a vision that is different from the one shared by the companies and institutions that are currently shaping the internet. But what is the internet? And does it even exist?
Aram Bartholl
formational awareness and providing an infrastructure based on
The Internet Does Not Exist “The internet does not exist. Maybe it did exist only a short time ago, but now it only remains as a blur, a cloud, a friend, a deadline, a redirect, or a 404. If it ever existed, we couldn’t see it. Because it has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time. Yet we are still trying to climb onboard, to get inside, to be part of the network, to get in on the language game, to show up on searches, to appear to exist. But we will never get inside of something critical outside position, we should have taken a good look at information networks. Just try to get in. You can’t. Networks are all edges, as Bruno Latour points out. We thought there were windows but actually it’s made
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that isn’t there. All this time we’ve been bemoaning the death of any
of mirrors.” [7]
The editors of the e-flux journal are not the first to make this point. In The Net Delusion, [8] Russian writer and researcher Evgenij Morozov insists that we should stop speaking about “the Internet” as a subject with its own intentionality and personality, because frastructure, constructed and perused by different people with different ideas and intentions, and with features that are neither good nor bad, but that can be used either for good or for bad. But the point that e-flux’s editorial board make is actually stronger: what they put into question is the very existence, or, better, the possibility to define, this infrastructure. It may, they argue, have
Domenico Quaranta
such a subject doesn’t exist. The internet is just a technical in-