Keeping the Internet Alive
Sustaining digital culture in content farms
Friends!
Allow me to tell you a tale of two Internets.
One Internet has never been bigger. An estimated 5.5 billion people are now online, and an increasing proportion of our physical world is connected to large data systems. Think of any everyday task or interaction; we have an app for that, probably.
Another Internet is dying. Or, if you like, increasingly “non-living.” Or killing what it used to be. At least, this is the sorrowful song that tech pundits and cultural critics have been singing for the past few years. Many of these nostalgic lamenters (read: millennials) cherished the social infrastructure of shared interest forums, personal blogs, and massive multiplayer online games of their adolescence. The youngest of us gave our formative years to Neopets and Club Penguin.
But times have changed: these clunky and personable forums have given way to infinite scroll and attention-fracking technology. Once-thriving small digital havens are disappearing as the Big Tech conglomerates continue to stake their claim on every corner of the Internet. Places of relation are harder to stumble upon; machine-generated slop is delivered to us every feed. Under these unfriendly conditions, our choices are to adapt, die, or… create better conditions. There’s a word for the act of cultivating and sustaining the substrate of shared life: Culture.
In this issue, we ask: What’s in a culture? What kinds of environments nurture life in digital spaces? How do we maintain a rich ecology of relationship in increasingly monocultured land? In Visions of Attention, Eleanor visits the Golden Record project, a message in a bottle that attempted to distill life on Earth for our neighbors in the cosmos. In Stuff for Study, I share readings on the possibility of rewilding the Internet, and how teenage subcultures carved their spaces online. And in IRL, learn about how you can join us at the School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn, where we are working (and playing) to rebuild a culture equal to the enormous opportunities of our moment.
Read on!
Culturally yours,
Czarina Ramos
Managing Editor
Visions of Attention
An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention
Proof of Life
Launched aboard Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977, the Golden Record is a message in a bottle flung into the “cosmic ocean,” a time capsule of life on earth meant to convey our cosmically brief yet expressively rich evolutionary history. Below an instruction-inscribed protective layer lies the record itself: a trove of earthly images and music, greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages, sounds of wind and thunder and lapping waves, whale calls, the laugh of hyenas, the tut-tut-tut of a tractor engine, the beating of a heart and (among many other sounds) a newborn’s cry.
No one may ever find it. Yet its creation is an act of speculative attention – toward other beings, other futures, other ways of relating to the universe. Flung back into our primordial mainspring of stardust, the Golden Record is an ontological offering that sets aside modernity’s legacies of dividing, conceptualizing and conquering in an effort to offer its imagined recipients a unifying vision of what it is to be alive atop this lush space-rock. Who are those recipients? We cannot say. Perhaps its message is meant for us.
Stuff for Study: For the Culture
Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics
Cultural criticism is a casualty of the digital age — Celine Nguyen for Asterisk Magazine
How amateur aesthetics breathed life into the Internet — Helena Aeberli for Los Angeles Review of Books
Theodor Adorno on the crimes of pop culture — Owen Hulatt for Aeon
The digital world is an extractive monoculture. Can we rewild it? — Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon for Noema Magazine
Punks, cars, and counterstrike: digital spaces in subculture — Emily Everitt for the Museum of Youth Culture
— Czarina Ramos
IRL
Wed, February 18th: Join us for our ONLINE training Attention Activism 201 where we’ll study practical strategies for Attention Activism, focusing on developing, organizing, facilitation, and movement-building skills. Enroll here!
Fri, February 20th: Learn the basics of screenprinting and create your own upcycled SoRA merch in our Sanctuary. RSVP HERE!
Sun, February 22nd: Join us for Vessels: Cotton King and A.I. God with Taeyoon Choi where they will do a lecture performance unpacking the hidden ties between the cotton industry and A.I. RSVP HERE!
Find more workshops, events, and gatherings here!