Dear Geert, This is a HUGE Personal thank you.
More on it later
all the very best
nina cz
Quoting Geert Lovink via nettime-l <[email protected]>:
Dear all,
all your responses so far to the campaign to ban X in the EU, which
only launched last Friday, have been exetremely interesting and
encouraging. Finally there is a debate about what?s to be done with X.
I am not behind this initiative, the person who initiated it wants
to remain anonymous (for the time being). This person has not got to
do anything with ?Brussels? (neither are sponsered by the EU or any
institution, for that matter). I see this campaign design first and
foremost as a conceptual artwork in the poltical category. This very
much comes from the nettime scene, let that be clear. And many of
you will know why. It is a tactical media aka
post-situationist/communication guerrilla action (with a very
serious intention).
Unfortunately, a call to ban X in the EU will not come from the
so-caled progressive-liberal ?civil society? organizations such as
Bits of Freedom, Netzpolitik and all others of the European Digital
Rights network (https://edri.org/about-us/our-network/) and campaign
should be, first and foremost, read as a radical call to exactly
these organizations to take a stand and follow the Brazilian example.
There is something bold and desperate in this call, and I believe
there is a need to acknowledge that before we move on. The
stagnation needs to end. Over a decade ago the social media
monopolies were already causing havoc, both on the political and the
mental health levels. At our Institute of Network Cultures we
brought these initiatives together in 2011-2013 under the network
name of 'Unlike Us' (https://networkcultures.org/unlikeus/), which,
at the time, already felt a bit late (this was just after the failed
Arab spring). This was launched together with Korinna Patelis, who
was teaching in Cyprus at the time. A Facebook Farewell Party and
similar initiatives followed but nothing happened. It all ended up
in platform capitalism and then, even worse, techno-feudalism. Calls
to fix the broken internet were made, some alternatives were
developed, but none of this found much resonance amongst the
userbase at large.
Europe has so failed to develop an alternative to the US ?free
speech? contruct and thus all discussions, also inside the EU, are
ultimately measured around that constitutional-legal term (or
ideology, for that matter). All regulation effforts will remain to
be framed as censorship and thus all alternatives remain futile. At
best Brussels can send fines to Silicon Valley? 5-10 years after the
fact. No public money is invested in alternatives.
To say that calling for a ban is lame and will not work and that we
have to emphasize alternatives instead has nothing achieved anything
over the past decade. It is important to admit this. To merely say
this again simply ignores the failure of the ?alternatives?
approach. Fediverse-Mastedon etc. might work ok but still fails to
attract many. In particular journalists and PR crowds continue to be
hooked onto X, as are most of the political class. The dialectics
between news media and the political class remains toxic (to use a
very polite word). Cade Diehm has already said it so much better
than I do here. Neither regulation nor alternatives have achieved
much. It is urgent to come together and have an open dialogue what
strategic next steps might make a real difference.
Yours, Geert
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# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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