Interview with Geert Lovink
By Daniele Miggino (March 20, 2006)
(journalist from the webzine www.mentelocale.it, an Italian daily online magazine involved in cultural issues)
The Italian translation of this interview can be found here.
DM: First of all, what was your talk about in Milan?
GL: After I introduced the research agenda of our Institute of Network Cultures, I read a fragment, in Italian, from Internet non e il paradiso, my last book, about the figure of the net critic. Then I spoke about the theory of blogging that I am working at the moment, which I connect to nihilism as an emancipatory movement. With this I mean that blogging creates a void, an empty media moment, away from the dominant meaning structures of mainstraim media. Franko ‘Bifo’ Birardi gave some really good remarks on the ‘prozac crash’ after 2000 and 9/11. Stockmarkets were based on a economy of illusion. There has indeed been a panic, a mood of depression that Internet culture, and our lives in general, moved too fast. Nihilist culture, for instance blogs, no longer need illusions. They are a curious mix of private and public, of diary and marketing of the self. But what we actually need are slow networks. Italia, please act! We closed off with a Dutch DVD, a typography film of 20 minutes made by Mieke Gerritzen, a flash animation that reflection on globalization and culture. I was one of the text writers of that film.
DM: It seems to me one of your main aims is to fight a manichesistic view of online and offline worlds. What you mean by “immanent net critic”?
GL: Already during the roaring nineties, it was not done to present the real and the virtual as two opposing categories. The Internet is not a parallel world, but I guess that’s clear by now. If only it would. We should challange our Californian friends to come up with fresh utopias and draw up an Internet that is truely immaterial, not of this world. The problem is that networks are more and more part of our everyday life, for over a billion people this is no longer a rumor but part of their lives. Networks are no longer pure and innocent, but are increasingly polluted by messy agendas. What we may have to get used to is to reconcile the being and not being there in a better way. The question of the net critic is another and is more related to slow institutional responses to quick changes in the media landscape. The immanent critic is someone who no longer needs to refer to other, neighboring media but can judge the Internet and its culture on its own merits. We’re not there yet. What you read in mainstream media about the Net is still preoccupied with this one question of newness. What is the lastest and what is cool? Fortunately we no longer ask what is so new about a car. We look into a specific qualities, or discuss larger issues about the impact on society and the environment. With net culture we have to do the same and go beyond the question of its likely potential.
DM: Why does the virtual sphere frightens so much intellectuals?
GL: The Internet questions knowledge hierarchies as they existed so far. I am not saying that Internet is creating a ‘flat’ structure. Not at all. It generates new power structures. What is under pressure, for instance, is the peer-reviewed (paper) journal structure. Old peers will no longer be in charge, there will be new players. Still, academics only get jobs if they participate in the Gutenberg galaxy and openly show disdain for the Net.
The same can be said of the position of public intellectuals. The Internet generates its own celebrities. What freightens the paperheads is the rise of the amateur. The decline of authority is an overall phenomenon. It turns the knowledge field into a muddy terrain. The so-called mass-amateurization of whose who work for free and produce second rate content (see Wikipedia) means bad pop music, hopeless videos, and that truely annoys those in power. It is not a threat, it is more subtle. It is a late, too late form of democratization, many decades after the sixties–one without a political dimension. There is no political project in blogs. They do not want to overtake power–and that frustrates.
DM: You say: as soon as it became a daily instrument the Net acquired all the “dirty” dynamics of normal life. What are these?
GL: It means that power infects the core of the network architecture. Usually this process is only projected on ‘evil’ politicians from authoritarian regimes tha censor their own part of the Internet. But we should also think of company intranets, filtering programs that are installed everywhere, increased access restrictions that fire walls cause. It is now organized crime that is making use of spam and virusses, not the 14-year old hacker anymore. It also means that Internet will be part of any activity in life.
DM: What you mean by saying that Internet is not Paradise?
GL: That’s the Italian title of my last book. Apogeo came up with it. In English that book is called My First Recession. My First Sony was a cute product in the late nineties, somehow very Japanese. I do not understand the Italian title, to be honest. I never met someone who thought the Internet was paradise, and then got disappointed. Internet culture is not emphasizing the ‘good’ in people. At best it is a machine for transformation. Networks facilitate rapid change The Web metamorphs you into some other stage, take you elsewhere. You lose the sense of time and place and drift off. You get lost, surf, pretend to be someone else, find out new info. To say that’s paradise, no. But it can lead you into other directions, and have a nice time off from your job, or boring everyday life.
DM: Aren’t some aspects of the foreseen control of the Net very worrying: i.e. the possible classification of bits in terms of quality or value, the limitations to freedom imposed by the concept of the Net as a ‘Safe Place for business’? Do you think this will really happen?
GL: Yes, and there is much more to come. The more we integrate in society, the less innocent the whole operation becomes. This should not surprise us as this is exactly what we demand: public access. Not Internet for us, but a tool for all to use. This is includes the church, maffia, big business, boring middle class house wives, curious toddlers, car dealers, heroin addicts, you name it.
DM: Nettime started in 1995. Did you expect such an evolution of the Internet over the past ten years?
GL: I don’t think the Internet hasn’t changed that much. It’s all faster, more multi-media, but that already existed ten years ago. The big changes happened earlier. Even in terms of basic functionalities the Net hasn’t changed. In a sense we have to face the limited potentialities of a project like Nettime. I could have imagined something a hundred times more bigger. But that failure was already anticipated in 1995. We’re power sceptics and do not believe in power of technology in the hands of people. In general yes, but not if you give it to a bunch of spoiled Euro-American artists. They will not really utilize the potentialities. That also counts for social movements. Media deconstruct and take apart power in the same way as it generates potentialities. There is a lot in this world that needs to be questioned and destroyed. The Net is good for such processes of dissolvement. It is much harder to use it effective in building up counter power. Don’t forget that we can no longer dream the dream of the avantgarde. We can only pretend to be pop for fifteen minutes of fame.
DM: What really makes the difference between old and new media?
GL: Immediate interactivity is so much easier to arrange with new media. The speed is increadible. Just play with it and you’ll find out. Velocity is addictive, dazling. But it also waters down meaning and social structures. New relationships are formed, but they are much more fluid.
DM: You are still optimistic about the Net. What do you think could be the positive features of the Internet over the next years?
GL: We are in the midst of the Web 2.0 hype. There are indeed a few features that I like and enjoy. One can easily imagine that blogs and social networks will grow bigger and become more complex. But we also see that such networks run into a reality wall. Institutions resist and cannot that easily be changed, neither from the inside or the outside. And this despite the fact that such structures are aware of the network potential. They are. Most institutions have wired their buildings, offices, trained their staff, but now shy away from the next round of innovation. Web 2.0 potentially breaks down frontiers and barriers and that’s not on the agenda. In times of uncertainty regarding “intellectual property” and “security” networks are in fact part of the problem. It would be naive to this otherwise. In this sense we’re entering a new era of subversive acts that will be ‘commited’ by outsiders. The features that you refer to are weakening existing structures that already have been dealing with a constant demand for ‘change’ over the past decade. There is change fatique. Is that positive? No. And will it stop further development of interesting applications? No.
DM: I saw there is no Nettime in Italian. Is there a particular reason for that?
GL: Independent cyberculture is strong in Italy. They do not need a nettime list, I suppose, even though someone can always give it a try. It’s never too late. As we speak the Brazilian nettime starts as a seperate list. In Italy there is so much activity in the field of media activism, net art, hacktivism, tactical media and theory. It’s one of the most active countries in Europe, for the simple reason that there have been a lot of activities of social movements (now it’s less, I heard). There is Rekombinant.org, Indymedia, ECN, telestreets, Neural and numerous others. But the Internet penetration in Italy is still rather low. This is why Internet culture can still maintain its countercultural claims. That’s not the case in Holland anymore. It’s deeply mainsteam there. We have no Berlusconi that controls all the media. The Internet is no safe haven for opposition and is exposed to all trends in society. Maybe it is time to think beyond the nineties agenda of nettime which was driven by a coalition of artists, geaks and activists. These days we no longer have to discover, and discuss, the potentials of new media. They exist. The question is: will we utilize the increadible power that is at our fingertips, and if so, for what cause?