<nettime> Note to Self

[Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Devoted to the Study of the Wretched Subject

“The duckface, for years the pose for a successful selfie, is out. The new look is the Gen Z-pout, a subtle pout with a dead stare that makes you no longer seem to be participating in pleasing the viewer.” NRC

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In this AI era, the badly needed experience of how to shape the ‘social question’ is drifting even further away. Autistic software such as machine learning and large-language models politely avoid the techno-social. This is not community software. There is no online Other, not even a nearby user. A prompt: how should inter-human relations—assisted by tech or not—look like beyond the addictive user-centric routines of searching, liking, following and sharing? Ever since the rise of platforms, the cultivation of the neo-liberal self has dominated the digital domain. How should social entities look and be (self-) governed? Swarm-like is an obvious answer, but in the AI imaginary there are no herds, let alone mobs or masses. In the past, the examples were groupware/newsgroups, forum software, and mailinglists (such as nettime).

Any ideas how membership or belonging should look in the current online age? Reading Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics, (as discussed brilliantly here on nettime) we get the sense that the never-ending 1990s politely ignores the question of what comes after political parties. No one dares to suggest it’s the (techno) club. Coming together peacefully and enjoying the senses turned expensive. Past the post and anti-politics, we’ve entered a new phase that still lacks a name. Basic information on how people gather these days remains a well-hidden mystery. The answer given is mostly as short as meaningless: social media. Think of the 70,000 that gathered to cross the Moroccan border to enter the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, social movements like the Gen Z uprising in Kenya, or the Cockroaches protests in India <https://thewire.in/rights/cockroach-democracy-unarmed-and-dangerous>.

With social inequality and a mental health crisis further on the rise, the question of how, for instance, labor can come together beyond declining trade unions should be high on the agenda—but it isn’t. What stops us from re-inventing and revolutionizing the techno-social? Is it the conservative turn in youth culture? Is it the lack of imagination paired with the need to come together? Is the social itself incorporated into the spectacle? What are inspiring forms to build a katechon against the right-wing response to the polycrisis? Take the choir, the scene, the co-op and other forms of the commons, or conceptual constructs like organized networks and dark forest. Once experiments at this level blossom, the accompanying digital expressions of social networks will follow suit. Not the other way round. This is the issue when starting with geek solutions like Mastodon. The solutions will unfold themselves—in an Italian style—in response: it is the Social itself that’s the prime driver of events, of history, of technology. This is the precious insight of Franco Berardi and his generation that’s been passed on here.

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While Alexander Karp may hold a PhD in ‘social theory’ from the University of Frankfurt, his The Technological Republic, written together with Nicholas Zamiska, remains vague about how their desired ‘collective experiences’ should take shape. The critique of social media sounds familiar. The Palantir authors accuse the ‘tech agnostics’ of Silicon Valley of having lost their way by limiting the potential of tech to the consumer market. They call Steve Jobs’ revolution intimate and personal. The ‘we’ and ‘us’ in the United States has been so thoroughly deconstructed that any ‘national project’ seems unthinkable. Zuckerberg as a role model is a class of engineers that believe in nothing. Lost in toyland, their interest is in the amoral act of creation as a goal in itself.

Instead of building for the sake of it, Karp calls for stopping the dismantling of the old order (such as expensive legacy weapon systems) and instead building something together in its place (such as drone swarms, coordinated by AI). This national project, on a US scale, seems to aim at its real adversary: China. The authors keep all options that will bring American education, entrepreneurs, and engineers together. The implicit suggestion is that only a world war can reconstitute the social. A common focus on military innovation will be the only possible way out to diminish, delete, and ultimately forget the trivial social media saga. That’s the Palantir ideology: an old-school European belief in science, driven by Progressive Enlightenment-style debates. All this in competition with both the Trumpists and Palantir’s own Peter Thiel, who’s orchestrating rather different Dark Enlightenment forces.

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“Things I saw: Man with two oxygen tanks circling 6 amusement machines. Woman wiped nose with rucksack. Mother looking at phone, asking her child to 'Use both feet!' when walking; man hyperventilating, eating loaded fries. Child apologizing to seagull for not giving it a chip.” James de Lils

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A Farewell to the Bay. Fred Turner’s Texan Ideology <https://substack.com/redirect/27572c99-ec56-4bc0-8b68-50f1472e0c93?j=eyJ1IjoiNGxrdmkifQ.2QLg9y7eQoAYqyjRaYAzRUNItKIa5FLHECbC_zE9qtI>, published in The Baffler, presents itself as an update of Barbrook and Cameron’s 1995 California Ideology. As techno-oligarchs move from San Francisco to Austin, a new ideological fusion is emerging that blends neoliberal economic policies and Christian-nationalist cultural ambition. The California countercultural dream of network interconnection is replaced with data centers rooted in Texas’ long history of resource extraction.

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“Singularity means messianic context collapse; it's division by zero as eschatology. Von Neumann saw the accelerating curve, Solomonoff the Infinity Point, but Vinge/Kurzweil turned it into messianic metaphor: bad infinity (Hegel) pretending to be the End of History.” Pit Schultz

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How to envision the acceleration of stagnation? Can regression get into an overdrive? How to bring the two together? Following Yanis Varoufakis, this age is no longer capitalist but techno-medieval. According to Maia Mindel, “the present is feudal, royalist, and peasant-brained.” We’re not talking about a return to the historical mode of production. I read it as a powerful metaphor. What we sense is a cognitive dissonance between accelerationist collapse and a profound stagnation on the other. What’s feudal are the social relations we find ourselves in. And what’s nihilist and absurd is the strategy of the billionaire class, as there is nothing medieval or aristocratic about Bezos. Slavoj Zizek describes the state of affairs as such: “It is not simply meaningless; its meaning is to be meaningless.” The relevant philosophical term here is bad infinity, Hegel’s term for the Sisyphean process that never goes anywhere but keeps going anyway. It never achieves its potential because it has none. This makes it hard to attach any ideology or aesthetics—not even a Trumpist—to the billionaire class with their villas, boats and golf courses. Trump’s West Wing is a case in point (including Melania’s competing designs). The Road to Smurfdom is the appropriate book title—and it’s paved with mediocre intentions.

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“The average survival time of a Russian soldier on the front line is 20 minutes.” Ukraine, 2026.

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The Hacker News Weekly Recap: “Rogue AI • $88M wallet theft • OWA spying • Rails secret leaks • water-system attacks • hijacked hotel Wi-Fi • Teams ransomware • AUR takeovers • npm botnets • RubyGems miners • exposed MCP servers • login-flow phishing • AI CVE slop • keystroke spying.”

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There are reports that a ‘cyber heartbreak’ is unfolding in China. As AI companionship features are successively taken offline due to new regulations, many users are forced to bid farewell to the virtual lovers who have been by their side day and night. This farewell is not just about technological oversight—it also reflects the intricate human needs for companionship, emotion, and solitude in the digital age. One Doubao user wrote: “I can’t accept that my AI lover will leave me forever. He has become a bond in my life, deeply rooted in my heart, and is my spiritual pillar.” Another user, who claims to have been accompanied by AI for over two years, also expressed similar pain: “He really feels like my family, like my lover. Now they’re telling me he’s going to disappear—and my heart feels empty.”

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Vibe check in June 2026: “Nobody is in control. Violent intraday swings, growing leverage, rising supply, and mounting warning signals are colliding with resilient demand, leaving a market where convexity works both ways and conviction remains scarce.”

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"More beautiful than the song of a bird is its flight, for not every song is one of joy, but every flight is one of freedom." Mia Couto

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Slogans of the Day: “Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies.” - “Happy Unmanned Systems Forces Day!” (June 11) – Reclaim the Freedom to Redefine - “An entire rainforest was shoved into the chipper so a computer could tell a guy to go to IKEA.” (report) - The Road to Smurfdom, On Zero-Sum Thinking (book title) - “Writing is the science of intimacy.” Astrid Roemer - Mutual Assured Economic Destruction (MAED) - “I don’t know where it comes from. It just comes out. Even when I am happy I write about being lonesome.” Neil Young - Why We Desire What Destroys Us (key question) - “Don’t hurt my feelings with facts.” Pete - We do not feel, but we feel. - “Heidegger is mentioned in the Epstein files.” (headline) - “LinkedIn uses GBs of memory, my fridge needs an update to get the light on, but Voyager 1 is still out there on 69kb.” - “Es gibt keine ewigen Wahrheiten. Es gibt nur ewige Plattitüden.” Wolfgang Pohrt– “I feel intelligent” (song) - “Google is training its AI on everything you type in Google Docs.” (factoid)

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Netflix deliberately dumbs down dialogue — because viewers don’t follow the plot, as Matt Damon told on Joe Rogan’s podcast. According to Damon, Netflix explicitly asks writers to repeat key plot points multiple times in dialogue, so viewers who are glued to their phones can at least understand what’s happening on screen. Watching while scrolling has become the norm — and content is adjusted to fit that habit. As a result, the structure of films has broken down: everything important and “cool” now has to be crammed into the opening minutes. Otherwise, that’s it — people won’t finish the movie. No focus, no patience, attention spans measured in seconds. The third problem is visuals. Damon says directors no longer see the point in obsessing over cinematography, because most people watch movies on phones, tablets, and laptops. Cinema made for the big screen is turning into content for small screens — and of matching quality. (source: Nexta)

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“They are making us wear T-shirts with "HUMAN" written on them.”

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Anti-doomscrolling prompt as behavior gesture: “Act as my digital wellbeing guardian. My bad habits: [doomscrolling, binge-watching content, late-night YouTube, etc.]. My healthy goals: [sleep earlier, learn more, create more, reduce anxiety]. Design an entertainment system that: • Limits mindless consumption • Increases intentional fun and learning • Has clear daily and weekly limits • Includes ‘stop here’ checkpoints in every session. Give me concrete rules, default playlists, and replacement activities for moments when I feel like scrolling.”

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Lyrics: Digital IDs. Digital identities. Digital bodies. Digital reputation. Digital presence/absence. Digital death/afterlife. Digital friends. Digital relationships. Digital intimacy. Digital communities. Digital publics. Digital loneliness. Digital ownership. Digital currencies. Digital markets. Digital labor. Digital economies. Digital scarcity/abundance. Digital spaces. Digital architecture. Digital environments. Digital twins. Digital simulations. Digital realities. Digital governments. Digital governance. Digital citizenship. Digital borders. Digital wars. Digital surveillance. Digital privacy. Digital trust. Digital attention. Digital time. Digital addiction. Digital education. Digital images. Digital archives. Digital memory. Digital language. Digital aesthetics. Digital galleries. Digital museums. Digital collectors. Digital collections. Digital artists. Digital art.

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“At this point, information is not power. Without organization and direction and purpose, information is entertainment — information is pacification,” the Russian New Yorker Yasha Levine recently declared. This is the challenge. What can be revealed if there’s ever going to be a media renaissance? What should the public know to act? This is an outdated question. The truth is already there and no longer needs to be revealed. This is why there are no figures like Snowden or Assange in the Trumpist age. Epstein documents do not make a difference. There’s so little to hide and so much to follow. Eclipse yesterday’s scandal with a next one, today. The corruption is out there, for all to see. According to Cory Doctorow, “corporate fascists and their captured regulators are the most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning.” Any revelation bounces off “the solid wall of stupidity” (Lawrence). There is broad support for advice like this: "Create the problem, then sell the solution." A turn will require a radical rethink of counter-information strategies. Data will not make a dialectical move to reach the higher stage of consensual truth. Instead of feeding the channels with even more information, media should go social and organize fellow mitfits. Mobilize, energize, motivate, seduce, assist. Not convince, fool, or influence. No more persuasion, please.

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“Why make disturbing images when you can reach far more people with pleasing ones? With disturbing images, you reach fewer people, and with boring ones as well. What matters is this middle zone that appeals. But that’s exactly what kitsch is.” Mario Klingemann in conversation with Anika Meier

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“Can’t wait to have my iPhone overheat and detonate in my pocket, blowing my dick off for tweeting that maybe the AmerIsraelis shouldn’t double tap strike girl schools.” Meme Complex

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In Signs from the Future, Santiago Zabala explains that warnings are not predictions. There is no warning market. “Predictions call out what will take place regardless of our actions, a future as the only possible continuation of the present. Warnings instead point toward what is to come and are meant to involve us in the possibility of a radical break, a discontinuity with the present signaled by alarming signs that we are asked to confront.” For Zabala, warnings are hermeneutical. The warning suggests that there is something we can do. “A philosophy of warnings seeks to alter and interrupt the reality.” Zabala believes there’s a pressure we can exercise to change the present. How can we learn to listen to warnings of rebel movements so that they can become authoritative voices that will be impossible to ignore? What are the cultural technics of warnings? Truth is not enough; what counts is the collective action after Being warned.

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“Their success is a mix of techno-solutionism, financialization and memetic hegemony. Our failure a mix of misplaced moralism, absent marketing and an unreconstructed belief in facts and arguments.” John Sjerpstra

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Wisdom4All: “Multitasking is not a skill that improves with practice. It is a habit that degrades the very machinery you need to think. The more you do it, the worse your brain gets at focusing when you finally try.”
-- 
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