Re: <nettime> Extinction Internet

Dear Geert

Thank you very much for sharing this text which has stimulated some reflections, not least as what is now being actively termed 'the crisis in the humanities' is gaining traction here in darkest Britain. Invited to comment, I am spending time thinking about how those of us who pushed against disciplinary boundaries over the course of the pre and post-Millennial decades might now evolve any kind of intellectually coherent position.

I read your paper earlier this morning then on impulse opened a book called The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part Three published by Archive Books in 2016 [I think *my copy is undated*]. It was based on a conference co-convened by Mark Fisher at Goldsmiths in 2014. I opened it randomly to see what might turn up. It led me directly to a chapter by Anna Munster entitled 'Distended Nervous System: Networked Media and Its Neurological Turns' and to a section heading from Neuro-turns to Neuropolitics and to a page (206) that included the line: 'Lovink asks where, in all this, is the economic and political analysis of Google and other networked corporations, and of the colonisation of content, real time and labor?'

She then states: 'Although concurring with his questions, I nonetheless think we need to be simultaneously asking specific questions about the neural micro politics at play here and to try to figure out their conjunctions and relays with molar dimensions of the economic and political'. The chapter contains many such insights.

Berardi was also a contributor to the event.

I remember walking to the train station after the conference in 2014 with Mark Fisher who I had not previously met. He kindly said he had welcomed my mentioning William Burroughs in my talk I had been talking about Burroughs' predictive reference in The Electronic Revolution, orig. published in 1970, to an ubiquitous playback environment (and also to his intensive experimentation with the psychic boundaries of his physical existence in the world).

Your talk/lecture/text strengthened my sense that some kind of position might be possible to find on the challenges of the present, even if as you say the conclusions might be chilling.

Thanks again

On Thu, 24 Nov 2022 at 19:21, Brian Holmes <[email protected]> wrote:

"Let’s stop building Web3 solutions for problems that do not exist and launch tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize."

The emergent internet of the 80s and 90s with all its open potentials was the radical machine that made transnational culture-sharing possible. Its colonization by globalizing capital was launched with social media, generalized by platform labor and completed by blockchain experiments gone tragically wrong. We live today under the accumulated wreckage of this project, and rather than wandering contemplatively from ruin to ruin (that's called critique) it's time to make new things, and to grasp the ancient where it is now emergent (that's called invention). Of course there will not be the same rush to engage with tools promised to immense corporate development, with all its accompanying perks and subsidies. Instead there will be an entirely different rush to engage, driven by uncanny combinations of hope, solidarity, outrage and fear of climate change. I just love this phrase: "decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize." Not virtualization, but actualization seems to be the keyword of the future.

On Thu, Nov 24, 2022 at 10:41 AM Geert Lovink <[email protected]> wrote:
Extinction Internet is not merely an end-of-the-world phantasy of digital technology that one day will be wiped out by an electromagnetic pulse or the cutting of cables. Rather, Extinction Internet marks the end of an era of possibilities and speculations, when adaptation is no longer an option. During the internet’s Lost Decade, we’ve been rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic under the inspirational guidance of the consultancy class. What’s to be done to uphold the inevitable? We need tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize. Join the platform exodus. It’s time for a strike on optimization. There is beauty in the breakdown.
Extinction Internet is Geert Lovink’s inaugural lecture, held on November 18, 2022 as Professor of Art and Network Cultures, within Modern and Contemporary Art History, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam.
—
Preface by Geert Lovink
My gratitude goes to prof. Mia Lerm Hayes to make it all possible, and to Frank Kresin, Dean of the Faculty Digital Media and Creative Industries, to facilitate the sponsorship of this chair by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
A few words about the background of the lecture topic. The Russian invasion in Ukraine and the mounting climate crisis urged me to not merely look back at the thirty-plus years of media theory, new media art and activism. The internet criticism that I have tried to define and practice needs to constantly be challenged and questioned in order to remain relevant. Together with my dear friend Ned Rossiter, with whom I collaborate ever since we met in Melbourne, back in 2001, I decided to go beyond my work of the past five years on the mental states of internet users, as recorded in my books Sad by Design and Stuck on the Platform, now confronting myself with Extinction Internet.
I am building here on the work of Bernard Stiegler and Franco Berardi on climate collapse and finitude in platform capitalism. I also benefitted from the dialogues with Athina Karatzogianni at Leicester University, who is doing research into the strategy debates of Extinction Rebellion, as well as Georgiana Cojocaru, a research fellow at the Institute of Network Cultures. This led to a short essay, entitled Extinction Bauhaus, on art and design education in the age of climate collapse. The following speech directly builds on these exchanges. Besides the readers of the text, mentioned in the pdf, I would like to thank INC team members Chloë Arkenbout, Laurence Scherz and Tommaso Campagna for their editorial and production to put out the text and in particular, as always, Mieke Gerritzen for the design.
Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2022
Download the .pdf here: https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ExtinctionInternetINC2022Miscellanea.pdf

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