News from the Collective

Go to: https://pharmakon.epokhe.world/seminaire-hypertexte/

Between 2018 and 2019, Épokhè association member Michel Blanchut has “taken advantage of a period of immobility at home” to transcribe the Pharmakon seminars of Bernard Stiegler, which span from 2012 to 2020 and were recorded between 2014 and 2020. Seeing the efforts by the association in valorizing and preserving the Pharmakon recordings on an academic Peertube instance, Michel proposed in early 2025 to share his transcriptions to the larger community of “amateurs” and “students” of Stiegler’s philosophy, through Épokhè and with my help.

How to make accessible and valorize this huge corpora of hundred of hours of transcriptions online? I wanted to create a “compass” or “hypertextual map” out of them, to help navigate the sprawling philosophy of Stiegler through an appropriate Web edition – rather than simply give access to a drive with separate .docx documents of each seminar session. As part of my PhD activities within the Research Laboratory on Digital Textualities in Montréal with Marcello Vitali-Rosati, we work on the enriched Web book generator “Le Pressoir”, which I saw fit for the mission (despite being made, initially, for more traditional academic books and collections).

With Le Pressoir, we can navigate and articulate these transcriptions using a search bar and annotate them “socially” via Hypothesis (see also this longform I wrote when I was at the INC, concerning this Web annotation tool and our practices). I also automatically indexed, with scripts, the key authors as well as the texts’ titles cited by Stiegler, and embedded within each session page the video recordings on Peertube, that we can listen to while reading and annotating the text, looking at recommended “vocabularies” as to Stiegler’s concepts, …

The aim of it all is to provide to Stiegler’s amateurs and people who study his thought a way to explore and investigate the history of his philosophy in the making, between 2014 and 2020 – his seminars being closely tied to the books he was writing and his different projects. It comes also as a final project of Marcello’s class on Digital Culture, of which the slides were also made with Le Pressoir. What struck me in editing these transcriptions is the extent to which Bernard Stiegler philosophized by re-reading: he articulates and reinterprets different texts he read in the light of current events and the “organological” theory of political economy that he is trying to consolidate through, among other things, his Pharmakon “school”.

I hope that this Web edition will encourage and serve as a support for the listening of the seminars, that is, as a complementary publication to the recordings. The latter keep a “therapeutic” and experiential value, it has been reported by many Épokhè members ; of course, the emotional complexity communicated by the tone, voice, pace of speech, physical gestures of Stiegler are lost in the written words of this Web edition. However, having it as hypertext can allow us to explore them in a more non-linear way, depending on what we search for (the mention of a certain text, author, concept, event, etc.). This makes the Pharmakon school even more a material for research, whether it is undertaken by scholars or by amateurs – if we agree, with Stiegler, that activity of research and even more, of philosophy, is something to be shared much beyond academia and its margins.

We are glad to share this edition with an international community through the INC. In the not-so-far future, we hope that an English version of these transcriptions will be published there as well!

Sword Art Online, created by Reki Kawahara, directed by Tomohiko Itō, 2012.

I stand still under this newly purchased furied face — a lit-up black mirror stands in front. The body is invited into stillness until numbness takes over. The rate of the heart becomes perceptible, ticking louder while low-pitched. “As if dead” — said the voice that tickles the brain.

I give in a rounded 15 minutes in this position, now seated, that’s the time that I take to convince myself that Taiz— my fursona— can take over. I enjoy inducing these images of a somewhat slow first gen playstation 1 loading bar.
“This game is heavy, therefore takes time.” — at last, Taiz giggles.

Login credentials <Enter>

Choose location <Enter>

( a ritual of immersion )

<Enter>.

Video-game platforms and VR chats — for those with more sophisticated gadgets —
prompt the world that Cybernetics once dreamed of, one that Sword Art Online (2012),
like many other future-lead narratives, depicted as a form of LARPing that surpasses
itself: one that transforms role-playing into new logics of affecting what many tend to call
the first, or, the physical body’s emotions and identity-building processes.

Instagram Close Friends story by @carpatosmusic, screenshot by @meii_soh

Video games are often depicted as the main field for those interested in LARPing studies
through their direct association to play. While I believe there to no longer be possible to distinguish the I[1] that is actually at play — online, offline and beyond —, the topics of gamification of life through online capitalistic-driven platforms,[2] or the gamification of gaming itself, like for example Fortnite where players are encouraged to complete daily or seasonal tasks to unlock cosmetic rewards, turn gameplay into productive cycles. It is however in how the play affects, not only the body but identity altogether that I propose us to pause.

For those living in digitised societies, the process of online identity curation—not exclusive to social media— comes to mind, both as a generative form of social engagement and multi-identity split, avatar, etc. In such cases, the act of log-in parallels with the production of new internet-poetics of longing, an intersection that I find curiosity when looking into queer, trans*, or non-normative bodies such as the one of furry identities. Particularly to these bodies, longing is driven by the aftermath of a long session of play, or, in other words, for the search for accessible futures, and safety that anonymity itself provides. In such cases, it seems fair to say that socially driven internet practices might open new conditions for selfhood, recognition, and identity altogether. One where the surveillance of each other— user to user— is purposefully close to impossible.

However, the process of attaining selfhood online is often driven by complex desires to become recognisable — recognition that breeds a need for distinction. In furry, the staging of log-in perpetuates future staging of longing. To long is to log, and vice versa. An emotional experience that exists in both online and offline forms of furry where subjects usually describe logging-off as a cathartic returning to a space that does not serve their actual body’s mental and, or, physical needs.

I- I should say the whole time that the human side of the mind is just sort of off in the background – and then after a few minutes of being out there, human side comes back and is just like: well, I can’t stay out here all night. I have no choice but to go back. Of course[,] that’s depressing, it’s like I can’t stay out in the woods being me, I have to go back and remain in the human world.[3]

In this interplay of wording —log-in / longing —and feelings within digital space, becomes later embodied by offline. An embodiment that I propose as a surpassing of the platform itself, by using what it has taught us — to dissociate and become anew. This is not exclusive to video-games however, as social media platforms do in many ways resemble the rewarding categories of gaming and therefore are games themselves, all users are incentivised to curate, and therefore to dissociate, for the sake of being reward of others’ consumption of a laboured image of self.

The furry suit, in this sense, mirrors the act of entering one’s credentials: both invite play through transformation. Furry and avatars are linked by their capacity for disidentification. This is not to suggest that furries are derived from technology, but rather to acknowledge their shared conditions: interfaces through which the physical body encounters tools of becoming. To log oneself, as a furry, is to stage a soft death — to allow body, language, and at times voice to mutate into another syntax of being. It is a rehearsal of dying as play — a LARPing of death that does not end but multiplies.

This “soft death” exceeds world-building; it becomes ritual. A ritual that allows brain and body to believe that the so-called Beast that shouted in Neon Genesis Evangelion’s episode 26 — that buried multiplicity of self — might awaken. The internet’s induced dissociation becomes the needed password into alternative states of being within oppressive frameworks. Furry practices offer a poignant offline example of digital disidentification, using technology to kill a primary version of the self while forming part of what I call Deathnology: a speculative and embodied methodology of killing the first self as a means of recognition and reprogramming.

Disidentification, as José Esteban Muñoz describes, is a survival strategy — a process of remaking the self from within systems that were never built for one’s full existence. It is neither pure resistance nor assimilation, but a third space that reorients power and recognition.

Across digital mythologies, this is visible not only through gaming or furry practices but also in digital performers such as @pinkydoll, a black woman who, by embodying what many describe as really hot NPC on TikTok, uses gamification, repetition, fantasy, and algorithmic intimacy as tools of visibility and self-making. “Ice cream so good!” she repeats, while receiving pop-up digital gifts that materialise on her screen. Her gestures blur the line between human and avatar, collapsing the distance between body, capital, attention and her own devouring. When, in one of her streams, she briefly interrupts her performance to address her child — “Stop doing that! You are going to kill the dog!” — the illusion shatters. This rupture between fantasy and lived reality exposes how digital selfhood is racialised, gendered, and commodified “She’s not a good mother”, @kaysarahkay (reddit 2023), “At least she’s not using the kid for views ”.

Pinkydoll’s embodiment of the NPC becomes a form of digital disidentification — using the machinery of the algorithm to exceed it, and in doing so, re-scripting the ways recognition circulates around the racialised female body. For racialised and gendered bodies, recognition becomes both a site of survival and exhaustion — a double bind that Deathnology seeks to reprogram. Through her, intimacy detaches from the physical body and reconfigures as a tactic of endurance and authorship.

Shall we call it digital curation, identity planning, or resume it to dissociation? I cannot quite yet pin it. But I propose that these are modes of destabilising the walking, breathing body and its assigned identity. They amount to an algorithmic killing of a first form of existence, mediated by dissociation, into new modelling forces of recognition.

If avatars rehearse death through play, cinematic and animated mythologies have long prefigured this. The intersections of technology, death, and identity remind me of Revolutionary Girl Utena (1999), where technology operates as both stage and simulacrum. Within this technological world, bodies are made to conform — emotionally, interpersonally, within love. The stage itself is a machine of ideology, and must be unmade to expose the world it sustains. By the narrative’s end, the two main characters unveil the mechanism: the technological world is revealed as the primary one, while the “outside world” — a place where roads do not yet exist but where “you can always build new roads” — emerges as a site of potentiality. It is here that one may return to oneself, inhabiting a second, third, fourth body perhaps (?) that has escaped the facade.

The gesture of killing the first self runs throughout speculative narratives and performance. To dissolve or suspend tactility and tangibility of self — even momentarily — becomes political and affective training in disidentification. It allows the performer or subject to glimpse the mechanics of recognition: how identity is granted, maintained, or violently affirmed. The killing of the first self, in this sense, is not annihilation but opening — a passage through which another mode of being flickers.

My on-going research project on Deathnology is one that wishes to consider the furry as a practice of soft death — a temporary unmaking of the first body. To wear a suit, to adopt a persona, to move through another creature’s syntax, is one that pierces through acts of play into trans*alteration. The body becomes a membrane that can be inhabited otherwise. There is something deeply queer in that gesture: to die into another form, to love through disguise. Within this speculative field, furry becomes a practice that momentarily surpasses the internet — not as escape, but as fleeting transcendence, a rehearsal of disappearance that still takes place within it.

When Pinkydoll performs her NPC livestreams, saying “Ice cream so good,” she stages an automated body — a surface looped for consumption. But when interrupted by her child’s voice — “Stop doing that! You are going to kill the dog!” — the automation collapses. The loop stumbles and grounds the LARPing back into her lived body. The automation becomes self-aware, exposing the rupture between performance and life. Even as the physical body remains the site of feeling, the digital becomes a refracted skin — another surface that learns to breathe, to blush, to glitch.

Deathnology begins here: not under the pressure of defining separations between physical or digital, but within the unstable bouncing between embodiment and its refusal. The killing here is not an ending but a passage, a soft death that reveals another kind of living. In identity-dependent platforms where the formation of a personal hero or avatar is required, Death traces as spectral — a becoming-apparent through disappearance, a choreography of recognition reprogrammed. An alternatively lived-in software where something that may look just like a player’s death is in fact something else entirely. A proposal at last, that one might live many times within a single lifetime, and that technology is not merely a tool but a mirror reflecting our endless attempts at transformation.

Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Adolescence of Utena, directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara (Japan: J.C. Staff / Toei Company, 1999), video-still.

[1] Hideaki Anno, dir., “The Beast that Shouted ‘I’ at the Heart of the World,” Neon Genesis Evangelion, episode 26 (TV Tokyo, 1996).

[2] Here, I am reminded of the physical-to-online interdependence between users and digital bodies necessary to live and survive as in FarmVille, where engagement and reward systems are mediated by the capacity of a digital body to produce or grow. This relationship mirrors a form of digital labor, triggering a neurological compulsion for productivity, reward, and recognition. Similar dynamics unfold in competitive and open-world online environments such as League of Legends, Fortnite, Overwatch, Valorant, and GTA Online, where a user’s temporal investment and sense of achievement are tied to the growth, maintenance, and social validation of their virtual existence within networked economies.

[3] Courtney N. Plante, Stephen Reysen, Camielle Adams, Sharon E. Roberts, and Kathleen C. Gerbasi, Furscience: A Decade of Psychological Research on the Furry Fandom (Commerce, TX: International Anthropomorphic Research Project, 2023), 632.

Meii Soh is a performer, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of queer identity, non-human narratives, and speculative storytelling. Their practice explores shapeshifting as a survival strategy, tracing how identity—particularly in its fluid, trans*, and dissociative states—can glitch, dissolve, and reassemble through interspecies entanglements and technological interfaces. Soh holds a Master’s degree from the Dutch Art Institute and has recently presented work at Het Nieuwe Instituut, SEA Foundation, the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, and The Wrong Biennale, among others. Currently, Meii is developing written and material research around their self-developed concept Deathnology and furries as speculative offline identities that reprogram recognition.

The introduction to this series of interviews can be read here.

 Interview with Deivison Faustino

At the presentation of the MTST’ book in São Paulo, I met Deivison Faustino, a figure who immediately struck me as both likable and interesting. He has a rapper-like style, with his cap worn backwards, and he is a professor as well as a leading scholar and public intellectual in Brazil on the work of Frantz Fanon, the anticolonial writer of the Algerian resistance. Together with Walter Lippold, he is the author of “Colonialismo digital: por uma crítica hacker-fanoniana”. In light of the deep global penetration of North American digital platforms, digital colonialism—whose genealogy is well reconstructed here—should not be understood as a phenomenon limited to Latin America; it concerns us all. 

He speaks with confidence and engaging rhetoric, and we arranged an interview a few days later, at a discussion organized by Geledés – Instituto da Mulher Negra, a civil society organization that defends the rights of women and Black people against racism and sexism, and that carries out advocacy, education, and research activities. The event was titled “Artificial Intelligence – Cyberactivism and the place of Black women in confronting democratic erosion.” Sitting in the third row, I noticed that I was not only the only foreigner, but also the only white man present at the discussion—something that already says a great deal about Brazil’s internal racial divisions, which, according to my interlocutors, are far deeper and more concealed than they might appear.

The conversation, which also involved two other researchers, revisited several issues that have made headlines in recent years, particularly how artificial intelligence can end up promoting disinformation and hate speech, manipulating perceptions, and creating information bubbles. After an excellent refreshment, around 8 p.m., I cornered the poor Deivison for the interview, pleasantly interrupted by a samba playing in the bar on the floor below, which provided a counterpoint to the content of our discussion.

Indeed, although the discourse on digital sovereignty has gained significant prominence in the Brazilian media, I have rarely encountered truly radical critiques of it. Yet radical critique is a duty of thought: Marx urged us to grasp things at their root, while Cornelius Castoriadis saw in the radical imaginary the capacity to bring forth what does not yet exist. And if, with Bernard Stiegler, the risk of computational capitalism lies in the symbolic misery of a passive imagination whose desires are pre-fabricated by the technological industry, then this kind of contribution seems to me central to the debate.

***

The first question is about your trajectory: how did you become interested in the issue of digital sovereignty?

My intellectual journey begins with social movements, especially hip-hop and the Black movement. For a long time, I worked as a researcher of anti-racist thought, studying various authors, until I reached Frantz Fanon. In a way, I helped popularize his name in Brazil. I began studying him when almost no one spoke of him, and a series of transformations in the country allowed Black authors to gain visibility—and at that moment, I was there, presenting Fanon.

Fanon has a discussion on technology that is central to his work, though it is little studied. However, my entry into technology was not through Fanon. In the early 2000s, the free software movement was very strong in Brazil, and several programmers and intellectuals in that movement were linked to popular, Black, and indigenous movements. I was trained by some of these people, especially by Márcio Banto, known as Ikebanto, who to this day is a free software programmer and refuses to use proprietary software under any circumstances. At that time, I was part of a hip-hop collective and was also organizing the Black movement from a radical left perspective. The idea was to develop secure communication technologies to support MST (Landless Workers’ Movement) and MTST (Homeless Workers’ Movement) occupations, while simultaneously discussing themes of revolution and political organization with young people. The free software movement was very attractive to this group, which was already thinking about technology politically. It was the moment when the internet began to spread more widely in Brazil, and digital inclusion for people in situations of social vulnerability was being discussed.

In 2003, with the election of Lula and the appointment of Gilberto Gil at the Ministry of Culture, free software gained momentum. Gil had a clear policy of strengthening the movement, and the Pontos de Cultura (Culture Points) program was essential in this process. These points distributed resources to grassroots social movements to set up studios—and the studios were all based on free software. Thus, the free software community trained hip-hop youth in recording, editing, and filming programs. With these resources, we managed to set up studios in the favelas during a time of great precariousness. It was a different Brazil. Back then, we had a political organization called Grupo Kilombagem, and Ikebanto—this hacker who joined us—upheld a Simondonian idea: everyone should learn to program. I never quite mastered it, but I became convinced it was important. Later, I entered the university and began to study anti-racist thought academically. I found in Fanon a reflection on capitalism and racism that made sense of my previous experience.

The great turning point came in 2020, shortly before the pandemic, when I reconnected with Walter Lippold. He is a hacker, part of the hacktivist movement—what we used to call the “man of the black screen.” Walter was one of those responsible for disseminating Fanon’s thought, scanning and distributing his books freely when there were still no translations in Brazil, in sync with the movement for free information. When we met, I was already studying technologies in Fanon, and the encounter was explosive: we wrote an article together on algorithmic racism. It became so extensive that it turned into the book Digital Colonialism. That has been my journey so far.

I was surprised by the level of Fanon’s popularity here in Brazil. In Italy, for example, this doesn’t exist in the same way. But who was Fanon? Why is his thought relevant to issues of technology, power, and subjectivity today?

Fanon was a thinker, activist, and militant in the national liberation struggles in Algeria. Born in Martinique, he was educated in France and fought in World War II. A crucial point in his thought is the relationship between the universal, the particular, and the singular. He shows how colonial power relations impose a project of “the human” that takes the white man as the parameter. This critique is fundamental for us to think today about algorithmic reasoning—which takes Europe and the United States as the standard, generating biases of territory, language, race, and gender. Fanon was an organic intellectual of the Algerian National Liberation Front and wrote about the political character of technology: colonialism used technology as an instrument of domination. It is important to remember that Fanon wrote in French, but the first translation of his texts was into Italian. This happened thanks to Giovanni Pirelli, son of the owner of Pirelli. He quit his family, became a communist, and financed resistance movements in Africa. Fanon was a close friend of Pirelli, went to Italy frequently, and almost died there. When Fanon died, Pirelli coordinated the Italian translation of his works. Fanon was widely read in Italy in the 1960s by the anti-fascist movement and later by the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, but he subsequently fell into oblivion. Something similar occurred in Brazil: Fanon was read by the left in the 1960s and by the Black movement in the 1970s and 80s, but then he disappeared. Only with the affirmative action policies in the 2000s—when the Black population began to enter universities and demand Black authors in academic curricula—did his name and those of other Black thinkers return to the center of the debate.

Fanon uses the radio as an example to think about the relationship between technology, colonialism, and anti-colonial struggles. In the 1950s, radio was the most sophisticated communication technology available, and the French used it to penetrate the subjectivity of Algerians: to disqualify the struggle, calling it barbaric or terrorist. The Algerians, at first, began to demonize the radio, seeing it as a colonial technology. Fanon shows that this path was infertile: every technology opens new possibilities and contradictions. The turn in the revolutionary struggle happened when militants stopped demonizing and began to raid French radio stations, stealing transmitters and creating their own programs, such as “The Voice of Algeria.” This technological appropriation changed the course of the struggle and allowed the revolutionary message to penetrate even deeper into the Algerian people. The French, realizing the power of this communication, banned the sale of batteries to Algerians to prevent their access to the radio. 

Fanon concludes that the revolutionary turn is not to reject technology by treating it as an absolute evil, but to contest its terms, to put it at the service of the struggle for justice. This implies understanding how it works—a hacker gesture, so to speak. Here in Brazil, the free software movement and hacktivism played a similar role when they brought open technologies to favelas, quilombola communities, and indigenous villages. Today, we discuss how to update the idea of free software. It is no longer enough to replace Windows with Linux; it is necessary to think about secure networks and free technologies in the face of the global dominance of Big Tech. For this, focusing on software is not enough; we need to discuss hardware and the entire infrastructural geopolitics of contemporary digital colonialism. OpenAI is anything but open. Hacktivism, which emerged as a political rebellion, ended up being co-opted by the neoliberal market of the Californian Ideology—many hackers became entrepreneurs or far-right influencers. Our effort is to rescue the critical dimension of hacktivism and articulate it with Fanon’s thought, which allows for a combination of technological critique, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism.

In Brazil, in recent years, a very important movement for data protection has been forming. However, how does this movement resolve the issue of protection? Sometimes it tends toward an institutionalist place and limits itself to state regulation—without a critique of the State itself and the logic of power. Other times, it does not incorporate racism, which, in a country like Brazil, is a major limitation. The debate remains dominated by white men from the Southeast, even those on the left, and this carries a lot of weight because issues involving other populations end up not entering the agenda as central. So, we are also interested in contesting this movement to think about the necessity of anti-racism as a component element. Discussing data protection or algorithmic racism without incorporating anti-racism and a critique of capital is to reproduce old schemes of domination.

But we were also interested in critiquing anti-racism itself, because we, as Fanonians, move toward anti-capitalist thought. A good portion of the people discussing algorithmic racism did so with a reformist agenda, in the sense of:  there is bias in the algorithm, so how do we solve it? Wait for Google to hire a Black programmer to audit the bias and revise it. Or you receive money from Microsoft to do a project in a quilombo. For us, this solution ends up bringing some limiting traps. So the idea of the “Fanonian hacker” was also to propose a reversal in the way the debate was being framed at that moment.

I think the perspective of regulating personal data protection should always be combined with industrial policy. When Fanon speaks of the need to build one’s own radios, wouldn’t that be equivalent to this idea of autonomous technological production?

Exactly. It is necessary to discuss regulation, but also to build technical, infrastructural, and political alternatives to Big Tech. We need to update the free software movement, create secure communication networks for social movements, and think about organizational strategies outside the regulatory logic. For example, Walter, my research partner, studies cyberwarfare and new forms of surveillance and control. This worries us greatly, especially when we see how proprietary digital platforms make social movements dependent. The information war and the Palestinian genocide exemplify this: companies like Palantir, Meta, and Google provide tracking and control technology. That is why we insist that movements understand the socio-technical dimension of contemporary “death power.”

Two concepts I like from Fanon are “sociogenesis” and the “zone of non-being.” How do you see these concepts applied to the debate on digital sovereignty in Latin America?

These concepts are very dear and very complex. Fanon places sociogenesis in articulation with ontogenesis and phylogenesis: the first as historical-social mediation, the second as singularity, and the third as universality. It is necessary to think about any problem within this triad. Colonialism prevents the recognition of the colonized as a universal human and a singular subject. All modern technological development stems from a Eurocentric notion of the human that excludes the colonized, taking the white person as the universal.

Fanonian sociogenesis politicizes the perception of universality; it shows that what seems neutral is not. Take the case of facial biometrics: the numerical parameters used to define “the human” reflect a racialized gaze, while racism renders the Black person invisible as part of universal humanity. This has mathematical and technological implications, but it also allows us to think about the particular dimension of technological development itself. Furthermore, it allows us to reflect on the particular: what technologies could the South develop to meet its own needs? Big Tech impoverishes this possibility by concentrating power and buying up startups that could generate local solutions. Thus, specific needs cease to be incorporated into the mathematical models that govern artificial intelligence.

There are clear biases: if we search for “Amazon” on Google, we see only the forest. There is a bias here, which is the gaze of the white person from the North upon the Amazon, because the forest itself is a forest in relation to people; that type of forest is the result of indigenous forest cultivation technologies. So, having only the forest without the people is already a partialized view of the Amazon. The invisibility of local contexts has grave consequences, especially when algorithmic models are used in areas like mental health. An algorithm trained with data from the North may pathologize cultural differences or produce wrong diagnoses in indigenous or Black populations. Sociogenesis helps us understand these asymmetries.

Fanon also reminds us that violence is a product of the colonial structure itself. He does not glorify armed struggle, but he recognizes that when violence is already present, the colonized can choose to die passively or to react. Today, this radicalism can be thought of in other terms: refusing digital sovereignty policies that are merely a facade for the expansion of Big Tech, for example. Digital sovereignty is also about asking whom it serves. I might not sign a digital sovereignty manifesto whose motto is to bring a TikTok data center to dry up the water of a quilombola community, for example.

And how do you see the development of the debate on digital sovereignty in Brazil, especially now, with so much presence of the theme in the media and government policies?

Latin America was built from colonization, and this, from the outset, frames the problem in terms of technological development, because it is inserted into capitalism through colonization. This is different from the United States, which was a settler colony, built to be the home of various European ethnicities—a territory where surplus labor, to use a Marxist term, was used for its own development. It is no coincidence that the various North American states united against England to build a project of autonomy and sovereignty that presupposed independent national development. Latin America was the opposite. Except for the territories liberated by Bolívar, national independences did not presuppose autonomous projects of capitalism and national development, but rather the readjustment of colonial logic in other terms. Florestan Fernandes, an important Latin American thinker, says that Brazilian decolonization was “interrupted from above.”

Brazil was a colony of Portugal. In the 19th century, Dom João fled Portugal for fear of Napoleon and came to Brazil, declaring it the seat of the empire. Our independence, led by the prince regent, was a conciliation from above that did not alter the slave structure or colonial property relations. National production continued to be the violent monoculture of export extractivism—sugar cane and, later, coffee. Fanon also speaks of these national bourgeoisies created by and for colonialism to serve the interests of the metropolises; therefore, they neither adhere to democratic and universalist ideals nor aim for political and economic autonomy. They seek only to be intermediaries for colonialism or neocolonialism. This is a very important point.

This always placed Brazil and Latin America in a subservient position, subordinate to the European and US economies, and sustained elites who were violent toward their own people. But in a country like Brazil, which is large—and Brazil differs from other Latin American countries in this aspect—there is a moment when the Brazilian bourgeoisie attempts a type of technological development. This was the era of Juscelino Kubitschek and the policies called “import substitution,” which sought to attract the export of British, American, European, and German capital to develop the technological park so Brazil could move closer to a more developed status. However, this process was late. Brazil developed an important automotive production park, for example, in the 1960s, but at a time when Europe was already exporting its production outside the continent. So, even though Brazil developed technologically more than some Latin American countries like Bolivia or Venezuela, Brazilian development was always subordinate to international capital. Still, there were important advances: the construction of Petrobras, our state oil industry, which provides a very comfortable position for Brazil in international disputes because it is exploited with national capital, with State money, and the royalties return to the State itself.

But what happens with digital technologies? First, there is a school of thought called “developmentalism” that directs this effort of technological development subordinate to central countries. This effort was destroyed by globalization at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century, and the elites dismantled the national industrial park to allow the entry of foreign capital. What is interesting to consider is that, even in the Lula government, sectors began to bet on what some call “neodevelopmentalism”, an attempt to resume the project of technological development, hydroelectric plants, and various branches, but this effort is limited by the high internationalization and financialization of capital in its current stage of accumulation.

It is within this debate that the discussion on sovereignty appears. When the digital issue comes to the center, some people thought it was enough to translate these neodevelopmentalist initiatives into the digital technological sphere; but they ran into the change in the dynamics of capital itself. For example, the export of capital from Big Tech is not so much about technology, but about services. There is a difference here: Volkswagen or FIAT needed to set up a factory here, but Microsoft doesn’t need to set up a factory here; it can even export a data center and rent space in its cloud without employing people or transferring data processing technologies. It is only at this moment, when the data center proves to be a major environmental problem, that Big Tech considers transferring them to Third World countries to access the water and electricity of those territories. But the technological centers remain in Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, or Wuhan. This places a set of obstacles in the way of this neodevelopmentalist intent because it cannot resolve what we call “value transfer” in Marxism: Brazil exports iron, gold, cobalt, lithium, and data, and you import cell phones. It is an unequal exchange that presupposes the enrichment of the more developed country at the expense of the impoverishment of the supplier of primary goods. A colonial path of capitalist development.

So the neodevelopmentalist intent runs into changes in the dynamics of capital itself. What is our problem? Often the debate is conducted based on indicators of sovereignty, such as the data center. We looked at world maps of data centers and identified a wide concentration in the Global North, partly due to climate issues related to the cold in those regions. But this is only the appearance of the phenomenon. When the Lula government creates tax exemption policies for Northern data centers to install themselves in Brazil, it operates as if this were a project of sovereignty, but it is only the intensification of the country’s subaltern position in the international division of labor. What is sovereignty? Is it having to take care of the environmental waste of central capitalist countries? Is it just GDP development? In Brazil, technological development was often achieved through the destruction of indigenous territories and quilombos, displacing Black populations. A true project of sovereignty would aim for investment in science and technology, in the production of technological responses that meet local needs, which includes the construction of data centers under local government management, obviously, but is not limited to that.

There is currently a dispute over the notions of sovereignty. So much so that the MTST will say: it is no use talking about sovereignty if there is no real popular sovereignty. We know that many social movements are outside this debate. The Lula government was under a lot of pressure and is now going to create a national artificial intelligence plan. But the plan often starts from the premise that we “cannot fall behind.” So, you buy sophisticated computers, you buy services, but there is little discussion about equalizing access to these technologies and, above all, creating the scientific conditions for us to produce our own technologies. According to official CGI (Brazilian Internet Steering Committee) research, there are still many people without internet access in Brazil. It has increased in recent years, but there are still many people who only access the internet via SIM cards. You pay five reais, but you can only access Facebook and WhatsApp. A survey from three years ago showed that among the poorest segments, a large number of people in Brazil think the internet is Facebook or Instagram.

A project of sovereignty would imply thinking about structural social inequalities on one hand, but it would also imply thinking about this inequality in terms of a development project: for example, in the matter of communications, if a company is going to have a concession to install cables, it needs to have a counterpart, which should be ensuring that all schools and hospitals have internet access. This never happens. They put the cable in the Southeast; even here in São Paulo, the richest city in Brazil, if you go to Morumbi, which is the richest neighborhood here, you have a greater number of internet antennas than in Paraisópolis, which is the favela just 100 meters from Morumbi. So capital builds its own logic of distribution without having to pay a “toll” to the State, because no one is saying let’s leave the internet, we don’t have the conditions like China has to create our own system, not today, but the demand is for plans that allow investment in local development and the overcoming of inequalities. In this sense, there is a dispute over which project of sovereignty we want. And the impression of many people, including myself, is that the federal government has been serving Big Tech more than social needs. 

Speaking of dependence, do you think there is also a form of epistemic dependence in the Global South?

Undoubtedly. In the 2000s, computer schools proliferated in Brazil, but they taught “Windows,” not computing. People were digitally alphabetized within Microsoft logic. This persists: today many think digital technology is summarized as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. This epistemic colonization impoverishes creativity and political imagination. Alternatives exist—platforms and systems that are not based on data extractivism—but they are rarely considered. Politicians and public managers also reproduce this mentality: when we discuss alternatives to Big Tech, they argue that Amazon is “faster” or “cheaper.”

Sérgio Amadeu usually responds: what if the fastest is not the best? Perhaps the best is the most secure, or the one that responds to local needs. There is also a symbolic colonization: surveillance cameras, for example, are sold as synonymous with security, even when they do not reduce violence. Poor municipalities invest millions in cameras while lacking hospital beds and school supplies. No one knows who supplies this equipment, where the data goes, or what interests move this market.

To conclude: you research the relationship between digital systems and public health. In what way can technologies reproduce institutional and structural racism?

I am currently participating in two projects on algorithmic racism and digital health. We are living through an aggressive transition from conventional health to automated models of diagnosis and care. Apps offer therapeutic guidance, and even the SUS (Unified Health System) hires technologies of this type, justifying the replacement of professionals with automation. The question is: if algorithmic racism implies bias, what happens when we replace human care with automated models? The risk is that these mathematical biases translate into wrong diagnoses—and in health, an error means death.

There are already studies in England and the United States showing that, from a logical-mathematical point of view, if social inequalities are not considered in the adjustment of the models, they reproduce the same inequalities. In Brazil, where the Black population dies earlier, Black women die more in childbirth, and indigenous people have higher rates of tuberculosis, the danger is enormous. Racism is a social determinant of health. Therefore, automated systems need to take this dimension into account, but the problem is that those who define automation are the market—and the market privileges surveillance, profit, and global standardization. The struggle now is to ensure that digital care does not deepen the inequalities that already exist.

By Alison Twells

A Place of Dreams has been many years in the making, the long gestation quite simply because it took me so long to work out what kind of book it should, or could, be.

The book explores the wartime coming-of-age of Norah Hodgkinson, a working-class schoolgirl from the East Midlands. It is crafted from a ‘suitcase archive’ containing 71 pocket diaries, which Norah began writing in 1938, when she was 12 years old. Alongside the diaries was a collection of letters from a sailor who—it turned out—had received a pair of socks Norah had knitted for the Royal Navy Comforts Fund in 1940, and a stash of photographs of him—I’ve called him Jim—and his brother—Danny—who was in the RAF and with whom Norah fell in love.

Piecing together Jim’s letters and Norah’s diary entries, it soon became clear that these were not the kind of men you’d want writing to your fifteen-year-old daughter. But Norah, coming of age in a period in which finding love and romance was the pinnacle of female achievement, was utterly thrilled by her entry into this new grown-up and very modern world.

Norah’s diaries are unique. Despite over sixty years of ‘history from below’, we still have so few accounts of ordinary peoples’ lives told in their own voices and on their own terms. Evidence written by working-class people is more likely to end up in a house clearance skip than an archive. Working-class girls are surely among the most under-represented in history. We have plenty written about them, material which often represents them as a problem in some way. In Norah’s era, we see newspaper articles shrieking fears about the alleged lax morality of girls and young women during the war, and commentaries of social workers, journalists, reformers, the police, the records of juvenile court proceedings and government departments, the concerns of which are usually very far from the girls’ own. As the daughter of a postman and a former domestic servant, might Norah’s diaries allow a different kind of access to a working-class girl’s interior life?

As well as unravelling Norah’s wartime experience, A Place of Dreams asks: what kind of writing would best allow me to tell Norah’s story?

Norah’s diaries are a challenge to read. It is not simply that much of what she wrote about was very mundane. Her daily concerns—the weather, her routines and household chores, the comings and goings of family and friends, her health, love interests and occasional world events—were all shared with other diarists, like the middle-class women who wrote for Mass Observation during the war. But Norah’s diary entries—written in tiny squares that allow for no more than twenty words a day—are more akin to almanacs and pocketbooks than the discursive, introspective diaries that find their way to publication. Laconic and telegraphic, they have little in the way of plot, dramatic tension, character development or self-reflection. Her use of parataxis, the juxtaposition of unrelated daily events, accord the ordinary and extraordinary equal value within any given daily window. The personal pronoun, the ‘I’, is almost entirely absent. Full sentences too. Norah relies on phrases composed of verb/object pairings (‘wrote to Danny’), with an occasional adjective thrown in (‘beautiful letter from my love’). Her style is so terse as to seem almost coded, her disjointed, staccato sentences hard to decipher without insider knowledge.

Given my training, the obvious way forward would be to write about Norah’s diaries, academic-style. Academic historians have much to commend us. We know our sources: their strengths and shortcomings, how they came into being, what they might mean. We are good at probing beneath the surface, steering clear of simplicity, unsettling false certainties. But putting Norah’s archive through the academic mill, subjecting her daily entries to an outside telling, would not get close to her life as she lived it. It could not bring her diaries to life. Nor would it lead to a story that Norah would recognise as her own, or even want to read.

A Place of Dreams builds on long-standing criticisms of academic writing; criticisms which say that our commitment to detachment and distance, to the solemn, argumentative voice of a purportedly neutral ‘hidden narrator’, doesn’t actually do what we claim it does. I ask if story can carry interpretation, if family stories and methods drawn from life writing might allow the kind of ‘insider’ perspective that Norah’s diaries feel to me to need, and if I can do all of this and still call it history…

‘History from below’, I have come to believe, requires more than a focus on an ordinary life written in an academic voice. It requires attention to both form and voice: an exploration of forms that allow other ways of knowing – through family stories and imagination, perhaps; and a writerly presence that is transparent, honest and warm.

For girls as a problem, see Carol Dyhouse, ‘Was There Ever a Time when Girls Weren't in Trouble?’, Women's History Review, 23:2 (2014), 272-274.

For criticism of academic writing, see: Alison Twells, Will Pooley, Matt Houlbrook and Helen Rogers, ‘Undisciplined History: Creative Methods and Academic Practice’, History Workshop Journal, 96:1 (2023), 153-175, and references therein.

For family stories as ‘inside history’, see Alison Light, Common People: The History of An English Family (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014).

Read A Place of Dreams: Desire, Deception and a Wartime Coming of Age by Alison Twells freely online or buy a copy on our website.

A Review of Alessandro Sbordoni’s Beyond the Image

“There is no gold standard for the image anymore.” Alessandro Sbordoni

There is no temptation whatsoever to read Sbordoni’s Beyond the Image: On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century as another lament over the collapse of visual truth in the digital age. Here I encounter none of the popular anxieties about deepfakes, social media, artificial intelligence, and the exhaustion of meaning. Beyond the Image successfully dodges the danger of being another nostalgic defense of representation, referentiality, and “Truth.” There is no conservative plea for the return of visual authenticity. This text is a troublesome and indispensable diagnosis of a historical mutation and a break in the regime of visibilities that condition our perception of things.

From a typical Foucauldian standpoint, I see in Sbordoni’s project an observation that another reorganization has occurred for vision as a field of power. Maybe even a potential for a line of resistance as anti-ocularity, a rejection of the algorithmic gaze in favor of parrhesiastic techniques of seeing and being-seen? What the book ultimately charts is the emergence of a post-visual regime where it is not just the case that seeing no longer guarantees knowledge; the idea that looking at something was ever a proof for something being the case is as old a lie as Platonism. Images never really promised reference, and truth was always emergent; it is always a mere superstructure, a connaissance on top of the governmentality, the savoir of the visible. What the book inaugurates is something more relevant, interesting, advanced – an accurate description of how this particular regime, the twenty-first century, manages, governs and deploys its own optical regimes. We are instructed on how perception is trained, formatted, optimized, and governed through algorithmic systems whose primary allegiance is (clearly) not to meaning but to circulation-for-its-own-sake, profitability, and control. Beyond the Image is, I argue, in its own right a genealogy of Pictorial Panopticism: a regime of images that discipline subjects according to the dictates of Capital.

Pictorial panopticism does not just operate by showing too much, it is an organizational principle of vision, a closed circuit. The image does not need to persuade, convince, or even deceive. There is no depth and everything is on the surface, the image only needs to circulate and create fiat value. Power is not invested in the content of the images, content is just the dynamism, the speed of the image; value is produced through movement alone. The rankings, indexes, repetitions that conjure up an imminence, the feeling of an impending doom that sustains anxious scrolling… The crisis diagnosed in Beyond the Image is epistemological and political.

On the one hand, classical panopticism functioned through asymmetrical visibility; on the other hand, being seen without seeing, pictorial panopticism functions through total participation and horizontal diffusion of visibility. It cuts the head off the watchtower. Everyone looks; everyone produces; everyone is exposed. The subject is no longer disciplined by the gaze of the Other but by the requirement to remain legible within an image-economy whose criteria are opaque and whose evaluative metrics are endlessly shifting. One is not punished for invisibility; one simply disappears inside a hall of infinite refractions.

This mutation also marks a deeper anthropological shift: the passage from the mirror stage to the screen stage, from the gaze to the stare. Where the mirror once structured subjectivity through misrecognition, doubling, and identification, the screen abolishes distance altogether. It absorbs directly without reflecting. The gaze, historically bound to desire, lack, and the possibility of resistance, is replaced by the stare: continuous, frictionless, optimized for meaningless endurance. The consumer becomes the regime’s preferred format of subjectivity: measurable, segmentable, endlessly adjustable. To stare is not to contemplate, but to remain operational, available, and extractable. What appears as participation is, in fact, a mode of capture in which vision is no longer oriented toward the world but synchronized with the imperatives of circulation.

This is the decisive mutation Sbordoni tracks: the passage from representation to operativity. Images no longer even pretend to stand in for reality; they stand in for other images, for data, for probabilities, for SEO optimizations (while SEOs are just words-becoming-images). Vision becomes a relay between interfaces. The image triggers an image. It activates. In this sense, pictorial panopticism is inseparable from algorithmic governance. To see is to process; to be seen is to be processed. What makes Beyond the Image compelling is its refusal to mourn this transformation in moral terms. There is no nostalgia for lost depth, no call to restore authenticity, no fantasy of returning to a pre-digital innocence. Sbordoni does not ask us to believe in images again. He asks us to recognize that belief was never the point. Images have always been technologies of power; what has changed is the speed, scale, and abstraction of their deployment.

Since I have a certain habit of reading theory in a particular way, I have to take the next logical step and search Sbordoni’s work for an opening where I can speculate on possibilities for resistance against the tyranny of the image. Clearly, the post-visual regime has no concern for truth, in fact it tosses truth around like a cheap whore, managing its distribution, deployment, and circulation. We can’t rely on better representations as forms of counter-conduct. It must take the form of interruptions, hesitations, refusals to optimize. What becomes political is not what is shown, but how visibility is inhabited. Slowness, opacity, refusal, misuse; these can be weaponized as both aesthetic and strategic gestures.

What ultimately matters, then, is not the ontology of images but their effects on the subject. Sbordoni’s analysis consistently displaces attention from visual content to the transformations images impose on modes of being, attending, and enduring. Images no longer address a viewing subject; they configure one. They train attention spans, modulate affect, recalibrate thresholds of tolerance and boredom, and normalize a state of permanent availability. The subject that emerges from this regime is not deceived or persuaded, but formatted, i.e. rendered compatible with the rhythms, demands, and extractive logics of the image-economy. In this sense, pictorial panopticism is not a theory of control through sight, but a theory of subjectivation through circulation: what images do is produce a subject for whom visibility is no longer an event but a condition of survival.

In this sense, Sbordoni’s work resonates less with traditional visual theory than with a specific and much more effective genealogy of anti-ocular practices. Beyond the Image is therefore not a theory of images but a theory of the conditions under which images govern. Its critical force lies in showing that the post-visual does not mean the disappearance of images but their total saturation of social life. We do not live after images; we live inside their logistics: it is a becoming-image of the body. The panopticon dissolves into interfaces, feeds, metrics, and predictive models. If there is a pessimism here, it is a lucid one. But it is not paralyzing. By refusing the language of loss, Sbordoni forces us to abandon false hopes and misplaced critiques. There will be no return to truth through images, because truth was never their function. The task, instead, is to learn how power perceives and how Capital trains us to perceive for it.

Portals such as GeoCities, Worlds, The Palace, and Habitat allowed their users to participate in an alternative reality in which, whether through supposedly naive websites, chat rooms, or metaverses, the primary goal was always to share interests and connect with people from different territories. Over time, as has happened with our organic habitat, many of these networks underwent a kind of virtual gentrification, the main consequence of which was forced submission to terms and conditions dictated by the most powerful people in the world: the 1% that began to be fought against on Tumblr and 4chan more than ten years ago. Following this, as a result of the twenty-year nostalgia cycle, a large number of users have recently become interested in a period they experienced only peripherally: the turn of the millennium. And although to a large extent it is a mere superficial and aesthetic issue, its premise of a failed bright future or utopia echoes an enthusiasm numbed by the logic of a world that is increasingly less suited to human rhythm.

This is where the video game Hypnospace Outlaw, produced by No More Robots in 2019, comes in. The game circles around contradictory feelings of nostalgia at the dawn of the internet. Beyond being a virtual tour loaded with popular references, Hypnospace Outlaw functions as a truthful and realistic tribute to an often idealized way of being virtual. Therefore, based on its narrative and formal analysis, parallels will be established with which to rethink the fin-de-siècle period of internet history and how it dialogues with a future situated in the present. Through certain commonplaces of nostalgia that beat tacitly in this work, we will reflect on the need to advocate for a renewed spirit with which to face a virtual everyday life that, despite being beneficial, consumes us as a community into a distracted and gray mass. Therefore, an approach to creations such as Hypnospace Outlaw will allow us to take a step back and rescue a transformative potential from a privileged position, that of the present, which is already filtered by the true lived experience.

You may ask Yourself, ‘Where does that Highway go to?’. Narrative and Formal Notes

Despite being an offline video game, Hypnospace’s portrayal of an internet that has already been buried exudes a deep sense of liveliness. This is why it captivates from the very first moments and why it dialogues with a stagnant and automated present. On the contrary, this work emphasizes the human factor from the outset by pointing to the human-technology symbiosis as the fundamental pillar of a bright future [Fig. 1]. However, the irony of the approach lies in the fact that these premises are endorsed by Merchantsoft, a company that has developed a device called HypnOS that allows its users to connect to the Hypnospace internet network while they sleep (hello Neuralink). The underlying intention of Hypnospace is to integrate technology into people’s daily lives, making it infinitely accessible. The dreamlike hyperbole behind the idea of never disconnecting from technology was evident in commercials such as the one for Windows 95, aimed at a general audience who could use the computer for any task and on any occasion (even in a restaurant!); or in others such as Newcom, in which a teenager physically enters the Information Superhighway, synonymous with the internet, which seemed to reference Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway.

Fig. 1 Screenshot from Hypnospace Outlaw. Frame from the video that welcomes the user and introduces them to Merchansoft technology.

Connecting and sharing with others under the laws of cyberspace were the symbol of a hopeful race toward the future, whose success depended on who had the power of these tools. This reasoning is followed by skeptical manifestos such as Mark Dery’s Culture Jamming, which, as early as 1993, saw the internet as a possible solution to an American society lobotomized by television. For Dery, through the virtual mirages of reality, users could take control of this technology to subvert stagnant cultural codes in an act that draws on détournement, photomontage, samizdat, and ultimately, hacking. The static nature and passivity of television would be replaced by the nomadism and interactivity of virtual communities that would gradually take up more space in our psyche, paving the way for true virtual reality. This narrative, also prophesied by the futurists of the time, is the roadmap for the equally naïve Hypnospace.

Within this sleepwalking internet, its users can create spaces in which to share their concerns with complete freedom, which means that, as in the 1990s, a unit (the player) is needed to moderate the content. This premise is the backbone of the entire work, which is nothing more than a MacGuffin to advance through a non-linear story about a company that led its invention to a fatal end. The enthusiasm radiated by websites such as GeoCities and humor blogs such as Something Awful inspired its developer, Jay Tholen, to create the game’s fictional websites[i], which follow a now-lost structure in which the host introduces themselves to the anonymous visitor and invites them to immerse in their interests in religion, skeletons, or cryptids [Fig. 2].

Fig. 2 Screenshot from Hypnospace Outlaw. Website discussing the cryptid Tall Green.

What is relevant about this artificial internet is how it mediates the feeling of nostalgia beyond postmodern intertextuality, as occurs, for example, in the life and work of Ann Hirsch, whose use of GIFs and vlogs shapes an art that deals with digital identity and hyperfemininity [ii]; while other artists such as Lizzie Klein capture the influence of virtual nostalgia in their work to create photographs that are essentially anachronistic [Fig. 3]. Therefore, the nostalgia that predominates in Hypnospace Outlaw is reflective in nature, aware of the inability and futility of returning to the past but, with a layer of contradictory irony, manages to bring it back [iii]. In this way, the work enters into the same hauntological game that has dominated certain internet phenomena and so seduced Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher, such as Vaporwave, the music of Leyland Kirby, or the digital crackling of vinyl records [iv]. Here, the slow start-up of the game interface, visually inaccessible websites, cyberbullying, and the emulation of poor bandwidth are details that shake up the present in order to de-idealize an artificially remote past.

Fig. 3 Photograph of Lizzie Klein’s ongoing project Health Freak.

It should be noted that the interest this work aroused at the time is partly a consequence of the proliferation of countless aesthetics and vernacular subcultures, ranging from the fascination with liminal spaces studied by Valentina Tanni and Raquel Luaces to the countless -core subcultures that form the backbone of the current Internet Core. Hence, Hypnospace Outlaw serves as a good example of capturing the nature of the aesthetic to which it belongs, Y2K, since this aesthetic umbrella encompasses all the imagery produced around the dreaded Y2K bug, which ultimately did not cause any problems. Therefore, the contradictory facet of nostalgia emerges in this work to the delight of a player who sees how certain characters gradually go crazy on their blogs with the advent of the year 2000.

As a contextual colophon to this part, it is worth recounting the final spiral of a story that is both emotional and tragic:

In the last setback, fears became reality and, during the turn of the millennium, the HypnOS  bands that all users were using failed at the same time due to a bad system update. This caused thousands of injuries and six deaths. However, the blame was placed on a teenager who created a harmless but eye-catching virus with the intention of getting a girl’s attention, a fact that unjustly condemned him to six years in prison. Despite this, years later, our final task will be to delve into files that prove how the computer cataclysm could have been avoided if the creator of Hypnospace had not succumbed to delusions of grandeur, as his stubborn obsession with improving the system went against numerous medical reports urging him to discontinue the product. After the success of our task, its creator confessed everything and accepted his sentence, but not before revealing that his remorse had been expressed through several letters lamenting the deaths of young and innocent victims [Fig. 4]. In the background, a melody accompanies the final scene with lyrics that continuously repeat the phrase: “Y2K, you let me down”.

Fig. 4 Screenshot from Hypnospace Outlaw. Letter addressed to one of the collateral victims.

Towards Another Path. The Lessons of Hypnospace Outlaw

To create a fictional microcosm of Hypnospace’s caliber, it is necessary to engage in dialogue with the productions of its time through pastiche and self-referential aspects, in addition to the aforementioned intertextuality. This postmodern miscellany, common to our mass of contemporary cultural objects that capitalize on nostalgia, is evident in the zeitgeist that shapes the game to the point of creating something new. The utopia referred to here is the same one that underlies in every feeling of nostalgia, a utopia to strive for or a utopia that could have been but was not. However, what has prevailed in our era is that failed utopia, the one that was glimpsed after the end of history and which, according to Grafton Tanner, was consolidated after the 9/11 attacks [v].

The designers are fully aware of this fact, as behind the façade of references that shape Hypnospace Outlaw, there are other more subtle ones that play with the ironic ambivalence typical of a virtual culture accustomed to playing with masks. Several examples clearly illustrate this. Merchantsoft (Microsoft), the company that designed Hypnospace, is followed by SquisherZ (Pokémon), a game that consists of collecting fluffy creatures; Professor Helper (Clippy), a virtual assistant who is not usually very helpful [Fig. 5]; the free music distribution system FLST (Napster); and websites with interactive hypertext stories that marked the work of net artists such as Olia Lialina, Mark America, and Shu Lea Cheang.

Fig. 5 Screenshot of Hypnospace Outlaw. Professor Helper website.

However, the most interesting ones are those that not only reference but also redefine the notion in question. This is the case with the harmless virus that was nothing more than a covert declaration of love, reminiscent of the famous ILoveYou computer worm; or with Mindcrash, a euphemism for the Y2K problem that caused so many deaths; while other events, such as the one that merged numerous websites into one, thus forcibly displacing many users, seem to allude to the subsequent birth of Web 2.0, the cornerstone of the platforms that now dominate the internet and stoned the virtual flâneur without a destination of his own on a website without hierarchies.[vi]

Although the internet has proven to be a tool capable of distorting time and turning the past and present into a spongy mass, as Simon Reynolds points out [vii], the fact that anyone can access any object under the guise of nostalgia does not necessarily symbolize that we are facing a cultural recession. As with many advances, the significant change lies in the accessibility and speed they bring, not in the new opportunities they offer, as these were often already possible before.

Due to the pace at which phenomena occur on the internet, it is natural for new cultural trends to coexist with outdated ones that manage to pass the novelty filter, a fact that further accelerates contemporary presentism. This is where the aforementioned aesthetics would be situated, which, when referencing the past, always err on the side of translating the selective amnesia of a community that identifies with anachronistic and poeticized codes. That is why Hypnospace Outlaw shows not only how much has been lost (or expired) in recent decades in terms of the internet, but also, as glimpsed earlier, it collects what only a historically blind person would miss, such as finding gore content by chance or being greeted by a shrill MIDI melody on every website. However, what has gradually evolved is the new sense of community to which the work refers so much.

Today, some of the contradictory notions of Gary Cross’s consumed nostalgia are even more noticeable. From his thesis on nostalgia that has been absorbed and regurgitated by the market through objects and passing fads, it is worth mentioning his interest in how it has created micro-identities common to a large number of people who interact with each other from a position of individuality [viii]. This code of conduct is the basis for hegemonic forums such as Reddit or, conversely, 4chan. Therefore, despite the loss brought about by a new vertical and commercialized model of the internet, what is truly desired is a human factor that remains latent beyond the mere consumption of virtual content.

Over time, the internet became completely ingrained in people’s lives, occupying both their work and leisure time. It is the place where you pay your bills. Society, seeing its pace of life and work mediated by the internet, created refuges out of nostalgia, sharing experiences and interests through those same platforms that were built on the ruins of others in the past. We saw how a non-place like the internet, that is, an anonymous, transitory place with no agency, became for different generations of people a landscape of nostalgic escape where everyone could partially recognize themselves and align themselves to ensure a different future. And although this fact may be inexorably conditioned by market and political interests, nostalgically longing for a promised future can always awaken in those who identify with it a sudden interest that brings with it the possibility of change.

The Possible Internet

In essence, part of that promised future portrayed by Hypnospace Outlaw has actually been realized in our reality, only based on the same socioeconomic dynamics that sustain the network. Aesthetically, the informational and visual anarchy that prevailed on the internet at the turn of the century has been replaced by more accessible, intuitive, and concrete interfaces, which has brought with it an oversimplification that advocates for easier navigation of different websites at the expense of a flatter appearance. Hence the artistic interest in recovering that spirit of “anything goes” that was lost in pursuit of a corporate aesthetic that, for the moment, still predominates in all spaces. Those who, beyond its aesthetic value, revere bastions of that era such as the green head of the Windows Player [Fig. 6a/6b], are not only indulging in nostalgia, but are also seeking, through these lost remnants of craftsmanship, an agency within an internet that is inseparable from everyday life.

Fig. 6a “Green Head.” Skin for the Windows Millenium Edition operating system music player, 2000.

Fig. 6b “Green Head.” Skin for the Hypnospace Outlaw music player.

The denial of the future, which has been exacerbated by an essentially retrograde technology such as the algorithm, could be mitigated if the mercantilist factor that brings with it the rebirth of past eras were removed. In order to avoid superficial gestures that feed back into communities as commodities, which Byung-Chul Han refers to as the “end of all community”,[ix] we must turn in a direction that escapes the nihilism of eras such as the one described here, whose non-collapse after the year 2000 condemned it to having to “fulfill” its promises. This fact, however, is what certifies that another path is possible despite the development that the internet and its culture may have undergone.

Although currently taking a step forward and opposing the hegemonic internet through the use of decentralized networks or free software applications is equivalent to the attitude of a contemporary Thoreau, the truth is that their mere existence shows how the flame lit by collectives and artists such as Monochrom, Critical Art Ensemble, and Sadie Plant through manifestos is still alive and becoming more necessary than ever. Works such as Hypnospace Outlaw, which require careful attention and special dedication to immerse oneself in the reflection of a world that once was, possess a transformative spirit, hidden behind the veil of nostalgia that is not always properly glimpsed. If we dissociate the consumerist and viral aspects of these works and aesthetics with echoes of the past, we can turn to transgressive creations that use the abject, the queer, dreams, the kitsch, glitches, or ecology as banners to shake the foundations of present-day culture. Although immaterial, it is essential to take a stand against what dissipates our agency in what remains of cyberspace. After all, even though it has been reviled and misrepresented, the continuum that pursues nostalgia as an engine of change still feeds back into culture; what remains, therefore, is to cautiously position ourselves behind the lights of a feeling capable of imagining new presents.

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Author bio

Francisco Villalobos is currently developing his thesis on internet culture at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Based on the theoretical framework of post-internet and digital folklore, his PhD research investigates how internet culture has created a vernacular language about digital daily life and the consequences of living conditioned by internet technology. He is also interested in the role played by video games on the internet and in other audiovisual manifestations that shape today’s cyberspace.

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References

[i] Richardson, L., (2023). “The influences and surprising origins of Hypnospace Outlaw” RockPaperShotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-influences-and-surprising-origins-of-hypnospace-outlaw.

[ii] Chan, J., (2012). “The Real Ann Hirsch: The Power of Performative Fiction” Illuminati Girl Gang Vol. II, Oct 29. https://htmlgiant.com/web-hype/illuminati-girl-gang-vol-2/.

[iii] Boym, S., (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books: 18.

[iv] Fisher, M., (2014). Ghosts of my Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: zero books: 74 – 76.

[v] Tanner, G., (2022). Las horas han perdido su reloj. Las políticas de la nostalgia. Barcelona: Alpha Decay: 47 – 49.

[vi] Darling, J., (2015). “Arcades, Mall Rats, and Tumblr Thugs” in Lauren Cornell, Ed Halter (eds) Mass Effect. Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century. Massachusetts: MIT Press: 325 – 328.

[vii] Reynolds, S., (2011). Retromania. Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: Faber and Faber: 62.

[viii] Cross, G., (2015). Consumed Nostalgia. Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press: 14 – 18.

[ix] Han, B.-C., (2021). No-cosas. Quiebras del mundo de hoy. Barcelona: Taurus: 31.

A Project by the Dutch Media Art Collective SETUP

The networking site Facebook, founded in 2003, was once the beating heart of our online social world—the place where we felt connected, friendships were formed, and self-discovery developed. These days, the platform has become a symbol of everything that can go wrong with social media: polarization, hate, disinformation, data extraction, and AI slop. When Facebook is mentioned, a widespread sense of unease is evoked. We should have cancelled our accounts a long time ago, yet many of us still cling on; there are still more than 3 billion active monthly users worldwide. Instead of calling on guilt and pushing alternatives, SETUP asked itself the simple question: why can’t we let it go?

In public debates about social media, our emotional attachment to these platforms is rarely discussed. Facebook isn’t just an app. It’s a digital diary of our lives, full of memories, relationships, and events. To start that conversation, we built the Facebook Museum: a place where we collectively can say goodbye to Facebook, where we both celebrate and question this platform’s beautiful and ugly sides. Before we can let go of Facebook, we first need to understand how and why we’re attached and what role Facebook played in our lives.

In July 2025, the Dutch Media Art Collective SETUP opened the world’s first temporary Facebook Museum in the main hall of Utrecht Central Station, the Netherlands’ busiest railway station. A pop-up museum where visitors could donate their own Facebook data, relive memories, and discuss their digital identity. The project attracted over 5,000 visitors and received widespread national media attention. The response illustrated the heartfelt need to reflect not only critically, but also emotionally and collectively on our digital past – and with it our digital future.

In December 2025, SETUP received financial support from the Dutch SIDN Fund to scale up and diversify the Facebook Museum in 2026.

Please visit www.facebook.museum (at the moment only in Dutch) to get an impression of the experience, the press coverage and visual material. This introductory posting gives an overview of the different elements of the museum and what SETUP imagines are possible directions the project can take.

What’s there to experience? Visitors can participate in the curation of what should be remembered about our joint time on Facebook, score keepsakes in the museum shop and vote on a suitable location for the permanent Facebook Museum. In addition, they can donate their Facebook data, reflect on their favorite Facebook moments and leave a card for this on a remembrance wall.

Existing Museum Sections:  

Pedestals with Objects and Stories

Multiple pedestals feature objects symbolising the experiences of six people who have had a startling, or sometimes exemplary, experience with Facebook. The objects appeal to the imagination, such as a cat collar, a pile of pubic hair, or a squash racket. Each pedestal reads the opening of the said story, accompanied by a QR code that the audience can scan with their phone to explore the story further. The stories alternate between positive and negative experiences about, on, and around Facebook. From testimonials of cosy crochet Facebook group members, to traumatised content moderators or victims of online doxing. The individual stories can be read here (in Dutch).

Preservation Wall

The preservation wall is a large blue wall holding three screens on which typical Facebook content passes by: cat pictures, illustrious Facebook groups, and memes. Visitors can vote on what content to preserve as Facebook’s cultural heritage by pressing the corresponding buttons below the screens.

Remembrance Wall

Like the preservation wall, the remembrance wall is a place of memories and nostalgia. Visitors can leave their personal (both beautiful and unpleasant) experiences with Facebook on the wall. Other visitors can browse through these testimonials and reflect on everything we have experienced together on this platform.

Data Donation Box

As the text on the Museum facade indicates (“Don’t delete your Facebook profile yet!”), we do not advise people to remove their Facebook profile indiscriminately. In addition to a trip down memory lane and insight into how culture-defining Facebook is (and has been), visitors also have the opportunity to donate their own Facebook data. They can put their downloaded Facebook data on a USB stick and submit it to the museum, to ensure that this valuable digital cultural heritage is not lost. We have made a clear step-by-step plan for the visitor on how to export your data from Facebook, archive it, and donate it to the museum if desired:  https://www.setup.nl/app/uploads/2025/12/a5large-fbdata-wikkelvouw-1mmbleed-fogra39.pdf

Scale Model of the Proposed Permanent Museum

Halfway through the exhibition space, you will come across a scale model of the permanent museum in the shape of a huge F. Next to the model, there’s a map of the Netherlands. Here, visitors can vote where the future permanent museum should be located, by pasting a blue sticker on their desired city, village or place.

Merchandise

An exit through the gift shop. At the moment available are: In Memoriam candles, t-shirts, postcards, wooden USB ‘coffins’, tote bags, booklets (a DIY guide to Facebook scrapbooking), and (tracking) cookies.

Future Exhibition Options:

1. The Complete Museum Setup (unmanned)

A setup which we can show for a month or more, and tell our full story. In essence, it’s the collection of all museum components as we used them during the pilot at Utrecht Central Station, yet adapted to the context where visitors can look around independently. No crew or museum hosts from SETUP are required for this. The Utrecht Central setup was focused on luring passers-by, selling merchandise and talking to visitors.

2. Small Museum Setup (unmanned)

A setup that we can place at a desired location for at least a week or a month. It is a more compact and focused version of the exhibition at Utrecht Central Station.

3. The Festival Experience (manned)

A setup for a few days or a long weekend, in which visitors quickly get a compact but strong impression. During Betweter Festival 2025 (a science festival in Utrecht with 2,500 visitors), we have already carried out a successful pilot. Here, visitors can share memories and craft mourning cards for their favourite Facebook moments using content from their own Facebook profile. For this, we provide photo printers, scrapbook materials, and other decoration materials. This activity results in spontaneous conversations about digital memories. If desired, we can adjust this experience to the context of your event.

Talks, Keynotes and Panels that SETUP Offers

Polarisation, screen addiction, brain rot. Our conscience speaks increasingly stronger to leave Facebook. However, this is easier said than done. How do we find emotional closure from this platform? And how do we preserve all the digital cultural heritage we have collectively created on it?

A talk of your preferred duration about our research findings on our attachment to big tech’s social media platforms in launching the Facebook Museum, and why it is so difficult to break free from these. We also provide insight into the design process of the Facebook Museum. Depending on the request, we can focus the talk on one or multiple of the themes and topics below. Additionally, it is possible for one or more of our colleagues to take part in a panel on the themes and topics below. If desired, we can also assemble and/or moderate a panel.

Themes that can be discussed:

• Influence and dependence on big tech platforms (both individual and societal)
• Collective attachment to big tech platforms
• Detachment of big tech’s social media (both rational and emotional), and what alternative strategies and language to develop for it
• Moving away from big tech’s social media on a business / professional level
• Design fiction, future fiction, speculative design methods:how to explore alternative future scenarios by means of artistic research
• Digital cultural heritage and how to curate, archive, and make it sustainably available

If you are interested in one or more of our Facebook Museum components, we can send a quote tailored to preferences and adjustments. For this, please contact Jiska Koenders – jiska@setup.nl

This first overview of the Facebook Museum project was written by SETUP’s staff member Marissa Memelink, together with Geert Lovink@INC.

About SETUP

The Utrecht-based Dutch cultural organization SETUP, founded in 2010, researches the impact of technology on society. Our focus isn’t investigating technology as a technical object (“how does it work?”) or as an expressive medium (“how can I make art with it?”) but as a force field within our community. SETUP creates accessible designs to make these power dynamics and their abstract effects tangible for a large audience. In doing so, we focus on the everyday future of technology. Because stories about new technology still often revolve around science fiction themes: a distant future where either everything is possible – or everything goes wrong. AI, for example, in 100 years will either “solve all our problems” or “take all our jobs.” But these scenarios omit important questions. Who pays the price for this new technology? What power does it create, and where is this situated? What interests are at play, and what ideologies constitute the design of these systems? That’s why we explore near-future scenarios in our artistic research, for which we look ahead a maximum of 5 to 10 years.

SETUP’s mission is to create a technology-critical society. A society in which everyone can participate in discussions and reflections on the development and deployment of new technology. Eventually, this will lead to other hardware, platforms, and power structures. But it all starts with a critical community surrounding these systems, actively exploring what a healthy relationship with technology means for them. Our philosophy is that in order to move towards an alternative future with technology, one first has to be able to imagine it. We believe the arts provide the free space necessary to question and investigate these alternative scenarios. Artists play a crucial role in this: creating images and agendas, offering a broader perspective, and posing critical questions. Not just as a mirror, but also as a crowbar. www.setup.nl

Previous Projects by SETUP

Since its foundation in 2010, SETUP’s projects have been focused on the Dutch-speaking community and have always had a critical yet cheeky-hilarious approach. Some examples of previous projects:

The pottery-robot Man and machine are often portrayed in the media as competitors. But can we explore a complementary relationship? Forget all the robots that ‘catch up’, ‘beat’ or ‘replace’ us. Come and merge into a beautiful symbiosis with our pottery robot. – https://www.setup.nl/projecten/de-pottenbakrobot/

Nude prompting workshop Does the advent of AI image generators make nude model drawing more accessible than ever? We put it to the test and bumped into more interesting hiccups than initially expected… https://www.setup.nl/projecten/naaktprompten-naaktmodel-tekenen-met-ai/

Project dodo – an exoskeleton for the dodo Through advanced biogenetic engineering, scientists are currently de-extincting the long-lost dodo bird. But once returned to earth, how do we make the dodo 21st-century proof? A project exploring human techno-solutionist tendencies. https://www.setup.nl/projecten/an-exoskeleton-for-the-dodo/

Alternative stock photography for technology Shiny humanoid robots, green Matrix code or brains full of zeros and ones. Photos accompanying tech news leave a lot to be desired. They maintain a mystified impression of what the technology is and what it means for us. Could it be done differently? https://www.setup.nl/projecten/nieuwe-stockfotos-voor-technologie/

Audio-visual material about the Facebook Museum:

Photos (credits: Bas de Meijer): https://www.flickr.com/photos/setuputrecht/albums/72177720327588487/with/54659546529
Video: https://www.setup.nl/video/het-facebook-museum/

Articles by SETUP about the Facebook Museum (in Dutch):

We richten een Facebook Museum op
Stichting Facebook Museum is officieel – dit is ons bestuur
Na het Facebook Museum willen we sociale media niet meer verslavend noemen
Sociale media zijn massaal toxisch verklaard, tijd voor een waardig afscheid

Press publications (in Dutch):

Item op Radi0 1
https://www.nporadio1.nl/nieuws/wetenschap-techniek/ac2ab72e-c957-44e4-82a7-e92e2d0a9c02/afscheid-nemen-van-facebook-makkelijker-gezegd-dan-gedaan
Item op BNR nieuwsradio
https://www.bnr.nl/nieuws/tech-innovatie/10577510/eerste-facebookmuseum-ter-wereld-in-utrecht-digitaal-cultureel-erfgoed
Artikel op NOS online
https://nos.nl/regio/utrecht/artikel/654177-waarom-we-facebook-niet-gebruiken-maar-ook-niet-kunnen-loslaten
Artikel in Telegraaf
https://www.telegraaf.nl/video/uniek-facebook-museum-opent-doneer-jouw-data/77742247.html
Artikel in Trouw
https://www.trouw.nl/binnenland/in-utrecht-kun-je-al-rouwen-om-facebook-het-platform-werd-steeds-vijandiger~b8625de7/
Item in uitzending en online Hart van Nederland
https://www.hartvannederland.nl/het-beste-van-hart/panel/artikelen/facebook-sociale-media-social-hyves-panel-gebruikers-missen
Artikel in AD
https://www.ad.nl/utrecht/facebook-museum-op-utrecht-cs-we-hebben-er-jarenlang-lief-en-leed-gedeeld-die-data-is-waardevol~a439aaf5/
Item in Oranjezomer
https://www.kijk.nl/programmas/de-oranjezomer/SyLYboBPFSs