How clearly we see it now. The post–like loop was an attempt to melt our brains. Then came the algorithm: an attempt to melt our bonds. Not content with making addicts, today the algorithm rewires our relationships to those we do not yet know, and many we do. Lured with the promise of followers, the hollow gratification of being noticed by strangers, we are sold a mirage in which algorithmic leverage is a worthy substitute for political leverage. Even radical endeavours have become inconceivable without a branded presence and a socials strategy touted by comms-pilled quacks. They seem to believe that blowing up online is really is on a continuum with blowing up neoliberalism. The opposite is true.
The internet is, was, and will always be a battleground. It is even more a battleground now than in the nineties. It will be more a battleground tomorrow than today. It is a battleground that only expands, across the globe and into the most discreet moments of everyday life. There is no unmediated space. There is no unmediated time. In communicative capitalism, we are always on someone’s algorithm.
Although we desire something other, we cannot simply step outside. The postdigital is real, which means the real is postdigital. But beyond the grey curtain of capture, meticulously maintained by the platform capitalists, hybrid reality entails multiplicity, connection, and new ways of being, thinking and relating. New realities are not so far from here, after all. The task is not to ride the algorithm, but to dive beneath its current. New forms of consciousness – and new forms of group consciousness – are not a destination, but a practice.
The GNNL is a practice.
A channel between realms and realities. Domestic and public. Common and cloistered. It defies the private. It is both between and toward. Here and there. The GNNL is a wayspace.
Ours is a life lived, all at once, on both sides of the wall. The GNNL sees no contradiction here, only ways through. Snickets of possibility.
The GNNL is, therefore, an invitation. To form new relations and ways of relating. To raise a new consciousness. To reconnect the political to the real. To evade capture. To trade comms for connections. To resist the privatisation of stress, of subjectivity, in pursuit of new solidarities.
The GNNL seeks a new culture. Of becoming over being. Of relating over knowing. And, yes, of collaboration over competition. Of life over capital. We are not afraid of difference, or vulnerability, or unknowing, or ruins. We are not afraid of struggle. We are not afraid of common endeavour.
In that spirit, unabashed, we embrace those who brought the GNNL to becoming. StreamArtNetwork x CDI x UKRAiNATV x Konfluxus x 3022 x VOID x Novara x Heart Reacts x Agit x Indymedia x Bifo x Radio Alice x comrades known and unknown, past and future and everywhere between. We remix and remediate their words, actions, hopes, fears, labour, technics, image, generosity and spirit.
The GNNL is always, like every worthwhile project in these times, a wager on shared experience.
The stream is our medium, our channel, our journey to each other and to ourselves. It is always already networked, an exchange, a signal. Streaming, like bodies, like struggle, is always in a state of imbalance. It’s directed towards an irreversible time. But we struggle against it. Openness and stability. Autopoiesis. Autonomy. It is the sideways glance at the barricade. We see each other. We see the way. We hope.
2025/11/6