Disillusion with social media only stimulates the search for ever more refined techniques of manipulation. Detoxing won’t help, writes Geert Lovink: it is collective action, not will power, that can free us from the permanent state of distraction.

Long version of the essay published by Eurozine.

Somewhere on Twitter there are two automated accounts that I created a few months ago. Their names are SorryBot and PhilosophyBot and one day they’ll become the leading activists in a fully automated social media project called #turingforthemasses. Their interaction will be automatic, without any human …

In on editorialization: structuring space and authority in the digital age, Marcello Vitali-Rosati examines how authority changes in the digital era. Authority seems to have vanished in the age of the web, since the spatial relationships that authority depends on are thought to have levelled out: there …

The Art of Criticism: A European Network for Experiments in Art Criticism Together with partners from the field of art criticism, the Institute of Network Cultures has set up the project The Art of Criticism: a platform for research, experiments and policy making in the field of art criticism. Solid …

Fic-ctio-cra-cy /ˈfɪkʃ(ə)krəsi/ n. pl. – cies. 1. Political regime that, implicitly or explicitly, considers the distinction between fact and fiction irrelevant. 2. A political or social unit that has such regime. 3. The principles of word-building and transmedia storytelling applied to politics and …

(This is part I of a series of essays on meme theory. Part II is entitled Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images). Part III is called Memes and the Reactionary Totemism of the Theft of Joy)

An inventory made for the Eurozine network