networked publics

2025-in-review

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It’s strange to measure every year against a concept developed by a science fiction writer, but William Gibson’s line “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed”1. has been my north star for my recent year-in-review essays. Gibson meant that the future was unevenly distributed by class: the wealthy receive high-tech healthcare while the world’s poorest live in squalor—though one might ask which of these is really our future. Yet the quote has been repeatedly misread as a claim about time andspace: that the future arrives somewhere first, perhaps unseen, while the rest of the world catches up. But this misreading is more productive than Gibson’s intent. Gibson’s critique of inequality is fair enough, but we all know this, decry it, and go on about our business. The misreading, on the other hand, is a theory of historical change.

With the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, a temporal rift opened, shattering the post-Covidean present. But many tried the early tools, encountered hallucinations, read articles about slop and imminent environmental ruin, and reasonably concluded there was nothing to see. By 2025, a cursory examination of news in AI would have assured them that AI had proved a bust. OpenAI’s long-awaited updates disappointed, and the company flailed, turning to social media with Sora, a TikTok clone for AI. Meta seemed to abandon its efforts to create a competitive AI and instead turned to content generation for Instagram and Facebook, something nobody on earth wanted. Talk of a bubble started among Wall Street pundits. The hype-to-disappointment cycle is familiar, and the dismissals were not unreasonable.

But again, the future isn’t evenly distributed, and if you don’t know where to look, you would be excused for believing it’s all hype. Looking past such failures, 2025 was actually a year of breakneck progress. Anthropic’s Claude emerged as the most capable system for complex tasks, Google’s Gemini became highly competitive, while DeepSeek and Moonshot AI proved that China was not far behind. More significant than any single model was the emergence of agentic AI—systems that can take on multi-step tasks, act, navigate filesystems, write and execute code, and work across documents. Claude Code was the year’s groundbreaking innovation. While “slop” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year, “vibe coding”—using agents to write programs—was much more important. Not only could programmers use them to accelerate their work, it also became possible for non-programmers to realize their ideas without any knowledge of code, a radical change in access I explored in “What Did Vibe Coding Just Do to the Commons?”.

By any first-world standards, at least, these tools are remarkably democratic and inexpensive. A basic Claude subscription costs about as much as a month of streaming, and even the $200 maximum usage account costs less than a monthly car payment. For many, however, the barrier is not price but something deeper—a resistance approaching revulsion. These tools provoke fear in a way that earlier technologies did not. It’s not the apocalyptic dread of the doomers or the Dark Mountain sensibility that apocalypse is near. Rather, it’s a threat to the sense that thought itself is what makes us distinct. The unevenness of the future is no longer about access; it’s now about willingness to engage.

As a scholar, thinking about the very short term is strange for me. I have always been suspicious of claims that radical change was upon us. I would rather align myself with the French Annales school concept of la longue durée, as defined by the great Fernand Braudel, the long-term structures of geography and climate. Faster than that were the medium-term cycles of economies and states, while he dismissed the short-term événements of rulers and political events as “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.”2. Events, he wrote elsewhere, “are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.”3. The real forces operate beneath, slowly, often imperceptibly.

Curiously, Braudel himself embraced technological change in his own work. In the 1920s and 30s, he adapted an old motion-picture camera to photograph archival documents—2,000 to 3,000 pages per day across Mediterranean archives from Simancas to Dubrovnik. He later claimed to be “the first user of microfilms” for scholarly historical research.4. His wife Paule spent years reading the accumulated reels through what Braudel called “a simple magic lantern.”5. Captured in 1940, he spent five years as a prisoner of war and wrote the entire first draft of The Mediterranean—some 3,000 to 4,000 pages—from memory. Paule, meanwhile, retained access to the microfilm and notes in Paris, and after the war, they reconstructed the text, taking his manuscript, verifying it and adding footnotes and references from the microfilm.6.

In 1945, the same year Braudel was liberated, Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think,” in which he imagined a device he called the “Memex”: a mechanized desk storing a researcher’s entire library, indexed and cross-referenced, expandable through associative trails.7. The vision remained speculative for decades. Now the world’s archives are being digitized; AI systems translate, summarize, and search across them in seconds and can translate any language. To take one example, earlier this year, I used Google’s Gemini to translate the Hierosolymitana Peregrinatio of Mikalojus Kristupas Radvila Našlaitėlis, a sixteenth-century pilgrimage narrative from an online scan of the Latin first edition. The result is not a polished scholarly translation, but a working text that allowed me to gain a good sense of a text that was previously unreadable to anyone without proficiency in Latin or Polish (the only language into which, to my knowledge, it had been translated). The role of the intellectual is being transformed—not replaced, but augmented in ways Bush could only sketch. This feels like something other than foam.

How to account for such a rapid shift? Manuel DeLanda offers one answer in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Working in Braudel’s materialist tradition and drawing on Gilles Deleuze and complexity theory, DeLanda describes how flows—of trade, energy, and information—accumulate and concentrate until they cross a threshold, undergo a phase transition, radically reorganizing into a new stable state. But here is the key insight: intensification is la longue durée. The accumulation of flows that began with the Industrial Revolution—or perhaps with writing, agriculture, or even symbolic representation itself—is the deep structure behind our era. Steam, electricity, computing, the internet: each was a phase transition within a longer arc of intensification. Cities accelerate such processes, as Braudel showed, concentrating capital and labor until new forms of economic organization emerge—Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, each becoming sites at which the future arrived first. Such conditions are not opposed to la longue durée; they are the moments when intensification crosses a threshold.

The continued pace of change this year underscores that there has been no return to equilibrium. But this has been accompanied by unprecedented resistance to technology, appearing as simultaneous terror at its apocalyptic nature (in jobs, if nothing else) and dismissal as useless, especially in Gen Z. A January 2026 Civiqs survey found that 57 percent of Americans aged 18–34 view AI negatively—more than any other age group. Curiously, the seniors category, which now includes most boomers, was the least resistant to AI, followed by Gen X and older millennials, all groups that grew up seeing radical societal and technological changes.8. It seems paradoxical that the smartphone generation recoils from the tools of the future. To understand this resistance means understanding the mentalité that shaped it—what Braudel’s successors in the Annales school called the collective psychology formed through lived experience.9. For Gen Z, that formative experience was network culture—both a successor to postmodernism and a form of collective psychology I did not fully understand at the time. Writing on network culture in 2008, it seemed to me that social media promised connection; instead, it brought division.10. The networked self was indeed constituted through networks, not merely isolated in postmodern fragmentation, but the fragmentation was now collective. Networked publics built barriers against one another, creating what Robert Putnam called cyberbalkanization: retreat into a comfortable niche among people just like oneself, views merely reinforcing views.11. Identity wars and mimetic conflict flared across filter bubbles that amplified outrage and tribal scapegoating as both MAGA and wokism built toxic online cultures. QAnon and a thousand other conspiracy theories propagated through Facebook groups and YouTube recommendations. Young men drifted into incel communities where loneliness became ideology and livestreaming mass shootings was celebrated. Influencers built their empires on hatred—Hasan Piker framed Hamas’s October 7 massacre as anticolonial resistance while Nick Fuentes celebrated mass shooters as vanguards of race war and civilizational collapse.

Nor did this just fragment culture—it exacted a massive psychic toll, as social contagion spread new forms of self-harm and mental illness. During the pandemic, teenage girls began presenting tic-like behaviors—not Tourette’s syndrome, but something researchers termed “mass social media-induced illness,”12. spread by TikTok videos about Tourette’s rather than any actual disease. The pattern was unprecedented but not unique. Eating disorders spread through thinspiration hashtags. Self-harm tutorials circulated on Instagram. The platforms that were supposed to bring us together instead spread desires, disorders, and identities through pure social contagion—and with them, violence and polarization. A generation that grew up inside this experiment—that watched it reshape their peers’ bodies, minds, and identities—is right to be skeptical of the next technological promise.

In 2010, it seemed like network culture had a good chance of becoming understood as the successor to postmodernism. Bruce Sterling and I were engaged in a kind of dialogue about it online. He predicted that network culture would last “about a decade before something else comes along.”13. And he was right, as I acknowledged in my 2020 Year in Review. By then, network culture was exhausted, and with the Covidean break, it seemed time for something new. In 2023, I taught a course at the New Centre for Research & Practice to try to broadly sketch the emerging era. It’s still early and hard to fathom, like trying to understand postmodernism in 1971 or network culture in 1998, but it’s clear that if postmodernism was underwritten by the explosion of mass media, network culture by the Internet, social media, and the smartphone, then the current era is shaped by AI.

But if Gen Z, scarred by the effects of social media, has been reacting with deep fear and anxiety, Sterling how epitmozes the other reaction, dismissal. In the most recent State of the World, for example, he derides AI-generated content as “desiccated bullshit that can’t even bother to lie.” He compares the vibe-coding atmosphere to an acid trip, mocking the professionals who utter “mindblown stuff” like “we may be solving all of software” and “I have godlike powers now.” For Sterling, AI can produce nothing but slop. Now Bruce has always had a healthy skepticism toward tech claims, but I can’t help but think of Johannes Trithemius, the fifteenth-century abbot who wrote De Laude Scriptorum just as Gutenberg’s press was spreading across Europe—defending the scriptorium against a technology he could not see would remake the world.

There are even deeper, more existential fears, and I’ve spent the past year addressing them on my blog, in the process laying the foundation for a book on the topic: AI as plagiarism machine; AI as hallucination engine; AI as stochastic parrot, mindlessly repeating what it has ingested (Sterling’s critique); and AI as uncanny double, too close to us for comfort. As I explain, the discomfort arises not from the machine’s otherness but from its likeness: a mirror held up to processes we preferred to believe were uniquely ours.

It’s no accident that I published these essays on my blog. As far as my personal year in review goes, this was very much the year of the blog. I have no plans to ever publish in an academic journal again. Why would I? Who would read it? Why would I want to publish something paywalled, reinforcing the walled gardens of inequality that academia is so desperate to maintain—even as it proclaims itself the champion of open inquiry and democratized knowledge? Academia has become the realm of what Peter Sloterdijk called cynical reason: rehearsing the tropes of ideology critique while knowing the game is empty and playing it anyway. This revolts me.

But for almost ten years now, since the shutting down of the labs at Columbia’s architecture school, I have been content to write from the position of the outsider, something I reflected on in “On the Golden Age of Blogging”. That essay was prompted by a strange comment from Scott Alexander, who lamented on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast that he had personally made a strategic error in not blogging during what he called the “golden age,” imagining that “the people from that era all founded news organizations or something.” The golden age he remembers is a fiction, as golden ages often are—and he gets the stakes entirely wrong. Evan Williams founded Blogger in 1999, sold it to Google, co-founded Twitter, then created Medium, which convinced hapless readers pay to read slop long before AI slop was ever a thing. The early bloggers who sought professionalization found themselves absorbed into the worst of the worst, writing for BuzzFeed, peddling nostalgia listicles that rotted psyches.

There was, however, a golden age for me, and I miss it: the architecture blogging community circa 2007—Owen Hatherley, Geoff Manaugh, Enrique Ramirez, Fred Scharmen, Sam Jacob, Mimi Zeiger (whose Loud Paper was less a blog and more a zine, but a key part of the culture), and others. We inherited from zine culture an informal, conversational tone and the will to stand outside architectural spectacle. But ArchDaily and Dezeen commercialized the form, shifting from independent critique to marketing and product. Startup culture absorbed architectural talent.

Blogging was powerful precisely because we had no stakes in it—we owned and controlled our means of intellectual production. The golden age of blogging is not in the past; it is now. After years of proclaiming I would blog more, in 2025, I really did. I wrote over 83,700 words on varnelis.net and the Florilegium—essay-length pieces on landscape, native plants, AI and art, architecture, infrastructure, politics, and tourism. My only regret is that my presidency at the Native Plant Society of New Jersey consumes so much of my thinking about native plants that little remains for writing. But the time will come, and if nothing else, my investigation of the Japanese garden aesthetic should point in the future direction for my writing on landscape.

I also continued to make AI art, or to be more precise, what I called stochastic histories. A major project was a substantial reworking of The Lost Canals of Vilnius, a counterfactual history in which, after the Great Fire of 1610, Voivode Mikalojus Radvila Našlaitėlis rebuilt the city with Venetian-style canals, complete with gondoliers, water processions, and a hybrid “Vilnius Venetian” architecture. As research, I used Gemini to translate Radvila’s sixteenth-century Latin pilgrimage narrative. AI, like photography or film, is what you make of it. Film is perhaps the better analogy—anyone can make a video. Making something worthwhile is another matter entirely. In December, I also completed East Coast/West Coast: After Bob and Nancy, a generative restaging of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1969 video dialogue using two AI speakers.

There were other substantial essays, too. In “Oversaturation: On Tourism and the Image”, I finally put down on paper something I had wanted the Netlab to address while at Columbia, but that proved too dangerous for the school to support. Universities cannot critique the very systems of overproduction they depend upon for survival. Publish or perish and endless symposia nobody is interested in are the academic versions of overproduction, but more than that, any architecture school claiming global currency cannot afford to offend either other institutions, like museums, that give it legitimacy, or, for that matter, the trustees that fund both. As I point out, tourism has always been mediated by imagery; take Piranesi’s vedute or the Claude Glass. Grand Tourists always had representations at hand to interpret their direct experience—but a new crisis point has been reached with both overtourism and the overproduction of images. Algorithmic logic now reorganizes cultural geography around “most Instagrammable spots,” making historical significance secondary to content potential. The Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto is the case in point—a 1,300-year-old shrine that Instagram made famous and that has now ceased to serve as a religious site due to the influx of visitors. The Japanese have a term for this: kankō kōgai, tourism pollution. Tourism has become the paradigm of contemporary experience—the production of imagery without cultural meaning; everything feeds the same algorithmic mill. Even strategies of resistance get metabolized—slow travel becomes a hashtag, psychogeography becomes an Instagram guide.

The Bilbao effect, which was a major driver of oversaturation, was itself a product of globalization. Hans Ibelings coined “supermodernism” in 1998 to refer to the architectural expression of Marc Augé’s “non-places,” an architecture optimized for the perpetual circulation of bodies and capital. It was the architecture of network culture, of the Concorde and the Internet. Koolhaas diagnosed its endgame in his 2002 “Junkspace“—”Regurgitation is the new creativity”—and then, tellingly, stopped writing. Today, network culture is long gone; nationalism is on the rise. The Internet is a dark forest now14. while the disconnected life is on the rise.15 The most exclusive resorts now advertise no Wi-Fi, no cell service, no addresses—only coordinates. Disconnection has become the ultimate luxury, sold back to the same people who built the infrastructure of connection. More cities are alarmed by the effects of overtourism than desire to attract tourists. In the US, new architectural proposals appeal to a retardataire aesthetic—Trump displaying models of a triumphal arch inspired by Albert Speer and marking a triumph of nothing in particular in models in three sizes (“I happen to think the large looks the best“), a four-hundred-million-dollar ballroom modeled on Mar-a-Lago, an executive order mandating classical architecture for federal buildings that Stephen Miller explicitly framed as culture war.

Yet both Bilbao and MAGA are spectacle, architecture-as-branding. But the Bilbao effect is imploding. No city believes anymore that a signature building by a starchitect will transform its fortunes. The parametricists have nothing left to say. Parametric design promised formal liberation—responsive, site-specific, computationally derived—but what it delivered was the most efficient, ugliest box. If the promise was the blob, the reality is the “5-over-1”: wood-frame residential floors stacked on a concrete podium with ground-floor retail, wrapped in a pastiche of brick veneer, fiber cement panels, and that obligatory conical turret element meant to signal “we thought about this corner.” As for AI-generated architecture, it is merely boring—giant sequoias hollowed out as apartment buildings, white concrete towers with impossible cantilevers, and lush vegetation sprouting from every surface—the same utopian fantasy rendered a thousand times over. These are renders of renders: AI trained on architectural visualization produces visualizations that are utterly disconnected from any tectonic reality. A new generation may emerge in response to new needs, but for now, the discipline has lost its cultural purchase. Architecture, for us, is a thing of the past.

The art world, too, has slowed. Museums are putting on fewer shows, shifting from aggressive schedules to longer, more deliberate exhibitions—or simply cutting programming as budgets tighten.16. The frantic pace of the Biennale circuit has exhausted dealers and collectors alike; smaller fairs are folding, and even the major ones feel like obligations rather than events. Galleries that survived the pandemic are now closing quietly, without the drama of a market crash—just a slow bleed of foot traffic, sales, and cultural attention. There is no new movement, no emergent critical framework, no sense of direction. The market churns on—auction prices for blue-chip artists remain high, collectors still speculate, art advisors still advise—but the sense of cultural mission has dissipated. What remains is commerce without conviction, a field that has forgotten why it exists beyond the perpetuation of its own economy. The institutions that trained artists for this field are collapsing alongside it.

As enrollment dwindles, design schools are collapsing—not merely contracting, but ceasing to exist. Most recently, the California College of the Arts announced in January 2026 that it would close after the 2026–27 academic year17., the last remaining independent art and design school in the Bay Area. It follows a grim procession: the San Francisco Art Institute (2020), Mills College (2022), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2023), and Woodbury University’s acquisition by Redlands and subsequent adjunctification—a fate that has methodically undone so many schools as faculty become contingent labor and institutions into hollow administrative structures run by well-paid, cost-optimizing consultants.

There is personal resonance for me in this. Simon’s Rock College of Bard, which shuttered its Great Barrington campus in 2025, was where I studied for my first two years before transferring to Cornell—a pioneer of early college education that offered a radical pedagogical experiment in what learning could be beyond conventional schooling. I arrived there straight from high school, as did my good friend and colleague Ed Keller; clearly, something interesting was in the water back then. Simon’s Rock made the development of young minds its central mission rather than an incidental focus of brand management or endowment growth, and its alumni list is impressive for such a small school. It has an afterlife at Bard, but it’s an echo at best.

The difference between these institutional deaths and simple market failure is this: they are not being replaced. When a retail business fails, another may open elsewhere. When a school closes, there is no succession. The market offers no alternative. Instead, what remains are the corporate university satellites—for-profit programs nested within larger institutions (like Woodbury’s absorption into Redlands), stripped of autonomy, their faculty reduced to precariat, their curricula bent toward what can be measured and marketed. The art schools that survive do so by transforming into something else: luxury finishing schools for wealthy families or research appendages to larger universities, where “design thinking” becomes another management consultant’s tool. The pedagogical mission—to create conditions where students might develop serious aesthetic judgment, where they might encounter genuine problems and be forced to think through them—is not merely challenged but impossible. The closure of these schools does not signal a failure of art education; it signals that the very idea of art education as something valuable in itself has been liquidated.

This hollowing out of cultural institutions is not incidental to the political moment—it is one of its hallmarks. Politically, most people have checked out. This is not 2017, when each provocation demanded a response; the outrage cycle has given way to numbness. In “National Populism as a Transitional Mode of Regulation”, I argued that Trump, Orbán, Meloni, and their ilk represent not a return to fascism but something new: the authoritarian management of declining expectations. National Populism correctly identifies that neoliberalism’s promise of shared prosperity has failed, but it channels legitimate grievances toward scapegoats rather than addressing the technological displacement actually causing them. This is its tragic irony: the National Populist base—workers made obsolete by neoliberalism and unable to participate in AI Capitalism—finds its legitimate anger directed into a movement that accelerates the very forces rendering them superfluous. Their value to capital lies in political disruption rather than economic production; they are consumers and voters, but no longer needed as workers. National Populist leaders offer psychological compensation—dignity, recognition, transgressive identity politics—rather than material improvement. The apocalyptic tenor of populist culture, its end-times thinking and conspiracy theories, provides a framework for populations sensing their own economic redundancy.

The alliance between tech billionaires and populist leaders is unstable. AI Capitalism requires borderless computation and global talent flows; nationalist protectionism contradicts these at every turn. Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen have aligned with the movement to dismantle the regulatory state, not because they share its vision but because populism serves as a useful battering ram against institutional constraints. Once those barriers fall, the movement and its human-centric concerns can be discarded. National Populism, as I conclude, is not the future—it is a political interlude, a transitional mode that will not survive contact with the economic forces it has helped unleash.

If National Populism is transitional, is there a positive vision that can replace it? In “After the Infrastructural City”, I responded to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, perhaps the most influential book of 2025, which argues that America’s inability to build is a political choice, not a technical constraint. Their solution: streamline regulation, invest boldly, build more. It’s a compelling vision—and a necessary corrective to decades of paralysis. But Abundance shares a curious blindspot with Muskian pronatalism: both assume we need more people. Musk preaches that declining birthrates spell civilizational collapse; Klein and Thompson build their vision on populations that will mysteriously arrive to fill what’s built, perhaps by immigration. Neither accounts for the possibility that AI changes the equation entirely—that a smaller population, augmented by intelligent systems, might not be a crisis at all. Populations are already shrinking across much of the developed world. What I call “actually-existing degrowth”—not the voluntary eco-leftist kind, but the unplanned demographic contraction now underway in Japan, Korea, and much of Europe—is coming for the United States too. Declining birth rates, aging populations, and regional depopulation: these are not future scenarios but present facts.

This doesn’t invalidate the Abundance agenda; it redefines it. Abundance cannot mean building more for populations that will not arrive. It must mean building better, adaptive, intelligent infrastructure for smaller, older societies. AI, rather than merely destroying jobs, can help navigate this transition: smart grids, autonomous transit, predictive healthcare. The opportunity is real. Managed shrinkage, done well, can mean more livable cities, restored ecosystems, higher quality of life. The question is whether political leaders can articulate a vision of flourishing within limits—or whether nostalgia for growth will leave us building for a future that never comes.

Against the exhaustion of institutions, against the hollowing out of architecture and art, against the closure of the schools that trained people to imagine, the blog remains. It may not be much, but it is one independent voice outside the collapsing structures around me. I wrote over 83,000 words this year. I made art. I thought through problems that matter to me with the help of AI, which provided me with tools I could only have dreamt of merely a year ago. Today, I uploaded hundreds of thousands of words from my essays to a directory in Obsidian so that Claude could draw connections between them (see here for just how one can set this up).

The future is already here—it just isn’t evenly distributed. Some are afraid or are still pretending AI isn’t happening. Phase transitions are uncomfortable. They are also where the interesting work gets done. One makes of one’s time what one makes.

1. William Gibson, quoted in Scott Rosenberg, “Virtual Reality Check Digital Daydreams, Cyberspace Nightmares,” San Francisco Examiner, April 19, 1992, Style section, C1. This is the earliest verified print citation, unearthed by Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations.

2. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 21.

3. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 901.

4. Fernand Braudel, “Personal Testimony,” Journal of Modern History 44, no. 4 (December 1972): 448–67.

5. Paule Braudel, “Les origines intellectuelles de Fernand Braudel: un témoignage,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 47, no. 1 (1992): 237–44.

6. Howard Caygill, “Braudel’s Prison Notebooks,” History Workshop Journal 57 (Spring 2004): 151–60.

7. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly 176, no. 1 (July 1945): 101–8.

8. Civiqs, “Do you think that the increasing use of artificial intelligence, or AI, is a good thing or a bad thing?,” January 2026, https://civiqs.com/results/ai_good_or_bad.

9. The concept of mentalités emerged from studies of phenomena like the witch trials, where beliefs and fears spread through communities in ways that could not be reduced to individual irrationality. For an overview of mentalités as a historiographical concept, see Jacques Le Goff, “Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities,” in Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 166–180.

10. Kazys Varnelis, “The Rise of Network Culture,” in Networked Publics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 145–160.

11. Robert Putnam, “The Other Pin Drops,” Inc., May 16, 2000.

12. Kirsten R. Müller-Vahl et al., “Stop That! It’s Not Tourette’s but a New Type of Mass Sociogenic Illness,” Brain 145, no. 2 (August 2021): 476–480, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34424292/.

13. Bruce Sterling, “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” keynote address, Transmediale 10, Berlin, February 6, 2010.

14. Yancey Strickler, “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” 2019, https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/. See also The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (Metalabel, 2024).

15. “Trend: Not Just Digital Detox, But Analog Travel,” Global Wellness Summit, 2025, https://www.globalwellnesssummit.com/blog/trend-not-just-digital-detox-but-analog-travel/.

16. “The Big Slowdown: Why Museums and Galleries Are Putting on Fewer Shows,” The Art Newspaper, March 10, 2025, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/03/10/the-big-slowdown-why-museums-and-galleries-are-putting-on-fewer-shows.

17. California College of the Arts, the last remaining private art and design school in the Bay Area, announced in January 2026 that it would close after the 2026–27 academic year. See “‘Nowhere Left to Go’: As California College of the Arts Closes, So Does a Pathway for Bay Area Artists,” KQED, January 13, 2026, https://www.kqed.org/news/12070453/nowhere-left-to-go-as-california-college-of-the-arts-closes-so-does-a-pathway-for-bay-area-artists.

Regarding Twitter

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I have another, much more interesting and important thing to talk about—e.g. the witching cats of New Jersey—but enough people have asked me for my hot take on the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk that I’ll take a stab at it. I will get back to my regularly scheduled programming in the very near future, but for now, I am going to celebrate the fact that moving this site to kinsta earlier this week has made a rapid response like this one much easier.

In the 2005-2006 academic year, I led a team of scholars at the Annenberg Center for Communication in researching the topic of “Networked Publics.” This project led to a book of the same name, published by the MIT Press in 2008 and an aborted project on the broader topic of network culture that faced too much opposition from entrenched interests in the academy to see the light of day. Our little group didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but if there was anything we could agree with, it was the grim conclusion of the brilliant politics chapter written by Merlyna Lim and the late Mark E. Kann: although the Internet is a powerful resource for mobilization, it is a poor venue for democratic deliberation.

To this day, we have absolutely no evidence otherwise. The dramatic rise of algorithmically-produced content feeds in the nearly twenty years since our research year has made matters much worse. As algorithms respond to user engagement and reaction, they deliver the content that users want to see, creating a spiral of ever-increasing polarization (for a series of links to studies on this matter, see this piece from the Brookings Institution). Making matters worse are the social media “cops” on both sides who thrive on attacking viewpoints divergent from accepted consensus. If you say that vaccines are important and that the 2020 election was legitimate but your social media “friends” are right-wingers, you’ll get called out by an army of Trumpenproles if you say so. If you say that magic monetary theory is insane or that defunding the police will hurt African Americans more than anybody, you’ll get publicly shamed by the Internet cops on the Left. Then there are things that we know very well not to talk about with our peers. To take one example, virtually no academic would publicly say that doctoral programs are in crisis and universities are producing vastly more PhD.s than there will ever be jobs for just so that doctoral chairs can gain status in the academy and professors can get free research assistants, even though most academics I have spoken to about this agree wholeheartedly off the record. I am outside the academy so I can freely say this. But nobody in the academy can. The cops there have the power to destroy unorthodox thinkers so nobody will say it. Even outside academia, there are positions so politically dangerous that I won’t dare utter them out loud even here, notwithstanding that the vast majority of my peers agree with them privately (you’ll just have to guess, so sorry). Internet cops gain symbolic capital by dismissing ideas that don’t conform to the orthodoxy and it’s been interesting to observe as a few cops have, coincidentally or not, attained positions of minor leadership in the academy (probably because no sane person wants them). Cops tend not to think for themselves, but rather they are guided by what Venkatesh Rao calls beef-only thinkers, who demand unqualified support, folks like Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, or Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

If, on the one hand, we have a social media landscape actively patrolled by cops, we also have a steady-state of outrage from the woke and the trumpenproles: everything is burning, right now/there has never been a more consequent election/there has never been a greater threat to democracy/etc. The news media—particularly TV news, but also online personalities—amp up the rhetoric in order to profit from the clicks. Outrage makes money, even as it makes us stupider. But after years and years of outrage, people are exhausted. It’s very much like pornography, searching for ever-greater stimulus, things got more and more extreme and eventually it wasn’t that people got scandalized, it’s that they got bored. Only the most politically active and the most insane want to the outrage to continue. After the nightmarish calamity following the 2016 election, COVID, the January 6 insurrection, and then the invasion of Ukraine, high levels of cortisol and adrenaline have literally taken their toll on our bodies, creating inflammatory reactions that leave us with no way to absorb more bad news. It may have been funny when a demented old grifter demanded to see Obama’s birth certificate, it was hilarious to see “America’s Mayor” stand up in front of the garage of a landscaping firm, burbling nonsense, his false teeth nearly falling out of his head, but nobody wants to see it again. In an economy sustained by growth, Facebook’s aging user group is down by significant numbers, and analysts are talking about a “death spiral.” Well, thank goodness. Nor is the subject of today’s diatribe, Twitter, immune, its active users are also fleeing, just in time for Musk’s ill-timed purchase. The only solution people are finding to this anxiety is disconnection, leaving all this crap behind. It will likely cause a rout for the Democrats in the 2022 election (I am not, however, entirely convinced of this), but if it does, it will be the far Left’s relentless barrage of alarmist news that will be, in large part, to blame.

What are the options? Clearly not Twitter. Elon probably should fire most of Twitter’s staff. Around 5,000 employees work at Twitter and, judging from the evidence, none of them save the people who make sure the servers don’t go down, do anything. The site has had virtually no innovation since its launch, the code is a notorious mess, and, well what do they actually do all day long?

Journalists like to promote TikTok as an alternative, but TikTok’s growth is limited to a high school and college age demographic in search of diversion. What political content exists there—a Johns Hopkins study suggests— is hardly any better than what can be found at Facebook and, in any event, like YouTube, TikTok is oriented less toward people producing their own content and more toward passive consumption and commenting. Instagram is not dissimilar, although there, the content-production tends to be aspirational and imitative in nature, contributing to body dysphoria and leading young women to seek to surgically reshape themselves into the “Instagram face” look pioneered by Jocelyn Wildenstein. The one healthy (for now) antidote for this is BeReal, an anti-Instagram that values immediacy and promotes looking real, or at least, candid and terrible, it’s only drawback is that virtually nobody except for college-age kids uses it (I know, you can visit mine, I have one follower). TIkTok and Instagram are terrible platforms for political messaging—although some will try—and BeReal is virtually useless for it. This, of course, is their charm.

If there are genuine alternative social media spaces right now, they are Discord and Substack. Both are flawed, but it’s Substack—not Twitter—that holds the only potential for a future social media platform right now.

Discord is a set of “servers” (not really servers, but they are called that, they are virtual spaces for micropublics) dedicated to a given topic, e.g. Minecraft gaming, Roblox, GTA, (Discord started as a space for emergent gaming communities), online generative art generators, techwear, eurorack synthesizers, alt-space, AI generative art, Arduino programming, white supremacism (this has since been banned) or whatever excites you. Discord is growing rapidly, but it has two major limiting factors. The first is that because of the conversation-like organization, unless one is actively engaged with a server, one rapidly loses track of what is being talked about. Catching up is neither intuitive nor, well, interesting. The second is that there is no broader link between these micropublics. Each server is a walled silo and there is no communication between them.

Substack is a platform for content-creators—mainly writers but also some podcasters— in which subscribers pay subscriptions for content and content-creators are promised income directly from their subscribers. Unlike the similar Patreon, however, it is more oriented around discovery and community. Log into the Substack site and you will be shown a sidebar with recommendations for other Substacks that are, shades of Facebook and Twitter, algorithmically recommended for you. Subscribe to a right-wing Substack, you’ll definitely be offered more. So, basically, another Facebook or Twitter. The up side is that Substack allows comments (depending on settings), and also has recently allowed users to incorporate RSS feeds from outside of Substack into their feed. If—and it’s a big if, one that likely won’t take place since it’s only my idea, not Substack’s—the platform can find a way to create glue between Substacks and users—such as making it easier for users to follow each other and talk directly to each other— it has some hope. The reason I hold any hope for Substack is that unlike Facebook or Twitter, it promotes long-form writing. This post makes no sense on Facebook or Twitter, but it will easily work on Substack. The second hitch is that Substack is heavily tied to a subscription economy. Most newsletters, it seems, cost about $10 a month. That’s great but can rapidly become unaffordable in an era where we are already paying for one or two newspapers, a couple of magazines, Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, and you get the idea… People are getting tired of subscriptions, very tired.

This leaves us with with WordPress. WordPress is not only the dominant worldwide blogging platform, it has a reader that allows readers to follow blogs and participate in dialogues in the comments. Again, it’s a long shot, but users are also implicitly encouraged to become bloggers and, well, why not? In the 1970s and early 1980s mass media seemed to be all-powerful, but then we had the Zine revolution and the explosion of the Internet, back when it was still fun and potential seemed everywhere. Substack and WordPress may not be the future, but I still think a platform with some future in it (I am no longer comfortable thinking it will be any lasting solution, let alone a utopian space of deliberative democracy) is coming if we have any hope of talking to each other online.

A final reflection on all this is how deeply sad this is for Elon Musk. Although he has recently shifted from being an icon of the Left to being an icon of the Right, he is the Steve Jobs of this age, having made both electric cars a reality and creating the first successful reusable rocket system. Ten years ago, even five years ago, owning two electric cars by 2022 would have seemed entirely implausible to me and yet, we replaced both our cars with Teslas in 2020. These cars require less maintenance than any other vehicles we have ever owned (thus far, our total repairs involve a heat pump valve on the Model Y and some issues with the rear gate on our Model S, plus some cabin air filter replacements oh, and new tires), have excellent performance (I’m a car guy, but my wife loves driving hers as well), and it is delightful to skip the weekly trips to the gas station. SpaceX’s phenomenal success speaks for itself (not only am I car guy, I’m a space nut) and Starship promises to revolutionize the space industry, and even though I am concerned about Starlink’s impact on astronomy, it has the ability to deliver secure Internet communications at broadband speeds virtually everywhere and has made a big, positive impact in military operations in the Ukraine. That, for whatever reason, Musk is spending his time and money on Twitter is very sad. If he wanted to have fun, wouldn’t it make better sense to just book a flight on a crew Dragon? I would. It’s not like he doesn’t won the only company that ever regularly sent people into outer space; eat your own dog food, Elon. Running Twitter seems incredibly boring. Moreover, Elon has a long list of failures to go along with the successes—Tesla Solar (I just put a new roof on my house, why wasn’t it from Tesla Solar?), Tesla’s Full Self-Driving has been around for almost two years and hasn’t gone anywhere (remember when Elon said we’d have self-driving Tesla taxis by 2020), and Tesla not only hasn’t released a single new vehicle since 2020, it has raised prices on existing vehicles while cutting out features such as front-facing radar and rear-facing ultrasonic sensors but hasn’t found ways to compensate. I own Tesla stock but I think they are in trouble unless Elon spends some time there soon and Twitter is a distraction he hardly needs.

Finally, as far as the future of Twitter. Who cares? It is a dying platform. I have met some great friends on it—many more than on Facebook—but if it dies and Facebook dies, it will be better for everyone. If Captain Dementia joins back up over the weekend, or Monday, or whenever, what does it matter. It’s not like anybody listened to him on Truth Social anyway.

On Drupal, or Wither Web 2.0?

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With the end of the year approaching, I might as well begin my reflections with yet another rote lament for why I don't post enough anymore. Blogging is dead for many and has been dead now for about as long as it thrived. Somehow, I resolve, I'll turn back to blogging one day, but other things come first, like my kids, my project at MoMA, various projects at the Netlab, teaching, articles that I have neglected too long, writing my book, working on the restoration of my house and so on.

But every now and then it turn back to the Web, if not to blogging then to working on the infrastructure beneath my stable of Web sites. In this case, this morning I took the Networked Publics site and converted it to from a live Drupal installation to a static site. Networked Publics ceased to be live years ago as it was the record of a year-long workshop that took place from fall 2005 to fall 2006 and the book that came out of the workshop was published in 2008. Besides me the last log at Networked Publics comes from my late colleague and friend Anne Friedberg some six years, twenty-four weeks ago. I find it sad that the group we formed doesn't stay together virtually, but such, I suppose, is the nature of scholarly collaborations involving individuals from radically disparate fields. Still, as a historian, the record of a year spent by a team of scholars investigating a topic seems worth paying a few dollars to keep registered so I spent a couple of hours to ensure the site wouldn't be tied to an aging Drupal 6 infrastructure.  

Looking back at the low-fi Web 2.0 site and the low-fi videos on it, it already seems like ancient history. But this was the state of the art not 15 or 20 years ago but rather a mere eight years ago. The trends that the Networked Publics group identified—the rise of DIY media in particular—are now not the province of nerds and geeks but rather part of our everyday lives. It's stunning to think back and remember showing the group the first video iPod that I had purchased soon after its release that year. Such, I suppose is the process of aging in the technological future. One gauges oneself as much by the personal milestones one experiences as by the tech one leaves behind.  

For me, development on Drupal has become something to leave behind as well. Last year I concluded my development of Docomomo-us.org, which I had transitioned from outdated custom cgi code to Drupal back in 2006, by having Jochen Hartmann take over as web developer and earlier this year I replaced the Drupal sites for both AUDC and the Netlab with sites driven by Indexhibit. This process of steadily whittling down my Drupal sites means that this remains the only one I have left (minus the seriously neglected Lair of the Chrome Peacock). 

But this isn't a mere status update regard the infrastructure of these sites. Changes in infrastructure, as my readers should know, are never innocent, but rather embody ideological and social changes. When I first came to Drupal back in 2005, I was encouraged by the ease of extending the system and its Open Source development. For a time I was active in the community at Drupal. Not being much of a coder anymore, I asked questions, gave suggestions, and helped out with some problems people had on the forums, but it became clear to me that most people on Drupal's communty site fell into three categories. Those just starting out, those trying to help out as they could (and usually fleeing when they felt overwhelmed… this typically happened after they had submitted a new module or theme), and those who were either dedicated hobbyists or worked with Drupal for a living. Not being part of the latter two, I wound up retreating.

As a designer, I had this foolish idea that my site should look the way I want it to look so I spent a ridiculous amount of time tweaking these sites by building themes for them and outfitting them with extensions called "modules." Unfortunately in an effort to optimize its code base, the developers of Drupal have adopted a mantra which states that "the drop is always moving" which simply means that Drupal will actively break any themes and modules during each major point release. The result is that I found myself needing a month of down time to upgrade my sites from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. For a scholar to do this is preposterously difficult. For a scholar with kids to do this is virtually impossible. 

Drupal 7 came out a while back, but lacking any compelling features, I chose not to upgrade. After all, a month of down time just to get back to where I was is hardly attractive. Now Drupal 8 promises adaptive themes that will appropriately react to the mobile platforms that increasingly drive Web traffic so I am likely to go to it, but even though new development was frozen in the system a year ago, it seems far from prime time. I spent more than half an hour today looking for a release date for the first beta and couldn't find anything but long-outdated information. If this site is to be believed, there are more critical bugs in Drupal 8 today than a year ago. 

Therein lies the trouble with Drupal and modern coding: immense complexity (see my comments on complexity at Triple Canopy). Projects of this size become impossible to manage, impossible to code, and impossible for users to work with. My front page is aging, an artifact from an era in which laptops commonly had screens with a resolution of 1024 X 768 not 1920 X 1200 (as my current one does) but to redo when it will only break again soon seems ludicrous. Perhaps I'll use another system like WordPress to run this site or maybe I'll pickle it and fork off to another platform. Any of this is possible, but I'll hardly recommend Drupal to anyone again or do anything but build the most minimal theme I can for it.  

Beyond a stern caution about the complexity that Open Source projects can generate and that can choke them, as Drupal has been choked, for all of the technological maturation that we've seen over the years since Networked Publics, the one thing that we've drifted away from is Web presence. If the static Web marked the 1990s, Web 2.0's dynamic Web sites dominated the time in which we wrote Networked Publics. Bringing varnelis.net back to life with Drupal in 2005, I envisioned it as part of an interlinked ecology of sites, both local (AUDC, DoCoMoMo-US, the Netlab, etc.) but also global, interlinking to other sites through RSS feeds and commenting systems. This hasn't happened, to this site or any other. Web 2.0's strongest links such as social bookmarking (repeated problems with Delicious at the hands of Yahoo! and AVOS and the meltdown at ma.gnolia) and RSS suffered a similar fate after Google Reader shut down this summer. As Open Source withers when it becomes over-complex, struggling corporations like Yahoo! and Google undo matters in their binge and purge cycles, buying up whatever they can in hopes of monetizing the Web and then wiping out communities when they turn out to be too hard to profit from.    

Instead of the open Web then, we have apps and the privatized, Balkanized world they promise. It's hard not to be gloomy about this, hard to find a happy face to put on all this. Perhaps that is my wont, but sometimes there isn't one. The problems of cooperation, collaboration, and democratic decision-making remain the thorniest of problems for Networked Publics. 

Networked Publics, or Pareto’s Revenge

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I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Penn Humanities Forum in a symposium on cores ande peripheries. I enjoyed myself tremendously. It was a welcome opportunity to have an opportunity to expand my work on networked publics and network culture, especially with such a great synergy between speakers, responders, and audience. I gave two talks, first a position statement and second, a talk on how power configures itself in networked publics.

I've uploaded the second talk to Vimeo and am including the text here. I don't have video for the first talk, but I will upload the text soon.

    

Networked Publics or Pareto's Revenge from Kazys Varnelis on Vimeo.

 

In this talk I want to explore how core and periphery might appear in networks and how they are networks reconfigure their structural conditions. 

During the last two decades, networks have become our dominant cultural logic. The Internet and mobile telecommunications devices have revolutionized our lives by connecting us in new ways, but more than that, in a book length study of network culture that I am slowly picking away at, I want to suggest that there has also been a mutation that produces this condition and that this condition is no longer simply postmodernity. 

Now I’m not suggesting technological determinism. On the contrary, it is the widespread technological determinism in society today that serves as evidence of network culture as a distinct period. Contrast the widely held techno-utopianism today with the technological pessimism of postmodernism. As late as the early 1990s, historian of science Leo Marx would declare “‘Technological pessimism’ may be a novel term, but most of us seem to understand what it means. It surely refers to that sense of disappointment, anxiety, even menace, that the idea of ‘technology’ arouses in many people these days.”

Even with the addled sense of overload that too much e-mail, too many SMS messages, too much Twitter, and too much of everything gives us, these voices are fewer and farther between than they were in the 1980s. We see Jaron Lanier and Nicholas Carr as Cassandras, not as leaders of some kind of neo-luddite movement. In contrast, oppositional movements like Occupy and the Arab Spring not only rely on the familiar technology of smart phones, Web sites, and Twitter but also use distributed networks as models for organization. RAND researchers John Arquila and David Ronfeldt refer to new insurgency movements as “Netwars.” They write that “Strong netwar actors will have not only organizational, but also doctrinal, technological, and social layers that emphasize network designs. Netwar actors may make heavy use of cyberspace, but that is not their defining characteristic—they subsist and operate in areas beyond it.”

So, too, commonplace menaces like Peak Oil and Global Warming are commonly shrugged off as being solvable with technological fixes. 

The network, meanwhile, seems everywhere, spreading far beyond technology, “everting,” turning inside out, as William Gibson suggests in Spook Country. Whether we take neoliberal affirmations of globalization, post-Marxist network collectives, educational institutions, or analytical models of organization in sociology, the network has replaced both the formless mass and the hierarchical tree as our model of collectivity. It has been two decades since Manuel Castells dubbed our social order “the network society.”

The network is the cultural dominant of our time, much as the machine was for the modern era. Like the machine, the network is a technology, and in this, our time shares a return to the modern obsession with technological change. 

In this talk, I want to focus on “networked publics,” a term that I wound up working with as a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication in the 2005-2006 academic year after a semester here at Penn. I want to pose the question of what sort of logics of hierarchy emerge within networks and how do these give form to the public, that meeting ground in which we come together to observe and discuss culture, politics, and other matters of common concern? 

Let’s start with culture since it is key to the public. In Ancients and Moderns Joan DeJean shows  that those debates on cultural matters in the seventeenth century were the theater in which a modern idea of the public first emerged.

 The cultural, of course, is the political; the stakes were high for Boileau and Perrault, no question And what of the decline of the public sphere or rather its metamorphosis into mass media and the development of the mass? Habermas descries the mass media as commodified, “a public sphere in appearance only,” its mission being to encourage consumption.

 But we should remember another meaning to the mass, which is that of a certain Utopic strain of modernity, that strain that can’t help but call forth an absolutist argument, be it Lissitzky, Corbusier, or Eisenstein. There is no alternate viewpoint to be entertained, no debate to be had, only Agitprop for the avant-garde that advocated a universalizing instrumental rationality. 

Postmodernity not only did not return a public sphere, it broke up the mass. After all, postmodernity and postmodernism were defined by the thorough triumph of the culture industry, with postmodernism in Jameson’s words, “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” But with this too, came the fragmenting of mass media in response to the shift from manufacturing to the service industry in postmodernity and the culture industry’s need to expand its market by directly targeting consumer groups.  

But if the rise of the culture industry is a constituent of postmodernity, during the last decade we have witnessed a stunning reversal. Culture has had tricks up its sleeve to foil the market, networked tricks. Just as its triumph seemed complete, the culture industry faced an unprecedented crisis of value. During the last decade, the free availability of information on the Internet has undone entire media ecologies. Just when it seemed to be defeated by commodification, culture decided to fight back and shrug it off. In part, consumers—particularly young consumers—have proven that they have little allegiance to the culture industry’s ideas of ownership, and are glad to pirate what they can. But even when the means are legal, consumers seek to optimize their spending on culture, throwing the media into crisis. That new media corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, and Mog are eager to help in the “creative destruction” only makes this more so. 

More than this though, relationships of producers to consumers have changed fundamentally, even from postmodernism. If Habermas described the privatization of the salon from public to private, now matters are reversed. No longer is the individual’s opinion restricted to the living room, rather they can give vent to their reactions across the Internet

Network culture, then is the age of networked publics. Networked publics are groups of individuals who congregate around issues and media that they share an interest in, regardless of their location. Networked publics do not merely receive information, they communicate bottom-to-top-and side-to-side, sharing opinions, reworking, and redistributing information. In this, networked publics have not only utilized but also greatly shaped the technological platforms that constitute media culture today. Think not of comments on newspaper articles, forums about television shows, YouTube, academic listservs and on and on. 

Networked publics do not, however, coalesce. There is no place in which we come together, no new public sphere. I’d like to point out that Habermas talks a great deal about architecture in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and in that respect, I’d like to draw an analogy with physical space. In his book The Big Sort, journalist Bill Bishop tries to account for how we have seemingly given up any notion of the public sphere for and wound up with a paradoxical country that is remarkably divided. Bishop argues that politics has become subject to a consumption mentality and we choose the places we want to live based on the presence of individuals who think like we do. Bishop: “For companies, there weren't mass markets any longer, only individual consumers to be targeted and then supplied with just the product they wanted. The country sorted into separate groupings of lifestyle and belief. We left behind a country that was striving to be whole in 1965, with the passage of civil rights laws and universal health care coverage for the elderly, and we began to sequester ourselves into tribes of like beliefs, images, neighborhoods, and markets.”

 We can see this sort of segmentation in, for example, the clusters that geodemographic marketing firm Claritas produces. Utilizing data like this, politicians tune their messages to generate the most votes. Now networked publics do link individuals across political boundaries, but the basic problem remains, you dig yourself deeper. 

So networked publics seem to be a set of peripheries that can’t coalesce. But there’s more to it than that and the rest of my talk will address networks themselves. We’ve seen the diagram of distributed networks, but if the nodes in a network are allowed to make their own link, something curious happens. Some nodes will connected more to others. Some of those highly-connected nodes will get even more connections. The result is the emergence of “hubs” that will have vastly more connections than other nodes. Take for example the Web site for this conference and compare it to Google.

Media theorist Clay Shirky has suggested observed that in the case of blogs, what is called a “scale-free” network developed naturally, leading to the disproportionate favoring of certain sites. Shirky: “This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.”

 As network theory shows, Shirky argues, this is absolutely natural: “Freedom of Choice Makes Stars Inevitable.” Shirky suggests that although this might one day be a problem, for now we can content ourselves with knowing that this is a natural property of the network. Fair enough, I suppose but if we see the network as a model for society, then we know that this is going to lead straight into neoliberalism and into the creation of a new set of cores and peripheries, network style. 

More than that, former Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson suggests that if we look at media consumption as a scale-free network, then the low section of the graph, or the Long Tail, is particularly rich. Anderson observes that aggregators such as Amazon or iTunes make as much money or more from the Long Tail in their libraries as they do from the hits oat the top. Artists in the Long Tail, Anderson suggests, can make decent livings from a dedicated community of fans, a networked public that revolving around them.

 Curiously, what happens is an evisceration of the middle. We all share knowledge of the big hits, but the middle is now obscured. We have networked publics—our love of Kung Fu movies or noise music or shoegaze—but will we ever meet except at the most basic big hit level?

But ultimately my point, to get back to what I was speaking about this morning is this. There is a power rippling through networked publics and that power is neoliberalism. For the network naturalizes its propensity toward creating ever-greater GINI coefficients. I want to finish by pointing to one particular origin of network theory that also gives rise to my talk’s title. The scale-free network in which 80% of the hits are taken by 20% of the nodes was first formulated by sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto, active in Italy in the first part of the last century. He came to this insight when he sought to explain the development of power in societies. Pareto himself believed that such scale-free networks were just. A ruling class, he argued, would always emerge. In writings that appealed to Mussolini and the fascists, he suggested that since this was the natural order of things, the state should simply get out of the way, allowing the natural social law to maintain itself. 

If recent apologists for Pareto have suggested that had he not died within a year of the Fascist assumption of power, he would have turned against it, it seems to me that our network culture might have been more acceptable to him. For networks may not seem to have cores and peripheries, but make no mistake, they give rise to power structures no less intractable. 

Toward Publishing

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A short time ago, we issued our first call for the Networked Publics: Publish project. Last Thursday a group of panelists from the Networked Publics panels met together with Netlab staff to discuss the abstracts.

The result is as follows: 

Everyone who submitted to the publication should finish their piece and post it online, tagging it #netdomus and sending an e-mail to me (use the contact form on the left) to let me know that they’ve done so. Anyone interested in submitting who hasn’t submitted yet should do the same. We’re facing a number of deadlines right now, the call for very specific things to write about isn’t yet out, but the general consensus here (or at least, the one I am most inclined to follow) seems to be that we are going to think of this as a newspaper or news magazine and conceive of appropriate sections, for example, sports, business, domestic, national, and international news, business, politics, weather, interviews, op-ed, entertainment, literature, society, tourism, automobiles, style, cooking, health, home decoration, real estate, family, and so on (I cribbed this list from here and you might find further ideas there). All the while, keep in mind the original context of networked publics, which is outlined here. 

One thing everyone should keep in mind is to write for a general readership. In other words, if you’re going to employ theory, don’t assume that anybody knows it. Explain it! 

Let’s say that the pieces are due on the 18th of July. That’s two and a half weeks from now, which is a long way away in newspaper or magazine time. After that, we will select from this list for work to publish on the Domus site and… well, we’ll see about what the next step (or media) after that will be.

Oh and if you don’t have a blog, don’t worry about it. We’ll find a means by which you can get your material posted! Just give us another week or so.  

 

 

Networked Publics: Publish

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I have announced this over at the Netlab site, but I wanted to make sure that the readers of this blog had a chance to see it as well. I’ll be blogging about the topic a bit throughout the summer and into next year, so stayed tuned for more. 

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The Network Architecture Lab and Domus announce Networked Publics: Publish, an open call for submissions to a new collaborative publication. 

During the last fifteen years architecture and the media have been turned on their head as technologies of production and communication integrated into our daily lives. But instead of the delirious optimism of the last decade, we now also face panic and crisis. The media industry is in flux: as new media rise, old ones are victims of creative destruction. The tools of architectural production, meanwhile, have been thoroughly transformed; yet thanks to technological and legal innovations that made possible the securitization of buildings, architecture faces its greatest economic crisis since the Depression. If we can be certain of anything, it’s that as Karl Marx wrote, "all that is solid melts into air."
 
We invite brief submissions (under 1,500 words) addressing the consequences of these changes for the architectural community. What are the transformations taking place in the architectural profession, in architectural media, in criticism? How are these transformations interconnected? What do these mean to you? What do they mean to the future of architecture and cities?
 
We are keenly aware that it is the engagement with precisely these epochal transformations that will define the critical output of our generation, and that the legacy of the previous generation of critics and theorists is no longer able to deliver the kind of thinking necessary to help us address and catalyze these conditions. This publication is intended as forum for debate through which the accepted understanding of the word ‘publication’ itself can be challenged, redefined, dismantled and rebuilt.  It will polemically frame our context, but it will also constitute a toolbox of ideas that outlines an agenda for criticism in network culture.
 
Domus, one of the earliest and historically most influential architecture magazines, sets itself as a case study for debate around the role of printed magazines in the contemporary era. If the magazine is no longer spontaneously embraced as a locus for debate, should the permanence of printed matter induce it to serve as a historical register for ideas developed elsewhere, e.g. on the Web (the magazine understood as an archive-in-progress of excellence)? Or, conversely, should it pursue agility, hybridizing across platforms? Does the notion of architectural criticism, understood in conventional terms, bear any relevance today? What forces designate the formal and conceptual frameworks of contemporary built architecture?
 
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There are three ways to submit.
 
The first way is to send in an abstract by 12 noon, EST June 24 pitching an article on the topic. This should be one brief paragraph on what you would like to write about although if you are inspired enough to submit your entry in full, you may also do so at this time.
 
An editorial team will meet to review submissions and send feedback to contributors on the 24th. At this meeting we will also discuss the gaps in the publication and post a call for submissions that specifically address such topics. A second way to submit an article is to respond to this call. Abstracts for projects responding to the call for submissions are due on July 2.
 
Final work for both submission tracks will be due on July 15. 
 
A third way to submit is to join a conversation over the Internet by tagging a blog or twitter post #netdomus. 
 
The publication will be available for free download at Domus’s Web site. A launch event will be held at Columbia’s Studio-X at the end of the summer but this conversation—and publication—will continue for some time to come.  
 
Contributors may find potential references in Networked Publics, a book published by MIT Press in 2008 and produced in collaboration with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication to examine how the social and cultural shifts centering around new technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure. This spring, the Netlab hosted “Discussions on Networked Publics” at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation’s Studio-X Soho facility, exploring the ramifications of these changes to architecture and cities through a set of four panels—culture, place, politics, and infrastructure. Discussions were recorded and are available here.
 
Please submit your proposals here.   
 

2/9/10 Discussions in Networked Publics

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The Network Architecture Lab announces a series of evening panels entitled “Discussions on Networked Publics “at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s Studio-X Soho Facility to investigate the changing conditions of the media, architecture, and urbanism today.
The mass audience and mass media analyzed by the Frankfurt School are long gone. As digital media and network technologies are increasingly integral with everyday life, the public is transforming. Today we inhabit multiple, overlapping and global networks such as user forums, Facebook, Flickr, blogs, and wikis. In lieu of watching TV, listening to the radio, or playing records, we text each other, upload images to social networking sites, remix videos, write on blogs and make snarky online comments. The media industry, which just a decade ago seemed well established, is in flux, facing its greatest challenge ever. If we can be certain of anything, it’s that as Karl Marx wrote, "all that is solid melts into air."

In 2008, we published Networked Publics (MIT Press), a book produced in collaboration with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication examining how the social and cultural shifts centering around new technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure.

“Discussions on Networked Publics” seeks to explore the ramifications of these changes, giving particular attention to architecture and cities. In a set of five panels—culture, place, politics, infrastructure, and network society—we will explore the consequences of networked publics in detail. Our goal will be to come to an understanding of the changes in culture and society and how architects, designers, historians, and critics might work through this milieu.

The first panel is on culture. Our panelists will address the question of how media, architecture, and architectural media are changing in the context of networked publics.

Panel 1. Culture
9 February, 6.30
featuring: Michael Kubo, Michael Meredith, Will Prince, Enrique Ramirez, David Reinfurt, and Mimi Zeiger

Panel 2. Place
25 March, 6.30

Panel 3. Politics
13 April, 6.30
featuring special guest Stephen Graham

Panel 4. Infrastructure
4 May, 6.30

Free and open to the public
RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu
Events begin at 6:30 unless otherwise noted.
Studio-X New York
180 Varick Street, Suite 1610
1 train to Houston Street
[Studio-X is a downtown studio for experimental design and research run by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.]


 

 

 

Networked Publics 2010

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Two phrases occupy my thoughts at the moment:

"All that is solid melts into air," Karl Marx’s adage suggesting that under capitalism all existing order will be swept away to be remade for the purposes of profit and efficiency has never been more true than today, when capitalism’s creative destruction is viciously turned on itself, causing a global economy crisis.

"The more things change the more they stay the same," or as written by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the original French, "Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose." Not only is Karr’s statement a way of looking at what Marx said, but it also seems true of what I’ve been doing for the last few years. As I finished Networked Publics and the Infrastructural City, I thought I had put those projects behind me, but now it’s clear that they are not so much books as categories that the Netlab will pursue for the foreseeable future, even as the other categories of network culture and the network city get added.

This spring, the Netlab is launching an ambitious series of panels, Discussions on Networked Publics, at Columbia’s Studio-X Soho. These will be framed along the categories that framed the chapters of  the Networked Publics book, e.g. culture, place, politics, and infrastructure.

The first panel, "culture" will be held at 6.30 on February 9 and will include as panelists Michael Kubo, Michael Meredith, Will Prince, Enrique Ramirez, David Reinfurt and Mimi Zeiger. These are among the sharpest minds in the field today and I am excited to have them participate in this discussion with me. There are more plans afoot in this project and I’ll keep you alerted as they develop.

In the meantime, I’ve spent a few days rebuilding various aspects of the Networked Publics site that broke during the past few years. The front page has been fixed after an update to a Drupal module killed the last version. I’ve also gone in and fixed a number of the links to videos, both the curated gallery of videos for the DIY video conference and also the videos for the three future scenarios that accompany the chapter on infrastructure and bring up consequences of policy decisions regarding network access. Throughout, the material hasn’t so much dated as demonstrated the importance of what we were talking about from 2005 to 2008. Seriously though, this isn’t a plug for me but rather for the other members of the team, who did such a great job identifying the critical issues.

Get the book, come to the discussions, and stay tuned to this blog to see how you can get involved (or if you’re really interested, drop me a line).

On Death

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I’m usually late in sending out holiday greetings and this year is no exception. We had planned to make a physical version of our annual family photo but didn’t manage to do it in time for the holidays, so we wound up sending out virtual versions. At least there was snow. I sent out the photo to perhaps 150 friends and colleagues and received the usual 20 bounces. One bittersweet surprise was finding out that my friend Daniel Beunza has moved to the London School of Economics. I’m sure it’ll be a great place for him—and he’s closer to his home country of Spain—but I’ll miss discussions about finance with this remarkable colleague. Much sadder was receiving an automated e-mail from Anne Friedman, another friend with whom I co-wrote the Place chapter of Networked Publics saying that she was on indefinite medical leave. I had received this same message a while back and was concerned, but I didn’t get in touch. This time, I looked her up in Google news—just in case—and was saddened to hear that she died this October.

I remember Anne and I talking about how I had discovered that Derek Gross, a college friend who died on 1996 via his Web page. This was before the age of blogs, but Derek updated his Web page regularly and when I visited it to see when his band was next playing, I found he had died, together with a record of his experience. Certainly it’s something I had never wished to see again, but just as surely discovering Anne’s death via the net is not going to be the final time.   

Anne was a brilliant scholar, as evidenced by her books Window Shopping and the Virtual Window, as well as a great friend. She was crucial for not only my chapter, but also for the Networked Publics group and our book, articulating issues that were fundamental to the project, asking and giving me sage advice throughout. I could not have written the chapter of the book without her. Together we sat in our offices, she in her Lautner House, I in the AUDC studio on Wilshire Boulevard, and wrote the chapter simultaneously on Writely (now Google Docs). In so doing, we experienced the phenomenon of our voices becoming co-mingled, producing a third entity that was neither Anne nor myself. I am heartbroken that there will never be a sequel.

Properties of Networked Publics

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I have uploaded the lecture on network culture, intellectual property, and subjective that I gave at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies to Vimeo.

Properties of Networked Publics from kazys Varnelis on Vimeo.

I was invited by Marysia Lewandowska, a visiting critic at the CCS this year. Her “Museum Futures” project sets the context and is well worth watching. See here.