Urgent aphorisms : notes on organized networks for the connected multitudes

Where to situate the study of network cultures? It hovers between a public form of ‘mass informality’ and hardcore techno-determinism. The social noise we see scrolling down our screens is a waste product of techno-settings in which our sweet entries are situated. Interface is King, with the consequence that real techno-aesthetic intervention increasingly becomes a lost archive in the history of network cultures. In retrospect Friedrich Kittler’s techno-determinism remained an unfinished project. Kittler’s post-1968 German media theory has not gone through many alterations since the early 1990s. The once bold statement ‘media determine our situation’ doesn’t shock anyone these days and has become an empty phrase. The media a priori is so obvious that it seems to have drifted into the realm of the collective unconscious. Henceforth no Kittler school. The grownup Kittler-Jugend are dedicated to scattered projects on the margins of academia. People once again obsess over their small careers and seem to have forgotten the primal energy that collective imagination can unleash. New generations read German media theory with interest but simply no longer have the time to read the necessary libraries to fully enjoy the details. Kittler himself abandoned contemporary techno-analysis and retired in imaginary Old Greece. How can there be a critique when such a position itself is still obscure and on the brink of disappearing? You start to sympathize with the programmer geeks when techno-determinism is sublimated by the highly attractive commercial sheen of Web 2.0.