70 GENIUS INTERVIEW Geert Lovink
slowing down, even for people who are following it closely. This is worrying. The problem of Facebook and Google existed ten years ago, but we’re only at the beginning of this big controversy. It took us ten years! Where were we in those ten years? There was a logic that was in place in that crucial period from, say, 1995 to 2005, when people moved quickly from one side to another, from one service to another, but that’s gone. Now people are locked in, and there’s a lot of psychological pressure. It’s not going to be so easy. FEED: What have you been working on with the Institute of Network Cultures, particularly the Video Vortex events? GEERT LOVINK: I founded the Institute of Network Cultures about 15 years ago. And it’s where theorists, researchers YOU NEED TO REALLY PICK YOUR BATTLE AND THEN STICK WITH IT FOR FIVE, 10, 20 YEARS
and practitioners continue to do intimate research on a diversity of topics. Our method is to build long-term networks to work on these issues, but that combines critique with alternatives. For us, there are no alternatives without critique and the other way around, too. We don’t just critique and cry for regulation. If we critique these platforms and we don’t have anything to offer, we better shut our mouths and go back to the drawing board. These communities work on specific topics, because if you want to develop alternatives, you can’t critique the internet in general. It’s like critiquing the sun. You need to pick your battle and stick with it for five, ten, 20 years. Our communities are backbones for people who exchange ideas, want to support each other and want to know what’s going on elsewhere. It’s also a place where new ideas are exchanged and critiqued, and people test new concepts. We believe in concepts and we believe they are the building blocks of every code, of every interface, of every media network and platform. We need to do that fundamental work, and it has tremendous long-term consequences. FEED: Has Europe done a better job than other parts of the world in dealing with online technology? GEERT LOVINK: One of the problems with Europe was that it was not prepared
to develop its own concepts when technological changes started happening in the mid-90s. There was a long period in which the European elites, including the business elites, looked down on the internet and all the funny gadgets. ‘The internet’s going to go away, it’s irrelevant, it’s entertainment’, they said. For this miscalculation, we have paid a big price. The only way to repair that mistake is to work on concepts together, because regulation alone is not going to do it. The European political class hasn’t even started with the problem of Facebook and Google. If you want to stay on top of this stuff, you cannot do it by regulation. We need to work on the level of critique, and do so in a positive way. But this New Age approach of saying, ‘if you’re only positive and nice to each other, it’s going to work’, is not going to go anywhere either – the gesture is nice but naive, because it disregards the enormous seductive power of the existing platforms. FEED: That’s an important point. These platforms aren’t just neutral technologies. They powerfully influence a lot of what we do. GEERT LOVINK: Facebook and Google have bought themselves into the most fundamental levels of all the regulatory regimes of the internet protocols. That is the most depressing thing to me. The
INTO THE VORTEX Video Vortex events gather participatns from diverse disciplines to discuss the aesthetics and politics of online video tech
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