With the highly regarded and well-used Nettime mailing list, Geert Lovink established himself as one of the few true leaders of sober, useful net criticism (a discourse he in effect cofounded). Now, with Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (MIT Press, 2002) and the forthcoming Uncanny Networks: Dialogues With the Virtual Intelligentsia (MIT Press, 2003), he further expands his vision where others have fallen silent. Finally, with the end of the dot-com hand-waving, comes a voice for all of the fissures in the facade.

My friend and colleague Brandon Pierce let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.
Culture is driven by technology. Contemplate, for a moment, all of the devices that have changed your life in profound ways; or attempt a regress to your mental and physical state of being before the birth of the World Wide Web. Undoubtedly, you will notice your life is now inextricably linked to and tangled within technologies that pervade our daily experience (technophobes excluded). Our relationships, interests, and attitudes have all been cultivated by technological …

The New does not emerge. It erupts, then fades away. It always begins with brief moments of undefinedness. — Geert Lovink
Our post-dotcom, post-unfortunate attack era is desperately seeking understanding. Internet criticism and Network theory (both hereafter referred to as ‘Net Theory’) are reeling from the subsiding of dotcom madness and the decentralized organization of terrorists. Net Theory seeks to understand, analyze, and critique a moving target. Indeed more than a moving target — a moving target made up of moving targets.

Systems. It’s not about nouns, it’s about verbs. It’s not about the dots, it’s about the connections between them. Networks, not nodes. The journey, not the destination. It’s a trigger, not a gun.

We all know our world is held together through a vast network of connections, and we’re all coming to realize that it’s becoming more connected and interdependent with every passing day. The question is how? In what ways are we altering our lives with this network, and how do we deal with the negative aspects of the overwhelming connectivity?

They’re everywhere: tiny cameras, webcams, security cameras… video-capturing devices are almost as ubiquitous as the banner ads for them: “Watch anyone, anytime.” We’re all stuck somewhere between reality TV and a TV reality. Following the panopticon from an eighteenth century architectural drawing by Jeremy Bentham to the pervasive surveillance of the twenty-first century, CTRL [SPACE] is a comprehensive history of watching and being watched.

Steven Shaviro is a postmodern seer disguised as an English professor at the University of Washington. His books and various other writings slice through the layers of our mediated reality and show what factors are at work underneath. He cuts open the tenuous sutures between academic fields and dissects contemporary culture like the slimy animal that it is. His book Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism (Serpents Tail, 1997) roams the land between the lines of traditional fiction and cultural commentary and comes back with dead-on insight and understanding.

With ninety-five theses that redefined online markets and their prospective web consumers, The Cluetrain Manifesto (Perseus Books, 2000) dropped a virtual bomb on the virtual world. David Weinberger was one of its four authors. Therein he stated, “The web is viral. It infects everything it touches and, because it is an airborne virus, it infects some things it doesn’t. The web has become the new corporate infrastructure, in the form of intranets, turning massive corporate hierarchical systems into collections of many small pieces loosely joining themselves unpredictably.” With his new …

John Patrick is Vice President of Internet Technology at IBM and has championed many Linux-related projects there. In spite of the hokey title of his new book, Net Attitude, Patrick’s ideas about the Next Generation Internet (NGi) and Linux defy its decidedly unsavvy niche and its seemingly bad timing.

Brian Eno calls him, “The New Gutenberg.” His work tip-toes through the same conceptual gardens as Marshall McLuhan, Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart, and yes, even Johannes Gutenberg himself. Hypertext (he is one of the principle developers of Storyspace — a standalone Hypertext authoring environment), media evolution and the computer’s role in the writing process as well as education are a few of his points of interest.