25/6 SPIDER Festival, Ljubljana

https://www.spiderfestival.com/radical-talks-2026

OTHER NETS

Coloured Pins and the Fishing Net

There are two ways of thinking society: coloured pins and the fishing net. Coloured pins begins with the individual. A colourful gathering of individuals with the most diverse beliefs, skin colours and faiths: all different, all equal. Together they create beautiful patterns. If one of the pins disappears, the pattern changes, yet society continues to function without interruption. The individual is special, but also superfluous. 

Fishing net, by contrast, begins with the community. The community is a net, individuals are the knots that hold it together. They are not colourful; they are grey-brown – like the threads of the net itself. The net catches enough fish for everyone to survive. Not only humans, but even the small fish. If one of the knots breaks, the net no longer functions. The individual is nothing special, but is needed. Their identity is not built upon their individuality, but upon their indispensable role within society.

The Other Internet

If the internet has a future — and this future is perhaps more certain than all others, such as the future of humanity, natural habitats, or spirit — it will undoubtedly shift the parameters of the possible. 

But what if another internet is possible, too.

Globalization is a scam. But it is the hardest materiality, too. Historical materiality that diminishes history itself. In the age of instanternity, history turns into metadata, a datedness. Nevertheless, material conditions persist. Techno capitalism brings the abstraction of capital to another level – at the same time, dialectically, it eats up raw resources on a new scale. What it produces is uniformization, bio-standardization, and living on garbage dumps. But life itself can be traversed. Immortality as the new generation product.

But – we are not interested in humanity’s fall from the throne of the alleged most intelligent being on Earth. The blow to human narcissism is not painful. Let us smash our heads against the ground! This is not about Man. Thinking is at stake. The thing at stake is the subject. More than that, it is the inter-subject, society.

How does the internet — as hyper-medium, as materialized ideology, as space-time — realize intersubjectivity? We know that, in the name of the neutrality of the internet, we are entering the age of a new social division: earthlings and spacemen. Nevertheless, radical pessimism is not a real stance today, just as overly excited optimism was not a real stance in the age of relative geopolitical stability. When one runs out of possibilities, what is required is thinking that is an action. A different internet is possible.

This is not a question — it is a presupposition. We want to talk about a non-exploitative high-tech socio-economic structure. Not as a utopian dream against the backdrop of the current dystopian reality, but as a real possibility. As doomsday looms, we repeat the slogan of 1990s Kovinotehna: the impossible is possible. It went bankrupt shortly thereafter. What are, then, the Other-Nets?