Strategies for Critical Internet Cultures in the Age of Trump
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:18
Herr Adorno ist dar, gute, ja, und nuch mei auf dem letzten
00:27
Penna zur Lüchter kommen, es kita wiecklich um Lössungen meines Herr Achtungs. It's very important to see that there are challenges ahead of us that need long-term
00:42
new concepts. So one of my very concrete proposals would be to disconnect social networking from news altogether. In the past, they were not connected, and I don't think they are.
01:01
So if we want to rebuild, let's say, the social net, this is one of the ways to do it. Maybe apart from nationalizing or socializing the platforms such as Facebook and Google. So if we want to analyze platform capitalism, also one of the things we need to do is to
01:27
take a bit more a step back and understand that the media sphere itself is shrinking, relatively speaking, from an internet perspective. So if we look at problems, for instance, such as Uber and Airbnb and so on, we see
01:47
a vastly expanding internet in all directions and the media issue is only one of many. And I think what we also need to be careful about, before I start, is to believe that
02:05
there is a problem in society that can be solved through representation. It cannot. The right-wing populism in Europe right now is a social conflict. This cannot be solved with technical means. I'm sorry, we'll have to fight this fight ourselves.
02:26
Google and Facebook are not going to help us, neither is Der Spiegel for that matter. So the problems in society will be tackled straight on. And we cannot delegate this to some journalists. This is not how we should look at it.
02:48
So yes, this is a very important starting point. It's Eugene Morozov's warning about techno-solutionism. We shouldn't go there. OK, so I've been saying this before we get into the topic, because yes, our...
03:16
So this is our Institute of Network Culture, started in 2004.
03:21
We're going through a difficult period at the moment. There's right-wing populism in Europe, and this means that the research into critical internet culture is really under pressure. And we can see that in the Netherlands. I'd like to warn you also in other places, maybe in Germany, yes?
03:44
From the right-wing neoliberal perspective, there's no need to further develop critical internet concepts. There's no need to further develop the internet cultures as we have. The only thing we probably need, like Erdogan and many others, there will be more regulation.
04:05
But is regulation really the issue? I don't think so. So if we're looking for new radical proposals, experiments, we should not think that just regulating
04:21
this business a little bit, having a filter here or there, is going to do the job. OK, so now I'm going through a few of our projects which have been developing over the last 12, 13 years. This is the oldest one. It's called Video Vortex.
04:42
This is Video Vortex, and it's about the aesthetics and politics of online video.
05:09
It's our biggest and oldest and most successful network, which a couple of months ago just met in India. This is another one, Society of the Query. We're now developing number three, which is about search engines.
05:26
All these projects you can join, as was already said, these are multidisciplinary projects where researchers, artists, activists, programmers are working together to look for both critique and alternatives.
05:46
So this is the idea to combine the two. This is a long-term one. It's very hard to fund critical research into search.
06:00
Search is really something that is going further in the background for obvious reasons. Social media is becoming so important. But we still think that we should pay more attention to search. The same with Wikipedia. This still is an active community that is looking into Wikipedia.
06:29
Another one. This is the Unlike Us Network, which is probably one of our bigger and more active networks at the moment. This looks into the question of alternatives in social media. We can critique Facebook and
06:45
Google, yes, and that's, of course, over the last years has been spreading a lot. But do we have alternatives? Of course, there's been many, many setbacks in this region, especially also after Snowden.
07:00
So after 2013, there was an extra layer, so to say, a security layer attached to all the requirements. So after Snowden, we found ourselves in a difficult period when it comes to the development of these alternatives.
07:22
But the question is even more, let's say, conceptual and more urgent, because the question really is, what is social networking today? Why did we end up with social media? How did the word social media come into that? In Italy, where this kind of theory is developed still and there's a very active community, luckily, no one is using the word social media.
07:50
They still speak about social networking and social nets, and I think this is important to stress if we want to have a solution.
08:03
So this network exists in 2011. Of course, these days, over the last couple of weeks, there was, again, another example of bubbling up. So I'm going to talk about Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter. Probably it's been discussed here already in a couple of presentations.
08:28
Yes, these are the examples that we're looking into, how peer-to-peer solutions, or as these are called, federated networks, can be developed and further discussed.
08:50
Before we just try it and walk away again, going back to Facebook, I think this is really interesting, and hopefully we're going again through a renaissance in that field.
09:05
Also, we've been developing with a lot of other partners in the Netherlands the graphic, let's say the design aspect, which for us, of course, we're from the Netherlands, so okay, we do design.
09:20
So the crypto design element is an important key, we believe. After Snowden, this is really one of the big, big issues. How do we get a user-friendly, designed way of secure communication?
09:43
In the Netherlands, with long-term disastrous right-wing policies of austerity, the question of the creative industries is now more than ever very urgent. There's a big consensus in the country that artists and so on, designers, everyone, should be able
10:07
to just earn their own living, so the precarity amongst people in this sector is really growing, and that issue, the issue of the labour conditions, is still a very important one, one that we've been dealing with since we started in 2004,
10:33
and to be honest, the problem has only gotten worse in the Netherlands. And that is why in 2014, we decided to add this new network, and this is now the most active one that we almost full-time put our energies in.
10:56
It's called Money Lab, it's about alternatives in internet revenue models.
11:01
So we look into the critique of crowdfunding, but also the critique of cryptocurrencies, and stuff like this, right? Right now, as we speak, Bitcoin is going through its second big bubble. And so, yeah, there's a spectacular kind of investment happening here, and it's very, very
11:29
important to examine, let's say, also the right-wing, new conservative elements in this software.
11:41
And this was done very, very well by one of our participants, he's called David Columbia, he wrote this text on the politics of Bitcoin, and I think it's very, very good to understand the ideological underpinnings of these software solutions before we adapt them, right?
12:01
And this is why we need to be on board so early, because otherwise we're in the face of implementation, but we don't know where it's coming from, which ideas have been key in the development. And Bitcoin is a very, very good example where a big right-wing and left-wing
12:27
factions both are clashing over the key terms of the architecture of this, in this case, cryptocurrency. And, of course, that spills over in the blockchain, and then before we know, Der Spiegel will
12:46
come and say, yeah, we can't solve the fake issue, but we'll put it on the blockchain. Really, I will hear them saying this in the next panel, right? Because there's such an urge, there's such a need, such a pressure from society to come up with solutions.
13:06
And before you know, this will be the solution that will be on offer. MoneyLab, of course, also looks at the bigger picture of how can we resolve the precarity in our sector.
13:24
One of the issues there, of course, is the debate about the universal basic income. That's one thing, maybe a little bit more focused on, let's say, the situation in the West, but at the same time, the whole world is, of course, catching up, developing,
13:45
and this issue of the cashless society is now a very, very urgent issue. For instance, in a country, a vast, vast continent such as India, right? So the whole idea of monetization, financialization of all internet activities is something that is ahead of us,
14:10
and we all need to be prepared for that, because the age of Facebook and Google really is over, right? Their model of the economy of the free, where you get a service for free and then give away your data,
14:24
that model is running out, and there's many, many indications across the world what is going on, what's going to come next. That, for instance, is also the case with our activities that we've developed over the years in terms of publishing.
14:48
Since 2004, we've published a lot of books, anthologies, smaller publications, maybe you've come across some of them, but in the last maybe four or five years,
15:04
we've developed our own technologies and ideas about publishing, and it became more and more important as a topic itself. It was no longer a tool, and it's really now about half of our activities are focused on the politics of digital publishing.
15:30
And we have now kind of a clone, it's next to our, we are only a very small office, right? We are with three people, something like that, and next to us, we have the publishing lab, right?
15:42
So if you have students or if you want to come for a couple of months to Amsterdam and look into this, you're welcome to join us. We have a place now where we can do that. These are, for instance, some of the series that we have. This is now our most popular series.
16:01
We started off with traditional books with a publisher, but this is our print-on-demand series. At the moment, we are already at number 25, and so we're very interested in this. This is the latest one that came out last week, and here you can maybe see what we're trying to do.
16:25
We're trying to develop it as a PDF so that you can read it online in a web reader, in this case, ISU. You can order it, the book itself, as a print copy, for instance, through Lulu,
16:41
but we can also use other print-on-demand services, of course. And most activities are in the development of EPUB, right? HTML5 format, and there we also closely work together with the World Wide Web Consortium,
17:04
who recently took over EPUB. Then there's another whole other field, what we're trying to do. We're trying to develop our own small alternative to medium.com. So, wemedium.com, as you know, these are the long reads, four to five thousand word essays,
17:26
stand-alone essays, and this is a series that is now doing very well. A lot of the young people who start to publishing, start doing research, can publish their first major story here.
17:43
And if you have one, please contact us. We're very, very open to collaborate with you. It doesn't have to be in English, by the way, we're a multi-lingual place.
18:06
Or any other language, for that matter. Yes, so, and here's my own work, every four years I'm putting out a book, in which I'm trying to summarize my own activities,
18:23
and it's actually this month, the German translation of this one comes out, and together with the Turkish and Chinese translations. So that's interesting to see.
18:41
We've also been collaborating with a group of artists recently, to produce one of the first 3D books, with 3D illustrations. So this is also a field that we are interested. The book is a little bit heavy to download, as you can imagine.
19:01
So yeah, it's still experimental, but this was really, really fun to do. One of the latest things, the new project, because we don't have much money at the moment, is certainly that we are focusing on this issue of the online self.
19:23
What is the online self? Of course, I can only define it these days, really only in relation to social media. For average users these days, the internet equals social media. We need to understand that.
19:42
We think that one of the solutions really also could be to further speculate, discuss, radicalize the ideas of how the self should be represented, and not leave that up to Mark Zuckerberg to decide how we define ourselves on the net.
20:05
This is kind of a historical approach. What we're doing in two weeks in Rome is that we are bringing together a lot of scholars who look at the politics of the self.
20:22
There's very, very interesting work done in this field, and that is one, of course, in which the politics of representation is important. There's a constant push, especially for young people, to do self-promotion.
20:42
But there's also, of course, the whole field of mask design, what we call mask design, anonymous. Anonymous is a very, very important and imaginative response. To come to a close, of course, there is now the question of
21:06
what is internet culture in the age of Brexit and Trump? This is an important issue to take very seriously.
21:22
It's very important there also to be open-minded about very reactionary forms of web culture, which is often condemned, of course, here, because it's often labeled very quickly as fake news. But remember, the 36% of people in France that voted for Le Pen,
21:47
they are very real, and we cannot just filter them out. This is really not the way we should approach this. Right-wing populism is not an issue that we can filter out.
22:04
There is no way. We need to go for the direct confrontation, for direct dialogue, and for organization as well. Not through social networks, but what we call organized networks
22:20
outside of the social media. This is very important, and I want to close here with a few issues, let's say, that I think are important for the next years. We need to address platform capitalism, and some of the scholars started doing this.
22:49
We need to understand that social media is part of a larger landscape, not an isolated phenomenon. And we need to develop sustainable revenue models,
23:04
and go away from the economy of the free. Then, of course, what I already said, the Unlike Us initiative is focusing on this. It is very important to start to speculate about the alternatives,
23:22
because otherwise we will only get bogged down in the discussion about regulating the existing media, and this will be, I think, a dead-end street,
23:41
if that's the only thing we can think of. In terms of research, we try to emphasize that critical concepts are very, very important for the long term. We see in science, and we see in the universities,
24:01
that because of funding, there's an enormous pressure to focus only on social science, not on the humanities, and to focus on quantitative analysis. That's why I started, of course, my lecture with Adorno. I think this critique of the social sciences is very, very important.
24:23
We need to critique the idea that problems in society can be resolved with quantitative analysis results. They can't. I'm sorry. And if we want to further develop the internet culture,
24:41
we need to have and to develop our own concepts beyond open science, beyond open source, beyond the open and free. I'm sorry, but this is really very, very much 90s, and we need to go beyond the idea that open is the solution for everything. It is not.
25:00
So what will be our next philosophies there? What do we have to offer for the future? This is important. So European collaboration, and that's what I'm really calling for here. Please contact us, include us in your applications,
25:20
or if you want to publish together with us, we're very, very much devoted to that idea of collaborative publishing. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Gerd Louwink. We have three more minutes left, so we can take one quick question.
25:44
One and one answer. I will come with a mic. I don't see any hand raised. No questions? There's a question. Thank you for that inspiring talk.
26:03
One question, what makes you so sure that the age of platform capitalism is over, as you said? Platform capitalism? No, no. Unfortunately, the age of platform capitalism is only starting, right? This is the problem.
26:23
Well, the question is whether we can tackle it, and whether in Europe we have an alternative to all the concepts of Silicon Valley. That is, of course, a question, and many people have looked to Brussels. Brussels hasn't done anything to regulate Google or Facebook,
26:44
let alone come up with an alternative, right? And so the alternative needs to come from us. We need to network. We need to come together and think, not how are we going to regulate Silicon Valley. No, this is a dead-end street.
27:04
We need to define in Europe what is the social for us here, and how do we want people to network, to collaborate together? This is, in my view, the challenge.
27:24
So thank you. Any more questions? We could take one more quick question if there was one.