After the Internet

* Book: Tiziana Terranova. After the Internet.

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"a collection of essays from the late 2000s and 2010s: (it) discusses the development of ... the Corporate Platform Complex, emerging conceptualizations of labour and struggle, as well as the potential for a digital commons."

Description

Tiziana Terranova:

"After the Internet (Semiotext(e) 2022) collects a number of essays that I published throughout the late 2000s and 2010s – a decade which represents a significant break in the development of digital computational networks. I wrote them while I was engaged in really quite an intensive bout of public speaking mostly in activist settings – involving collective intellectual work on the question of the changes in the capitalist economy and potentials for struggle – as well as a major relocation from the UK to Italy. As I was revising the essays, it became clear to me that throughout the 2010s, the internet really had become quite residual – it no longer defines the social experience of digital networking. It operates in the background, it supports it, but it has been displaced by the new hegemonic modes of digital connectivity – that is corporate private platforms. To me it feels as if the Internet is not just residual, which would imply that it has become irrelevant, but also kind of undead (as Hito Steyerl put it) – and that is quite a different condition.

Let’s also point out how the internet was really never a pure domain of resistance and grassroots organization, on the contrary it entailed its own power dynamics and social hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion. And yet, it also expressed something that embodies for me certain ideals and practices that fit the definition of what the late Dave Graeber called “everyday communism” as entailing an antagonistic relation to the capitalist economy (especially the software industry). The Internet’s specific modes of antagonism however concerned the power struggles that were specifically felt by technically educated white males (free access to information, open source programming). The Corporate Platform Complex (CPC), however, has expanded and amplified the forces of what I call general antagonism – extending them to race, gender, sexuality, labor, ableism etc."

(https://projectpppr.org/platforms/after-the-internet-an-interview-with-tiziana-terranova)