December 9, 2014
Join us at Friends with Books: Art Book Fair Berlin for a series of lectures and discussions with Metahaven, Julieta Aranda and Ana Teixeira Pinto, Hito Steyerl, Diedrich Diederichsen, and others in anticipation of the next installment in the e-flux journal reader series, coming soon from Sternberg Press.
The internet doesn’t exist. We thought it was made of wires and black boxes because that’s what computers used to look like. It’s no longer inside a browser window or floating on a cloud. It has no material base. The internet already dissolved into us, into a heap of effects and affects. In warped identity recognition, bling memory, loving solidarities and nasty breakups, secrecy and ad-hoc informalism, do-gooder corruption, algorithms converting light and exuberance into capital and back.
As arguments for censorship and surveillance now paint a picture of a technological apparatus that is “too complex” to comprehend, we start to see how easily we may be sliding into a headless technocratic autocracy that is not so different from the most classical corrupt economic and political regimes. At the same time, we have internalized network theories and internet protocols so deeply that we might be better off talking about things like weather, affect, and paranoia if we want to understand what communication across long distances has really come to look like.
Visit the e-flux booth, table J1 at Friends with Books: Art Book Fair Berlin on December 13 and 14 for your very own The Internet Does Not Exist T-shirts, mugs, and samizdat USB sticks, as well as other titles the in e-flux journal readers series.