalists, authors, or directors, and only content creators who are subjected to abstract, invisible algorithms and filters, then why did the label, media become accepted so easily in the case of corporate social networks? Why wasn’t it enough to stick to social networks as they were called in the early days? Whose dream is ‘one world, one platform’? For me, Bernard Stiegler’s call for antidotes to the devastating endgame of entropy is still a powerful counter-force.
It’s urgent to reclaim the speculative media concept and snatch it back from Big Tech. That way, the distinction between mainstream and independent or alternative could become meaningful again. The emphasis on the public nature of “the media” is well-intentioned, but it needs more room for experimentation. In the 1990s, Canadian media theorist Arthur Kroker noted that ‘media’ slowed down and was no longer an accurate term to describe digitization paired with fiber optics: communication at the speed of light. Media mediate. They slow it down, filter it, and amplify it. Take Sara Gelao’s concept of esoteric media that carries communication to the inner realm, away from the compromised public realm, and diverts exchanges into the inside, called Dark Forest by others, in preparation for a better future ahead. Whether the inner tech can remain secretive will have to be examined. What other media do you envision that defy the platform and AI logic? How can we envision dark knowledge a la Wim Nijenhuis in this overexposed field? Dutch architecture theory, again, may show us the way.
In light of a yet-to-be-developed philosophy of technology, the premise here is not just to study but to overcome the current setbacks, slop, regression, and stagnation. Many are already suspicious of the dominant tech platforms, yet unable to break their addictive habits.
What does it mean when we state that media are a constellation, rather than a historical phase in the development of hardware and software? The urge to historize may be part of the hype cycles of those who heavily invested in AI and infrastructure. In defense of lost causes. We can add media, and, surprisingly, also the internet, to that list. However, we have yet to uncover its valuable core. It starts with the growing consensus that the platform is the right step in the wrong direction. With Žižek, writing in his In Defense of Lost Causes, we can say that a return to decentralized alternative media is needed (perhaps not even the internet, with its military Cold War origin). In this case, that would mean moving away from automated convenience and subliminal habits in favor of do-it-yourself IT. Tech as a tool, not as an invisible, always-on environment. It will be liberating to put away the communication tools after we used them. How much one wants to be disrupted is a discussion for later.
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Words of thanks. Without the call Emilie Randoe made to me, living in Sydney at the time, in 2002, there would not have been an INC. I would like to thank the board of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences for the trust they have given to me and our Institute over all these years, and the dean of the faculty, in particular the former dean and chairman of the board Geleyn Meijer who made it possible, in the difficult period around 2012, for me to become employed fulltime. I would like to thank all staff members, interns and volunteers, of all three generations for the wonderful time we had together, and the amazing work we achieved. In particular I want mention here Ned Rossiter, now with us online, visiting a conference in Seoul. My dearest partner Linda, visiting Australian family and who’s up driving up north from Perth and tonight in Geraldton. There’s our sound designer son Kazimir, who’s here with us today. I am very much looking forward to work with the fourth generation, who are also with us today here, who will shape the next stage of INC as an NGO/cultural organization in the coming years.
First generation member Sabine Niederer, instigator Emilie Randoe, Geert Lovink, second generation member Patricia de Vries, third generation member Sepp Eckenhaussen.