Networks, Platforms, Digital Commons: Interview with Geert Lovink | institute of network cultures

Conducted for issue 2 of The Reservoir (Brooklyn, 2023), theme: Communion, distributed by Autonomedia.

By Max Moorhead

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, net critic, and activist, who has been writing about, and experimenting with, decentralized online communal life since the 1980s. His latest books, Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet (2022) and Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (2019), diagnose the melancholy of online life today and look for alternatives to the corporate platforms that dominate much of the internet’s landscape. I spoke with Geert about experimentation during the age of decentralized networks, and how to make sense of our desire for experiments with communal life when many of us spend a large part of our waking life online.