3CL signs an MOU with the Institute of Network Cultures
Weak Ties, Old Friendships
I first met Geert Lovink at my first academic conference at the University of Hull, around 16 years ago. Geert was on my PhD media theory reading list, and I was trying to determine if blogging could really be deployed to get around gatekeepers and empower people interested in counter-culture and shaking the roots of power. I don’t quite know how we stayed in touch over the years. In 2017, Geert showed up for a European Graduate School residency in Malta that I had facilitated; occasionally he would send an email to me and an unknown other with a monosyllabic ‘Talk to each other’. Or people would call and say ‘I’m in Malta and Geert told me we should meet’. And sometimes he’d send me books.
A couple of weeks ago, copies of Platform Brutality: Closing Down Internet Toxicity arrived in the post. It is Geert at his most unsparing. The argument, in brief: social media no longer merely distracts us; it wounds us, and the violence is encoded deep in the architecture of the platforms themselves – remote, invisible, indirect. The title borrows from Achille Mbembe, whose Brutalism traces the extractive, world-consuming character of contemporary capitalism. And yet the book refuses to end in lament. It asks what comes after the platforms, and how we might organise the exit. That refusal to stop at critique is very Geert, and it is very much the spirit of the institute he built.
At the risk of boring my students at the University of Malta and my colleagues at 3CL, I continue to believe in the strength and resilience of weak ties and old friendships. So I am very pleased that the 3CL has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Institute of Network Cultures, the Amsterdam-based hub for critical research into the cultures of the internet that Geert founded in 2004. INC has always been an institution made of ties. It grew out of mailing lists and the tactical media networks of the 1990s, loose affiliations that Geert somehow kept alive across decades and continents. An MoU between us is simply that method, continued.
The two organisations have circled the same questions for years, from different vantage points. INC has spent two decades building a body of critical internet theory: on the sadness engineered into social media, on techno-feudalism, on the attention economy, on what organisation might look like after the platforms. The 3CL works the same terrain from a different angle. Our Strategic Plan commits us to critical digital and AI literacies, to human agency in automated environments, to understanding and resisting information disorders, and to digital sovereignty for small states operating inside infrastructures they neither own nor govern. If the INC’s centre of gravity lies in diagnosis, ours sits a little closer to the scaffolding: the literacies, frameworks and policy tools that help citizens, educators and policymakers push back and imagine alternatives. In practice, the traffic has always run both ways. The INC builds tools alongside its theory; our primers carry theory in their bones.
There is also a shared publishing approach and scientific ethos. The INC pioneered a model of fast, open, hybrid publishing that treats research as a public good, free of paywalls. That ethos runs through everything the 3CL puts out, from our open-access primers to Insights, the Diamond Open Access occasional paper series we launch later this year. Both organisations are small, deliberately lean, and allergic to the slow machinery of conventional academia. Both believe critique is only half the job.
Geert was one of the earliest champions of Young People & Information: A Manifesto. His own Extinction Internet sits in the manifesto’s further reading. He shares our belief that young people should organise themselves if they want to reclaim the early promise of the Internet. The goal is one both organisations have pursued separately for years: citizens who can read the systems that shape them, question them, and change them where they fall short. We now pursue it in company, across our publications, our research and our networks.
