Krystian Woznicki is a critic and co-founder of Berliner Gazette. His recent book Fugitive Belonging blends writing and photography. Other publications include A Field Guide to the Snowden Files (with Magdalena Taube), After the Planes (with Brian Massumi), Wer hat Angst vor Gemeinschaft? (with Jean-Luc Nancy) and Abschalten. Paradiesproduktion, Massentourismus und Globalisierung.
The planet, as authoritarian capitalism’s plaything, is subject to real-world economic-ecological downward spirals. And yet exorbitant space exploration projects continue to build escapist dreams on extractivism. And the threat of nuclear war continues to push at the limits of tenuous environmental stability.
Security forces increasingly use data-driven crowd control techniques to pre-empt unpredictable situations. Unlike traditional prevention methods, pre-emptive policing actively engenders crowd behaviour – and in doing so interferes with the basic conditions for political agency, argues Krystian Woznicki.
Artificial intelligence and its deployment in settings as diverse as commerce, policing, politics and warfare requires that we rethink our understanding of human agency, argues political geographer Louise Amoore. AI amplifies longstanding prejudices circumscribing access to the political public sphere and is changing our relations to ourselves and others.
Central organizing principles such as “community” have been redefined by globalization, notes Krystian Woznicki. Art faces the question of the representability of community or rather, its unrepresentability. The latter includes the community of the excluded. Referring to photographs by Bruno Serralongue, Woznicki suggests that the excluded are best represented as zombies: they appear as a community that wants to force its way into society. Their goals are unclear.
The blogging movement’s claim to empower the “netizen” is being undermined from two sides. As blogging becomes more and more fashionable, commercial considerations start to come foremost. On the other hand, some of today’s most successful blogs are written and read by a media elite. The concept of citizen journalism needs to be re-thought in the light of these developments, writes Krystian Woznicki.
Multilingualism campaigns aiming at lingual diversity on the Internet create a basis for putting a language online but do not manage to reflect upon what kind of environment the Internet, apart from its uniformity, really represents for the respective language and its development.
With the spread of the Internet, the utopia was given a location in cyberspace. It was now a question of exploring, surveying, and settling this new continent. Those who departed for it dreamed the dream of a better world. In its immaterial expanses, new social models could be tested and new forms of life practised. Capitalism, racism, and all the other evils of the material world would be overcome. And what is more: it was not only the perfect counter-world, but also represented the next world order. Linked-up, decentralized, without hierarchies. This dream was of course also based on a new image of humankind.
