Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (review)

If the internet were a city, Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink would be the Baedeker of its bohemian quarter. Zero Comments represents his fourth book-length tour of the net’s intellectual hubs since 2003. Like its predecessors, it delivers its readers into the digital salons of the blogosphere and the many online networks in which coders come together to make everything from software to music. It also surveys regions of heady offline debate—contemporary German media theory, for instance, and transatlantic colloquies on the role of the aesthetic in organizing networked labor. Though the book never attempts to sustain a single argument across its pages, it makes an excellent introduction to some of the most current debates within and about internet culture.

The book’s currency depends on Lovink’s own mobility. Though appointed as a professor at the University of Amsterdam and widely read in academic circles, Lovink has long functioned as a public intellectual. In the 1980s, he participated in Adilkino, also known as the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge, an influential group of media theorists; later, he became an editor of the media art magazine Mediamatic and a cofounder of the Dutch community network Digital City. More recently, he has convened a slew of gatherings, online and off, and led discussions on the future of digital art, new media technologies, and collaborative labor.

Zero Comments synthesizes Lovink’s roamings into eleven essays. Each addresses a single area of debate, such as the social impact of blogging, tactics for media activism online, or the complex politics of online cooperation. The essays also hum with the voices of Lovink’s many and well-selected conversation partners. In his essay on alternative media tactics, for instance, he offers a brief but very useful history of online social movements devoted to media activism. He then analyzes contemporary debates about those movements, first in his own voice and then, increasingly, by incorporating long passages of commentary first posted online by a range of other writers. In one sense, the essay devolves: Lovink’s singular voice and whatever linear case the essay hoped to make begin to disappear. In another sense, though, it evolves: the essay itself becomes a cocktail party into which Lovink has invited his reader.

Insights ping around the room, so to speak. Lovink’s own range from the banal (“the strength of tactical media is that it can bring people together”) to the provocative (“the concept of a digital multitude . . . is based entirely on openness”) to the acute (in online production “the contradiction between selfishness and altruism has proven to be a false one”). Those of his collaborators range as well. At their best, the essays function as mirrors of the discussions within which Lovink first developed them. In an essay on “distributed aesthetics,” for example, he introduces Anna Munster, with whom he convened a 2006 conference in Berlin. Though he writes solely in his own voice, Lovink introduces a theory of aesthetics that, as he acknowledges, owes much to her thinking. In their joint view, European and American culture are leaving a moment in which digital technologies support a separate online world and entering one in which we inhabit “relays of entwined and fragmented techno-social networks.” These networks in turn require that artists and others develop ways of representing links, patterns, distributed groupings—i.e., a distributed aesthetic.

Historians of technology in the arts might point out that over the last forty years, everyone from mail artists to installation builders has been preoccupied with representing social and sociotechnical relationships. They would be right, but they would miss the point: Zero Comments does not aim to be a comprehensive survey of emerging cultural forms so much as a model of intellectual engagement with the people and ideas shaping those forms. It raises more questions than it answers, but at the same time it presents a sharp-eyed look at the collisions of machine and culture, amateurism and professional...