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SatThe days when digital society was a wild, transformative new frontier are over. Today’s internet citizens face information overload, invasive algorithms, and a corporation-controlled landscape where the truth twists constantly out of reach like shifting sands. Are there still any sites of magic, folklore, and personal identity left on the internet? Writer and author Leigh Alexander shares some wonderfully weird and intimate perspectives on digital culture that may inspire us to find shards of hope in a space that looks increasingly like a cyberpunk horror.
Dahlia Borsche is musicologist and curator. In 2019 she took on the position of Head of Music at the DAAD Artist-In-Berlin programme.
Leigh Alexander is a writer and narrative designer (Reigns: Her Majesty, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Monitor). Her journalism (The Guardian, How We Get to Next, Medium, Motherboard) tackles offbeat futurism, digital society, immaterial labor, technomancy and how the internet, politics and pop culture intersect. She is the author of Breathing Machine, a memoir of early internet society, and her occasional ASMR video series, ”Lo-Fi Lets Play”, explores ancient computer adventures.
Matthias Haenisch is a research associate of the research group “MuBiTec – Music learning with mobile technologies” (University of Cologne, Berlin University of the Arts, University of Erfurt, University of Lübeck; promoted by the Federal Ministry of Education and Science), where his research concerns, among other things, questions of socialization, subjectification and aesthetic experience in postdigital communities.