Digital Sources




Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet
Geert Lovink 



(Valiz, Amsterdam, 2022)



THE VOID
Stuck on the Platform: Interview with Geert Lovink
from: Institute of Network Cultures

Host: Chloë Arkenbout
Guest: Geert Lovink
Directors and Producers: Tommaso Campagna, Jordi Viader Guerrero
Music: Daniel Leix-Palumbo
Graphic Design (background): Mieke Gerritzen


This page presents the digital sources mentioned in the footnotes of the book Stuck on the Platform, Reclaiming the Internet by Geert Lovink. The links present the extensive collection of references Geert Lovink has collected online during the writing process of the book. This collection of links corresponds to the order in which they appear in the footnotes in the chapters of Stuck on the Platform. This digital overview of the sources allows for further online exploration of Lovink's sources. 



Introduction
Phantoms of the Platform or Internet’s Muddy Enlightenment



“The Internet is
inside us.”
Patricia Lockwood




 The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)



The Great Recoil of Neoliberal Globalization



What Is Inverted Thinking?



HUSTLETOLOGY




 twitter.com/geraldi_nej/status/1398266186790486017



Yanis Varoufakis: Capitalism Has Become ‘Techno-Feudalism’






Bruce Schneier on Security: Feudal Security



 Nathan Schneider: Online Communities Are Still Catching Up to My Mother's Garden Club


“Theory is the answer.
But what is the question?”
Johan Sjerpstra




You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype



The Rise and Fall of the Palo Alto Consensus



The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump



 Louis Armand, Alienist Manifesto 10




“I love the smell of unruly memes
in the morning.”
@jamie_jk




Tamara Kneese — Our Silicon Valley, Ourselves



The Internet Didn’t Kill Counterculture, You Just Won’t Find It On Instagram



 Collapsology



Political theory: Hannah Arendt's courses on "The History of Political Theory" and "What is Political Philosophy?"



 inhabit.global



Chapter 1
The Anatomy of Zoom Fatigue



“Human kind is
so resilient. For example, I have acclimated to Microsoft Teams.”
Ian Bogost




One Concept Will Transform the Future of Work Post-COVID-19



Is Internet Fatigue Ruining Your Life?



 “Remote Work? Demand Dial-Up”



 Posthuman Bodies – Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston



 “Aesthetic Flattening”



“Zoom Fatigue’ is Taxing the Brain: Here’s Why That Happens”



 Google Trends: ‘Zoom Fatigue’



 “The Reason Zoom Calls Drain Your Energy”



 “A Theory of Zoom Fatigue”



 “Embodiment and Social Distancing: Projects”



 “Square Roots: Paula Burleigh on Zoom and the Modernist Grid”






 “The Fatiguing Effect of Camera Use in Virtual Meetings: A Within-Person Field Experiment”



  “Anti-Video-Chat-Manifesto”



 Iveta Hajdakova “I’ll Just Never Know” 



 “Stanford Researchers Indentify Four Causes for ‘Zoom Fatigue’ and Their Simple Fixes”



 “Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue” 



 “How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body”



 The Embodiment Studio 



Tried to save myself but my self keeps slipping away
Tried to save myself but my self keeps slipping away
Tried to save myself but my self keeps slipping away
Tried to save myself but my self keeps slipping away

Talking to myself all the way to the station
Pictures in my head of the final destination

‘Into the Void’ – Nine Inch Nails


 “Teaching Into the Void” 



 “Tuning in to Marimba”



Chapter 2

Requiem for the Network 



“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








 clusterduck.space 



Chapter 3

Exhaustion of the Networked Psyche:
Probes into Online Hyper-Sensibilities




“I don’t need you,
I have wifi.” Addie Wagenknecht






 “You Can Handle the Post-Truth: A Pocket-Guide to the Surreal Internet”







 Review of:

Hartmut Winkler, Switching—Zapping: Ein Text zum Thema und ein parallellaufendes Unterhaltungsprogramm (Darmstadt: Verlag Jürgen Häusser, 1991).



 “This ‘Black Mirror’ Episode Is the Show’s Sharpest Condemnation of the Tech World Yet”



 “Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience”



  Nina Power, An online collection of published and unpublished writings:


There is, I must tell you, an absolutely unbelievable freedom in no longer worrying about what people say about you, and a glorious release in no longer feeling guilt-tripped or manipulated into holding a particular line. There is profound joy in realizing that the internet is just one tiny sliver of “reality,” and even then this reality is pretty questionable, and might be just a weird blip in the long history of humanity.


 “Fortnite And Roblox Are Changing Social Media As We Know It”



Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 51”


The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?


Chapter 4
Stuck on the Platform:
Notes on the Networked Regression


“Every time I think I’ve sorted out my life, capitalism collapses.” @zinovievletter (Juliet Jacques)






 Platform Design Toolkit 




 “How Not to Know Ourselves”





“Platform data do not provide a direct window into human behaviour. Rather, they are direct records of how we behave under platforms’ influence.” Angela Xiao Wu






 “Platform” on the list of Banished Words 2019:


“People use it as an excuse to rant. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter have become platforms. Even athletes call a post-game interview a ‘platform.’ Step down from the platform, already.”
Michael, Alameda, California


   Tim O’Reilly “A Tale of Two Platforms”



  “The Trouble with Platforms” 



 “Travel Websites Mislead by Falsely Declaring Few Rooms Remain”



   pando.com/2020/06/29/trouble-platforms-google-amazon-facebook-apple-market-cap/. 

Ana Milicevic proposes we speak about platform oases and no longer use the walled garden metaphor: “There’s still life outside of a walled garden; outside of an oasis the air is arid and you’re lucky if you run into a tumbleweed here and there.” 





 The Platform Is The Enemy



 “Zadie Smith on Fighting the Algoritm: ‘If you are under 30, and you are able to think for yourself right now, God bless you’”




 “Ben Grosser: Planning the Exodus from Plaform Realism” 



 Ben Grosser’s projects: Go Rando, Facebook Demetricator, Order of Magnitude,The Endless Doomscroller 



 “Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power”





 “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?”



 “Rich Millennials Plot the End of Civilization”



Technofeudalism: Explaining to Slavoj Zizek why I think capitalism has evolved into something worse





 “Inside the Whale: An Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian”



 “Everyman Their Own Platform”



“You May Be Using Mastodon Wrong”



Chapter 5
Minima Digitalia 



“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”
Amir Taaki 





“What happens when a spectacular growth of techno-magic is paired with a similar explosion of misery at the level of mental economics?”
Johan Sjerpstra


“Hypothesis: It’s time to downplay the media & communication aspect of “social media” and start to see platforms as technical compensation for the loss of the social and the destruction of the self. Social media has become “the social” itself. There are no non-digital social relations anymore.”


The starting point in the design of new social media apps is the group and the social, not the user. The tools will be goal-driven. What needs to be done? Not sharing for the sake of sharing. In this way, we move from profile to project, from like to decision, from behavioral to social psychology. 


“Once, the purpose of knowledge was to give form to reality; then its aim became the production of possibilities; now it has become nothing but a risk manager. Once, we were producers; then we became consumers; now we are products. Once, the body’s strength was exploited to produce goods; then the energy of desire was exploited to consume goods; now one’s creativity is exploited to produce the self as a commodity. Once, we had children; then we desired children; now we have become children. Once, love was a pact of mutual support; then it was a desire; now it is the price at which we sell ourselves. Once, machines were a means to our ends; then they were the ends for which we were the means; now they are oracles that interpret signs and whose prophecies we interpret. Once, we were in a disciplinary society; then we were in a society of control; now we are in a risk society.”
Anna Longo


“The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At ten, I was clickingaround a webring to check out other Angelfire sites full of animal GIFs and Smash Mouth trivia. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. At fifteen, I was uploading photos of myself in a miniskirt on Myspace. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection—this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.”
Jia Tolentino


“This morning I checked how many hours I spent this week on YouTube, binge-watching doggies being saved, koalas being cute, American political news, plane crashes, music, celebrity news, motivational videos, the unicorn cult, vegan privilege videos. Yesterday I clocked 14 hours. I feared my nicotine addiction would be replaced by something else. And alas it happened. With great shame, I have to confess it turns out to be YouTube. I did feel I gave up on everything. It was so cozy, just sitting in my bed postponing everything, including getting a life.”
Niklas Göke 


What’s the role of design in an age of chaos and complexity? What contribution does it make in times of economic crises and downturns? Is it the perfect tool to accelerate the collapse? This makes me wonder if design, as inherently speculative work, can only thrive when things are growing. Can we think against this tendency; can we design decline? We’re not talking here about clever ways to promote zero growth. What does it mean to give shape to entropy? This is a Virilio meets Warhol question. Aesthetics of the incident. How can we design contradictions that become unlivable, surfacing the lie? Why be smooth and pleasurable when the mushroom cloud of crisis is erupting before our very eyes?


What we cannot come to terms with is the mass conformity of the unique individual. Social media symbolizes “Lonely Crowd 2.0,” a decidedly busy form of loneliness. It is neo-feudalism, without the aristocratic class as ideal. Uneducated billionaires do not distinguish themselves through a sophisticated lifestyle, openly refusing to embody public values associated with enlightenment, high culture, ethics, and morals.


Chapter 6
Delete Your Profile, Not People
Comments on Cancel Culture



“Guess who’s getting X’ed? You made a choice, that’s your bad. I’ll be honest, we all liars. I’m pulled over and I got priors. Guess who’s going to jail tonight?” Kayne West






 “What It Means to Get 'Canceled'”




 

 Mark Fisher: “Exiting the Vampire Castle” 



 “Sleeping Woke: Cancel Culture and Simulated Religion” 



 Eliot Ackerman et al. “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”:



“The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.” 


 Sad By Design



 “Club-Wise, A Theory of Our Time”



 “Hoe De School een slagveld werd in de strijd tegen racisme in de nacht” 



De School “Live Podcast: Taking Responsibility (19:00 - 21:00 CEST)”





 “La Haine, De School and Systematic Violence”



 “Dekmantel Festival Criticized over Lack of Latin American Artist at 2019 Edition”


 

 “Toonaangevend radiostation Red Light Radio international in opspraak” 



 “Red Light Radio Accused of Failing to Uphold Community Values” 



 “Red Light Radio stopt met het maken van radio” (Red Light Radio Stops Making Radio)


 

 “Hoe een kunstenaar carrière maakt onder aanhoudende beschuldigingen van aanranding en verkrachting” (How an Artist Makes A Career Under Assumptions of Sexual Assault and Rape”)



 “Calling Out Dutch Art Institutions” 



 KIRAC
(Keeping It Real Art Critics)



 Geen Podium
(No stage for the glorification of sexual violence) 



 “Call-out Culture/Cancel Culture”



 “De controverse rond Destroy My Face van Erik Kessels”
(The controversy surrounding Destroy My Face by Erik Kessels)



 “Appeasing the Gods of Posting”



 Bernadette Corporation 



How to?
Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.
Sex Pistols
Anarchy in the UK


Chapter 7
Crypto-Art Annotations




“My ultimate dream job is to trade labor for capital.” @333333333433333 (Darcie Wilder)






 https://cryptoart.io/data



 “Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain”


 

 “The Real Lesson of the GameStop Story is the Power of the Swarm”



 “Confessions of an Angry Middle-Aged Lady”





 “You’re Sleeping on Crypto Art”  






 

“If you have a problem, use blockchain. Now you have two problems and a right-libertarian fan club.”
@aral (Aral Balkan)





 twitter.com/fatherrich_/status/1343000927448535043:


According to Robert Saint Rich,

the influence of social media has created a perspective in artists that they need to produce masterful quality works in a large enough quantity so that they can be shared on an almost daily basis. This is an impossible standard that forces artists to create uninspired work.


 “What it means to own an artwork governed by an NFT is not some settled fact.”



 “Hodl”



 “Code as Law: Contemporary Art and NFTs”



pando.com/2020/06/29/trouble-platforms-google-amazon-facebook-apple-market-cap/


Ana Milicevic: “Snap and TikTok are great examples of next-gen alternatives to the current platform establishment but they still monetize in the same way as the incumbents,” noted Ana Milicevic, “what new platforms may emerge if the main monetization engine shifts away from user attention into something new?”


 “A Guide to Ecofriendly CryptoArt (NFTs)”



 “NFTs as Micro-Social Networks: The Path to Crypto Adoption”



 “How NFTs will kill Netflix”




Chapter 8
Principles of Stacktivism 



“There is always room for the worst and that is why we must not lose hope.”
Radu Aldulescu






 “Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech” 



 First use of the term stacktivism 



 #PSMIManifesto



 Public Spaces, reclaiming the internet as a public domain 



 Reclaim Your Face campaign 






Yuk Hui: “We must constantly ask what happens to our sensibilities when the sky is covered with drones and the earth with driverless cars, and exhibitions are curated by artificial intelligence and machine learning software. Is this futurism really something that speaks to us?”





  “The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty” 



 “A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies”



 “The Abstraction of Benjamin Bratton: Software, Sovereignty, and Designer Sociology”



 Strelka Institute 



 Definition of a stack


 “Re-wilding the Bauhaus: What Its Foundation Course Should Be Like Today”



 Niels ten Oever’s PhD thesis: ‘Wired Norms: Inscription, resistance, and subversion in the governance of the Internet infrastructure’ 



  “Alternatives for the Internet: A Journey into Decentralised Network Architectures and Information Commons”

 

 “Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common”



 Public Stack Summit 



 “Redefining the European Stack” 



 Non-Facebook Proposal





“In this way we move from profile to project, from merely liking to collective decision making, from behavioral to social psychology, from influencers to cooperation, from shitstorms to debates.” 





Reconfiguring the Techno-Social
Conclusion 




“A lot of people think the internet started good and just became bad, but I was there and it was always terrible.”
Ian Bogost






  “How Is It To Be Done?”



 “Public digital infrastructure should be at the core of Europe’s tech sovereignty strategy”



 A definition of ‘instituting’ 



  “Reimaginging the Platform Economy” 



 dataprevention.net 



 Refusal, the theme of the 2021 transmediale festival





 Platform Socialism 



 Interview with Facebook Whistle-blower Frances Haugen



 Wall Street Journal: The Facebook Files



 Platform Realism 



 Varia: Focusing on the development and mainstreaming of platform alternatives 



 Gestures of Radical Imagination 



 Money over IP



 “How do we fix a broken internet?” Tech as a Collective Design Act 



 restofworld.org



 “Inside Gaia-X: How chaos and infighting are killing Europe’s grand cloud project” 



Colophon





Stuck on the Platform is written by
 Geert Lovink  

Web Design and Graphic Design
Irene Stracuzzi

Design of link/broken link-symbols by Irene Stracuzzi

Website built using
cargo.site, including the use of the kaleidoscope effect

Typefaces
Neue Haas Grotesk Regular
Medium / Serif System Default

Publisher 
Pia Pol, Astrid Vorstermans
Valiz, Amsterdam

Amsterdam, 2022

Digital Content:
1. The Broken Timeline (Curating Digital Art)
 2. Digital Sources (Stuck on the Platform)

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