How to be the internet you seek: a glimpse into history of internet manifestos
anya shchetvina
It is hard to make sense of networked digital technologies. We often turn to smaller forms that structure those imaginations of socio-technical relationships for us ― like sign-tool metaphors of a folder, a window, a cloud or forms of discurse, like electronic frontier or cyberspace. And they can be in-between, like small, recognisable, mediated genre of internet manifestos.
Manifesto is based on an internal paradox. It is a text that wants to be an action. How is it possible? It needs to find the right form that would give it agency. Martin Puchner[1] notices an interplay between what can be called “performativity” and “theatricality”. Performativity is the idea that words can be used as actions. For example, when we say “I agree” or “You are fired”. The issue is that when it comes to written texts, manifestos are at risk of being merely theatrical, limited to a pretentious pose without provoking any difference. You read it, you think “okay, nice, beautiful”, but it doesn’t do anything to you.
The manifesto history doesn’t end after “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”, “ABC of Tactical Media” or “100 anti-theses on cyberfeminism”. Since then, hundreds of manifestos have been published on the internet about the internet. So, decades after, how do new authors and communities try to do things with words?
As an online object, a manifesto is also a media form. It exists in a graphic interface, can have subpages or hyperlinks, be dynamic or interactive. Moving away from aesthetics of printed leaflets, manifestos develop self-reflexivity about their medium.
“Manifesto for a critical approach to the user interface” (2015) argues that the graphic user interface should not hide the economical, ideological and metaphorical systems on which it is based. Manifesto is published through MediaWiki, whose interface is not hiding its “backstage” and is promoting transparent knowledge on how to operate it.
Similarly, “Internet manifesto” by Sadgrl (2023, older version) stands for opposing big platforms by creating personalized online spaces for yourself and people you want to be in touch with. The manifesto is not a plain text but a toolkit with lists of useful hyperlinks for etiquette principles, software, design elements and tutorials.
Instead of challenging old authority to establish a new one, they do work of gathering, sculpting, acknowledging, giving voice, offering. They are small texts for small actions: to write a blog post, to reference a quote author, to create your own webpage beyond social media.
Form follows. Instead of legitimising themselves through a resemblence with printed form, they do small steps in search for new mediality and agency. These manifestos are not performative or theatrical. They don’t pretend that if they speak loud, the desired world can already be here.
Instead, they model the desired world.
They are utopian thinking applied practically, through examples and toolkits. Maybe the most radical move of techno-political imagination is neither about a radical statement nor about a form, but rather about a gentle weaving of a model assamblage between the medium, the message, the infrastructure and the user/reader.
- ↑ Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.