Geert Lovink & Bernard Stiegler, the encounter that invites us
If one uses the metaphor of the spider’s web to designate our contemporary internet space, one would feel more in the skin of a poor fly trapped than in that of the agile spider that takes advantage of its natural environment. There is nothing fatal in this idea. By retracing the path of thinkers such as Bernard Stiegler or Geert Lovink, it is still and always time to weave our own web, a web that re(sembles) us. Through this essay-narrative around the connection between Geert Lovink and the former president of Ars Industrialis resonates a call for alliances between theory (sciences) and practice (everyday life). In other words, the alliance of hackers, artists, critics, journalists, and activists needs us, digital humans.
There are coincidences that are difficult to understand but that transmit messages in their own way. The fortuitous coming together of Bernard Stiegler and Geert Lovink around the forest of Tronçais (Allier) is one of them. On one side of the forest lived the philosopher, founder of Ars Industrialis, of which Épokhè is the continuation, a thinker of the relation between techniques and existence. On the other side, the network activist, pioneer critic of digital monopolies, theorist emerging from the avant-gardes of video and founder of the Institute of Network Cultures (INC)1. “In 2012, I had very serious health problems, which forced me to reorganize my work and private life, Geert explains to us. With my wife, we visited the Allier and decided to buy a summer house near the forest of Tronçais. It was later that I learned that Bernard lived on the other side of the forest, half an hour away by car… When we moved there in 2013, I took the car, crossed the forest, and went to meet him. It was really at that time that our collaboration began.”
This physical rapprochement had been preceded. For if the collaboration between the two men began in 2013, Geert had been following the thread of the French thinker since the mid-1990s: “I encountered Bernard’s thought quite early, with the famous book written with Derrida, Echographies of Television – Filmed Interviews2. It was one of the rare books that I immediately read in French, and that I still have in my library. I think it was in 1996. This book between Derrida and Stiegler proposed a different approach to television; it was striking at the time. I really studied Bernard with Technics and Time, in English, volumes I, II, and III. From 1989 to 1994, I was editor of a journal called Mediamatic, which was at the origin of a European discourse on video and art. At the time, there was particular attention paid to German media theory, after the wave of Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze… but nothing much new was happening. This book represented a promising direction and was closely related to the work we were then doing on television and video art…”
Their trajectories converged further around the year 2008. That year, Bernard published Taking Care of Youth and the Generations3. Geert, with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, then launched numerous critical projects and recalls those years: “In 2008, something happened. Web 2.0 had become hegemonic. It was also the explosion of the iPhone: people began to carry all their information with them, which was not the case in the era of the PC and modem. The democratization of these technologies had reached a critical mass. All the promises of the 1990s had collapsed. Platform capitalism, born at the beginning of the 2000s, had established itself. 2008 is an important year in Bernard’s work, but also in mine and that of many others. He continues: All our reflections began to converge: in Amsterdam with the INC, Bernard with his philosophy of technics and his counter-institutional strategy... He was one of the first to identify the mental problems and destructive behaviors generated by the internet. His critique, which at times recalled that of McLuhan4, highlighted the impact of these technologies on the condition of post-literacy: education and daily life were becoming post-literate, with the rise of vision, of television, to the detriment of reading, thinking, and reflection.”
In the following years, and in the context of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and global protests, Geert Lovink launched Unlike Us: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives5: “It was at this time that I began to communicate with Bernard. I gradually approached him and his circle, including Harry Halpin, Yuk Hui... In March 2013, we organized an Unlike Us conference where we invited Bernard. It was the first time I met him.” Nearly 20 years after reading Echographies of Television – Filmed Interviews…
Where are we today? Twelve years after the Unlike Us conference and despite all the promises of digital emancipation, nothing has changed. Everything even seems to have worsened. The GAFAM have consolidated their hold. TikTok and Instagram have turned the world’s youth into a vast group of compulsive spectators, caught in an endless flow of images and sounds that seem to die at the very instant they are broadcast. Geert, Bernard, and so many others have warned, thought of alternatives, but nothing comes of it. The mass of the phenomenon and its speed of rotation seem to be carrying us toward a black hole. Geert: “Our critique of the hegemony of social media and platforms remains totally relevant. Yet we never sought an avant-garde position, and I don’t think it is one. It is rather a tragic position, in a world in regression. The world has regressed. With time, one can see Bernard as an avant-garde thinker, but at the time we did not have that feeling. We rather thought that the others were behind. Even today, many do not understand the economic and political dimensions of the internet, nor the mental effects on young people. For us, it was already obvious.”
The philosopher and the activist are not prophets of doom but indeed the scouts of a situation that has only continued to crystallize since.
Why are their observations, widely shared, not followed by changes? Is there a missing link in the chain of Stiegler and Lovink? Which one? The last? Or rather the first? Who? We, the Digital Humans. Those who form this famous mass. Paradoxical thing: it would suffice, however, that each person adopt singular behaviors for the mass effect to diminish, and with it the revenues of capital. Nothing is less simple, of course: YouTube, Meta, and TikTok capture our attention so effectively... These “places to be” are not, fundamentally, that at all.
Putting online the entire corpus Pharmakon distilled by Bernard Stiegler on Peertube goes in the direction of the struggle for a web that we desire, the Web that we want6. It is up to us to be singular in the interstices, to recognize it in others, to encourage it. It is also up to us to bear the shadow that alternative networks imply, among other inconveniences. To us not to fear the social downgrading that comes with a non-use of today’s hegemonic (a)social networks. This is even more pressing in the most fragile social classes and it is a point not to neglect.
Bernard Stiegler often spoke of “amateurs”7: not dilettantes, but literally those who love and who want to take care of knowledge. Regularly throughout his rich career, the thinker of technics hammered home the importance of alliances between philosophers, artists, activists, and these “amateurs of knowledge” who refuse to leave technics to the experts, the merchants, or the fascists.
It seems to me that this is where the encounter of Bernard and Geert concerns us, us — amateurs. For their “alliance” was not only an intellectual complicity: it traces out a collective path. Bernard is no longer here, but he has left us with a duty. Not that of repeating his thought, but of activating it.
In action as much as in thought. How to become this digital human who acts as a man of thought and who thinks as a man of action, to take up Henri Bergson’s magnificent formula8 ? How to weave this web, today?
Certainly not by hoping that States alone will regulate. The responsibility falls to us, to us who love, who desire, to us who refuse fatalism. To philosophize, to code, to write, to détourner, to experiment — all this must combine. This is what we want to try to do, for example, with these Cahiers du Net, conceived as a place of collective experimentation. An experimental, desirable, and loving islet!
No heroes, but indeed a collective task incumbent upon each of us. How can I, in my own measure, contribute to another configuration of networks? How to invent algorithms that nourish an authentic joy? The joy of learning, of discovering, of experimenting, this childlike joy that seems very far away if one does not come to give a great kick into the deathly form of the current web. Not a fake joy, dopamine distributed by addictive platforms, but a joy analogous to that of the child who discovers the world.
A joy of creating, of sharing, of inventing together to go against the erosion of our capacity for attention, our capacity to be moved, our taste for thought and creation…
This joy, I find that we rediscover it in the photo below, taken at the end of the performance Sad by Design9 realized by Geert Lovink with the musician John Longwalker in 2020. An immense memory for Geert: “The last time I saw Bernard was in Berlin, at Transmediale 2020, a few weeks before the lockdown, a few months before his departure... He had given a lecture there, and I had presented my performance Sad by Design, greatly influenced by his work and our collaboration. It was his last public appearance. I was reading there the text of a new essay I had written in France in the summer of 2018. Bernard had attended the performance and we had discussed it afterward. I was very proud that he was in the room. It was in a memorable place, the Brecht-Theater, Luxembourg Square. One of the great moments of my career.”
The symbol of the forest remains. On the two banks of this forest, Bernard and Geert. Today, it is up to us to cross the forest, to go toward one another, and to invent together the paths of another web. No more passivity, acceptance, resignation, our little daily nihilisms... We are all in the same boat on this last point: even Bernard admitted to ordering his books on Amazon.
The encounter between Bernard Stiegler and Geert Lovink works as an invitation: The amateur must join the activist and the philosopher in the forest of the web9.
What does one find in the forest? The famous rhizomes dear to Gilles Deleuze, whose thought invites horizontal action. Wiki definition: “This structure opposes the pyramidal hierarchy. The idea of the rhizome is associated with postmodernist thought and with French Theory. It is notably used in philosophy, in art, as well as in the study of social and political evolutions.”
Let us expect nothing from above. The solution is rhizomatic, horizontal.
Let us weave our web for joy.
Charles-Emmanuel Pean
To go further
The latest books by Geert Lovink:
- Platform Brutality (2025)
- Stuck on the platform (2022)
Other links:
Derrida, Échographies de la télévision – Entretiens filmés (1997)↩
Livre La Toile Que Nous Voulons, 2017↩
Conférence de Bernard Stiegler, Une nouvelle figure de l’amateur↩
citation de l'ouvrage Le Bon Sens ou l'esprit français (1895)↩
Performance Sad by Design↩