The Internet Does Not Exist takes its provocation seriously: the network we inhabit has no inside, no face, and no stable ground — only edges, mirrors, and the consciousness it has already reshaped without our consent.
About This Book
Assembled by the editors of e-flux journal, this collection confronts the fiction of the internet as a place — a bounded, navigable territory — and replaces it with something far more unsettling: a planetary infrastructure that conditions thought, harvests attention, and redistributes power while remaining structurally invisible. The essays gathered here trace the network's origins in US military and commercial interest, its role in the acceleration of financial globalisation, and its reformatting of cognition itself. This is not a book about digital culture as lifestyle. It is a serious reckoning with information networks as political and epistemic architecture, essential reading for anyone who wants to think clearly about what the connected world is actually doing to us.
Key Features
- 316 pages of critical essays on network theory, digital infrastructure, and political economy
- Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle
- Published by Sternberg Press
What You'll Discover
- Why the internet's infrastructure was and remains disproportionately rooted in US governmental and commercial control, from ARPANET through to contemporary service providers
- How the shift from depth to surface that Warhol diagnosed in celebrity and advertising culture has now colonised language itself across planetary networks
- The argument, drawing on Bruno Latour, that networks are all edges — not windows but mirrors — making any critical outside position structurally impossible to occupy
- How contradictions within information networks are not resolved but traversed, and why that capacity for asymmetric, empathic navigation may define the next form of political consciousness
About the Author
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle are the editors of e-flux journal, one of the most intellectually significant platforms in contemporary art and theory. Their editorial work consistently positions art practice within broader questions of politics, infrastructure, and global power.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 316
- Dimensions: 108 x 178 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783956791307
- Publisher: Sternberg Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Theorists, architects, and designers grappling with the politics of digital infrastructure, e-flux readers, and anyone thinking seriously about how networks reshape cognition, culture, and power.