Input ↔︎ Output | Part 6: Cybernetic Video Histories

This is the sixth blog post of a multi-part series making sense of THE VOID’s online video practices in the context of cybernetic participatory culture, the legacies of tactical media, stagnating platformization, encroaching AI, and the nascent StreamArt Studio Network. Read part one,  part two,  part three,  part four, and part five.

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I would like to think that the blurring between mental and manual labor is at the core of THE VOID. We have repeatedly stated that the manual labor that goes into producing a livestream is part and parcel of our “intellectual” research. In this same spirit, I regard Bernhard Rieder’s Engines of Order,[1] a work that could only be written by someone acquainted with the tactics and strategies of software-making, as a source of (loose) inspiration. Like Rieder, I wish to write from practical experience. That is, I want this (ironically) textual and very conceptual piece to be an expression of my hands rather than my mind.

A thinker perishes by means of their examples. As Annemarie Mol suggests, it is through examples that thinking reveals its material base.[2] Examples are the moments when that which the author is really writing about—not concepts, ideas or values, but their own habits, experiences, and histories—come to the forefront. These are the moments when the particularities and material interests of the philosopher are revealed. Philosophy tends towards abstraction, replicability, and eternity, but it is, nonetheless, always an abstraction of a contingent something and someone. I wish to look at this contingency as an advantage rather than a setback. A concealed pre-condition to go back to whenever abstraction loses its narrative force, its red thread, its momentum. Examples ground conceptualization back to that which undoubtedly exists: the fleeting and ungraspable empirical world. In a way, they tame and control the metaphysical “vices” of thinking by connecting the philosopher’s assertions about the non-experientable realm of reasons and meanings to the allegedly verifiable empirical world of facts.[3] And, while I am personally not someone troubled by being vicious (I am seduced by the edgy obscurantism of metaphysics and generally abhor the normie dryness of so-called facts), I am also awed by the overwhelming historical excess and intensity of the empirical.

How to setup a pop-studio, how to best key a green screen, how to best switch between inputs, overcome Eduroam's firewall, curate a program, arrange people on a stage, distinguish them from the audience, engage them with that audience... These are all tactics that have slowly evolved into more formalized, diagramized strategies. Simultaneously metaphoric and symbolic (they are both useful blueprints representing future actions and pretty images that exceed their signifying functions), our studio setup diagrams allow us to look at our activities from a different angle and at different times. Diagram-making is an activity that attempts to produce a holistic picture (a top-down view from nowhere,[4] as Donna Haraway puts it) of events that are actually chaotically experienced IRL. They are a way to tame, to abstract, events that, in many ways, are out of our control. But also, as the project matures, these diagrams, followed by inventories, proper cable organizing, and regular meetings, have become a way to externalize and share our know-how.

As I mentioned on a previous post, the purpose of these images is to enable us to go live once again. Perhaps with more confidence and calm each subsequent time, we must go back to implementing these blueprints on machinic and biological hardware. This alternating between abstraction and concretization, diagramming and cable connecting, is not only an excuse for later theoretical reflection (such as this one), but also a process of acculturation into a practice. In other words, it is a process of subjectivation, of producing a character I’d like to call the tactical non-user.

On another previous blogpost I also called this subject the indisciplinary technical user borrowing terms from Philip Agre, Mahmoud Keshavarz, and Ramia Mazé. This character is inspired as well by Rieder's software-maker and I like calling it too a practical theorist. With this in mind (and at hand), in some ways I see THE VOID as an experiment in the production of this subject. The tactical non-user exists in a community of shared practices and know-how; they are actors of an alternative technological culture collapsing labor distinctions between the “casual” user and the “professional” developer or designer. Therefore, non-user: a rejection of the socially constructed and politically enforced position of the user.

An Incomplete Proto-history of Participatory Video

This idea is not at all new. The blurring of the producer-consumer distinction is at the center of Ivan Illich’s classic text Tools for Conviviality[5] which argues for an alternative, pluralist, self-directed, and limited role of technology in society. As Marloes de Valk writes in his article on the Computing within Limits community, its related terminology, and practices[6]:

“convivial tools will break down the distinction between programming and using programs and see the distinction between user and programmer as a major obstacle for the usefulness of computers. Convivial tools encourage users to be actively engaged with, and to generate creative extensions to, the artefacts given to them, releasing designers of tools from the impossible task of anticipating all possible uses of a tool and all people’s needs.”[7]

Closer to us at THE VOID, the deconstruction of this distinction can also be found in the origins of Web 2.0’s participatory media cultures.[8] During the 2000’s and early 2010’s (basically, before the 2016 tech-lash), the user-generated internet was in several ways regraded as a democratic advancement over the one-way and “authoritarian” regimes of 20th century mass media. The broadcast model of radio and television were a regressive enemy that networked communications should’ve ended. The hopes for a self-organized and bottom-up participatory culture were placed on the technological development of networked communications. High on techno-determinism, the 2000s era of techno-optimism saw in networked technologies the kernel for a horizontal political culture of cooperation between autonomous agents.

I bring up this well-known narrative for two purposes: First, I want to highlight that the link between media production practices and self-organization through networked technologies is not a far-fetched one. If networked technologies held the key for autonomous and self-organized societies, broadcasting technologies were the relic of the past to supersede. The network seemed the evolution to the broadcast as it allowed the masses to “broadcast themselves” even if the audience was itself not massive. A narrative that today strikes almost tragic after networked technologies, from the platformized internet to neural networks, have brought about the further centralization and concentration of media production into the hands of the few.

Second, and performing a movement away from techno-determinism and towards the matrix of social relations, I wish to argue that, while networked technologies do present an opportunity to reorganize social relations bottom-up, practices of self-organization existed way before their technological abstraction. Mirroring Pasquinelli’s sociomorphism of AI,[9] it was not Web 2.0 that allowed people to create self-organized media initiatives, but, as Henry Jenkins argues, people were broadcasting themselves way before YouTube showed up:

“If YouTube seems to have sprung up overnight, it is because so many groups were ready for something like YouTube; they already had communities of practice that supported the production of DIY media, already evolved video genres and built social networks through which such videos could flow”[10]

In his article, Jenkins gives several examples to make the case that the culture that the user-generated web profited from had its roots in countercultural and grassroots initiatives. His claim is that “by reclaiming what happened before YouTube, we may have a basis for judging how well YouTube really is serving the cause of participatory culture”. Like Pasquinelli, Jenkins makes the case for social cooperation preceding the technology that captures and abstracts it for future replication, scaling, and, ultimately, profit.

In a brief historical detour, I would like to mention some of the participatory video practices that came before the platformized internet. I have already made a nod to Paul Ryan’s guerrilla filmmaking and the cybernetic counterculture of the late 1960’s in the US. I would also like to mention the squatter-led, community access, local televisions of 1970’s and 80’s in Amsterdam, and the urban television initiatives in Bologna during the early 2000’s. These latter two are connected to of larger movement of tactical television (later on renamed tactical media) that coalesced around the Next 5 Minutes Festivals starting in 1993.

All of these are examples of video activism that saw in community-led video-making not only the potential of recording and distributing alternative or dissident content, but also the possibility of creating new social relations based on cooperation. Video, an assemblage linking cameras, magnetic tape, cable TV infrastructure, and cathode ray TV sets, was regarded as a diagram triggering new self-organized/cybernetic social relations.

Paul Ryan and Michael Shamberg, both members of the countercultural video activist collective Raindance Corporation publishing on the magazine Radical Software in the 1970s, viewed video as a tool for self-representation and thus reflexivity, self-awareness and self-correction.[11] Video was a very literal Foucauldian “technology of the self”: the relatively simple gesture of recording oneself was a way to give oneself an image, thus defining one’s own parameters of existence among others. Ryan wrote an algorithm for this experimental video practice of reflexivity:

“Taping something new with yourself is a part uncontained.
To replay the tape for yourself is to contain it in your perceptual system.
Taping yourself playing with the replay is to contain both on a new tape.
To replay for oneself tape of self with tape of self is to contain that process in a new dimension…”[12]

With video, everyone would be able to electronically become a Klein worm, constantly differing into new subjectivating subjects.

Viewed from the 2020’s, this promise of recursivity[13] seems way too grand for the all-too-mundane selfies, vlogs, Twitch streamings, or YouTube video essays. However, this is not the entire picture of the cybernetic hopes of video. In his seminal text Guerrilla Television, Shamberg’s views on television were not limited to the technological improvement of the self. Audiovisual feedback loops were only one part of a larger ecological critique of video production’s political economy. For Shamberg and the Raindance Corporation at large, Guerrilla Television was a tactic to fight “the beast” of the broadcasting system.[14]

Inspired by Marshall McLuhan and Gregory Bateson’s ecological theories of the mind, each form of media produces an ecology or environment in which humans are in constantly evolving symbiotic relationships with machines. The broadcasting system beast was a specific form of media ecology that “has to lust after huge numbers of people per program to stay alive, […] producing a crowd-pleasing mentality and a collective mass consciousness that reduces diversity […] [The beast] has no capacity for feedback, […] its one-way transmitters helping to “condition passivity””.[15]

The potential of video didn’t rest on broadcasting the “right” kind of content, but on the possibility for every citizen to produce, distribute, and access their own content through video tapes and cable TV. As William Merrin explains:

“Shamberg’s goal was the creation of a popular movement of “community video”: an “indigenous production” without professional mediation, in which local groups shoot, edit, and present their own footage, directly expressing their own concerns. “Guerrilla Television is grassroots television […] it works with people, not from up above them”, helping to produce a new network, community consciousness, and an “information structure”.”[16]

Merrin’s article “Still Fighting the Beast: Guerrilla Television and the Limits of YouTube”, points out that the Raindance Corporation applied the language of cybernetics and computation (feedback, self-organization, and self-processing) to media production in order to articulate a critique of broadcasting and imagine a radically democratic media ecology. I wish to point out once again that this is the same cybernetic jargon that a few decades prior guided the development of the perceptron with the intention to create an alternative model of bottom-up, topological computation.

Even if it hasn’t lived up to all its promises, especially those regarding the ownership of the means of distribution, Web 2.0’s participatory culture can be linked back to the media ecology Guerrilla Television wanted to achieve. And, making an even greater historical and conceptual leap, to the topological computational paradigm of neural networks.

Today, it’s kind of obvious that participatory culture and neural networks feed into each other: participatory culture produces the cultural conditions and desires to produce content that will later be used to train the network and will be deployed to produce digital environments (algorithmic social media) and content (slop), that will further encourage content production and consumption. The advent of machine learning has successfully captured bottom-up localized production and transformed it into a fundamental part of a privatized, global, production-driven, computational media ecology. Nevertheless, this cooption is not obvious nor necessary.

There is nothing inherent to participatory cultures that calls for data intensive computation and social relations mimicking the factory plant’s conveyor belt. Neither there is causal connection between platformization and user-created content. That is, participatory culture enjoys an autonomy towards networked technologies. As the Italian autonomist Marxist school has noted, while capital needs labor for its reproduction, the inverse doesn’t hold true.[17] Analogously, while networked technologies de facto act as mechanism for the reproduction of participatory cultures, the latter can survive and thrive without the former.

If participatory cultures haven't lived up to its cybernetic emancipatory promises, it was precisely because they entered a parasitic relationship with networked technologies. This surreptitiously shifted its goal from “fighting the beast” to producing a totalizing system of cybernetic loops that relegated the problem of distribution and archiving to a new version of that same beast, even while production has in some ways become more distributed.[18]

But this doesn't mean that problem lies solely in technology and that we should wholly reject it. It is rather about the social relations we want to vessel through them. What do we want technology for? Designed by whom and addressed to whom?

Telestreet and Indymedia or Nostalgia for Early 00’s Progressive Techno-optimism

In a similar way to the Raindance Corporation and its Guerrilla Television, the Telestreet movement in Italy during the early 2000s sought to counter the RAI-Mediaset media monopoly. Starting in the summer of 2002 with Franco Berardi's Bologna-based OrfeoTV, Telestreet was a network of tactical pirate television stations broadcasting lo-fi videos for few hours a week using a 1000€, 400-meter-range equipment.

From today's vantage point, the early 2000’s look like a heated yet bustling period for independent media. IndyMedia, an open publishing network of activist journalist collectives that emerged after the police repression of the protests against the 1999 Seattle WTO Ministerial Conference, was quickly expanding into global community. Two years later, in the summer of 2001, media activists and independent journalists from around the world, including those part of IndyMedia, put together a media center at the Genoa Social Forum. The Genoa Social Forum was a counter summit organized by a network of movements, civil society associations, unions, and political parties to protest capitalist globalization during the G8 summit taking place in the Italian port city. It's not hard to see how this counter summit represented a high point of what internet communications could achieve: civil society and grassroots initiatives now had the means to build global bridges. This time not for commerce and geopolitical strategizing as the leaders of the post-war order had done for decades, but for international solidarity and collective action.

Nevertheless, these days of gatherings and protest are notoriously remembered, once again, for the violent police repression of the mass protests of the 20th and 21st of July. And, importantly, for the unjustified police assault to the activist media center, located in the Pascoli School and the Pertini-Díaz school, where not only the broadcastig equipment was located but also where activists and organizers were sleeping.[19] These were still the times before cameraphone witness-activism but, as media activists, the victims knew the importance of heavily documenting what happened. The events in Genoa represent an early case of the kind of hybrid political confrontations that are now commonplace: violence against media producers that produce media to counter violence.

Against this backdrop of agitation and repression, but also optimism about the new ways political action can hybridize with media production, the Telestreet network was born. Matteo Pasquinelli himself narrated and summarized this movement and listed the different mini broadcasting stations that comprise it in a series of texts and publications.

In an edited volume on mediactivism from 2002, Pasquinelli writes on the theoretical and political aspirations of the community television movement more broadly. Focusing on UrbanTV, another Bologna-based Telestreet initiative he was part of, he contrasts community television to public-access television initiatives. This means that TV was not only useful as a tool for the free access information via publicly owned (state owned) channels. TV was not an accessory communication channel for a pre-existing society, but the vessel through which communities and their corresponding subjectivities are produced bottom-up. In contrast to the to the liberal American slogan "Information wants to be free", Pasquinelli brings up again the autonomist-favorite notion of the General Intellect from Marx's Fragment on the Machines and proclaims that "Information wants to be General Intellect". So, he advances that the issue at stake in community TV is reclaiming the autonomy of the technological and symbolic means of social production:

“[...] the objective is to reclaim the media as means of production rather than means of representation: as means of economic production, world-image production, needs and desire production.”[20]

Reclaiming the means of social production asks for autonomously managed media production, distribution and archiving infrastructure at a local/urban level. TV’s ability to weave a social fabric is deeply linked to a local context, which for UrbanTV was, as its name suggest, urban. A local and community-managed TV network was the means to reopen the apartment buildings in the dormitory city sprawls that TV itself had closed decades ago.[21] At its grandest, community TV was advanced as the way to (at last!) build a bottom-up “Europe of the cities”.[22] A call to action made, ironically, during the historical turning point that consolidated today's bureaucratic EU of the non-sovereign nations.

Paradoxically, this early 2000s version of reterritorialization or the “go touch grass” meme was heavily mediatized by the deterritorializing technology it was fighting against. One might argue that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, yet I think that this mediatic optimism provides us with an insight that is difficult to shrug at: the Telestreet movement was able to see how TV was full of inactivated potentialities. This is true of any technology or media form, use exceeds design intention.

UrbanTV and Telestreet saw in community television an opportunity not only to reclaim the communications infrastructure that the state, and increasingly the private sector, held a monopoly of, but also an “alternative transmission schema, a different collective narrative, new content not as much informational but as motors of desire and community”.[23] An insight that Pasquinelli will repeat twenty years later in his social history of AI and that also inspires the main argument of this essay: connecting the untapped potentialities of machine learning with those of online video. It is then not only about technological infrastructure, an affair seemingly reserved to hackers and tech bros, but also about socially and ideologically rearticulating it to produce a new imaginary superstructure. Producing new diagrams at, both, the infra- and the supra- level.

The Ground We Stand On: The Remains of Amsterdam’s Pirate Media Ecology

To close this incomplete and brief, but hopefully politically progressive, proto-history of streaming or cybernetic video, I would like to mention the squatter-led community media initiatives in the Amsterdam of the 1970’s, 80’s, and 90’s. Pasquinelli continuously references community television in The Netherlands as an example of what could be done in Italy. Brian Holmes also goes back to this movement when narrating the tactical television scene of the 90’s.[24] David Garcia writes that, what started as a pirate radio movement to organize the flourishing Amsterdam squatter movement against evictions in the 70’s, eventually transformed into a robust media scene publishing newspapers, zines, and broadcasting television in the 1980’s:

"Anyone visiting Amsterdam in the 70's and early 80's would have found a that some of the best places in town were the squatted bars and clubs and if they had stayed longer and looked deeper they would have also found a vivid squatter's media, of news papers, zines, pirate radio stations, and television."[25]

At the time, The Netherlands was one of the few countries with wide-spread access to cable television, which was regarded a public good rather than luxury for profit service as in many other countries. The squatter movement polemically and illegally took advantage of this situation to broadcast their own transmissions. What's interesting to me here is that the popularity of their programming led to the creation of a legal framework to regulate it, Open Channel, and an authority to oversee it, SALTO.

According to Garcia “[SALTO's] statutory obligation is to make the open channel culturally representative. In other words, ensure that the main ethnic and social groups and movements are visible.”. He then proceeds to make the community-access vs public-access TV distinction that Pasquinelli deems key to untap television’s political potential: “It is this approach is that distinguishes community access from public access which is open to anybody and is based on a simple first come first served principal. Public access is the dominant system in the US, the birthplace of open channels on cable.”.

SALTO still exists today, and it is now firmly embedded in the traditional media landscape of the city. It provides a valuable service “support[ing] programme makers with broadcasting on the radio stations and television channels through affordable broadcasting facilities, technical support and training”.[26] In many ways, it is an example of a successful yet semewhat disappointing institutionalization of a bottom-up initiative. I want to underline this movement from grassroots cooperation to regulation and institutionalization—that can be seen as cooption—to historically restate Pasquinelli’s point of the sociomorhpism of technology. In this case, technology not only understood as a device or a collection of devices, but an assemblage composed of diverse institutions, social groups, political projects and ideologies, technical artifacts and infrastructures.

The histories of Amsterdam’s squatter TV stations, Italian Telestreet, and American Guerrilla Television, show how these technological assemblages often start from highly politicized social movements that, more often than not, are in a conflictual relation with the powers that be, even if they're later absorbed by them. This portrays a different picture of technological design and development: design tables, academic labs, control rooms, ethical committees or parliamentary hearings are not necessarily at the center of all technological design processes. The relations that get abstracted into diagrams by professional designers originate in specific cultures whose practices tend to have a political motivation.

Reclaiming the Tools of the Master?

This shift in perspective is somewhat of a provocation: the technological world we live in is as much a result of big technological corporations, that have monopolized the control over the communities of practice of technological design, as of the politically engaged self-organized initiatives that use technology as instruments against oppression, vessels for community-making, or networks for support and solidarity. Making explicit the link between self-organization and networked technologies partially saves the latter from being solely regarded as the tools of the master. Current machine learning is undoubtedly embedded in a capitalist mode of production, and it is definitely not neutral nor a-ideological. Yet, it is the product of a multiplicity of not necessarily coherent historical processes and not the direct result of a monolithic master plan.

However, highlighting these alternative histories and untapped potentialities does not imply taking today's AI ideology at face value. The above provocation is not a wholehearted acceptance of the technologies that came out from the heyday of cybernetics, but a demonstration that they can be something different to what they are today precisely because they have already been something different. For these media activist movements, the key technological advancements were radio, video, television, and the internet, not large langue or diffusion models implemented in deep neural networks.

My guess is that this is not only due to these groups using the technologies available at the time, but that this is also an implicit techno-political decision. Media activism requires articulating a technological assemblage in some ways over others. Frank Rosenblatt was already implementing cybernetic ideas of self-organization into hardware almost two decades prior to Guerrilla Television's publication. Yet, for the Raindance Corporation implementing recursive feedback loops was not about creating a system for trait reduction, categorization, identification, and prediction. It was rather about fighting The Beast and its monopoly over perception to allow for the emergence of a different media ecology. Their concerns were not placed on emulating the human ability for prediction, but, as the UrbanTV manifesto underlines years later, on producing different modes of relating to one another.

Participatory video production culture is ever more crucial for predictive machine learning systems. Terabytes of online video are used as training data for energy-intensive solutions to questionable design problems. When framed within the assumptions and expectations of AI, participatory culture becomes a moment subsumed to an assemblage that reinterprets video production as data production and, therefore, defines the producer solely as a user or a motor for data production. The community-making potential of localized televisions is replaced by the repetitive prompting of globe-spanning infrastructures. This assemblage displaces the user/video activist as a node of action and privileges the software-maker/designer/engineer, the corporate stakeholder, and, more recently, the tech ethicist as the “humans-in-the-loop”.

So, what is there to save from AI? Not its aspirations of becoming a general-purpose, consumer-facing technology, but its proto-history: the interconnected participatory initiatives it has captured. The task is then about resurfacing these obscured elements to completely rearrange this assemblage into something else. To connect parts differently and produce new diagrams. From an automated master’s eye to a network of cooperating urban televisions.

Writing this in 2024 (and published in 2025), the Amsterdam of the 80’s or the Bologna of the 2000’s appear as nostalgic memories of a time full of political potential. At THE VOID we're still too attached to platformized services and institutional contexts to sincerely claim that we are tactically parasitizing on existing infrastructure while resisting capitalist capture. The “creative” culture we live in, either online or localized in Amsterdam, seems too constrained by the institutions and platforms it depends on even when trying to overcome them. The promises of DYI video have long been fulfilled by the user-created internet, so what's the point of cultivating new participatory cultures today after their exhaustion? Isn’t everything that’s uploaded to the internet ending up as training data on perpetually heating data centers? What should we do different to avoid cooption?

First, as the UrbanTV manifesto noted, it's not that much about creating the right type of content. Second, and this is my addition, I believe that this is not a design problem. It's not about nudging other people somewhere else to do this or that using technology: designing just the right integrated tech solution to get the common citizen into video activism. It is also not about designing the right, fair, or value-driven machine learning model, but about practicing the kind of social relations we want to have in the first place and then, maybe, abstracting them with technology. How do we create a social infrastructure of cooperation instead of that of identification, targeting, prediction, and micro-managing that the platformization of the social web, and now AI, have created? The politics of design processes have still much to learn from the politics of self-organization.

Our diagrams for THE VOID are not necessarily a blueprint to scale-up our operations, but a way of creating our own shared habits over our tools. Paths of action that will enable us to go live once again. But more than trying to provide a fixed workflow, our congealed know-how in a diagram is a reminder of what self-organization is all about: gathering collective forces to make the improbable happen again. That even if the past feels unrepeatable now, it probably also felt unattainable back then. As the Dutch squatter collective Adilkno once wrote about street riots:

“During such an event, the meeting takes place between the strangers who populate the city. The crowd, which as a stream of traffic had become invisible to itself, recognizes itself anew and reacts as such: it rediscovers its reality in a concrete form. The individuals who, according to Canetti, overcome their fear of touch in the crowd, meet each other as bodies and embrace that experience at once. And this while in the day-to-day order the other was merely an image, a collection of advertising messages regarding lifestyle, status, sexuality, subculture. The accumulation of characteristics everyone makes of himself loses its disciplining impact on the spot…. However exceptional the damage caused in the stories that make the rounds later, the concrete incidents are shorter-lived than the ultimate surprise at how in the world this could have happened. The chain reaction has surpassed every initiating action. The amazement over this can be hardened into a nostalgic attitude, which demands that the events of the good old days, having become inconceivable, will not happen again. But it can also be transformed into the radiance of the promise that the adventure can be relived, that the same event can be staged more times, from beginning to end, but by us ourselves.”[27]

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[1] Bernhard Rieder, Engines of Order: A Mechanology of Algorithmic Techniques (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462986190.

[2] Annemarie Mol, Eating in Theory (Duke University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012924.

[3] See Davide Panagia, Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University press, 2024), 42–52.

[4] Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

[5] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973), http://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality.

[6] Marloes De Valk, “A Pluriverse of Local Worlds: A Review of Computing within Limits Related Terminology and Practices,” LIMITS Workshop on Computing within Limits, ahead of print, June 14, 2021.

[7] De Valk, “A Pluriverse of Local Worlds,” 3. De Valk is in fact summarizing 1987 paper by A. C. Lemke and G. Fisher describing convivial computing: Andreas C. Lemke and Gerhard Fischer, Constrained Design Processes: Steps Towards Convivial Computing, Technical Report (Colorado University at Boulder Department of Computer Science, 1987).

[8] See Henry Jenkins, “What Happened Before YouTube,” in YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, Digital Media and Society Series (Polity, 2009).

[9] Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023), 153, 160.

[10] Jenkins, “What Happened Before YouTube,” 110.

[11] See William Merrin, “Still Fighting ‘the Beast’: Guerrilla Television and the Limits of YouTube,” Cultural Politics 8, no. 1 (2012): 97–119, https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-1572012; Holmes, Brian, “Tactical Television. Movement Media in the Nineties | Regarding Spectatorship,” 2015. 

[12] Quoted in Holmes, Brian, “Tactical Television. Movement Media in the Nineties | Regarding Spectatorship.” 

[13] It’s interesting to note here that recursivity or recursion, a recurring theme in the history of philosophy from Proclus, to Hegel, Yuk Hui, and Douglas Hofstadter, which was later “secularized” by information and communication sciences as the cybernetic feedback loop, is too an algorithmic technique in computer programming (the ability for a program to call itself), and is currently heralded by AGI simps as a first sign of artificial consciousness awakening.

[14] Merrin, “Still Fighting ‘the Beast.’” 

[15] Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971); quoted in Merrin, “Still Fighting ‘the Beast,’” 103. 

[16] Merrin, “Still Fighting ‘the Beast,’” 104.

[17] Nick Dyer-Witheford, Autonomist Marxism (Treason Press, 2004), 7, https://libcom.org/library/autonomist-marxism-information-society-nick-witheford.

[18] Although our production techniques are still highly attached to the tools, both hardware and software, of corporate giants. 

[19] For a recounting of these events (in Italian or Spanish) see Teresa “Ze” Paoli, “Indymedia Italia: Bologna, Genova, Palestina,” in Media Activism: Strategie e Pratiche Della Comunicazione Indipendente, ed. Matteo Pasquinelli (DeriveApprodi, 2002); Pasquinelli, Matteo, ed., MEDIACTIVISMO: Estrategias y Prácticas de La Comunicación Independiente (DeriveApprodi, 2003). 

[20] Pasquinelli, Matteo, MEDIACTIVISMO: Estrategias y Prácticas de La Comunicación Independiente, 14. (Translation own). 

[21] Pasquinelli, Matteo, MEDIACTIVISMO: Estrategias y Prácticas de La Comunicación Independiente, 143. 

[22] Pasquinelli, Matteo, MEDIACTIVISMO: Estrategias y Prácticas de La Comunicación Independiente, 142.

[23] Pasquinelli, Matteo, MEDIACTIVISMO: Estrategias y Prácticas de La Comunicación Independiente, 16.

[24] Holmes, Brian, “Tactical Television. Movement Media in the Nineties | Regarding Spectatorship.”

[25] David Garcia, “A Pirate Utopia for Tactical Television,” Tactical Media Files, September 15, 2012, http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/ articles/3568/A-Pirate-Utopia-for-Tactical-Television.

[26] “SALTO Amsterdam - Over ‘Open Access,’” SALTO, n.d., accessed September 3, 2025, https://www.salto.nl/over/. (Translation own).

[27] “Special Movement Teachings,” in Cracking the Movement: Squatting beyond the Medi, by ADILKNO, trans. Laura Martz (Autonomedia, 1994), https://networkcultures.org/bilwet-archive/Cracking/special.html.

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References

De Valk, Marloes. “A Pluriverse of Local Worlds: A Review of Computing within Limits Related Terminology and Practices.” LIMITS Workshop on Computing within Limits, ahead of print, June 14, 2021.

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