Extinction Internet is not merely an end-of-the-world phantasy of digital technology that one day will be wiped out by an electromagnetic pulse or the cutting of cables. Rather, Extinction Internet marks the end of an era of possibilities and speculations, when adaptation is no longer an option. During the internet’s Lost Decade, we’ve been rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic under the inspirational guidance of the consultancy class. What’s to be done to uphold the inevitable? We need tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize. Join the platform exodus. It’s time for a strike on optimization. There is beauty in the breakdown.Extinction Internet is Geert Lovink’s inaugural lecture, held on November 18, 2022 as Professor of Art and Network Cultures, within Modern and Contemporary Art History, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam.
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Measures such as ‘ethical AI’ and ‘good data’ will not bring about social justice, end racial capitalism or forestall climate disaster. How to channel discontent and counter-hegemony into an actual transfer of power in the late platform age?
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This is a critique of how designers deal with contending histories and multiple presents in design to speculate about socio-technical futures. The paper unpacks how embedded definitions and assumptions of temporality in current design tools contribute to coloniality in designed futures. As design practice becomes implicated in how oppression extends from physical systems to global digital platforms, our critique rejects the notion that it is only AI that needs fixing and it dissects the Futures Cone used in speculative design to make these issues visible. As an alternative, we offer a hauntological vocabulary to aid designers in reorienting their speculative tools and accommodating pluriversality in anticipatory futures. To illustrate the benefits of the proposed metaphors, we highlight examples of coloniality in digital spaces and emphasize the failure of speculative design to decolonize future imaginaries. Using points of reference from hauntology, those that engage with uncertain states of lingering or spectrality, and notions of nostalgia, absence, and anticipation, this paper contributes to rethinking the role that design tools play in colonizing future imaginaries, especially those pertaining to potentially disruptive technologies.
