Samenvatting

Articles by Dutch researcher of new media, co-founder of the Institute of Network Cultures and professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam Geert Lovink, first brought together especially for Russian readers. In the book, the author analyzes both the simplest cultural techniques - from selfies to comments, and the state of democracy and modern progressive movements, and also calls to comprehend our technological sociality in the era of the centralized Internet. The current state of the Internet disappoints many, but how unexpected is it? How did the enthusiasm for decentralized networks and anonymity turn into platform centralization and commercial and state surveillance? Why did all our sociality suddenly shrink in a small space of a smartphone, which is destined to become obsolete in a year? How can a theory keep pace with the development - or degradation - of the Internet? In a collection of essays entitled The Critical Theory of the Internet, which we published together with the Garage Museum of Modern Art, the Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink addresses all these issues and calls for understanding our technological sociality in the era of centralized Internet. The collection includes critical works of the last fifteen years, published in the English editions of Zero Comments (2007), Networkswithouta Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), as well as completely fresh texts in the early author's edition, which subsequently entered the new collection of essays by Sadby Design (2019).