Door: Zach Blas
“Contra-internet describes the emerging artistic militancies and political subversions of neoliberal, networked digital technologies. Recognizing the internet as a premier arena of control today, contra-internet is both a refusal of, or exodus from, the internet and also an attempt to build aesthetico-political alternatives to its infrastructures. Aspects of the contra-internet include the global proliferation of autonomous networks and development of encryption tactics.
Contra-internet practices involve:
- An implicit critique of the internet as a neoliberal agent and conduit for labour exploitation, financial violence, and precarity.
- An intersectional analysis that highlights the internet’s intimate connections to the propagation of ableism, classism, homophobia, sexism, racism, and transphobia.
- A refusal of the brute quantification and standardization that digital technologies enforce as an interpretative lens for evaluating and understanding life.
- A radicalization of technics, which is at once the acknowledgement of the impossibility of a totalized technical objectivity and also the generation of different logics and possibilities for technological functionality.
- A transformation of network-centric subjectivity beyond and against the internet as a rapidly developing zone of work-leisure indistinction, social media monoculture, and the addiction of staying connected.
- Constituting alternatives to the internet, which is nothing short of utopian.”
