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Dr Geert Lovink - University of Amsterdam

Geert Lovink is Professor of Art and Network Cultures in the University of Amsterdam’s Art History Department and is founder of the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

    Those that define internet standards shape our thinking and hold the key to our freedom of communication—no trivial task. Yet tech policy is seen as boring, a yawn-inducing issue offloaded to engineers, corporate lawyers, research universities, and government ministries. In the previous age of global internet governance, regulations and protocols were outsourced to technocrats (and a few “civil society” NGOs agitating on the margins). However, in this age of “techno sovereignty,” where everything from 5G to TikTok is capable of causing geopolitical conflict, there is no more consensus. In short, we demand protocols, not platforms. But who’s going to get us there? Meet the stacktivists.   What is the Stack? Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack (2016) can be useful to …