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Mapping the paradigm shifts that the network culture engendered, Kazys Varnelis touches on the changing nature of the subject. From the illusion of its autonomy under modernism, and its schizophrenic fragmentation under postmodernism, it seems like the subject’s fragments are currently being dispersed through and/or outsourced from the network.

– First of all, I do not see how there is a “division between the self and the net” (pp.6), as such a condition is rather suggestive of their hybridization.

– Secondly, how can the subject defend his or her place in society, if he or she is no longer its last indivisible unit, in charge of a core individual agency? If Deleuze’s ‘dividuals’ are constituted through multiple micro-publics at the same time, how can one defend one’s personal and cultural integrity within the whole of networked society?
Reversing the question, is there any point in doing so anymore? Should we rather reflect on how this seemingly distributed subjectification could empower a meta-subject, one that is an integral part of a networked community? I am thinking about examples of collective action enabled by social networking platforms and the emergence of a hivemind.

With regards to the hivemind – written roughly a decade ago, Jaron Lanier’s Edge essay titled “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of New Online Collectivism” is a critical take on the potential mishaps of the then emergent digital collective. He used the example of Wikipedia to suggest that, although it began as a utopian endeavor to democratize knowledge by handing its authorship over to the networked public, examples of bias, misrepresentation and e-vandalism became commonplace. He concludes:

“(…) it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.”

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On a similar note, Varnelis uses the example of Wikipedia to talk about a new mode of production that is not based on capital (pp.10). Being co-authored by the networked collective (?), Wikipedia is a product of non-market production that Varnelis notes is non-alienating. In this light, it seems like Marx’s theory of alienation, inherent in capitalist production, does not apply here. However, to what extent is this another myth of the Internet? For instance, digital labor is arguably alienating, obscuring the worker. Digital workers are usually invisible, not recognized as such, or unaware of their role as voluntary content providers.

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The biological understanding of electric technology was foundational for the Delians. According to Wigley, they conceived of a global city as a body, hyperextended in the landscape by means of physical and non-physical networks (pp102). Metabolism resonated in this approach, in the sense that the city became anthropomorphized, understood as a networked structure of ‘organs’.

However, Doxiadis prescribed that settlements should grow only in one direction (pp.88), with their ‘heart’ following a linear trajectory of movement across the landscape. Why would he suggest this, since linear growth is not common in nature? Is this a surviving influence from a modernist urban planning vocabulary? Notably, Athens’ problematic urban fabric is a result of an uncontrolled exponential growth during the decades of the 50s – 70s, which manifested itself in a radial, organic manner. Could Athens have served as a counter-example of his theory? Interestingly enough, when he later designed for Detroit, he used a radial spider web as a model.