How can the future of the internet be imagined beyond social media platforms? What can we learn from other networks? Those were two of the guiding questions of the recent workshop “After Networks: Reframing Scale, Reimagining Connections” at the RWTH Aachen University, Germany, in which we were able to share views from the Local Networks Initiative. Participating researchers, artists and other networkers took a break from their usual 24/7 life online to reflect on what could happen after, or during, the decline of the most prominent digital network, the internet, into a corporate platform complex. Here we share our takeaways from the event, juxtaposing five perspectives on the future of networks and their afterlife.
1. The artist’s view
Did you know: There were web artists before the internet. Sound strange? Well, Eduardo Kac made animated pixel art works using the extinct digital network Minitel. The trajectory of his work reminds us that no network is immortal. The relatively expensive communications network Minitel, very popular in France during the 1980s and 1990s, slowly vanished when a more accessible and international network (www) took the stage in the late 1990s – opening new spaces for (artistic) expression.
Kac’s concept of telepresence-art invites us to reflect on the ever-changing interactions between the digital and the physical, creating new kinds of self-reflexive presence. He has moved constantly from one networked space to the next, testing possibilities of dialogue and communications – from artistic explorations of slow-scan television transmissions (1987), non-human creativity loops (1994, when Kac made a plant and a singing canary bird communicate through sensors and a telephone line), to later holographic and space art (from 2017 onwards).
Kac’s political commitment as an artist has “zero interest in the immortality visions of the trans-humanists” but is, rather, attached to a quest for post-human moments of networking, “stepping out of the frame.” Instead of feeling oppressed by an omnipresent network, he insists on focusing on the unpredictable factors.
2. The media archaeologist's take
Now that we know that networks can become obsolete, it is not a surprise that media archaeologists like Lori Emerson are unearthing and documenting their remains. In her upcoming publication “Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook” she puts into historical perspective the seemingly timeless character of the internet: “[T]he present corporatised, monolithic, surveilled state of our networked communications is just one possibility out of many, and there is radical promise in uncovering hidden alternatives: from pirate radio to barbed wire telegraph, from synthesisers transmitted over the telephone to encoded messages bounced off the surface of the moon.”
According to Emerson, the internet in 2025 has turned into “the opposite of innovation” and agrees with Félix Guattari's critique on mass communication, of it having “always more centralisation, conformism, oppression.” Yet, as a free radio activist and philosopher, she still sees spaces of freedom and self-management within networks, namely “a shift to small servers” to host content and services. Examples of successful “other networks” include homemade fence telephone systems (emerging as early as the late 19th century), the innovative use of teletypewriters (telex) for Chile’s socialist cybernetic network Cybersyn in 1973, the free radio movement of the 1980s or the experimental setup of interconnected cafes in Los Angeles in the 1984.
Questioned about wireless networks, Emerson does not see them as either a new (thinking about drums and smoke signals being used previously) or an isolated phenomenon, since “networks combine and recombine in time.” On a technological level she also sees a growing “tendency towards hybrid networking”. Forms of centralised control and collective appropriations will continue to shape networks, a story with “no definitive beginning and no end”. Local networked approaches should continue to face “constant power struggles about network structures.”
3. The critique’s eye
So, now that we know that “all ends with beginnings” (to quote French electronic music duo Daft Punk), let’s further reflect on our certainties and bring in the perspective of two decades of critical internet research from the Institute of Network Cultures (INC) in Amsterdam, Netherlands. New to you? Well, according to founder Geert Lovink, the INC never really grew in scale since it never let itself be co-opted by big tech. But, he assures us: “It's a nice Asterix and Obelix village with lots of adventures.” And Lovink likes to tell its stories, like when they founded the Money Lab Initiative ten years ago, proclaiming that artists and other “content producers should be able to live from the internet” only to find out that by then all “the good people refused monetisation”. As his story goes, this collective refusal not least favoured “tech oligarchs to install a system that is highly beneficial for them” and led to online business models oscillating between a “depoliticised crypto scene” and a net-culture depended on constant and exhausting crowdfunding.
Other stories are equally sobering [1]. However, though many of his observations are frighteningly convincing, he refuses to completely enter the dystopian rabbit hole, not only because it would leave alone those who are “the main target group of platform companies: young people.” To work with them, to understand their world view and needs instead of convincing or moralising about their activities has been the focus of Lovink’s work since 2017.
How does his positioning as a researcher inform his understanding of networks? Loving sees the network ontology increasingly undermined by ever-more sophisticated platforms evolving into “we-chat-one-click-shops where you can do everything”. What to do about this? His proposal is to “break and dismantle them”, not to abolish digital spaces as such but to make them networks again, networks that are conceived as tools and not as immersive mirror cabinets. “Because if networks become tools again, you can put them aside.” So, will the network become the digital hammer to smash the platform machine and the type of society it brings into being? We will see!
4. The chronicler's call
Some call the internet an omniscient garbage dump, where data accumulates and is never lost... at least until you reach the limit of your free storage package. In any case, are we ready to entrust tech-bros with the role of the librarians of the future?
The multidisciplinary After Memory project, from Nathalia Lavigne, Lisa Deml and Víctor Fancelli Capdevila [2] reflects and experiments with memory unpacking, remembering and forgetting and its ambivalence in analog and digital formats and spaces. How is our organic memory is affected by social media, data storage and automation? And, at the same time, can the digital memory serve as a support for sustainable networks and collaborative ideas?
“This bears both challenges and chances, as practices of remembering and forgetting are reconfigured and their competences are transferred from institutional actors to civic initiatives and individuals. In turn, the role of museums and archives is also redefined, so that their collections no longer preside over a sovereign narration of the past, but constitute shared repositories for the future," the project notes.
5. The community network experience
On a more localised perspective, two examples of community networks were presented, the Phily Community Network and Ribeirão Grande/Terra Seca women-led community network. The LocNet initiative has supported policy and advocacy work in Brazil which aims at an enabling environment for community-centred connectivity iniatives.
Projects like the ones shared have in common a more holistic approach to the lack of connectivity problem, considering communities as agents of their own connectivity process. By fostering local capacity building, technological appropriation, the use of local labour and materials, and also techno-political discussions, communities can also play a role in governing their networks, both in terms of its infrastructure and content management.
To support the community autonomy, the Philly Community Network addresses tech literacy. They also value net neutrality principles and the belief that the internet should be provided free of throttling, zero-rating and the tracking and monetisation of user behaviour.
At the Ribeirão Grande/Terra Seca Community Network, the women farmers are at the centre of network management and act as its guardians, managing its captive portal and users. Additionally, they have tested a DNS/IP manager, fostering a local approach to content exposure and optimising the network performance.
While community networks do not offer a solution to all the complex discussions around platformisation of the internet and the increasing concentration of power on its infrastructures, they point to paths along which the autonomy of self-provision connectivity supports the power of local community over internet governance and last-mile infrastructure. While it is increasingly hard to perform daily tasks and access basic human rights without the internet, the response is not as simple as a “Yes” or a “No” to the internet, We need to look at how we can foster environments that support a more informed consent to what the internet has become and how to create local autonomy and governance over connectivity.
Bruna Zanolli and Nils Brock are Rhizomatica’s Innovation, Technology and Sustainability co-coordinators at the Local Networks Initiative.
Notes
[1] Titles by Lovink include “Sad by Design”, “Stuck on the Platform”, “Extinction Internet” and “Platform Brutality”.
[2] A great side note on their website is that it was built with the awareness of its own digital footprint, using no proprietary software and hosting both the website and its code in Germany (respectively at Uberspace.de and Codeberg).