INC Reader #18: This Can’t be the Place

What defines this era of the internet? A sense of doom, maybe – technofascism and brutality, a loss of control, an inability to grasp what we’re entangled in. And yet, we attempt to make sense of our precarious positions, to wrap our heads around the place we’ve ended up in. It feels like discourse is always attempting to catch up. There’s an acute desire to untangle the complexities of the contemporary internet, but the deeper you go, the more lost you seem to get. Nothing seems to accelerate more rapidly than the internet, and to write about something that is in constant flux feels contradictory – is writing not an act of crystallization, after all?

This book is a collection of essays that were previously published under the Longform series for the Institute of Network Cultures between the years of 2020-2025. They are formally adventurous, theoretically rigorous, and collectively tracing the shape of an internet that has changed almost beyond recognition in five years.