Out Now: Platform Brutality by Geert Lovink

By Geert Lovink, September 27, 2025

Platform Brutality by Geert Lovink, Valiz, Amsterdam, September 2025. Jetzt auch auf Deutsch, Die Brutalität der Plattform, erschienen bei Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, November 2025. The Spanish edition (with Bellaterra) and the Italian one (with Meltemi Editore) will be out in the first half of 2026. The internet has become an integral part of all human [...]

Living With Algorithms In Costa Rica – Interview with Ignacio Siles

By Geert Lovink, September 3, 2025

How do we live, or rather cope, with algorithms? Ignacio Siles wrote a book about it, Living With Algorithms, Agency and User Culture in Costa Rica (MIT Press, 2023). I met Ignacio Siles in San Jose in April 2025 when I had the honor to open the academic year of the University of Costa Rica [...]

Notes on Deletion and Technological Sacrifice

By Geert Lovink, August 27, 2025

“Artists have successfully used toilets before, so why not large language models?” Hito Steyerl – Set as default location: “Wenn ich nicht hier bin, bin ich auf dem Sonnendeck.“ Rationalism today: explaining genocide for the good – Ethics advice: “If you can’t get the model to say what you want, just rewrite the data.” – [...]

Internet Core II: Pequeñas Mitologías

By Geert Lovink, September 24, 2025

24/09/2025 - 25/09/2025 @ 18:00 - 22:00 - MediaLab Matadero, Paseo de la Chopera, 14, 28045 Madrid, España 24 y 25 de septiembre de 2025 de 18 a 22h Internet Core: pequeñas mitologías es un portal tribal hacia un espacio de cruce, reflexión crítica y acción colectiva en torno a las estéticas y subculturas de Internet. En este encuentro de dos días, compartiremos [...]

Interview with Klaus Theweleit on Male Fantasies Today

By Geert Lovink, July 21, 2025

If you’re curious about the intellectual roots of my former theory collective Adilkno and the current Institute of Network Cultures, look no further than the book I read in early 1983, half a year before I graduated in political sciences at UvA: the two-volume Male Fantasies by Klaus Theweleit (then only available in German). This [...]

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 [...]