Stowe Boyd

What are the characteristics of the Net? First of all, the Net is a place where communicative action establishes its own plane of meaning. There is no world pre-existing the moment of communication. There is no coextensive world. Every interruption in communication corresponds to the turn-off of that particular public world. Secondly, the Net is a circuit where the contents of the exchange – messages, products, the objects of the public sphere – can go from one point to another without passing through any center, and without constituting an area of belonging. Finally, in the Net the agents don’t bear an identity, or rather, it is a place where identity and the flow of enunciation don’t necessarily coincide.

Let us not talk about the Internet, and all the time that it makes us waste looking at a screen that flashes mostly useless data at us. I am not interested in talking about the Internet, but about the Net, that is, the paradigmatic model that it implies. The Internet is only a laboratory for experimenting ways of communicating that will become ever more concrete, involving, and fast. The Internet will assume unforeseeable characteristics, tied to various possibilities: it might connect to television and thereby to the transmission of presence; it will plug into virtual Reality and the production of immersive worlds of experience; or, maybe, it will become a supermarket. In any case, this will not prevent the model of the Net from producing new forms of social relationships.

Franco Berardi (Bifo), Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination, 1998