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Scratching the Surface #72: Shannon Mattern

I used to kind of deify these peo­ple, pre­sum­ing that they were pre­sent­ing some gospel that I just had to work and work and work to try to under­stand so that I could like, put on their glass­es and see the world through their lens­es. But ulti­mate­ly I real­ized that these are fal­li­ble peo­ple, often ego­ma­ni­acs, often real­ly bad writ­ers. And that’s why I can’t under­stand it. So it’s not to give up on them too quick­ly. If you put in the work to try to under­stand what they’re say­ing. But not to regard their work as gospel. 

There Is No Internet

What I’d like to do for prob­a­bly the next 40 to 45 min­utes is just first of all talk about how Reading Writing Interfaces as well as the Media Archaeology Lab under­lie my next/current project that I’m call­ing Other Networks,” which will lead me into an expla­na­tion of my kind of mys­te­ri­ous title There Is No Internet.” And I’ll fin­ish with talk­ing about spe­cif­ic exam­ples of oth­er net­works. When I say oth­er net­works” I’m talk­ing pri­mar­i­ly about net­works that were out­side or before what we now call The Internet.