• https://www.tiktok.com/@dr_inna/video/7166011573893434670?

lan
g=en
(overpathologizing)
• https://www.tiktok.com/@lenarae.lh/video/7158234999282699566?l
ang=en
(fetish content)
• https://www.tiktok.com/@melissaong69420/video/71904731231611
81486
(external cognition)
• https://www.tiktok.com/@deemakes_/video/7177876752142748974
(transition)
• https://vimeo.com/75735816 (Center Jenny)
The Internet: Then vs. Now
1. The internet today can largely be conceptualized through curation,
selectivity (algorithms), and the dissipation between
personal/public boundaries
2. The temporality of the internet is cyclical and infinite (the endless
scroll)
3. Its main mode is simultaneously production and consumption; or
productive consumption
4. Internet celebrates and promotes: global and personal intimacyOne
of the primary means with which we live (work, love, desire,
befriend, communicate, entertain, etc.)
The Internet: Then vs. Now
1. The internet today can largely be conceptualized through curation,
selectivity (algorithms), the dissipation between personal/public
boundaries
• We follow and interact with the content we want to see reproduced back to us
and find interesting and worth investing our time in
• Algorithmic systems make suggestions and curate our social media worlds
• Internet both emanates from and pierces the intimate (bedrooms to other
people’s bedrooms, public space into private spaces and vice versa)
• Your business can become everybody’s business
• Millennials are not comfortable being on camera; vs. Gen Z (big generalization)
• Personal data is surveilled, stolen, recorded, and sold
The Internet: Then vs. Now
2. The temporality of the internet is cyclical and infinite and
fast
• the endless scroll
• Scrolling feels linear/vertical but is reiterative (repetitive); i.e.
regurgitates similar content, is meant to keep you addicted/on
• circulates amongst an enclosed circle of information
The Internet: Then vs. Now
3. Its main mode is simultaneously production and consumption; or
productive consumption
• Duration of audiovisual content changes our relationship to knowledge and
how we consume it, our attention, and our ability to choose / flick away what
we want to consume / not consume
• MLMs (Multi-level marketing) or MLM-adjacent schemes; i.e. rich influencers
advertising you can live like them (rich, travel, free) and subscribe to their
course to find out how
• Technocapitalist culture that is premised on predation
• Targets vulnerable populations: the poor, working- class, those with mental
health challenges
The Internet: Then vs. Now
4. Internet celebrates and promotes: global and personal
intimacy
• Cosmopolitanism, world travel, freedom of movement
(idealizations) -> in reality not everyone has access to this life
• OR this life is a false life / staged / supported by sponsorship
• Works through intimate relations / filiation; generational
fixations
• Live streaming; what is happening now
The Internet: Then vs. Now
5. One of the primary means with which we live (work, love,
desire, befriend, communicate, entertain, etc.)
• Distortion / blurring the line between private and public life;
private and work life
• Home life is work life (remote work, “get ready with me”; life
imitates capital)
• The “worker” as a subject becomes obfuscated
The Internet: Then vs. Now
Today, the Internet is accessed mainly through mobile devices
and personal/mobile computers, but also increasingly in many
household items (refrigerators, speakers, cameras, doorbells,
televisions, etc.)
The Internet: Then vs. Now
“Let us dare, then, to make the following hypothesis: the raw materials of today’s
production process are excitation, erection, ejaculation, and pleasure and feelings
of self-satisfaction, omnipotent control, and total destruction. The real stake of
capitalism today is the pharmacopornographic control of subjectivity, whose
products are serotonin, techno-blood and blood products, antibiotics, estradiol,
techno-milk, alcohol and tobacco, morphine, insulin, cocaine, living human eggs,
citrate of sildenafil (Viagra), and the entire material and virtual complex
participating in the production of mental and psychosomatic states of excitation,
relaxation, and discharge, as well as those of omnipotent and total control. In these
conditions, money itself becomes an abstract, signifying psychotropic substance.”
(Preciado, Testo Junkie)
The Internet: Then vs. Now
In the past, the Internet consisted of
• Websites and landing pages (more so than now)
• There were social media sites (myspace, live journal, Asian
avenue, later blogs)
• Early 2000s rise of YouTube, long-form vlogging (video
blogging)
• Also arrival of anime onto North American shores (pirated
anime on YouTube, as well as other shows)
The Internet: Then vs. Now
In the past, the Internet felt more regional (like its own space
or environment), you explored it, surfed it (by clicking links,
following trails, word of mouth from other people (gossip),
randomization, etc.)

Today, the internet is a textural fabric that allows us to engage

and commodify almost every aspect of life
The Internet
• Has and continues to change over time both conceptually and physically
• Has its own aesthetic and discursive formations
• For example, accessing websites is a different aesthetic experience than using social
media
• Social media relies on filial relations (generations, kinship)
• Historic ways of navigating the Internet permitted users to be more exploratory
(more so than the Instagram explore page as that is curated), to take risks, stumble
upon content, etc.
• The Internet did not produce content and deliver it you specifically and uniquely,
rather the content was out there to be discovered through personal agency and
initiative
• Social media now, arguably, works through a logic of gossip
The Internet: Why Does This Matter?
• The Internet has aesthetics (form) too
• What are the ways that you understand the phenomenology
(using senses to experience the world) of the Internet?
• What are the aesthetic formations of the Internet?
• How do people engage with the internet? Live with it?
Succumb to it? Suffer from it?
The Internet: Then vs. Now
“Capital, having reached its maximal capability for flight, sets off a process of
escalation. The vision that defines the neoliberal moment is one according to which “all
events and situations in the world of life can be assigned a market value.” The process
is also characterized by the production of indifference; the frenzied codification of
social life according to norms, categories, and numbers; and various operations of
abstraction that claim to rationalize the world on the basis of corporate logic. Capital,
notably finance capital, is haunted by a baneful double and defines itself as unlimited in
terms of both ends and means. It does more than just dictate its own temporal regime.
Having taken as its responsibility the “fabrication of all relations of filiation,” it seeks to
reproduce itself “on its own” in an infinite series of structurally insolvent debts.” (3)

--Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason

The Internet: Then vs. Now
“Capital, having reached its maximal capability for flight, sets off a process of escalation.
The vision that defines the neoliberal moment is one according to which “all events and
situations in the world of life can be assigned a market value.” The process is also
characterized by the production of indifference; the frenzied codification of social life
according to norms, categories, and numbers; and various operations of abstraction
that claim to rationalize the world on the basis of corporate logic. Capital, notably
finance capital, is haunted by a baneful double and defines itself as unlimited in terms of
both ends and means. It does more than just dictate its own temporal regime. Having
taken as its responsibility the “fabrication of all relations of filiation,” it seeks to
reproduce itself “on its own” in an infinite series of structurally insolvent debts.” (3)

--Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason

The Internet: Then vs. Now
“Let us dare, then, to make the following hypothesis: the raw materials of today’s
production process are excitation, erection, ejaculation, and pleasure and feelings
of self-satisfaction, omnipotent control, and total destruction. The real stake of
capitalism today is the pharmacopornographic control of subjectivity, whose
products are serotonin, techno-blood and blood products, antibiotics, estradiol,
techno-milk, alcohol and tobacco, morphine, insulin, cocaine, living human eggs,
citrate of sildenafil (Viagra), and the entire material and virtual complex
participating in the production of mental and psychosomatic states of excitation,
relaxation, and discharge, as well as those of omnipotent and total control. In these
conditions, money itself becomes an abstract, signifying psychotropic substance.”

--Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie

Tommy Pico’s IRL
IRL (in real life)
• Long poem ”text message”
• Short lines
• Slang / colloquialisms
• Non-sequiturs
• Juxtaposition
• Enjambment