“What does it mean to kill the internet?”
“To understand withdrawing access to the internet as killing emphasizes a potentially grievable loss or a violation of international human rights laws, as the United Nations claims.”
“This is confusing though. If the internet was killed by the Egyptian government, then it must be assumed that the internet is on the side of the revolutionaries; however, internet infrastructure is fully controlled by the state. If the internet was, in fact, killed in Egypt, then it was both a suicide and a murder.”
“Put simply, it was an act believed to curtail revolution, but the Egyptian government failed to see the potential for political struggle after the internet’s death—as though the desire for political change can only persist within telecommunications itself.”
“The events in Egypt are not isolated. A whole minor history of the internet is waiting to be told, not based on its core contribution to the project of globalization but rather on political blockage and impasse; not a history of total flatness, global villages, and linkability but of sharp breaks, dead ends, and back doors: a history of when the internet ceases to exist.”
“In the United States the internet has never been shut down, but it has become a refined crystallization and extension of an extremist surveillance state.”
“In the US, the death of the internet is the refashioning of network infrastructure into a smooth site of capital accumulation and governmental control.”
“Masses camp on city sidewalks—in front of Apple stores and Walmarts alike—in manic anticipation of the newest networked commodities, whose shiny black surfaces belie algorithmic subterfuge by states.”
“Online, Trump’s dreaded freedom of speech is morally policed by a sprawling content management workforce, operating under undisclosed guidelines, whose blocking of uploads reminds us that YouTube and Facebook were never agoras for freedom of expression to begin with.”
“At the helm, as it were, is the internet user, a biopolitical subject engineered by corporations and possessed of a dazed and addictive subjectivity that hungers for feeds that never stop, clickbait that always demands another click, and content generators that multiply browsing tabs until a computer crashes.”
“What is the internet’s historical present? To answer this question, we must first make a basic observation: contrary to media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s insistence that media is an extension of man, the internet—a paradigmatic example of media—has become an extension of control.”
“At the World Economic Forum in 2015, Google chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt promised that “the Internet will disappear” into our environments.”
“What is the difference between killing and disappearing the internet?”
“Schmidt elaborates: “there will be so many IP addresses … so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time.””
“Here disappearance is the opposite of an internet shutdown. It is the elimination of the possibility of killing, a guarantee of total integration, seamlessness, and dispersion.”
“To disappear the internet is to dissolve its infrastructures into the very materialities that compose contemporary life and the world.”
“Internet = a new chemical element. An eye that is always GoogleGlass. A surface whose interactivity never falters. A transparent city where your personal data is your gateway to culture and entertainment. A cloud to aid a body that does not stop producing data, except perhaps in death. Rest assured, the disappearance of the internet is the emergence of the internet of things, a technological promise to reengineer all objects and beings as ontologically networkable.”
“Governance is now a rhizome gone bad, as networks that are assumed to be immortal unleash a torrent of rapid flows aimed at protocological control and management, in which all life is networked, administrated, and programmable.”
“The disappearing act that Schmidt predicts for the internet remains purely technical and misses the point that the internet is also disappearing into us by becoming a mode of subjectivation, a set of feelings, a sense of longing, a human condition, a metanarrative.”
“Out of this vortex of killings and disappearances emerges a definition of the internet that goes far beyond its technical infrastructure: the internet as a totalized sociocultural condition.”
“Like capitalism, the internet has come to exist as a totality, with no outside, no alternative, no ending.”
“By shifting from thinking totality to thinking possibility, Gibson-Graham perform a much-needed intervention into anticapitalist politics.”
“How, then, might we practice “contra-internet” politics?”
“what is the form adequate to revealing the internet as totality? An initial yet insufficient response might be: the network.”
“The internet may be comprised of networks, but a network is not necessarily the internet. However, the network links life to the dominant forms of governance and control today. So just as the dildo’s form is external to the body, perhaps a contra-internet form must be external to the internet—must be something other than a network. What might be outside networks?”
“In “The Outside of Networks as a Method for Acting in the World,” a chapter from his 2013 book Off the Network, Ulises Ali Mejias introduces the “paranode,” a term that conceptualizes that which is other to—or an alternative to—a network configuration. The paranode is an antidote to “nodocentrism,” which, argues Mejias, is the dominant model for organizing and assembling the social.”
“Derived from neuroscience, the paranode is the space that networks leave out, the negative space of networks, the noise between nodes and edges. It is the space that “lies beyond the topological and conceptual limits of the node.””
“In a recent conversation with David M. Berry, Alexander R. Galloway combatted the crushing totality of nodocentric thought that obscures the paranodal:”
“Today we are trapped in a sort of “networked” or “reticular” pessimism … reticular pessimism claims, in essence, that there is no escape from the fetters of the network. There is no way to think in, through, or beyond networks except in terms of networks themselves … We have a new meta-narrative to guide us … By offering no alternative to the network form, reticular pessimism is deeply cynical because it forecloses any kind of utopian thinking that might entail an alternative to our many pervasive and invasive networks.”
“Galloway’s reticular pessimism destabilizes the nodes and edges of the network form. Cracks and fissures appear out of what were once straight lines and solid dots.”
“The outside’s force is felt and an opening to the paranode appears. It is the moving toward such an opening that marks the beginning of all contra-internet politics.”
“Although FireChat does not break from the network form into the space of the paranodal, it does generate antiwebs, or networking alternatives to the undead World Wide Web.”
“These events illustrate an emergent network militancy whose goal is to expose the inadequacies of the internet as a political horizon and also offer a utopian glimmer of another kind of network.”
“But the internet’s end is also the paranode’s beginning. The paranode is the horizon, the site of futurity that contra-internet practices move toward.”
“As contra-infrastructure and theoretical model, the paranode proposes two militancies: the practical search for antiwebs, which is not a killing or disappearing but a commons to come; and the intellectual task of making thinkable that which is not only outside the internet but also beyond the network form itself.”
“As the Zapatistas might say, let us approach the internet at the speed of dreams.”