[D66] Requiem for the Network

[A.OUT]

https://networkcultures.org/geert/2020/01/28/geert-lovink-requiem-for-the-network/

Blog:
Geert Lovink: Requiem for the Network

By Geert Lovink, January 28, 2020 at 2:54 pm.
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(This essay was written in August 2019 for the INC/Transmediale 
co-publication The Eternal Network: The Ends and Becomings of Network 
Culture that came out on January 28, 2020 at the opening of the Berlin 
Transmediale festival. You can read and download the publication here. 
The essay was slightly shortened; below you will find the original text).

—

Requiem for the Network by Geert Lovink

“In the final stage of his ‘liberation’ and emancipation through the 
networks, screens and technologies, the modern individual becomes a 
fractal subject, both subdivisible to infinity and indivisible, closed 
on himself and doomed to endless identity. In a sense, the perfect 
subject, the subject without other—whose individuation is not at all 
contradictory with mass status.” Jean Baudrillard[1]

This is the age of network extinction. Small is trivial. Notorious 
vagueness and non-commitment on the side of slackerish members killed 
the once cute, postmodern construct of networks. Platforms did the rest. 
Decentralization may be the flavour of the day, but no one is talking 
about networks anymore as a solution for the social media mess. Where 
have all the networks gone?

In this age of the subject without a project, there is no ‘underground’ 
anymore. Building one, two, three, many networks as alternatives to 
crumbling institutions such as trade unions or political parties once 
was a fashionable post-cold war tactic. Back then, networks were also 
seen by shady agencies like RAND as stealth technologies able to 
infiltrate, disrupt and penetrate rogue states or actors perceived as 
enemies to the US world order. Introduced in the 1980s in banking as 
‘financial networks’, followed by the democratization of the internet, 
the concept has now reached the status of ‘gesunkenes Kulturgut’. Is it 
the ‘open’, informal character that killed the network or rather the 
absence of a collective will to do anything much more than feed on 
click-bait?

For TechCrunch writer Romain Dillet the term social network has become a 
meaningless association of words. “Chances are you have dozens, hundreds 
or maybe thousands of friends and followers across multiple platforms. 
But those crowded places have never felt so empty.”[2] He concludes that 
the concept of wide networks of social ties with an element of 
broadcasting is dead. What killed the network is the never-ending push 
to add more “people you may know.” More equals better and aligns with 
the capitalist imperative of perpetual growth. In the logic of social 
networks, accumulating more friends is equivalent to a firm 
demonstrating a strong capacity to expand its market reach. Yet a sad 
emptiness accompanies the mass individualization of the cult of 
personality. “Knowing someone is one thing, but having things to talk 
about is another.” Blaming dark pattern design in a desperate attempt to 
push even more ads, tech companies will do whatever it takes to grow. 
The result: “As social networks become bigger, content becomes garbage.” 
Instead of entering the political debate on how to break up these 
monopolies and build meaningful alternative tools that can replace the 
platforms, Dillet comes up with the cheap digital detox gesture. “Put 
your phone back in your pocket and start a conversation. You might end 
up discussing for hours without even thinking about the red dots on all 
your app icons.” Is it possible to re-imagine the social and not blame 
ourselves for being weak, addicted individuals?

In the meantime, networks have elegantly been removed from the tech 
vocabulary. You will search in vain for the term in the books that 
capture the state of the internet such as Nick Ssrnicek’s Platform 
Capitalism (2015), Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack (2016) or Shoshana 
Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). Even activist 
literature rarely uses the term anymore. The mathematical and social 
science-driven ‘network theory’ has been dead for over a decade. The 
left never made an attempt to own the concept. If anyone did, it was 
‘global civil society’, a hand-picked collection of NGOs that played 
around with Manuel Castells’ Network Society in an attempt to enter the 
realm of institutional politics at a transnational level. The 
distribution of power over networks turned out to be nothing but a 
dream. The valorisation of flat hierarchies, a notion especially 
endorsed by ‘the network is the message’ advocates, has been replaced by 
a platform system driven by influencers who are ‘followed’ in a 
passive-aggressive mode by everyone else without consequence. Instead of 
a redistribution of wealth and power we feverishly continue to ‘network’ 
under the calibrated eye of platform algorithms.

In the meanwhile, whatever happened to the network idea? For this essay 
I have made the rounds, visiting different continents, to consult how 
fellow activists, artists and researchers estimate the sorry status of 
networks today. I started off with Dutch post-digital art critic Nadine 
Roestenburg who believes that millennials and Gen-Z see networks as a 
given, “an underlying structure that no longer takes a fixed shape. 
Everybody and everything is always connected to each other, there is no 
longer a white space between the nodes. The network has exploded into a 
void; a hyper-object too big, too complex for our understanding. Meaning 
is lost in meaningfulness and therefore we are desperately searching for 
a starting point, a single node that can reconnect us. This explains the 
popularity of digital detoxes, mindfulness, meditation. In arts, 
psychogeography, as a tool to trace the physical of the digital, a 
requiem for understanding starting at visualising the invisible network 
structure.”[3]

Nadine suggested I contact Bay area-based Jenny Odell, author of How to 
do Nothing. She wrote back: “One thing hasn’t changed is that we require 
certain contexts in order for speech and action to be meaningful. There 
is such a big difference between 1) saying things in a group where you 
are recognized, and which has convened (physically or digitally) around 
a specific purpose, and 2) shouting into an anonymous void, having to 
package your expressions in a way that will grab the attention of 
strangers who have no context for who you are and what you’re saying. 
Both in group chats and in-person meetings, I’m amazed at how things 
actually get done rather than just said, with people being able to build 
off of the expertise of others in an atmosphere of mutual respect. 
Social media, through the process of context collapse, makes this kind 
of thing impossible by design.”[4]

Jenny Odell believes it is worth revisiting and defending ideas of 
decentralized federation “because the model preserves the aspects of 
sociality that make the most of the individual and the group. Looking 
back at the history of activism, the decentralized form shows up over 
and over again. The density of the nodes allows people to form real 
relationships, and the connections between the nodes allow them to share 
knowledge quickly. To me, this represents the possibility of innovating 
new ideas and solutions—rather than one-off, mic-drop statements and a 
bunch of ‘connected’ individuals simply spinning their wheels.”

Let’s get unfashionable and dig up an Adorno quote from Critical Models 
to recast into the social media age: “The old established authorities 
decayed and were toppled, while the people psychologically were not 
ready for self-determination. They proved to be unequal to the freedom 
that fell into their laps.”[5] This is what networks require: an active 
form of self-determination. Self-organization from below is the precise 
opposite of smooth interfaces, automated imports of address books and 
algorithmic ‘governance’ of one’s news and updates. Self-determination 
is not something you download and install for free. During the turbulent 
1990s centralized information systems lost their power and legitimacy, 
but instead of smaller networks that claimed to be more democratic 
and—in theory—promote autonomy and people’s sovereignty, all we got were 
even larger, more manipulative monopoly platforms. Self-determination is 
an act, a political event, and precisely not a software feature.

Like any form of social organization, networks need to be set-up, built 
and maintained. Unlike mapping software seems to suggest, networks are 
not just generated on the spot, as if they were machine-generated 
entities. We’re not talking here about automated correlations. Forget 
the visual snapshots. Networks are structured by protocols and their 
underlying infrastructures; they are not free-floating entities. What’s 
of interest in times of depression and despair is their vitalism, not 
merely a network’s birth or cause of death. Once networks start to grow 
on their own, they may develop in unexpected directions, flourish but 
then stagnate. They can also fork and are just as easily abandoned as 
they were once started. Unlike other forms of organizations the 
political charm of networks lies in their ability to create new 
beginnings, much in the same spirit as Hannah Arendt writes about the 
miraculous energy that is unleashed when we are beginning anew.[6] 
Rethinking networks as tools to create new beginnings can lure us away 
from ‘collapsology’[7] and push aside the never-ending obsession with 
the finality of this world.

The informal character may invite unknown outsiders to join networks, 
yet this often leads to a culture of non-commitment and informal 
hierarchies and power plays by those that are most active. What are we 
supposed to do? Respond? Like? Retweet? This uncertainty is part of the 
network architecture when you do not have pseudo-activity through likes, 
clicks and views. Networks are easy to join—and abandon. They do not 
require formal membership nor the creation of a profile (usually the 
creation of a random username and password is all that’s required). 
However, networks do not fall out of the sky, even though the sudden 
events such as riots and flash mobs seem to suggest otherwise. On 
platforms these ups and downs are being replaced (or should we say: 
overcome) by a constant stream of messages. Instead of inviting us to 
act, we spend most of our time keeping up-to-date, constantly in a state 
of mild-panic trying work through the backlog of Tweets missed over the 
past few days or updates ignored on your favorite social media platform 
(yes, the same one as everyone you know is on). Depleted and too wiped 
out to do anything else, we’re left contemplating in a near-comatose 
condition the now well-known feeling of the void. Emptiness amplified 
with nothing better to do. That’s one of the primary affective 
consequences of the mass training program for an automated future. 
Platforms establish a psychic blockade to think and act (to put it in 
Mark Fisher’s terms). Their ‘service design’ is such that we’re no 
longer lured into taking action. Instead, we express our outrage or 
concern. These are the ‘networks without a cause’ that invite us to 
respond to each and every event with a stripped-down opinion, basic 
signs, responses.

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