<nettime> Without Us

[olia lialina via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear Nettimers,

First of all, I’d like to invite those of you who are not too far from 
Stuttgart to attend the lecture series I’m organizing this semester at 
Merz Akademie.

Secondly, as you can see if you follow the link, the guests and I are 
trying to create a kind of syllabus around the lectures. Do you have any 
suggestions for what to add to the reading/watching/playing lists?

yours

olia

https://pad.profolia.org/s/Without_Us

“With us, the adventure of becoming human has entered a new phase,” 
writes philosopher Vilém Flusser in one of his most beautiful texts, 
Digital Apparition. The year was 1991, and by “us” he meant “those who 
sit in front of their computers,” “press the keys,” and “realize 
possibilities”: “realize alternative worlds and thereby themselves.”

It is 2026. We have tried all the key combinations and helped to build 
the world in which we are hardly needed anymore. Computer users have 
generated enough data, uploaded enough videos, photos, texts, and 
documents for AI slop to thrive and for the Dead Internet to zombie 
around forever. The world we once saw as a place where we can be 
ourselves — or become someone completely different — has squeezed and 
evaporated our dreams, producing a concentrate, a powder: easy to store 
and repurpose.

The digital today belongs to “ideal subjects” (Goriunova); non-playable 
characters write their own lore (de Seta). What does it mean to be 
“glitched and fragmented” (Menegon)? How does it feel to be “moss in 
between the sidewalks” (N.B. Spiders)? Will “we go dark when the servers 
go dark”(Diehm)?




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