Yan Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Media, Tongji University, Shanghai, China. His research focuses on media archaeology and digital culture. According to Zhang, in China, media and communication studies have historically developed from the tradition of journalism studies. He wrote to me: “Many university departments were originally centered on journalism and mass communication. Over the past decade, however, Chinese media scholarship has undergone a significant theoretical transformation. With the growing influence of German media theory, scholars have increasingly turned their attention toward media materiality, technological infrastructures, and the technical conditions of media and communication. This transformation is often understood in China as part of a broader “materialist turn” in media studies. Since 2021, Tongji University has maintained an active academic exchange with Siegfried Zielinski, organizing several public lectures, dialogues, and academic events. As I am currently conducting research on media archaeology, I have been particularly interested in your early engagement with German media theory, including your writings on media archaeology and your essay Whereabouts of German Media Theory in Zero Comments.”
Yan Zhang: To begin, I’d like to talk about German media theory, which has become one of the most widely discussed areas of media research in China in recent years. You were already engaging with this body of thought early, whereas its broader reception in China came many decades later. What first drew your attention to German media theory? Was there something about the intellectual climate at the time that made these debates particularly compelling to you?
Geert Lovink: From age 13 there was an elective affinity between me and the German language. I decided not to get intimidated by the grammar and the long sentences. I loved its poetic sound. The Dutch language is rather raw, like a farmer’s dialect. Things were obviously complicated because of German fascism and World War II, but in the 1970s this was addressed head-on, not at all ignored or brushed aside. At the time, English was not yet dominant, except in pop culture. I had to learn French too. At home, we spoke many languages, like Italian and Russian. Soon I felt close to the Germans of my generation and made West German friends in the neighboring Ruhrgebiet. The way in were also the Fassbinder films. When I started my studies in political science, I read a lot of German literature, political literature, and philosophy. The defining title was Martin Jay’s history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination. I was touched by their power to come together to create an institute dedicated to critical theory. They had the confidence to rebuild Marxism, away from Stalinism, in an undogmatic and often personal way until that dramatic year, 1933, followed by exile, until their return to West Germany in 1949. For me, as an anarchist, their approach was fearless (tough, slightly conservative). It showed me that it was possible to build an intellectual school. At the time, we worked on alternative media and the role of self-organised publishing houses, free radio stations and distribution methods, all linked to the squatters, anti-nuclear and feminist movements. With a group, we ran a squatters’ weekly newspaper called bluf! in 1982-83, which was intense; soon after, I wanted to utilise these experiences to build a structure for radical (media) theory, which started with the Adilkno collective, the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge (1983-1999).
I was one of the last to study mass psychology, a predecessor of today’s communication science, at the Kurt Baschwitz Institute. Look him up; Baschwitz is a German exile. Through this, I came closer to Freud. Just before I graduated, I read Klaus Theweleit’s Male Phantasies, from Freiburg, also the town of Friedrich Kittler. Their work is similar in terms of style and topic. They were the same age, from the same scene. This is how I made a natural move from housing struggles and Marxism/anarchism to debates in the humanities. While it may have felt like a liberation from sectarian dogmatism at the time, I remained politically active. I experienced the exploration of humanities-based German media theory as a true dissident intellectual adventure, and it remains so today. At the time, it already diverged from the uncritical persuasion-marketing logic of communication science and dull literary analysis.
I encountered Kittler’s books in West-Berlin, where I lived, on and off, for longer periods, in a squat. In 1986 I hitchhiked to one of their conferences in Kassel where I heard their speeches and got to know this circle of theorists in person. This is why I nicknamed them the Kassel School–very Lacanian, at the time. Not much later I started to review their anthologies, in English, for the Amsterdam-based media art magazine Mediamatic. Soon my institute INC will publish them all, in a digital publication called The MediamaticYears. It opens with my 1989 review of Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900, and Film Grammophon Typewriter. Mediamatic was a video art magazine, not at all academic, but also no longer ideologically tied to social movements. Instead, it asked the ‘new media’ question.
What drew me to the Kassel School was their unusual mixture of theory and poetry. The Kittler-style topics were straight-out materialist: media determine the situation. That’s the famous opening sentence everyone knows. It is about war as the driver of technologies, a topic that is again super relevant if you think about the role of drones and AI in the war in Ukraine and the role artists and designers are playing in drone innovation. However, one has to accept that West German hermeneutics is historical in nature; it is linguistics and philology driven by 19th-century authors and debates. Deal with it. First, read up on Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan (I would also add Heidegger and Jünger). Next, bring this into the 20th-century media scape of early film, poetry, and radio to understand why certain poetry talks like a machine gun. Lines of a poem are code, and vice versa.
YZ: In My First Recession, you identify some key figures associated with media archaeology. Some of the names seem unexpected from a Chinese academic perspective. N. Katherine Hayles, for instance, is more commonly regarded in China as a theorist of posthumanism, while Paul Virilio tends to be situated within the broader tradition of French theory. What led you to place figures such as Hayles and Virilio within the constellation of media archaeology? Do you see them as having been directly influenced by German media theory?
GL: It doesn’t work quite like that. Let’s not think in boxes about who’s influencing whom. Virilio is from a previous generation. Take his War and Cinema and his defining Speed and Politics. His topic is media, technology and war, just like Kittler. Readers are free to compare. There’s my German transcription for nettime of their encounter on ARTE television in 1995 called The Information Bomb, later translated into English for Angelaki by John Armitrage.[1] Same with Hayles. Some of her work is historical, dealing with cybernetics, from a philosophical background. That will do. In whose interest is it to police the borders of media archaeology?
Zielinski started as a film historian but is obviously a media archaeologist. Take the Derrida-trained Avital Ronell and her 1991 Telephone Book. Will this wild thinker pass the Foucault test? Not a relevant question. This book is about Heidegger taking a call in 1933. One does not call; you’re called. This classic in media theory is such a rewarding read. Most media theory is historical. Mine is not; neither is Alex Galloway’s, nor is Wendy Chun’s. Next, giving literature a firm materialistic grounding is a task in itself. To me, a more interesting question is whether they are in dialogue with Canadian media theory, in the line of Grant, Innis, McLuhan, Kroker. That’s where I situate Chun. These days female contributors are key.
Think of Vera Tollmann, Annekathrin Kohout and Anna-Verena Nosthoff. I’ve interviewed all three in English, if you’re interested. Mind you, Nosthoff deals with cybernetic history and brings in Günther Anders, whose work is, again, most relevant today. See it as a discursive network that each of us travels through in our very own way. It’s an amazing intellectual journey I can recommend to all, even if you do not want to touch any European or North American thinker. Fine. Look at the way Yuk Hui from Hong Kong carves out his own way. Yuk and I met through Bernard Stiegler in 2013, yet another Derrida philosopher of technology.
YZ: In Zero Comments, you noted that several of Friedrich Kittler’s books deserved to be translated. In China, however, only a small portion of his work has been translated, including Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and The Night of Substance. Which of Kittler’s other works would you consider particularly important today?
GL: I respect the importance of translation into Mandarin and understand how hard it is. The books discussed here are not an easy read in their original language. However, translation can also be a power play in the hands of a few that, in a vast country like China, will define what’s to read—and how. The politics of who introduced which thinker, translated which work is boring institutional politics—very Japanese, by the way. In academic discourse, real cultural differences exist, with noise on the line, but also the dull interests of gatekeepers. Let’s not forget, this is also the case in the Anglo-Saxon world and its journal cult. Monographs have become less important over the past decades, worldwide. This is even the case with Kittler. Look at this phenomenal Monoskop bibliography. What you will note are the countless shorter essays, lectures, interviews in magazines, radio and TV, co-written pieces and interpretations of his work worldwide. What immediately comes to mind is a Chinese-language Kittler Reader. Is Dracula’s Vermächtnis from 1993 already translated? I would start with that one. Keep in mind, his late work, Music and Mathematics I and II, have not yet been translated, not even in English. You want to make a career with Kittler? Start with those.
YZ: Among Chinese scholars, German media theory is often understood as a decisive break with humanistic hermeneutics—as an approach oriented toward technical systems and engineering. In your own writing, however, you seem to see considerable critical potential in the German media-theoretical tradition, particularly in the work of Kittler. Where, in your view, does the critical potential of German media studies lie?
GL: Obviously inside the triangle literature-media-war. This is both historical and methodological, I have to say, because it’s not quite the right term. It’s a way of looking, a pair of glasses. One could also call it a source of inspiration. Think of drones that are flying cameras but also bombs, operated by AI, developed in Ukraine by artists, geeks and designers.
What’s more Kittler than that? His work can so easily be updated, put in another genre, maybe even a century from now. Look at his own light approach in this. UNIX and C were equally important languages to express. Pink Floyd is a serious object of study, but so were D’Annunzio and Ceausescu.
YZ: In Zero Comments, you also make an intriguing distinction between media theory and media philosophy. Could you elaborate on the methodological difference between the two? This distinction is particularly interesting from a Chinese perspective. Institutionally, media and communication departments in China are still largely dominated by the tradition of mass communication research. Media philosophy consequently occupies a relatively marginal position and has had difficulty establishing an institutional space of its own.
GL: I am not interested in institutional games. I was never good at it. Of course we all hope that the established disciplines take media and philosophy more seriously. Are people doing relevant work that stands out, breaks down barriers, comes with new points of view? That should be the question. Obviously, theory is freer, regardless of what authorities think. But where do you find such pockets of freedom? Inside literature? If one situates media and technology within traditional disciplines, such as philosophy or the social sciences, these studies first have to position themselves within them. What’s your method? How do you define aesthetics? What’s the social? Being inside is always the safer option. Will media studies still exist in a few decades, or will it all merge into one? Becoming massively influential, with billions of users, obviously doesn’t mean anything for the sense, let alone the influence of those who study it. Epistemology should have a titanic significance in the age of AI, right? Who’s ever heard of it?
YZ: In your autobiographical reflection, media archaeology appears to have had a significant influence on the development of your own work. What about media archaeology resonated with your approach to internet culture and net criticism?
GL: To give one’s techno-social practice a solid, materialist grounding. That simple. IT is an anti-intellectual industry dominated by hot air, groundless claims, driven by ruthless hype machines. There’s not just classic marketing but finance-driven expansionism. All this needs discourse analysis, paired with a political and financial analysis of players. In IT, hypergrowth is the default. There is nothing else. If you grow organically, you’re out and not a player. This is why we have billionaires. Venture capital prevents modest growth. In such a climate, dominant for a good three decades, there is no memory. Creative destruction of others erases any difference, creating a desert landscape incapable of telling stories, including its own history. Needless to say, there is no funding to write the branch’s history. Let alone a more sophisticated form of reflection such as media archaeology. What remains is airport literature about heroic entrepreneurs such as Jobs and Musk.
It’s enlightening to go deep into the history of cybernetics. Until recently, there was almost nothing. Kittler loved Pynchon and his stories about the military, Cold War conspiracies and encryption. We read Paul Edwards, but besides that there wasn’t much. You had old Whole Earth Catalogue editions, but their hippie pragmatism is still out there, waiting to be thoroughly deconstructed. Hayles is important, but she’s not a storyteller. There is no written history of the internet yet (compared to film, literature, music, theatre). Because it’s not part of culture? Because it is not a medium? Because no one’s using it, it’s invisible infrastructure and thus doesn’t exist? Because it’s not interesting? You tell me. Too popular, too obscure? Too technical and only of interest for a handful of geeks and engineers? In the same way as there’s no cultural histories of the highway, the electricity grid or the postal network?
YZ: One distinctive feature of German media theory is its close relationship with technical practice—programming, tinkering with machines, and engaging directly with technologies. This aspect remains relatively difficult to incorporate into media education in China. In your own teaching, what kinds of activities or assignments do you ask students to undertake besides reading theoretical texts?
GL: There’s a contradiction at play here. While students may seem tech-savvy, this is often limited, consensual knowledge at the interface level. Choices are limited, so if you play around a bit, one can usually figure it out. But that’s not what programmable environments are like. If done well, coding could change functionality at a paradigmatic level. Wow, suddenly it can do something entirely different! How much of the Kittler romanticism of the programmer-philosopher will remain in the age of AI is still debated. Vibe coding will lead to an overproduction of code garbage. That’s entropy Stiegler-style, which ends up in stagnation if not collapse. This is why some predict that the nerd-geek will remain a powerful, yet separate, professional class that administers secret meta-knowledge. Machines cannot maintain their own hardware. Regardless of what one thinks of AI and automating everything, data centres and robots run on complex systems that constantly need maintenance and updates.
To answer your question about students, my approach has always been more on publishing, streaming and podcasting. For that, you may need some tech knowledge, but everyone can play a role in running your own media. Programming only plays a part. Running an independent student blog helps students to understand that their research matters. It raises creative, critical minds that can express themselves, from relatively simple cultural studies insights of digital pop culture to the development of new concepts, as we’ve seen recently at the Institute of Network Cultures with girl theory such as girl math, developed by the feminist mathematician Irma Mastenbroek. This shows how GenZ can play a decisive role in the theory formation of the contemporary—brought together in the INC production called Girl Reader (Set Margins’, 2026), edited by Mela Miekus and Mita Medri.
YZ: As you have pointed out, when artists and humanities scholars collaborate with engineers or AI researchers, they often find themselves in an asymmetrical position: they may have relatively little influence over the technical agenda. In your view, how can humanities scholars and engineers work together more effectively?
GL: Art and science is an idealistic construct that has plagued marginalised, cash-strapped arts and humanities for decades. Do you see any evidence of this in computer science, in biotech? Let’s distinguish between training and adaptation to the latest IT software and collaboration in multidisciplinary teams that work on fundamental (read: not applied) research. The latter is pure ideology. It’s true, in Silicon Valley one can occasionally run into cognitive psychologists and user interface designers. Many of the artists have been retrained as software engineers. That’s submission, not a meaningful dialogue. Instead, I would propose focusing on investigative arts, artists that question power. The theoretical source of this would be Fuller/Weizman’s Investigative Aesthetics. My personal sources of inspiration are Forensic Architecture, Molly Crabapple, Trevor Paglan, Noura Tafeche, and Badiucao. Over the decades, we used the term ‘tactical media’ for their unconventional ‘multi-media’ approaches that combine audio-visual evidence with critique and irony in both paper and digital form, as performances, documentaries, exhibitions, and websites.
YZ: Let’s turn to your work on internet culture. In Sad by Design, you draw on Mark Fisher. Since around 2024, there has been growing interest in China in nostalgic internet cultures such as Dreamcore, glitch art, and vaporwave. I was particularly intrigued by your distinction between nostalgia as an “old melancholy” and techno-sadness as a condition of being trapped in an eternal present. We have encountered something similar in our own research on video games and Japanese anime, particularly the recurring theme of the death loop: the protagonist repeatedly dies while trying to complete a task, only to start all over again. It seems to embody precisely this sense of an “eternal present,” in which one’s actions no longer seem capable of moving time forward. How do you understand this particular experience of time?
GL: I do not recall Mark Fisher playing a role in the writing of the Say by Design essay, back in 2018, even though I was very familiar with his work. He died a year earlier of a severe form of depression. Mark spoke at one of our INC conferences, a few years earlier. Capitalist Realism anticipates the mental implosion, a turning point we now date to 2016, the year of the rise of right-wing techno-libertarianism, Brexit and Trump. Tech-induced melancholia is a reflection on the stagnation, the inward-looking mood in internet culture. I do recall three authors: Jaron Lanier and his 10 Things, Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today and Audrey Wollen’s Sad Girl Theory. At the time, it felt like compiling a huge pile of materials. My take was that sadness was machine-generated, driven by social media companies through settings and design, and not just a spin-off of culture at large (as expressed in The Great Regression, a German anthology from 2017). I wanted the readers to feel the techno-sadness by compressing all the bits and pieces, bringing emo back to the willingly designed tech condition.
YZ: Staying with the question of temporality, Lauren Berlant also suggests that one way of resisting the linear temporality of modernity is to attend to heterogeneous temporalities within everyday life. How can this approach be put into practice?
GL: Don’t go there. Tech power has turned circumstances upside down. I have no nostalgic feelings for the modern era, especially not the post-World War II period, but the post-modern is now the dominating mode of power.—and it is worse. Regardless of Berlant’s good intentions, the ‘heterogeneous temporalities’ have taken a dialectic revenge. There is no solidarity in diversity. Just electronic loneliness, paired with a return of reactionary ideology. Who would have thought that the current youngers find conservative norms and lifestyle ‘cool’? I do not have to repeat here how social media platforms operate. The organised distraction, first described by Nicolas Carr and Sherry Turkle and then theorised by Bernard Stiegler, is all too real. Scrolling dependency is about to destroy the ability to critique, reflect, and even read. There are no modernist mass media anymore. The subjects-turned-users all have their own unique experience. That’s heterogeneous hell. The issue here is that, despite the promises of ‘difference’ thinkers, the liberation of subjects did not materialise. The issue is not that we all think the same. The platforms work hard to customise and present us with what we want.
YZ: You make the fascinating observation that the rise of cynicism coincided with the emergence of blogging culture in the 1990s. We rarely approach the history of social attitudes from the perspective of media history in this way. Would you agree that cynicism is also connected to increasing professionalisation and bureaucracy?
GL: I see lots of gaps and opportunities for groundbreaking Gen Z research here. I gave it a try again with my copium essay (published in my recent book Platform Brutality), returning to my 2007 book Zero Comments. The nihil state comes after the collapse of overproduction. I regard contemporary forms of nihilism as a mask, a protective armour, not as a replacement for religion. Let’s not criticise cynicism as a belief system, or identity, for that matter. Is it rather an ideology, or a drug, to keep you going? What’s the essence of indifference? What does it mean to feel flat? To undergo short sensations that do not make you feel anything? Nothing sticks, not even the trauma. You do not feel the pain. This condition no longer revolves around the heroic version of nihilism. The Berlin media theorist Martin Burckhardt is onto something here: What drives an individual to become caught up in futility, he asks. What’s the social drive of the I, Inc.? This culminates in an anthropological reassessment of the Marxian theory of value—the field of ‘value critique’ in which Robert Kurz made invaluable progress.
YZ: I was excited to come across your discussion of “Airheads,” because the Chinese equivalent has become one of the most popular expressions on the Chinese internet over the past two years. Of course, it has acquired a rather specific meaning in the Chinese context: it can refer to moral nihilism, narcissistic personality disorder, or even ruthless bosses who exploit their employees. In what context did you introduce the concept of “Airheads”?
GL: The Triumph of the Airheads and the Retreat from Commonsense is a 2006 book by Sydney journalist Shelley Gare. It’s a good example of Australian cultural studies, aka communication studies, that anticipates pop trends in Western society, in this case the influencer logic on social media. Gare is moralistic about the downward trend away from expertise and professional reporting. Instead of providing background analysis, reflection and critique, she witnessed the rise of hysteria over micro-trends, and the cultivation of private sentiments, driven by “insatiable consumerism, obsession with statistics, an aversion to reading books, selfishness, short-term thinking, love of theory and jargon and a tendency to bully.” At the time, I connected this to the rise of the internet persona of the self-made celebrity of the blogger. I read this as a product of a software shift, away from forums, lists and other online communities towards what I call a profile-centric interface design, in which the user is downgraded to a spectator that follows, likes and responds.
YZ: Chinese social media platforms function somewhat like Twitter, in the sense that users often follow accounts that share their views and interests. As a result, echo chambers, filter bubbles, and information cocoons have become major topics in Chinese communication studies. From your perspective, what are some of the newer or emerging issues in internet culture that you find particularly important today?
GL: That would be the automation of content creation. The figures are depressing. Spam, bots, algorithms, AI-generated reports and ‘fake news’ have downgraded the internet as a medium. Many feel it’s beyond repair. Entropy is near. Behind any message, there can be malware, a virus. This is leading to a culture of suspicion. Even when there’s trust, one should be careful when clicking. This condition is further fueling the closed spaces you mention. In our discussions, this is associated with the term Dark Forest. Retreat is a necessary response. How sad is it to be unable to meet others? To find meaningful information, one can no longer rely on search engines. As AI merely summarises known sources, presenting bland, flat outcomes, the initial enthusiasm quickly fades away. This leads to closed recommendation circles. The internet as a public forum, Habermas-style, is still a long way off. Still, I am optimistic about the widening range of alternatives. However, as long as techno-libertarian venture capital can decide which apps will be successful, there is little hope for improvement.GL:
YZ: I was struck by your observation that it is also difficult for independent, non-commercial artists to survive in Europe. I had previously assumed that this was a particularly serious problem in China. From the news and cultural coverage we see, the art scene in Europe often appears extremely vibrant. In contrast, independent artistic practice in China faces additional difficulties because of strict political censorship. You have often collaborated with independent artists in your own research and projects. Could you tell us about some of these collaborations and what they have involved in practice?
GL: I agree, collaborations with artists are precious. Interdisciplinary encounters are rare—despite the official ideology to the contrary. To me, contemporary art is an early warning system; art as an antenna of the human race, as Ezra Pound stated. If you work with artists, study and discuss their work with them and fellow critics, you start to get a sense of how slow theory (and even more so academic thinking) is. One could say something similar about science-fiction novels and films. The faster society changes, the more we desire to work with concepts and media that allow anticipation. Even now, when the situation is stagnant, we need to study forms of regression as we fall deeper into the abyss. Right now, the logic of prediction is shutting down all these speculative spaces of possibility and becoming. How will (visionary) artists respond to that? In terms of examples, I suppose I am close to the net art movement and everything that came after the mid-nineties, from post-digital to crypto and NFTs. I want to mention Rosa Menkman’s development from glitch to resolution studies, Constant Dullaart’s punk grotesque, Jan Robert Leegte’s formalism, Clusterduck’s meme aesthetics, and Paolo Cirio’s confrontation with digital power structures. Criticising content isn’t enough. These artists actively take on the dominant interfaces. Yes, they’re all European—and so am I. These artists are relevant for me as I move between Amsterdam and Berlin, Rome, Budapest, Barcelona and Krakow.
YZ: Finally, I’d like to ask about your ideas of Tactical Media and Orgnets. How have you actually used these ideas in practice to mobilise left-wing political action?
GL: At the very end of the 22 years of our Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam Polytech HvA, we published Fragments of Tactical Media, in which you can read what tactical media means to us, in 2026. This is an inventory of minor practices. It doesn’t address meta-questions like how to deal with platform capitalism, the poly-crisis, and so on. As you may know, we emphasise moving on from social media blues to streaming video. In this way, one starts to create networks again and move away from ultra-short 18-second videos to online performances that can last hours. There’s no doubt an element of tactical withdrawal in these artworks. There’s a quest for meaning and sustainable social bonds in a time of collapse and war.
The organised network as social form is part of this movement. Orgnets is a concept I developed with my Sydney friend Ned Rossiter, back in 2005, and whose time has yet to come. We see it as an alternative to political parties, unions, but also social networks. Against the corporate exploitation of weak ties, we’ve put the shiny crystal of the strong ties. Importantly, we emphasize the social movement aspect: temporary coalitions of smaller (often local) units that cooperate. The social is not a disposable commodity. We will take its design back into our own hands. Again, time is a crucial factor here. Orgnets are meant to last, and should, in theory, not fall apart after one event, as they are based on mutual aid, friendship, respect and common(s) sense. Come together. Create one, two, many institutes, schools, movements and mix the real and virtual in your very own way, even without money. Try it out.
Amsterdam, August-September 2026