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Extinction internet: our inconvenient truth moment
Extinction Internet is not merely an end-of-the-world phantasy of digital technology that one day will be wiped out by an electromagnetic pulse or the cutting of cables. Rather, Extinction Internet marks the end of an era of possibilities and speculations, when adaptation is no longer an option. During the internet’s Lost Decade, we’ve been rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic under the inspirational guidance of the consultancy class. What’s to be done to uphold the inevitable? We need tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize. Join the platform exodus. It’s time for a strike on optimization. There is beauty in the breakdown.
Extinction Internet is Geert Lovink’s inaugural lecture, held on November 18, 2022 as Professor of Art and Network Cultures, within Modern and Contemporary Art History, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam.
Extinction Internet is Geert Lovink’s inaugural lecture, held on November 18, 2022 as Professor of Art and Network Cultures, within Modern and Contemporary Art History, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam.
74 pages, ebook
Published January 1, 2022
15 people want to read
About the author
Geert Lovink
73 books59 followersGeert Lovink is a Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) and a Professor of Media Theory at the European Graduate School. Lovinl is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economical change of the new media field through events, publications and open dialogue. As theorist, activist and net critic, Lovink has made an effort in helping to shape the development of the web.
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January 20, 2026I didn’t expect Extinction Internet to be my first read of 2026. After the vortex of 2025, I had planned to begin this year with fiction, hoping to enter it with a more optimistic attitude. That plan shifted after I attended Prof. Geert Lovink’s talk on network culture a few days ago. While commenting on the implosion of digital culture, he quoted a passage from Extinction Internet, arguing that:
“Extinction Internet is not merely an end-of-the-world phantasy of digital technology that one day will be wiped out by an electromagnetic pulse or the cutting of cables. Rather, Extionction Internet marks the end of an era of possibilities and speculations, when adaptation is no longer an option. During ther Internet’s Lost Decade (2010s), we’ve been rearranging the deck of chairs on the Titanic under the inspirational guidance of the consultancy class. What’s to be done to uphold the inevitable? We need tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize. It’s time for a strike on optimization. There is beauty in the breakdown.”
This quote sparked something like a revelation in me. It reminded me of the spectrum of emotions I encounter while doomscrolling on social media — anger, desperation, numbness, hollowness, hopelessness — and it brought back that persistent sense that something is wrong, a feeling that rings like a fire alarm in the back of my mind whenever I’m online. So I quickly found the book and read it in one go. It was worth it.
Published in 2022, amid Covid-19, the book is filled with doom-laden predictions about the future of so-called digital culture that was once believed to be one of the internet’s most promising dimensions. Reading it, I found myself slipping into flashbacks of the Covid-19 lockdown. At the time, my peers and I lived with a simultaneous sense of stagnation and urgency. Left with no choice but to experience our lives and seek interaction online, we sensed that something had been altered during that period, and that shift profoundly reshaped our perception of reality.
Coming out of the lockdown, I remember feeling as if a new trajectory for our future had been carved out, pushing us beyond the point of no return. I kept thinking of that tingling sense many times, especially amid the domination of generative AI over the past year, but I couldn’t quite name what it was until I read Extinction Internet and reflected on those years.
[The apocalypse of internet culture]
The rise of TikTok during the lockdown period marked the beginning of an era of hyper-expressivity. The platform is designed to enable massification and an endless stream of bite-sized, attention-grabbing content. In TikTok’s wake, social media became overloaded with material built on reproduced templates and fragmented ideas. More information, less knowledge; more performance, less creation. After the Covid-19 lockdown, it became clear that virality had overtaken interactivity, and the algorithm had become our matchmaker.
Looking at social media these days, it becomes increasingly convincing to me that things have been going downhill since Covid-19. Facebook’s newsfeed feels less and less relevant, now crowded with posts from unrelated people that are either advertisers or content creators engaged in what they call “personal branding”. Advertisements even seep into personal profiles. It has become clear that our personal information is a gold mine that big techs exploit for data, and they do so unapologetically.
The way we react and interact with one another on social media is also shaped by the platform design and algorithm. What might seems like personalisation actually creates more and more echo chambers. We barely have a say in why we consume the content that we consume, just as we don’t even know why do those content appears on our “for you” page.
All of these observations struck me at once when I encountered the term “the massive increase of entropy”, which Geert Lovink quoted from Bernard Stiegler to describe the symptoms of an extinction internet. An enormous volume of content is being produced and distributed online, to the point where meaning is exhausted, and the only principle left to be reproduced is the platform’s logic.
This inevitably leads to platform realism and the collapse of collective imagination. Our generation’s most intense battles and ideological clashes are both witnessed and forgotten on social media platforms; we absorb content from these platforms into our memory, while our narratives are flattened into data points. The internet has preselected the material of our experience and fixed the horizon of our imagination. We can scarcely think about others without the intervention of algorithms set up by big tech.
Blindly searching for meaning online, we reproduce the logic of automatisation embedded in the platform:
“The user-as-programmer is condemned to live on as a zombie, mindlessly swiping and scrolling, no longer aware of their own activity. While in the recent past I have described this behaviour as subliminal or subconscious, in the next phase the medium is braindead. While a profoundly soporific state is rapidly emerging, our habitual information gestures continue to function in an automated style.”
[The automated unconscious]
My generation is often labelled “digital natives”, implying that the internet is our homeland, our habitat. But it has never been that natural. Living with the internet is a learning curve, and after Covid-19 we find ourselves at an unconscious point along it. Our bodies have familiarised themselves with fatigue and depletion from constant online exposure to the point where these sensations are now perceived as normal. The logic of the platform has seeped into both mind and body; it has passed our internal barriers, and we are no longer suspicious of it. The exhaustion after doomscrolling remains very real, yet the act of doomscrolling itself has become part of daily life.
Media technologies have entered the body in such a way that the body and soul can no longer be separated from the semiotic infosphere. It is not just the changed physiognomy. Also think of the neurons in the brain that reorganize the very possibility of how we think or the fatigue that we feel in our eyes, fingers and our whole body after yet another Zoom session. This is how technologies of depletion work in ways that scale across society.
Referring to Franco Berardi’s work, Geert Lovink described this as “the third unconscious”. It is “the techno-social dimension of the mind, in a world that is no longer focused on growth and (schizo)productivity but on extinction, anxiety and degrowth.”
Once again, I found myself reflecting on my experiences during the Covid-19 lockdown. I used to force my body to stay alert during Zoom calls, felt constrained by the need to show up on camera, and grew resentful of how online work kept intruding into my personal life, regardless of time or space. Now, all of this is perceived by both mind and body as normal. I was trained to integrate the infosphere into my life, and I no longer know whether I can step outside the system at all.
Prepared and trained during the lockdown era, I now feel increasingly less resistant to submitting my life and my time to the internet. Doomscrolling has become a way of managing anxiety, and outsourcing parts of my work process to generative AI is a tempting coping mechanism under corporate productivity demands. Platform design that hinges on information bombing and automated usage habits has numbed my mind and disarmed me.
And just like that, self-isolation has become a default mode of what counts as “healing”. The entropic state of the extinction internet now echoes in my own state of mind, leaving me with a narrowed space for questioning the status quo and reimagining alternative ways of living.
***
But are we really hopeless? Read the remaining parts of my review here: https://alongthelinesofflight.wordpre...
P.S: The design of this book is STRIKING! Love the way text and design were brought together to make this book a form of resistance.
“Extinction Internet is not merely an end-of-the-world phantasy of digital technology that one day will be wiped out by an electromagnetic pulse or the cutting of cables. Rather, Extionction Internet marks the end of an era of possibilities and speculations, when adaptation is no longer an option. During ther Internet’s Lost Decade (2010s), we’ve been rearranging the deck of chairs on the Titanic under the inspirational guidance of the consultancy class. What’s to be done to uphold the inevitable? We need tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize. It’s time for a strike on optimization. There is beauty in the breakdown.”
This quote sparked something like a revelation in me. It reminded me of the spectrum of emotions I encounter while doomscrolling on social media — anger, desperation, numbness, hollowness, hopelessness — and it brought back that persistent sense that something is wrong, a feeling that rings like a fire alarm in the back of my mind whenever I’m online. So I quickly found the book and read it in one go. It was worth it.
Published in 2022, amid Covid-19, the book is filled with doom-laden predictions about the future of so-called digital culture that was once believed to be one of the internet’s most promising dimensions. Reading it, I found myself slipping into flashbacks of the Covid-19 lockdown. At the time, my peers and I lived with a simultaneous sense of stagnation and urgency. Left with no choice but to experience our lives and seek interaction online, we sensed that something had been altered during that period, and that shift profoundly reshaped our perception of reality.
Coming out of the lockdown, I remember feeling as if a new trajectory for our future had been carved out, pushing us beyond the point of no return. I kept thinking of that tingling sense many times, especially amid the domination of generative AI over the past year, but I couldn’t quite name what it was until I read Extinction Internet and reflected on those years.
[The apocalypse of internet culture]
The rise of TikTok during the lockdown period marked the beginning of an era of hyper-expressivity. The platform is designed to enable massification and an endless stream of bite-sized, attention-grabbing content. In TikTok’s wake, social media became overloaded with material built on reproduced templates and fragmented ideas. More information, less knowledge; more performance, less creation. After the Covid-19 lockdown, it became clear that virality had overtaken interactivity, and the algorithm had become our matchmaker.
Looking at social media these days, it becomes increasingly convincing to me that things have been going downhill since Covid-19. Facebook’s newsfeed feels less and less relevant, now crowded with posts from unrelated people that are either advertisers or content creators engaged in what they call “personal branding”. Advertisements even seep into personal profiles. It has become clear that our personal information is a gold mine that big techs exploit for data, and they do so unapologetically.
The way we react and interact with one another on social media is also shaped by the platform design and algorithm. What might seems like personalisation actually creates more and more echo chambers. We barely have a say in why we consume the content that we consume, just as we don’t even know why do those content appears on our “for you” page.
All of these observations struck me at once when I encountered the term “the massive increase of entropy”, which Geert Lovink quoted from Bernard Stiegler to describe the symptoms of an extinction internet. An enormous volume of content is being produced and distributed online, to the point where meaning is exhausted, and the only principle left to be reproduced is the platform’s logic.
This inevitably leads to platform realism and the collapse of collective imagination. Our generation’s most intense battles and ideological clashes are both witnessed and forgotten on social media platforms; we absorb content from these platforms into our memory, while our narratives are flattened into data points. The internet has preselected the material of our experience and fixed the horizon of our imagination. We can scarcely think about others without the intervention of algorithms set up by big tech.
Blindly searching for meaning online, we reproduce the logic of automatisation embedded in the platform:
“The user-as-programmer is condemned to live on as a zombie, mindlessly swiping and scrolling, no longer aware of their own activity. While in the recent past I have described this behaviour as subliminal or subconscious, in the next phase the medium is braindead. While a profoundly soporific state is rapidly emerging, our habitual information gestures continue to function in an automated style.”
[The automated unconscious]
My generation is often labelled “digital natives”, implying that the internet is our homeland, our habitat. But it has never been that natural. Living with the internet is a learning curve, and after Covid-19 we find ourselves at an unconscious point along it. Our bodies have familiarised themselves with fatigue and depletion from constant online exposure to the point where these sensations are now perceived as normal. The logic of the platform has seeped into both mind and body; it has passed our internal barriers, and we are no longer suspicious of it. The exhaustion after doomscrolling remains very real, yet the act of doomscrolling itself has become part of daily life.
Media technologies have entered the body in such a way that the body and soul can no longer be separated from the semiotic infosphere. It is not just the changed physiognomy. Also think of the neurons in the brain that reorganize the very possibility of how we think or the fatigue that we feel in our eyes, fingers and our whole body after yet another Zoom session. This is how technologies of depletion work in ways that scale across society.
Referring to Franco Berardi’s work, Geert Lovink described this as “the third unconscious”. It is “the techno-social dimension of the mind, in a world that is no longer focused on growth and (schizo)productivity but on extinction, anxiety and degrowth.”
Once again, I found myself reflecting on my experiences during the Covid-19 lockdown. I used to force my body to stay alert during Zoom calls, felt constrained by the need to show up on camera, and grew resentful of how online work kept intruding into my personal life, regardless of time or space. Now, all of this is perceived by both mind and body as normal. I was trained to integrate the infosphere into my life, and I no longer know whether I can step outside the system at all.
Prepared and trained during the lockdown era, I now feel increasingly less resistant to submitting my life and my time to the internet. Doomscrolling has become a way of managing anxiety, and outsourcing parts of my work process to generative AI is a tempting coping mechanism under corporate productivity demands. Platform design that hinges on information bombing and automated usage habits has numbed my mind and disarmed me.
And just like that, self-isolation has become a default mode of what counts as “healing”. The entropic state of the extinction internet now echoes in my own state of mind, leaving me with a narrowed space for questioning the status quo and reimagining alternative ways of living.
***
But are we really hopeless? Read the remaining parts of my review here: https://alongthelinesofflight.wordpre...
P.S: The design of this book is STRIKING! Love the way text and design were brought together to make this book a form of resistance.
November 30, 2024
Diferente do que alguma pessoas desavisada ou mal-intencionada registrou aqui no Goodreads, este livro não é de autoria de Dafne Melo mas, como diz a capa, o autor é Geert Lovinik, que em 2022, proferiu essa palestra inaugural em Amsterdã. Nela, o professor holandês diz que acredita na necessidade da extinção da internet para acabar com todos os prejuízos que a rede mundial de computadores e principalmente a plataformização têm causado para a sociedade humana. Principalmente, pare ele, a Internet tem nos desprovido do lado social da sociedade, nos tornando individualistas, egoístas e extremamente consumidores, o que é o mesmo que dizer neoliberais capitalistas. Ele traz uma citação de Regina Harsanyi em que ela cutuca o leitor: "Me convença que esta não é a Idade das Trevas Digital". Com tanto negacionismo, obscurantismo e fascismo gerado por esse tipo de sistema, é difícil uma pessoa precarizada dentro desta realidade, pensar em utopias ou alternativas novas num mundo opressor e precarizante que nos consome (através de dado) de dentro pra fora, e de fora pra dentro (através de procedimentos estéticos para padronizar a "beleza").
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews