Speech at the 1th Annual Conference on Network Society

Thanks a lot for the invitation to have me here to deliver my first public speech in The Peoples Republic of China. I’ve been here a number of times, but this is my first public speech. I am very honored to do that at the first conference of the Network Society Institute.

My talk will be partly biographical and partly theoretical-political. The presentation centres around three key concepts that have shaped my life and my work: media, network and platform. As I’m not a religious follower of Gilles Deleuze, I’m not going to say that there are ‘assemblages’ between these three ‘plateaux’ (even though I agree with this), neither that there is a historical following order in which a new category appears as the old one fades away. In this age of the platform there is neither a decline of ‘media’ nor of ‘networks’. Having said that, historically speaking, in my life time, we could make a case that the ‘media question’ was important for me in the 80’s and 90’s, especially with my background in media activism inside social movements and the emergence of do-it-yourself media (which we coined tactical media). Speculative media theory and media activism era were followed by the rise of networks. In Amsterdam there were the hackers internet provider xs4all.nl in 1993 and the Digital City (dds.nl) community access public infrastructure, launched in early 1994. Pit Schultz and I started the nettime.org initiative in mid 1995, which is still an important electronic mailing list of people who think about politics and aesthetics of the internet. We asked ourselves the simple question: if there is literary criticism, theater criticism and film criticism, then how could internet criticism look like? This, of course, worked with the premise that the internet itself was a ‘medium’. Nettime itself became an example of a network, a worldwide community that still exists after twenty years.

Over the last five years we’ve seen the emergence of platforms, of which we could say that it is not a sign of progress but rather one of regression. Since 2004 we study media, networks and platforms in Amsterdam at the Institute of Network Cultures (INC). You have to imagine that this is not more than a small room, we are only two or three people. We facilitate critical research networks. Coming from the autonomous squatters movement, it is important to understand that we’re good at doing things with little financial resources. We want to keep the ability to mobilize the collective imagination that another world is possible, also with little or no budget. We do this through connecting people and facilitating collaborations and networks. INC is a small research center in a Dutch polytech. That’s applied science. We are not part of an academic research university, so I’m not a professor and I don't have MA or PhD students but we do have the freedom to research. And that’s something.

Let me give some examples. In 2009 we started Society of the Query, a network that questions the politics and aesthetics of search engines.(fig. 1 )The title is a reference to Guy Debord (of the French Situationists) who wrote Society of the Spectacle, back in 1968. The big shift between the society of the spectacle which we know as television and film, to this much more abstract and much harder to understand internet-based society of the query, which is so invisible.

fig. 1

Network society is not spectacular but abstract and we must ‘make it visible’ , because that’s the first step to make the invisible power relationship visible. This is difficult. We all use search engines but these days we don't even notice it anymore that we are searching. There is no difference between Google and Baidu in that sense. They are both facilitating entities and operate in the background. As they are moving into the back ground they become more powerful, yet less visible. This is a Freudian notion: what disappears and is repressed will eventually return. So it’s not as if Baidu is becoming less important. Search engines benefit from becoming invisible.

Another project we started in 2010, in India, together with our friends in Bangalore at the Center of Internet and Society, is Critical Point of View (CPOV). CPOV is a reference to the Wikipedia policy called Neutral Point of View. (fig. 2) Some Wikipedians don't like CPOV because one is not supposed to criticize Wikipedia. We’re supposed to be uncritical supporters, but we at INC say no. We think that the best way to support Wikipedia is to criticize it’s pre-assumptions, and to criticize it from a post-colonial point of view (in this case India), and how to do this by working together for instance with the scholars and activists in India, which is a very important source of inspiration for us. Unfortunately, after in interesting start, this project didn't get much support, but it is still alive. Wikipedia is the largest non-profit website on the internet, and if we don't watch out it will disappear. In part this is a financial issue, but there is also a danger that if Wikipedia does not change internally, and it does not become more culturally diverse and involves many more people, it disappears.

fig. 2

fig. 3

Since 2011, the year of the Arab Spring, the Movement of the Squares and Occupy, we have been running Unlike Us. (fig. 3) All the networks I'm presenting here you can join by signing up for an email list.

Unlike Us is about alternatives in social media. How can we envision other network architectures? How can we get rid of this stupid category of ‘friends’ and ‘likes’? Social networking is not about ‘sharing’ what corporations and state agencies consider ‘news’. Architectures that really redefine the social in a technological age focus on exchanges and collaborations. What do we have in common? Where do we differ? What can we do together? Social media companies are not interested in that because they cannot sell advertisement around those types of activities. They want us to buy stuff and like brands. But how can we get rid of the idea of friends? How can we un-friend? The fact that I somehow know you doesn’t mean we are friends. I’m not a friend of you. For instance if I look at some information and I don't like it. And if I recommend you something it doesn't mean I like it. I don't like your selfie (but there is no way I can tell you this). We need to fundamentally rethink the way we are using and we are defining those relationships with information objects and with each other. Unlike Us as a community still continues, but of course it is difficult to find money. Critiquing social media doesn't make you very popular. That’s a fact, and no fake news.

The Facebook Farewell Party we co-organized in 2015 was amazing, but in Holland the event in the Amsterdam National Theatre was controversial as you’re not supposed to leave Facebook. It is considered social suicide. This is like organizing a social suicide party. I can tell you its quite difficult to shock Dutch people, they supposedly tolerant and open-minded for new things. The event was not a success but luckily a lot of people showed up. Maybe after Trump and after whole idea of Facebook denying to be a media company, things will change. There is a lot of interesting dynamite out there, what looks quite innocent, like the definition of media, but in the case of Facebook this goes to the core. They honestly believe they are neutral and innocent and call themselves a so-called ‘technology company’. Their denial of being a media company is interesting case.

Ever since INC started in 2004 we have been publishing material, until we woke up one day and realized that we were becoming a publisher ourselves. We put out digital books and readers in pdf format and put them on the web. We produce online pamphlets, e-pub essays, so-called long-forms and other types of small booklets we are doing a lot of experiments in this field. Now that we have difficulties with funding digital publishing is becoming our core business. If everything fails this somehow continues because you can do it with almost no money.

Since 2015 we have a practice-based addition to the Institute of Network Culture No.2, which is next door, of course more successful. It’s called Publishing Lab and if you are interested you can come and work with us. The model is based on interns working on 4-5 months projects. Students from all over the world work. We do practical experiments (remember we are not academic), we produce code, we produce prototypes and so on. We operate outside of the conservative-libertarian startup logic, that’s our aim. If you are interested in the future of publishing, you can have a look at the website (www.publishinglab.nl) and maybe if your interested come to Amsterdam and work with us for four or five months. 

In the downward funding cycle that we are in right now we’re looking for more partners and we found a very interesting partner in the Dutch art critics, because the Dutch art critics are a really facing a difficult time themselves. Where can we publish art criticism, where can we publish critique that has an impact? What are the new channels for criticism? And in a way this is maybe the core of what I have been doing for many decades this very question. How can we create new cultures of criticism? And this is now one in which the art critics who are so in the defensive, because there are less art journals, people read less in general. This is about finding new ways, for instance, by producing videos, podcasts, experimenting with new forms of online publishing and so-on. So this is what we have been doing since maybe last year or this year. By the way, since long time this is again the project that we have been doing in our own language, in Dutch, and we will include an international component to this in English.

The biggest project INC is doing right now is MoneyLab. Since 2014 we are looking at alternative internet revenue models in the arts, how can artists, activists, critics make a living? MoneyLab looks at the politics of crowd funding, we intervene in the debate about blockchain and bitcoin or invite people from Africa to talk about mobile money or discuss demonetization in India.(fig. 4) I am very happy that this project is doing well. The project is instigated by the 2008 global financial crisis and the austerity that came after that. Funny enough we are already eight years into this crisis, it’s one of the slowest crisis that I have experienced. This is all the more amazing if we realize that we are living in a real-time world. This should also wake us up that certain crisis maybe even the one which caused Trump to become the U.S. president is something that has long-term causes. We have become unfamiliar to think in those long-term causes. This is a problem because obviously we are living in a real-time media environment in which new things show up every second.

fig. 4

fig. 5

We also feel strong about a campaign called CryptoDesign, which is a design challenge in Amsterdam we co-organized for the second time in November 2016.(fig. 5) We ask designers to help us visualize complicated computational processes, because to politicize this field we need the help of visual artists and designers absolutely. Because the politics are so invisible and so complex especially if you are talking about crypto. The revelations of Edward Snowden (in June 2013) helped a lot in that sense, as did WikiLeaks and Anonymous. We need a collective visual imagination at this level. We need to stop complaining about our loss of privacy and do something. Regulation is one thing, alternatives is the other. In Amsterdam we believe these two political strategies are interlinked.

A new emphasis in 2017 will be on selfies. I’m not against selfies. Many people think “Oh, Calvinists do not like selfies". There is subversive potential in the redefinition of what is the online self. We cannot easily bail out. We cannot preach offline romanticism, and say, switch off your phone and computer and you’ll be fine. That’s not what we are preaching, we have to face directly the elements of popular culture that are out there. Maybe even in the British cultural studies tradition: we have to face this part of digital pop culture, not deny it or run away. After years of looking for funding, we found two universities in Rome who we interested to work with us on an international conference called the ‘Fear and Loathing of the Online Self’.

In terms of methodology, I’m Against Method (Paul Feyerabend’s title of his famous book. Having said that, maybe there is something like an approach what we do (a system into the madness).  This is how we work: we create the networks of people of artists of researchers and we try to bring them together sometimes. Currently we have no more money for events, we have less money for the events to be honest. Because the Dutch funding doesn't want to finance it anymore, but we can still do things here at this level, together with international partners.

Let’s now look into the three concepts. When I am talking about media I really have to be more biographical. I can talk about McLuhan but I’m not Canadian, I am deeply rooted into the trauma of continental  20th century Europe, in fascism, the story about technology that was politicized, instrumentalized and used to exile and then exterminate entire groups, leading to genocide and war. When I was a young media theorist, Klaus Theweleit and Friedrich Kittler were my heroes, and my source of inspiration, both in terms of ideas and style. These two West-Germans, who confronted the history of the technological media, going back to the second world war. In the case of Klaus Theweleit, his analysis is much more biographical, psycho-analytical, for Kittler more focused on literature, but both had a strong interest in reading the technological subconscious ways in which the architectures of the media are deeply ingrained in the logic of war. The birth of the computer out of the war (the cybernetic project) is something we should never forget. We cannot say “oh yeah, we’ve overcome this." The genealogy is there. What we learn when we study the origins of media are these deeply traumatic events. The birth of the computer is a traumatic event, if you hold a computer you are always reminded of that although the computer will not talk to you, it will not tell you its own history. Instead, the computer as an object and machine is about to disappear. It literary disappears into the cloud. The computer shrinks into our pockets and bag in the shape of a mobile phone. It is one big history of disappearance, computing our lives in the background. Of course, there is now media archaeology. If we are talking about history of the media there is media archaeology. I was deeply into Theweleit and Kittler at the time when my friends wrote a book called Media Archive, which summed up the contribution of our group called Adilkno[1] to the speculative phase of media theory. The original version in Dutch came out in 1992, and the extended version in English in 1998. This is an intense period of speculation, also known as the dot com phase of the mid to late 1990s. Then came the dot com crash and 9/11, followed by the re-emergence or reinvention of the web, called web 2.0. The Western internet industry went through a traumatic phase of shrinking after an unprecedented destruction of capital. Not only nowadays what we speak of social capital, but in these phases we are really talking about money but also about intense speculation of what the web could become. So, a lot of that was destroyed, and then of course we move into a phase of further consolidation. I’m not sure if the next phase will be called platform capitalism, we’ll see.

The second concept is network. I can only present a schematic approach here. The first phase for me would be social network analysis from the 1970s, a specific type of sociological research was almost gone almost forgotten. The 70s approach was purely sociological, pre-technological and slightly bureaucratic. Social network analysis was anything but innocent, aimed to map suspect social networks such as mafia structures and criminal relationships between companies, drawn by hand, aided by primitive computer databases. As we’re in Hangzhou right now, at the Institute of Network Society, the approach here is very different. Because it’s not about how can we monitor social groups how can we eliminate this or that. It’s a much more broader network approach, in which people believe that the network can be an alternative to the existing social structures. The network is embodied in people and processes, it is not just an outsider’s perspective of some sociologists that map social relations. Now what does that mean? It means that the network can for instance take up the role of religion, the family, the party, the state, the trade union, the neighborhood organization, and so on. These are the fundamental social structures of the 19th and 20th century. And in this approach they say that maybe these very static and very strong social structures can be replaced by something that is more flexible. The network society is a proposal to think of social structures in a different way.

Over the last 5-10 years we've seen the rise of a humanities emphasis on the networks. Artists were early to take up the network topic, however, this cannot be said of the humanities. By and large the network concept remains an alien concept, mostly associated with biology or computer science.

In 2007 we tried to formulate a new network theory when INC organized an event together with the University of Amsterdam (called New Network Theory). It’s probably the last time that we’ve done anything about network theory itself. We are called the Institute of Network Cultures but I wanted to focus really on the networks in action and we forgot about the theory of the networks itself, primarily because of the explosive growth of the internet and social media in particular.

Not much has changed over the past decade. The three network approaches, once formulated by Paul Barran in the early 1960s are still there: centralized, decentralized and distributed networks. New is the proposal of the federated network, and that should be number four. It is a new architecture but how do we envision it? It is said to be decentralized on the lower and more centralized on the higher levels. Then there is the approach that I have developed together with Ned Rossiter which we call the organized network.  The key point is that we say: we don't want weak ties we want strong ties. We should undermine and prevent weak ties (do not become “friends”). If you want a network create a strong network straight away, and start with a relatively small network. The network theory itself gives us lots of clues how to do that. We know that the core of good working network consists of 10-15 people and somewhat bigger network in which you can communicate has a maximum of 150 people. And beyond that you get lost, you have no idea and you are only benefiting other people, companies, the states by growing it. So, a bigger network works against you and only benefits others. These are very basic network ideas you can read them everywhere. This is not rocket science. However, in today’s social media context this becomes increasingly difficult to build for the simple fact that it is in the interest of the social media giants that these networks grow overnight, and explode. And they do.

The Stack by Benjamin H. Bratton presents an important new step. It’s good milestone to criticize it after the network society trilogy of Castells. Bratton comes up with a grand proposal,  it is speculative theory, which is not about the network anymore. We could say that the concepts of network, media and platform are ‘stacks’.  The book is a structural analysis of what is now called ‘platform capitalism; even though Bratton doesn't want to call it like that. Nick Srnicek he has written a small book about platform capitalism. This could be read in contrast, or in addition to Bratton. I think it’s good to have a debate about platform capitalism, also here in China. What are the specifics of the platform economy in China?

If the 1980s gave birth to media theory, and the 1990s was the decade of networks, we are now living under the spell of the platform. As the word indicates the tendency is to move upward,

to centralize, to integrate, and to synthesize. While network ideology boasted its decentralized nature, platform culture stands proud to announce that the family of man has finally found its common home. Right? We all come together there. In his 2010 article Tarleton Gillespie summed up neatly the various reasons why the platform concept emerged in the aftermath of the dot-com crash. According to Gillespie the word platform was strategically chosen to present the contradictory activities of online servers as a neutral ground, so it creates a neutral ground for ‘do it yourself’ users who are producing for free. The centralizing aspect of the platform is very important, and this is what makes it fundamentally different from the network logic.

The platforms hint at the integration of different players, applications and user data onto a higher level, creating a synthesis, a platform sovereignty, as Bratton calls it (a reference to Carl Schmitt). We are also talking about its exception. These two things are coming together, so the platform is centralizing and Bratton therefore asks the question: is it a camp or an enclave? A worrisome, important question for our time.



[1] https://monoskop.org/Adilkno

Speech at the 1th Annual Conference on Network Society

Thanks a lot for the invitation to have me here to deliver my first public speech in The Peoples Republic of China. I’ve been here a number of times, but this is my first public speech. I am very honored to do that at the first conference of the Network Society Institute.

My talk will be partly biographical and partly theoretical-political. The presentation centres around three key concepts that have shaped my life and my work: media, network and platform. As I’m not a religious follower of Gilles Deleuze, I’m not going to say that there are ‘assemblages’ between these three ‘plateaux’ (even though I agree with this), neither that there is a historical following order in which a new category appears as the old one fades away. In this age of the platform there is neither a decline of ‘media’ nor of ‘networks’. Having said that, historically speaking, in my life time, we could make a case that the ‘media question’ was important for me in the 80’s and 90’s, especially with my background in media activism inside social movements and the emergence of do-it-yourself media (which we coined tactical media). Speculative media theory and media activism era were followed by the rise of networks. In Amsterdam there were the hackers internet provider xs4all.nl in 1993 and the Digital City (dds.nl) community access public infrastructure, launched in early 1994. Pit Schultz and I started the nettime.org initiative in mid 1995, which is still an important electronic mailing list of people who think about politics and aesthetics of the internet. We asked ourselves the simple question: if there is literary criticism, theater criticism and film criticism, then how could internet criticism look like? This, of course, worked with the premise that the internet itself was a ‘medium’. Nettime itself became an example of a network, a worldwide community that still exists after twenty years.

Over the last five years we’ve seen the emergence of platforms, of which we could say that it is not a sign of progress but rather one of regression. Since 2004 we study media, networks and platforms in Amsterdam at the Institute of Network Cultures (INC). You have to imagine that this is not more than a small room, we are only two or three people. We facilitate critical research networks. Coming from the autonomous squatters movement, it is important to understand that we’re good at doing things with little financial resources. We want to keep the ability to mobilize the collective imagination that another world is possible, also with little or no budget. We do this through connecting people and facilitating collaborations and networks. INC is a small research center in a Dutch polytech. That’s applied science. We are not part of an academic research university, so I’m not a professor and I don't have MA or PhD students but we do have the freedom to research. And that’s something.

Let me give some examples. In 2009 we started Society of the Query, a network that questions the politics and aesthetics of search engines.(fig. 1 )The title is a reference to Guy Debord (of the French Situationists) who wrote Society of the Spectacle, back in 1968. The big shift between the society of the spectacle which we know as television and film, to this much more abstract and much harder to understand internet-based society of the query, which is so invisible.

fig. 1

Network society is not spectacular but abstract and we must ‘make it visible’ , because that’s the first step to make the invisible power relationship visible. This is difficult. We all use search engines but these days we don't even notice it anymore that we are searching. There is no difference between Google and Baidu in that sense. They are both facilitating entities and operate in the background. As they are moving into the back ground they become more powerful, yet less visible. This is a Freudian notion: what disappears and is repressed will eventually return. So it’s not as if Baidu is becoming less important. Search engines benefit from becoming invisible.

Another project we started in 2010, in India, together with our friends in Bangalore at the Center of Internet and Society, is Critical Point of View (CPOV). CPOV is a reference to the Wikipedia policy called Neutral Point of View. (fig. 2) Some Wikipedians don't like CPOV because one is not supposed to criticize Wikipedia. We’re supposed to be uncritical supporters, but we at INC say no. We think that the best way to support Wikipedia is to criticize it’s pre-assumptions, and to criticize it from a post-colonial point of view (in this case India), and how to do this by working together for instance with the scholars and activists in India, which is a very important source of inspiration for us. Unfortunately, after in interesting start, this project didn't get much support, but it is still alive. Wikipedia is the largest non-profit website on the internet, and if we don't watch out it will disappear. In part this is a financial issue, but there is also a danger that if Wikipedia does not change internally, and it does not become more culturally diverse and involves many more people, it disappears.

fig. 2

fig. 3

Since 2011, the year of the Arab Spring, the Movement of the Squares and Occupy, we have been running Unlike Us. (fig. 3) All the networks I'm presenting here you can join by signing up for an email list.

Unlike Us is about alternatives in social media. How can we envision other network architectures? How can we get rid of this stupid category of ‘friends’ and ‘likes’? Social networking is not about ‘sharing’ what corporations and state agencies consider ‘news’. Architectures that really redefine the social in a technological age focus on exchanges and collaborations. What do we have in common? Where do we differ? What can we do together? Social media companies are not interested in that because they cannot sell advertisement around those types of activities. They want us to buy stuff and like brands. But how can we get rid of the idea of friends? How can we un-friend? The fact that I somehow know you doesn’t mean we are friends. I’m not a friend of you. For instance if I look at some information and I don't like it. And if I recommend you something it doesn't mean I like it. I don't like your selfie (but there is no way I can tell you this). We need to fundamentally rethink the way we are using and we are defining those relationships with information objects and with each other. Unlike Us as a community still continues, but of course it is difficult to find money. Critiquing social media doesn't make you very popular. That’s a fact, and no fake news.

The Facebook Farewell Party we co-organized in 2015 was amazing, but in Holland the event in the Amsterdam National Theatre was controversial as you’re not supposed to leave Facebook. It is considered social suicide. This is like organizing a social suicide party. I can tell you its quite difficult to shock Dutch people, they supposedly tolerant and open-minded for new things. The event was not a success but luckily a lot of people showed up. Maybe after Trump and after whole idea of Facebook denying to be a media company, things will change. There is a lot of interesting dynamite out there, what looks quite innocent, like the definition of media, but in the case of Facebook this goes to the core. They honestly believe they are neutral and innocent and call themselves a so-called ‘technology company’. Their denial of being a media company is interesting case.

Ever since INC started in 2004 we have been publishing material, until we woke up one day and realized that we were becoming a publisher ourselves. We put out digital books and readers in pdf format and put them on the web. We produce online pamphlets, e-pub essays, so-called long-forms and other types of small booklets we are doing a lot of experiments in this field. Now that we have difficulties with funding digital publishing is becoming our core business. If everything fails this somehow continues because you can do it with almost no money.

Since 2015 we have a practice-based addition to the Institute of Network Culture No.2, which is next door, of course more successful. It’s called Publishing Lab and if you are interested you can come and work with us. The model is based on interns working on 4-5 months projects. Students from all over the world work. We do practical experiments (remember we are not academic), we produce code, we produce prototypes and so on. We operate outside of the conservative-libertarian startup logic, that’s our aim. If you are interested in the future of publishing, you can have a look at the website (www.publishinglab.nl) and maybe if your interested come to Amsterdam and work with us for four or five months. 

In the downward funding cycle that we are in right now we’re looking for more partners and we found a very interesting partner in the Dutch art critics, because the Dutch art critics are a really facing a difficult time themselves. Where can we publish art criticism, where can we publish critique that has an impact? What are the new channels for criticism? And in a way this is maybe the core of what I have been doing for many decades this very question. How can we create new cultures of criticism? And this is now one in which the art critics who are so in the defensive, because there are less art journals, people read less in general. This is about finding new ways, for instance, by producing videos, podcasts, experimenting with new forms of online publishing and so-on. So this is what we have been doing since maybe last year or this year. By the way, since long time this is again the project that we have been doing in our own language, in Dutch, and we will include an international component to this in English.

The biggest project INC is doing right now is MoneyLab. Since 2014 we are looking at alternative internet revenue models in the arts, how can artists, activists, critics make a living? MoneyLab looks at the politics of crowd funding, we intervene in the debate about blockchain and bitcoin or invite people from Africa to talk about mobile money or discuss demonetization in India.(fig. 4) I am very happy that this project is doing well. The project is instigated by the 2008 global financial crisis and the austerity that came after that. Funny enough we are already eight years into this crisis, it’s one of the slowest crisis that I have experienced. This is all the more amazing if we realize that we are living in a real-time world. This should also wake us up that certain crisis maybe even the one which caused Trump to become the U.S. president is something that has long-term causes. We have become unfamiliar to think in those long-term causes. This is a problem because obviously we are living in a real-time media environment in which new things show up every second.

fig. 4

fig. 5

We also feel strong about a campaign called CryptoDesign, which is a design challenge in Amsterdam we co-organized for the second time in November 2016.(fig. 5) We ask designers to help us visualize complicated computational processes, because to politicize this field we need the help of visual artists and designers absolutely. Because the politics are so invisible and so complex especially if you are talking about crypto. The revelations of Edward Snowden (in June 2013) helped a lot in that sense, as did WikiLeaks and Anonymous. We need a collective visual imagination at this level. We need to stop complaining about our loss of privacy and do something. Regulation is one thing, alternatives is the other. In Amsterdam we believe these two political strategies are interlinked.

A new emphasis in 2017 will be on selfies. I’m not against selfies. Many people think “Oh, Calvinists do not like selfies". There is subversive potential in the redefinition of what is the online self. We cannot easily bail out. We cannot preach offline romanticism, and say, switch off your phone and computer and you’ll be fine. That’s not what we are preaching, we have to face directly the elements of popular culture that are out there. Maybe even in the British cultural studies tradition: we have to face this part of digital pop culture, not deny it or run away. After years of looking for funding, we found two universities in Rome who we interested to work with us on an international conference called the ‘Fear and Loathing of the Online Self’.

In terms of methodology, I’m Against Method (Paul Feyerabend’s title of his famous book. Having said that, maybe there is something like an approach what we do (a system into the madness).  This is how we work: we create the networks of people of artists of researchers and we try to bring them together sometimes. Currently we have no more money for events, we have less money for the events to be honest. Because the Dutch funding doesn't want to finance it anymore, but we can still do things here at this level, together with international partners.

Let’s now look into the three concepts. When I am talking about media I really have to be more biographical. I can talk about McLuhan but I’m not Canadian, I am deeply rooted into the trauma of continental  20th century Europe, in fascism, the story about technology that was politicized, instrumentalized and used to exile and then exterminate entire groups, leading to genocide and war. When I was a young media theorist, Klaus Theweleit and Friedrich Kittler were my heroes, and my source of inspiration, both in terms of ideas and style. These two West-Germans, who confronted the history of the technological media, going back to the second world war. In the case of Klaus Theweleit, his analysis is much more biographical, psycho-analytical, for Kittler more focused on literature, but both had a strong interest in reading the technological subconscious ways in which the architectures of the media are deeply ingrained in the logic of war. The birth of the computer out of the war (the cybernetic project) is something we should never forget. We cannot say “oh yeah, we’ve overcome this." The genealogy is there. What we learn when we study the origins of media are these deeply traumatic events. The birth of the computer is a traumatic event, if you hold a computer you are always reminded of that although the computer will not talk to you, it will not tell you its own history. Instead, the computer as an object and machine is about to disappear. It literary disappears into the cloud. The computer shrinks into our pockets and bag in the shape of a mobile phone. It is one big history of disappearance, computing our lives in the background. Of course, there is now media archaeology. If we are talking about history of the media there is media archaeology. I was deeply into Theweleit and Kittler at the time when my friends wrote a book called Media Archive, which summed up the contribution of our group called Adilkno[1] to the speculative phase of media theory. The original version in Dutch came out in 1992, and the extended version in English in 1998. This is an intense period of speculation, also known as the dot com phase of the mid to late 1990s. Then came the dot com crash and 9/11, followed by the re-emergence or reinvention of the web, called web 2.0. The Western internet industry went through a traumatic phase of shrinking after an unprecedented destruction of capital. Not only nowadays what we speak of social capital, but in these phases we are really talking about money but also about intense speculation of what the web could become. So, a lot of that was destroyed, and then of course we move into a phase of further consolidation. I’m not sure if the next phase will be called platform capitalism, we’ll see.

The second concept is network. I can only present a schematic approach here. The first phase for me would be social network analysis from the 1970s, a specific type of sociological research was almost gone almost forgotten. The 70s approach was purely sociological, pre-technological and slightly bureaucratic. Social network analysis was anything but innocent, aimed to map suspect social networks such as mafia structures and criminal relationships between companies, drawn by hand, aided by primitive computer databases. As we’re in Hangzhou right now, at the Institute of Network Society, the approach here is very different. Because it’s not about how can we monitor social groups how can we eliminate this or that. It’s a much more broader network approach, in which people believe that the network can be an alternative to the existing social structures. The network is embodied in people and processes, it is not just an outsider’s perspective of some sociologists that map social relations. Now what does that mean? It means that the network can for instance take up the role of religion, the family, the party, the state, the trade union, the neighborhood organization, and so on. These are the fundamental social structures of the 19th and 20th century. And in this approach they say that maybe these very static and very strong social structures can be replaced by something that is more flexible. The network society is a proposal to think of social structures in a different way.

Over the last 5-10 years we've seen the rise of a humanities emphasis on the networks. Artists were early to take up the network topic, however, this cannot be said of the humanities. By and large the network concept remains an alien concept, mostly associated with biology or computer science.

In 2007 we tried to formulate a new network theory when INC organized an event together with the University of Amsterdam (called New Network Theory). It’s probably the last time that we’ve done anything about network theory itself. We are called the Institute of Network Cultures but I wanted to focus really on the networks in action and we forgot about the theory of the networks itself, primarily because of the explosive growth of the internet and social media in particular.

Not much has changed over the past decade. The three network approaches, once formulated by Paul Barran in the early 1960s are still there: centralized, decentralized and distributed networks. New is the proposal of the federated network, and that should be number four. It is a new architecture but how do we envision it? It is said to be decentralized on the lower and more centralized on the higher levels. Then there is the approach that I have developed together with Ned Rossiter which we call the organized network.  The key point is that we say: we don't want weak ties we want strong ties. We should undermine and prevent weak ties (do not become “friends”). If you want a network create a strong network straight away, and start with a relatively small network. The network theory itself gives us lots of clues how to do that. We know that the core of good working network consists of 10-15 people and somewhat bigger network in which you can communicate has a maximum of 150 people. And beyond that you get lost, you have no idea and you are only benefiting other people, companies, the states by growing it. So, a bigger network works against you and only benefits others. These are very basic network ideas you can read them everywhere. This is not rocket science. However, in today’s social media context this becomes increasingly difficult to build for the simple fact that it is in the interest of the social media giants that these networks grow overnight, and explode. And they do.

The Stack by Benjamin H. Bratton presents an important new step. It’s good milestone to criticize it after the network society trilogy of Castells. Bratton comes up with a grand proposal,  it is speculative theory, which is not about the network anymore. We could say that the concepts of network, media and platform are ‘stacks’.  The book is a structural analysis of what is now called ‘platform capitalism; even though Bratton doesn't want to call it like that. Nick Srnicek he has written a small book about platform capitalism. This could be read in contrast, or in addition to Bratton. I think it’s good to have a debate about platform capitalism, also here in China. What are the specifics of the platform economy in China?

If the 1980s gave birth to media theory, and the 1990s was the decade of networks, we are now living under the spell of the platform. As the word indicates the tendency is to move upward,

to centralize, to integrate, and to synthesize. While network ideology boasted its decentralized nature, platform culture stands proud to announce that the family of man has finally found its common home. Right? We all come together there. In his 2010 article Tarleton Gillespie summed up neatly the various reasons why the platform concept emerged in the aftermath of the dot-com crash. According to Gillespie the word platform was strategically chosen to present the contradictory activities of online servers as a neutral ground, so it creates a neutral ground for ‘do it yourself’ users who are producing for free. The centralizing aspect of the platform is very important, and this is what makes it fundamentally different from the network logic.

The platforms hint at the integration of different players, applications and user data onto a higher level, creating a synthesis, a platform sovereignty, as Bratton calls it (a reference to Carl Schmitt). We are also talking about its exception. These two things are coming together, so the platform is centralizing and Bratton therefore asks the question: is it a camp or an enclave? A worrisome, important question for our time.



[1] https://monoskop.org/Adilkno