Cyberspace in Vogue | @ MGLC Švicarija, Ljubljana
Lecture by Ivan Slijepčević
Transcription
Maks Valenčić: I think that we can proceed with the next talk, which is by Ivan Slijepčević, who is an interdisciplinary and multimedia artist, writer, and blogger, whose work spans performance, prose, poetry and cultural research. He is a founding member of the Faust collective, a performance and research collective, and the author of "Bodies in the Rain," a debut collection of both poetry and prose, on Faust Books. His research focuses on contemporary subculture and internet culture, and he blogs regularly through his Substack "Acid Diaries."
Ivan Slijepčevič: Okay, so just a couple of things before I start. If you've read my little abstract thing which I wrote for this talk, there's a lot of semi-direct and almost haunting allusions to something that's inherently dark, when I'm describing the physical, or, in this case, the realm of the physical. It almost feels like I'm describing a virus of some sort — in the sense of, "oh, this is something that just feeds on the virtual," or this kind of emancipatory and almost self-explanatory undertone to cyberspace. That is very much not the aim or the goal here. There is a sort of implicit hierarchy to this — well, it's not a relationship, but there is a sort of implicit hierarchy to how the virtual, the digital and the physical are structured, with the physical owning, more often than not, the virtual and the digital. I'll get into this later in the talk; I just wanted to clarify that even though that is certainly my impulse, and that's probably the reason why it could potentially come off as dismissive towards the physical in the initial reading, the goal is not to dismiss. The goal is just to provide a sort of topology of these things.
The first thing that kind of comes to mind then — probably the most important distinction for my talk — is this distinction between cyberspace and what would be the internet, essentially, and the human perceptions of these terms. I saw a YouTube video a while ago; I think the title was something along the lines of "the internet used to be a place." That, in and of itself, feels self-explanatory, in the sense that there was a sort of spatial component to the internet, or that there was a social component to the internet, even before social media took over and ultimately severed "cyberspace" from "the internet." I guess an argument could be made that in the era of web rings, and I don't know, web 1.0 and web 1.5, and to some extent also web 2.0, at least in its early stages, it used to be a lot more fun, to put it simply; the emphasis was on cyberspace. The emphasis was on, you know, colorful world-building, essentially, and what we have now is basically free, uninhabited ad space that is being sold to advertisers, corporations and so on.
The internet is essentially a gateway into cyberspace, because cyberspace embodies something that's much broader than the internet. Cyberspace is inherently social. Cyberspace is emancipatory, and in some cases, it's helpful to think of it as inherently revolutionary, whether or not there's potential... The potential is certainly there. Whether or not this potential brings about good utility — that's an entirely different conversation that I do not feel qualified to engage in. The main thesis of this talk would be the idea that the line between the physical and the virtual has eroded, and has unevenly and consequentially created a hierarchy that wasn't supposed to be there. There's a lot of talk around this in certain areas of the internet and in certain areas of cyberspace as well. Current online scenes, such as people writing on Substack, writing blogs, creating their own kind of retro web rings and whatnot, certainly add to this conversation. But that in and of itself isn't kind of — the idea isn't that my impulse is to want these things to become mainstream, far from it — but just, in terms of the practice of the anti-internet and pro-cyberspace and pro-digital kind of mythology, it brings about mostly good utility, meaning that that should be the aim of the digital subject that engages in these things.
So how did this capture of cyberspace take shape? For instance, if we look at the political world as it is now, online platforms now host real "political business." There was a Ro Khanna interview on CNN in 2024. Ro Khanna is a sitting congressman in the US, where he kind of offhandedly mentioned that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), amongst other prominent politicians, is mostly conducting official work via Twitter, now known as X. This, again, feels very self-explanatory; it's kind of a "duh" statement, in the sense of "of course they're doing that." There isn't any reason as to why we should think these inner workings of the political world are happening someplace else. But it kind of points to the rising role which these platforms have, and the influence these platforms have. In this sense, platform ownership can very well equate to political power. For instance, Elon Musk — whom I'm sure all of us here love and adore very much — the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, is a key figure in the "information arms race" and "the AI arms race" and so on. By owning these platforms — I think this is a quote I initially heard from Žižek, of all people — it's not just that by owning Twitter, by owning X, and by owning such an important platform for inter-human communication, that they are owning the platforms; it's also that they are quite literally setting the physical and social parameters of mainstream political discourse, in the West at least. And also in places where there is a bigger, more physical barrier to enter these types of discussions — I think North Korea, for instance, or Russia, or places like that — but mostly I mean that a Western man owns all of this, so I guess it pertains to the West the most.
Twitter/X is an interesting case, precisely because that was, canonically, I think, the first platform, the first social media website or platform to have canonically removed a sitting president from its space. This was long before Elon's purchase of Twitter, and I think this was around January 2021, when the whole January 6th thing was at an all-time high, and they just decided to boot Donald Trump off. He was very much, I would argue, politically crippled in the process, in the sense that he couldn't conduct official business, just like AOC. But also on top of that, what was then his main channel on the internet, which he used to communicate with the public, was severed. So it naturally sparked a lot of debate with regards to whether these platforms are even morally justified in removing a sitting president from the space that shapes discourse.
I think it's historically hilarious that such a thing took place on that platform in particular, because nowadays it just feels like the complete opposite is the case. There isn't any — if you have power and influence, regardless of who you are, whether you're an artist that's more right-leaning, or more tech-bro oriented, or you're a sitting president, or an influencer, or whoever else, just a public figure in general — chances are you're not going to get booted off unless you do something really, really bad. In which case, I think someone else is going to intervene before you get booted off. It's more of a consequence of something, rather than a real mechanism for sanctioning bad speech.
Tech CEOs are therefore, as a class, shaping elections, various ideological shifts amongst the voting public, and they managed to give birth to this kind of collective apathy, or the desire for social atomization even. People increasingly don't see the value in birthing community. They don't see the value in participating in any type of public discourse. Every single side has this sentiment much more prevailing now than it was even a decade ago. And I think this is one of the bigger reasons as to why this is the case, and that poisons not just people, not just digital subjects — if we're talking about the internet — but also the very digital infrastructure that allows for these spaces to take shape and exist as they are. There were cases where certain platforms and their CEOs wanted to resist, and they were mostly bought out and morphed into something else entirely, meaning that they lost their initial social, emancipatory edge, or they just ended up getting shut down entirely. All of this — just to give an interesting bit of information — canonically predates the pop-cultural "AI arms race" narrative, but history in this case is quite literally working faster and more efficiently than the normies, which I find hilarious personally. But anyway, moving on.
The digital, which is kind of at the core of all this — the digital lost its charm. First and foremost, it resembles the real world too closely now; hence the influence within the digital domain, and the loss of its emancipatory potential, allowed for something that could be considered utterly conservative to replace it, and that whole category was boxed out and essentially lost to time. In terms of web design, there was definitely a very obvious collapse happening. There's way less color, there's way less visual distinctiveness, and the visual language of the web nowadays, at least, reflects this almost irreparable damage to the space itself. Beyond that, there's also a discursive shift happening. Everything that works, in terms of the discourses that are capable of shaping and shifting cultural dialogue, even if it's not that in its essence, still has to be delivered as engagement bait; true engagement, less-discourse, is rare, if even real at this point.
The barrier to entry that was present during the web 1.0 and 1.5 days, respectively, has nearly vanished. This holds true for technology, in the sense that smartphones are, nowadays, universal access points to the internet — if we exclude older demographics, meaning your grandparents and people who are even older than that. Corporate jobs, even now, at least on the upper echelon of the corporate world, mandate an always-on digital presence. I think Google employees, for instance, are required to have their digital employee badges quite literally linked to their phone. So if you lose internet access, or if you lose access to your phone, you are not going to be able to, quite literally, go to work. So, yeah, there is this push for always having to be online, meaning that, to circle back to what I was saying before, the line between the internet being a place, the internet embodying cyberspace, and the internet being something that we are forced to engage with at all times — the whole idea of these things being separate is virtually non-existent. And the exact opposite is being encouraged, and forced onto, what would once be engaged through digital subjects.
The early web, in this instance, was quite literally true cyberspace. Web 1.0, or the early web, enabled a kind of total immersion, with a firm physical/virtual boundary being present. Being offline in this sense meant truly and quite literally being offline. You had no way of being present within cyberspace while being offline. Web 1.5 to web 2.0 — that would be the early blogosphere era, for instance — is where there is a kind of gradual popularization and normification of the internet, but the cool, weird within cyberspace still persisted. One of the more, I guess, niche — although, given this audience, not so niche — examples is the accelerationist and accelerationist-adjacent blogosphere: for instance, the K-Punk stuff, the joint hyperstition blog featuring both Nick Land and Anna Greenspan, amongst other people, Bird on the Moon, I Feel Love. Those were all spaces with distinct voice and style. And it was also self-affirming, in the sense that content didn't require external validation to exist. It was just there. You could engage with the discourse — the engagement was encouraged, but it wasn't forceful, because it was, I guess, assumed that you could engage with theory and all of these ideas in other ways as well. There was an offline alternative to online discourse as well, which in turn meant that the more literate, the more politically engaged, the more culturally diverse crowd was left to its own devices within cyberspace. And I think that the absence of "the normie crowd" allowed for a firm type of discursive apparatus to emerge there.
Web 1.5 was therefore "embodied accelerationism." It housed accelerationist thought outside of academia at a time when it wasn't all that welcome — even though whether it was ever really welcome within academia is the question, and maybe, just maybe, that's also a good thing, but that's an entirely different discussion. Good for accelerationists, obviously, and very bad for tired academia. In this sense, it looked and behaved like the future. There was a kind of universal literacy level present, social novelty and a general openness towards the new. Cyberspace, in this case, isn't something that necessarily requires the presence of digital subjects, but what allows it to evolve is the kind of constant reaffirming of this very vague line between offline organics, organics within the physical, and then ultimately becoming digital subjects that are engaged within the virtual.
Nowadays the situation is very different, because one has to be on the lookout for cyberspace in order to separate it from the internet, or just, you know, the mainstream, so to speak. What this does, just like in the web 1.5 days, is allow things like bare-bones blogging, web rankings and anything that is indexable outside of the few main web search engines — it allows these things to flourish in a way that's much more underground, not just in terms of accessibility, but also in terms of how this is produced. If you want to do bare-bones blogging nowadays, and not for something as easy and straightforward as Substack, for instance, your knowledge of HTML has to be at least existent. There is a bigger barrier to entry again. And that kind of allows for this non-gatekeeping but still separate discourse to take shape. That's where people don't really discuss tweets, but as digital subjects they discuss "ideas," to put it in a very cringe way, I apologize.
There's a lot of restoration attempts, and things that allow for this kind of reclaiming of a cyber future — I guess one of the more interesting attempts is the so-called "indie web movement," where digital subjects are reclaiming autonomy for online spaces themselves. "Neocities" and other such HTML revival platforms come to mind here. I think this is very interesting; we're not talking about reclaiming autonomy just for online subjects, we are quite literally talking about reclaiming autonomy for spaces. These things exist on the outer edges of the internet, and they form the core of cyberspace. And the role of digital subjects isn't just to keep this intact, but also to dress it accordingly and help it mutate further, I guess.
One other cool thing that I found is the Bear Blog platform. It's essentially a bare-bones alternative to the more mainstream options, such as the Google Blogger thing or Substack. There's a free tier and a paid tier, and if you don't buy the paid tier, your blog isn't accessible in any other way besides someone actually clicking on the link to your blog. There are also a couple of other less relevant distinctions, but that can all be circumvented with continuous engagement with different web rings. These websites and blogs are very much text-and-image only. You're going to have to at least know HTML basics if you want to format these posts correctly and make them look like blog posts, so it is strongly encouraged that you pick up HTML — but what this allows for is not the bare separation of discourse, it's quite literally a different type of discourse that is happening. I think that's at the core of all of this.
Mainstream video platforms are maybe a good example here. What you see on a platform like YouTube — the quality and the content of what people are discussing isn't necessarily just predicated on your own personal algorithmic choices, I guess, and what the algorithm feeds you. It can sometimes depend on the size of the channel, in the sense that smaller channels, before getting the financial incentive to shift gears towards more palatable things, just by virtue of being smaller in size, can engage in things that the palatable mainstream would very much consider weird.
There's a quote I grabbed from Kill All Normies, the book by Angela Nagle. In that passage, she talks about the relationship between the artsy Tumblr crowd that, at one point, during 2016, very much went down an alt-right type of pipeline, and then it caused them to vote for Donald Trump, for instance. And even if they couldn't vote, they were very much engaged with that side of the internet. But anyway, the quote goes: this period also saw the erosion of a mass-culture sensibility that had included a mainstream media space and a shared public, and the Trumpian victory doubled as a defeat for that mainstream — one now scorned by ordinary voters and by ironic online subcultures of both right and left alike, all of whom position themselves against that discredited center.
That is true. That last part is true, insofar that, regardless of your political affiliation, there is a chance — especially if you've seen in real time this transition between web 1.5 and web 2.0, early web 2.0 to the current web 2.0 — if you've seen these transitions play out while being on the internet yourself, you're probably going to develop some sort of disdain towards the way in which information is being disseminated and reproduced. Therefore, to put it bluntly, you're going to probably feel some sort of contempt towards the very space of the digital — but on its face, it doesn't have anything to do with the digital. It has everything to do with what I was talking about at the beginning of this talk, which is this very apparent notion that the internet, or what we think of the internet today, is mostly just free ad space.
I was talking to a friend a while ago, and they said something to the effect that Reddit queer discourse cannot compare to early attempts at queer digital emancipation. That's not just because "older is better," even though I guess we're hitting an age right now where maybe it's much easier to fall and trip over these little pitfalls. But it's also quite literally just about how digital subjects engage with the internet and online discourse as such. A lot of this seems very boring. It seems very non-artistic. There's also this idea that the "creative online class" — which would be the content creators, the YouTubers, the Substack people, the broader creative class — kind of killed the artist and the artist class, which points to this idea of experiments not really being welcome online anymore, and at least not in any kind of sizable number. There is a kind of myopia that runs through these mainstream discourses, and that's the feeling I get even after making the switch from Twitter to Substack, for instance. Substack is marginally better in terms of what it offers its users to engage with — there's a lot more space for substantive disagreement and substantive discussion. But it still lacks the desire for self-emancipation. It's still very much just Substack discourse that doesn't want to branch out or even explore other online avenues in that way.
There's a fun little YouTube channel that I came across a couple of weeks ago called Osaka Syndrome. This is a very strange and fun person to engage with, mostly because I just saw them, and what kind of drew me in was their usage of CRT TVs and retro gaming gear — which was like your average terminally-online vlog-type channel. But everything from their setup, to the technology they used to edit and make and upload these videos, to the technology they're showcasing in passing in these videos, evokes this notion of "hey, let's" — and this is very Fisherian in a way — "let's try and find an alternative to this never-ending hellscape of substance-less discussions and ads." Web3, at least conceptually, is a cautionary counterexample to this. As far as I can tell, it's very much corporate-driven, and it offers a sort of false promise of utopia that doesn't really do much to extend this utopia to the digital subjects — it is only focused on bettering the platforms, not the space. If fully actualized — not to sound like a doomer — most likely there would be no digital future left to engage with, let alone save.
To kind of recap: cyberspace and the physical are obviously entangled, but the relationship is very much uneven. The early web offered a model of healthy immersion, and a type of novelty that was unique to the language of the digital. To restore this is possible, but I guess the aim would be to try and resist corporate capture. If we look at it from the perspective of theory, places like Substack, for instance, allow you to leave, or effectively exit, the boring, "stuck in the past" ways of academia, but sadly it feels like exiting Substack should also be on that priority list. Obviously, the question that we're begging here is: can the virtual reclaim this sort of autonomy for the physical?
Just to finish off, there's another quote from Kill All Normies — I think it's a neat quote to illustrate, A) all of this, and also B) how some sort of reflection on this can also be incredibly misguided on its own, right? The old cyber-utopian left once claimed that "the discussed had become a network" beyond the control of any established medium, and that a leaderless, user-generated social media would define the new public sphere. That network arrived, but it delivered power to the right rather than the left — those who fetishized the spontaneous, leaderless, internet-centric network as inherently progressive failed to see that leaderlessness alone said nothing about a movement's actual political content, leaving that vacuum open to almost anything.
The through-line is factual. The through-line is true. The line connecting all of these thoughts seems to hold, but we're working within organic parameters still, in the sense that digital burnout is very real, but cyberspace burnout doesn't really exist — precisely because cyberspace isn't really fully conceptualized, let alone explored to the utmost degree. So we can't really talk about that, but people can get burnt out from the internet. And if that happens to the left, of course the right is going to take advantage of that. And them coming into power is quite literally just a cyclical thing of "oh, who owns the means of production within the digital at this point in time" — when this changes, of course, the carrot keeps moving, sometimes leftward, sometimes not. Nothing really novel about that, but what the left should internalize — or bring back, I suppose — is this spontaneous, leaderless, internet-centric network, and connecting all its nodes to serve a sort of common goal of digital emancipation. The absence of leaders has its drawbacks, of course, especially when we're talking about the political implications of that. But I think, given the right incentives and the right tools at its disposal, it can also be, dare I say, beautiful, right? But I guess that remains to be seen. Thank you for listening.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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