Hito Steyerl: Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, 2013

Is the internet dead? This is not a metaphorical question. It does not suggest that the internet is dysfunctional, useless or out of fashion. It asks what happened to the internet after it stopped being a possibility. The question is very literally whether it is dead, how it died and whether anyone killed it.

But how could anyone think it could be over? The internet is now more potent than ever. It has not only sparked but fully captured the imagination, attention and productivity of more people than at any other point before. Never before have more people been dependent on, embedded into, surveilled by, and exploited by the web. It seems overwhelming, bedazzling and without immediate alternative. The internet is probably not dead. It has rather gone all-out. Or more precisely: it is all over!

Steyerl, Hito. “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” e-flux journal 49 (2013), accessed April 3, 2016, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead.
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