Without Us
“With us, the adventure of becoming human has entered a new phase,” writes philosopher Vilém Flusser in one of his most beautiful texts, Digital Apparition. The year was 1991, and by “us” he meant “those who sit in front of their computers,” “press the keys,” and “realize possibilities”: “realize alternative worlds and thereby themselves.”
It is 2026. We have tried all the key combinations and helped to build the world in which we are hardly needed anymore. Computer users have generated enough data, uploaded enough videos, photos, texts, and documents for AI slop to thrive and for the Dead Internet to zombie around forever. The world we once saw as a place where we can be ourselves – or become someone completely different – has squeezed and evaporated our dreams, producing a concentrate, a powder: easy to store and repurpose.
The digital today belongs to “ideal subjects” (Goriunova); non-playable characters write their own lore (de Seta). What does it mean to be “glitched and fragmented” (Menegon)? How does it feel to be “moss in between the sidewalks” (N.B. Spiders)?
Curated by Olia Lialina, net artist, professor of New Media and Post-Digital Cultures at Merz Akademie; author of Digital Folklore, Turing Complete User and From My to Me.
