68 GENIUS INTERVIEW Geert Lovink
AROUND THE MID-80S, WE GOT INVOLVED IN PERSONAL COMPUTERS AND THEN FROM THE LATE 80S ONWARD, I HAD A MODEM AND STARTED USING BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS ON THE INTERNET
FEED: How did you become interested in the power of video? GEERT LOVINK: I presume it’s because of my background in the video art scene. In the late 80s, I was an editor of a magazine on video art called Mediamatic . I’ve been following new media ever since. With the arrival of the internet, we started to experiment and bring together all these existing media initiatives, which we were running as more or less alternative and public infrastructures. We did that under the umbrella of the term ‘tactical media’, in which people do a little bit here and there. They can do graffiti on walls, but also multimedia with a computer. They can do live broadcasting on cable television and make shows on pirate radio, publish their zines and, of course, start their first websites. In the mid-90s, this is the situation we found ourselves in. FEED: Was there hope and anticipation back then about what these tools could do or what they might mean? GEERT LOVINK: We strongly believed in our own infrastructure. This is important – and this is what we have lost. We don’t have our own infrastructure anymore. The infrastructure that’s left, for local radio or public access channels, which are still running via copper, is one people no longer use. Everything has become digital, and with that comes a regime of neo-liberal
regulation, privatisation and not much left of autonomous infrastructure. We did our best with community networks, with stuff like Digitale Straat in Amsterdam, and our own provider, Access For All, to build up that autonomous infrastructure in the 90s. But five years into it, we started to lose the game and it became clear, especially after the dot-com crash, that big money had moved in. There was no way for us to regain that position. Now it’s 20 years later and the debate is returning, with the looming bankruptcy of Facebook and Google – the moral bankruptcy, that is, not the actual one. But maybe one proceeds the other, who knows? There is, at least in Europe, a growing awareness that these companies are not for the public good. The insight comes a bit late, but nonetheless. FEED: What can be done to get platform ownership back into local and community hands? GEERT LOVINK: If the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world just continue as they are, this is good. The more arrogant they are, the more they speed up their own demise. Also, with Google, the more arrogant it becomes, the more apparent there is a real problem. The split up, in my view, is already inevitable, one way or another. First, the split between Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, but also the separation of Google from its search engine and so on. These are first-step measures. We’re not talking about the dominance of Amazon, which is another concern. Or the nationalisation of Apple – which is also imminent, in my view, because once the Chinese resource crisis hits and China closes its factories producing Apple products, there will be a problem.
SQUATTERS’ RIGHTS Lovink started off during
the squatters’ movement in Amsterdam
unprepared for it. It’s really enjoyable to see the naivety of the Americans in this respect; the unpreparedness of them. These developments are all geopolitical in nature. They’re focused on technological warfare through standards. Look at the Huawei controversy. There’s another interesting battleground happening around the ownership of 5G and the Internet of Things and of this most intimate of devices that we all carry around and use to share the most personal details of our lives. That battleground has direct and immediate consequences for billions of people. The video aspect is interesting, because all this is moving into a post-text world. There’s overwhelming evidence for this move across the globe. Less text, more images, more memes, more videos, more platforms to play those videos on. For you and me, this is more than self-evident, but the world is not taking notice of these rapid shifts. Most people still talk about a newspaper or a traditional television
FEED: Do you think that will happen?
GEERT LOVINK: Oh, definitely. This is one of their first measures and it’s going to hit the Americans very hard, they’re completely
feedzinesocial feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook