7 - Speculation

Summary

What will happen to the Internet in the future? ‘I will answer very simply that the Internet will disappear’, is what then-Google Chairman Eric Schmidt famously answered at the World Economic Forum 2015 (Schmidt in Szalai, 2015). Two years earlier, filmmaker, artist, and writer Hito Steyerl asked ‘Is the internet dead?’ (2013: online). Eric Schmidt and Hito Steyerl could not be more different in the ways in which they engage with questions concerning the presence of the Internet. While Schmidt envisions a seamless transition to a trans-societist1 condition via ‘devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won't even sense’ (Schmidt in Szalai, 2015), Steyerl asks whether that kind of Internet actually ‘stopped being a possibility’ “ (2013: online), because it is left to those who commercialize and racialize instead of forming potentials. While the Internet and more general processes of digitization should not be confused, these discourses about the future of the Internet also illustrate how digital information matters and may come to matter.

Hito Steyerl is one of many artists who calls attention to the ethics and politics of the Internet. Since the early 2000s many post-Internet art projects emerged, but only some of them take a stance on what it means to make online or digital information matter through art. Furthermore, not all who create artistic content through, with, or in relation to the Internet consider themselves part of the post-Internet art community. Yet, two contentious issues within the post-Internet art discourse are pertinent to the debate as to how art projects make online or digital information matter. One point concerns the ontologies of digital information and the Internet: Is the Internet – in line with Schmidt's vision – indeed ubiquitous? Is it true that ‘all culture has been reconfigured by the Internet’ (Connor, 2017: 61), which implies that a standpoint outside such cultures is no longer possible? Related to that is, second, the status of the ‘post’ in post-Internet: what does that temporality imply? Artist and writer Zach Blas, with whom I spoke about information practices, offers important considerations about both points: ‘ “Post-“ announces that challenging instances of passage and transformation can only be articulated through what they proceed’ (Blas, 2017: 87).