In your work, you suggest that the mythology accompanying the rise of the Internet is now defunct, having been colonized by platforms and algorithms. In this post-Internet scenario, the challenge does not lie in returning to the “naivety of the Net,” but in identifying new paths forward…
First of all, I would like to clarify that the idea that the Internet, also understood as an emancipatory technology, is “dead” (an idea introduced, among others, by the artist Hito Steyerl a few years ago) does not mean that it has completely disappeared. On the contrary, the idea of the Internet as an emancipatory technology has a “spectral” presence, it continues to haunt platform capitalism as a set of latent but unrealized possibilities, which persist, even in a conflictual way, within the platforms themselves.
The view that the old Internet is no longer adequate, and that platforms are a model to be overcome, has also been raised in circles closer to the world of programming, where people are thinking about revisiting the so-called “first principles”, or foundational principles, of digital communication. It seems to me, however, that these attempts and rethinks often reflect a libertarian and individualistic ideology that is ill-suited to the political challenges of the present moment, which has been described as one of “polycrisis”. Another model is that of the fediverse, but the debate there, too, remains open. There are certainly other technical experiments under way that would be worth exploring. The challenge is to make these technologies genuinely popular and widely adopted, in a context where the technical infrastructure of today’s digital communication is firmly in the hands of large corporations. There are no simple solutions: the model of the old Internet is inadequate for mass digital communication, and platform capitalism is essentially an extractive mechanism. How do we get out of this double impasse?
In the shift from the digital to the post-digital, you emphasize the importance of recovering the material and hardware dimension. How does this tension between the dematerialization promoted by platforms and the need for corporeality manifest itself?
Friedrich Kittler, the leading German media theorist, used to say: “there is no software.” By this he meant that everything, in the end, must be translated into the material level of hardware, down to the level of microchips. Platform interfaces, too, rely on a very material, indeed almost mechanical, conception of the body, shaped by behaviorism and its stimulus–response model. Finally, new technologies such as generative AI are massively material and have a significant environmental impact. So there is a profound materiality to computational digitality, but it is a materiality that challenges us to rethink what it entails and what it means.
This is not about making matter “vital,” but about rethinking it through the lens of post-classical physics, from chaos theory to particle physics. This represents a fundamental challenge.
In this post-digital phase, do you see any early signs of a more radical transformation? Consider, for instance, how generative artificial intelligences are draining traffic from the web and reshaping our modes of content and image creation… What further developments might we expect?
It is very difficult to predict how things will evolve. In a recent volume, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Svitlana Matviyenko describe a tension between cyberwar and revolution. Digital militarization, to also cite Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein, should not be underestimated, including its capacity to mobilize users on a mass scale, nor should the pressures toward a radical transformation of the present order. These political tensions constitute the very environment in which technological development is unfolding today.
