D. Schmudde via nettime-l on Fri, 3 Jul 2026 16:06:11 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Seeking alternatives: Artistic portfolio infrastructure against AI scraping and platform enclosure 

Stella,

Happy to see these explorations of our shared media ecosystem.
The focus on visual media precludes some interesting things happening in other media. In particular, there have been several attempts to establish artist-run cooperatives in the music industry.
I'm not claiming this is a media-specific thing. But the music industry has established a set of norms that remain widely accepted long after the arrival of the web. Specifically - that music has value. At least 99¢ or $2 or whatever the average rate is for a track on Bandcamp.
Somehow the ecosystem is large enough that Bandcamp can exist in the world of large streamers such as Spotify. And yet it remains consolidated enough that the road for professional musicians is arguably more narrow and more difficult than ever. Hence we see these music cooperatives sprout up because there is at least a proven economic value to share and sustain a community of that type.
I talked about Ampled extensively here: https://schmud.de/posts/2020-05-21-third-way.html. They're gone now, but others have arrived since then.
Finally, since I think you were musing about local communities, I'll also riff on live (hence local) music. It's unfortunate that Instagram is where so many bands now tell their followers where they are playing next. Some leftist venues here in Turin have gotten on the Fediverse, which is great, and for my tastes, https://goth.it is really important. That's a national site, but it's really easy to go local. 

/David

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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Seeking alternatives: Artistic portfolio infrastructure 
      against AI scraping and platform enclosure (Stella Aster)
   2. Happy 250: Orwell and the Living Curse of Specialization
      (Max Herman)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2026 22:20:26 +0100
From: Stella Aster <lists@stella-aster.com>
To: nettime-l@lists.nettime.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> Seeking alternatives: Artistic portfolio
	infrastructure against AI scraping and platform enclosure
Message-ID: <a752e077-76b3-406f-802d-db3b10cad881@stella-aster.com> 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
In my local community, Instagram is the predominant platform for artists 
of all kinds.
What are the affects and capacities that social media platforms like 
Instagram provide for artists and audiences?
- Publishing, somewhere to publicly post content, perhaps about one's 
practice
-?Discovering, of other peoples things, by a number of mechanisms including:
- Identifying, in the form of usernames to provide direct access to profiles
- Searching, in profile name, description, post descriptions, etc. but 
perhaps also by geolocation, tags, etc.

- Recommending, in the form of one or more algorithmic feeds
- Responding, in the forms of comments (linked, structured publishing) 
and reactions
- Collecting, by being able to bookmark and save favourite posts to lists 

- all tied together with a cohesive user interface design.
Interestingly the Web provides a different and overlapping set of 
affects/capacities:

- Publishing

- Discovering through:
- Identifying, in the form of URLs, although mostly people just remember 
domains, if at all

- Linking, from one page to another
- Searching in the form of search engines, which isn't a core part of the technology, but an old and established part of the infrastructure 
since the early days

- with no unified or simple interface for publishing
- and where the interface design from one page to the next can vary 
widely, for good and for bad.
Within our media ecology, some of these affects/capacities are also facilitated by humans in particular roles. Critics? sort through, 
select, and re/present other people's things, according to their
particular taste, which supports bringing an audience to those things. There has been a lot of discourse recently about AI slop and how this is capital automation of human culture production, i.e. "if we can get the machines to make the art we are no longer accountable to artists", both financially and ethically. The recommendation engine was the vanguard of the generative AI. Just as generative AI is an assault on artists of all kinds, recommendation engines are assaults on social artists including critics, those of us whose materials are preexisting social and cultural artefacts and the people, relations, and social worlds who produce them.
I think the main reason social media platforms like Instagram are popular is that they make publishing simple and easy (they're not the same, and doing both is difficult, especially for a global multicultural intergenerational user base). The Web was never designed with "how can my grandma publish photos of her cats?" in mind, and so if you want to just publish "on the Web", you already need to know so much, and then choose from one of a bunch of options, or pay for a website builder service, which quickly turns into an expensive walled garden. Or you can 
just set up an Instagram.

I like that there are services out there now focusing on simple
experiences for publishing on the Web. I've been using bearblog.dev for 
my monthly updates (https://asterisms.bearblog.dev/ if you're
interested!). In fact now that I think about it, with WriteFreely, you could set up a website where everyone can have their own very simple blog: https://writefreely.org/features/community-building But that's 
designed more for writing.

There is Pixelfed, which is the closest I've seen to a Fediverse
Instagram, and again you could host a node for a community. I was thinking of that for a local art community, but I imagine people might be concerned with discovery, lack of existing network, and duplicating work onto another platform. I would love a way to scrape Instagram profiles into a Pixelfed instance, that would give me enough motivation to actually set up a local art Pixelfed I think. But then again, maybe that is the young technologist in me, always eager to solve problems 
with my keyboard, when perhaps I should just start with some
conversations, and be relational about it.
Hope my musings are useful. Please keep us up to date with your progress ?? 

Stella ?

On 22/06/2026 09:00, tt.garnet282--- via nettime-l wrote:

Hello Nettime community,
I am currently reflecting on the material conditions of digital artists in the age of generative AI and platform capitalism. Specifically, I am looking for alternative network protocols to host and give visibility to a personal artistic portfolio while actively evading automated scraping bots and mass commercial servers (M, A, G, A, etc.).While tools like Glaze or Nightshade offer data-poisoning defenses at the file level, I am interested in exploring infrastructural resistance. I have been looking into the "Small Web" and decentralized alternatives (p2p, Gemini, Gopher, etc.).
Does anyone have a similar experience?, Do you know any appropriate network for this?, What other protocols or low-tech alternative networks are artists currently deploying to reclaim control over their digital spaces?, What do you think? I look forward to hearing your insights, projects, and critical perspectives. Thank you very much! 

Best regards,

jfgg



------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2026 18:34:44 +0000
From: Max Herman <maxnmherman@hotmail.com>
To: "<nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets" 
	<nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
Subject: <nettime> Happy 250: Orwell and the Living Curse of
	Specialization
Message-ID:
	<PH3PPFBAAA1BB69AAAD9015C6E1AD014D41A5E82@PH3PPFBAAA1BB69.NAMP223.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"



+++++
Two hundred and fifty is not a "whole" kind of number. It's more like a quarter: twenty-five cents, the first quadrant, halfway to halftime. Sadly both right and left in the US believe the system is terribly hopeless and must be either torn down or allowed to fall as quickly as possible. It's not a happy, peaceful, united birthday party for the nation, like the bicentennial kind of was. It's closer to total breakdown, where the monied interest hates voting and the voting interest hates money. We couldn't even get to the first break in play before falling irretrievably behind.
This is part numerology and part reality. The roaring success, the infinite aspirations of the founders have not yet materialized. Yes there has been a supergrowth of machines and production, but the ruination said industry has caused as its fundamental cost has been at least as great. The planet is rapidly running out of the basics: water, safe air, soil, and livable temperature (that is to say, earth, air, fire, and water are elementally out of balance). All plants and all animals are in severe danger. Today's mercury is off the charts, and even the hope to study how to maybe address it is illegal, literally: Drumpf's DoJ will attack you viciously if you even suggest trying to research positive solutions. Peace on earth and good will toward men? Don't be absurd.
To use a financial term, the whole world, which can mean "the whole planet" or "everything human," has gone upside down. The negative trendlines have overtaken the positive and are only getting worse. 

+
At such a dystopian moment we would do well to remember Orwell, who warned us about "1984," the flip of 1948 which marked Churchill's Iron Curtain speech and the start of the First Cold War. Maybe 2026 is the real flip, because it's the real start of the Second Cold War. Except this time it's worse. The damage of Cold War One, which has almost crashed the planet already, is now primed for a second act, barely different from the first, which will certainly doom everything that hasn't already been doomed.
What has been the great curse to put us here? In a word, specialization. We got so good at making machines we forgot how to do everything else. And to make matters worse, each of us only knows how to make our meager personal part of the machine -- each to their own little gear, swivel, axle, or bearing. Call it the banality of maladaptation.
Even words have been no exception to this curse. Orwell wrote a lot about writing, how it gets automated like a copy machine and floods out the "something else" that the planet and humanity cannot survive without. What that lost redemptive capacity is should come as no surprise: the ability to write, speak, and think honestly with agency rather than as a mechanical program. There's no mystery to it at all, none in the slightest, which renders it paradoxically almost invisible.
Mark Twain spoke of it when he said "corn-pone opinions." People's words too often come from where we get our cornbread, or where we think we get it. Are you southern? Talk pro-southern talk. Northern? Pro-northern. Like every group mammal, humans know full well on which side our bread is buttered. We start learning our roles from the second we are born, and stick to them as long as we possibly can. 

+
But, but, but: when you have the capacity to mechanize the literal universe you must learn something additional beyond the kind of talk that keeps your cornbread coming in. You have to be able to talk about the whole picture, the whole universe, the ball of wax, and do so responsibly since your actions are enough to affect that whole for good or ill and thus to destroy or preserve it. You have to, as it were, learn or re-learn how to speak without specialization. By you I mean the species, and that means you.
The word for this is, and has always been, poetry. As Shelley wrote better than I ever could, in his "Defense of Poetry," true imaginative expression (which includes all arts, verbal and otherwise) unifies rather than specializes and is therefore the unacknowledged legislator of the world. It is the cure for Orwell's curse. We can be certain, and we don't even have to re-write it. It's available free at Gutenberg.
You might object: "no, it's not poetry but crown, clergy, techne, and war that rule events." Sure they can control some things, some of the time, but they do so generally by destruction, deadening, and nullification. These are the specialization which, along with all their infinite subspecialization, have failed to constrain humanity's power to destroy the planet.
Not a Shelley fan? Try Blake: he agreed poetry was the "all" kind of writing that could pull our fat out of the fire. And there are more than English voices too, Tokarczuk's "Ognosia" for example, and Gao Xingjian's "Soul Mountain." Every language has their own.
Transcending specialization starts with you. Look at how you have specialized, how you have been coopted, where the shackles rub you raw. You'll know right away once you look. There are some things "you just can't talk about" because "of who you are." This is most often, for people not in poverty, professional etiquette. Then it's interpersonal stuff -- what would your friends think. For those in poverty, the chains are heavier and cut deeper: local street violence, religious warfare, brutal law enforcement administered without rhyme or reason. All these chains make poetry even more impossible. And so the abyss beckons, the banality of all evil, and we fall, we fall, we fall.... 

+
Yet all of this, these word-stories and word-pictures, are like dreams. In one moment you can awake and do different. As Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language": "If you simplify your English [or whatever language], you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects.... One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one?s own habits."
Like Bartleby, the copy-maker of Wall-Street, you can simply say "I prefer not to." Or like the Buddha: just sit and breathe. One breath, one sentence, and you're there. Where? Everywhere! You've gone back to yourself, you've found your original substance, you have left the prison of your specialization, simply by one simple waking moment.
This is the moment we can celebrate at 250 plus or minus 0.000001 years old. The best of times, and the worst of times; the start of the wake-up which by the half could have us back on track, but only if we try: a stable arch, as one might put it, where two weaknesses leaning against each other make a strength. All cultures have them.
True sustainability doesn't last just a hundred years. That's a drop in the bucket, one apple in a bushel. Sustainable is a thousand years: 2776. At point zero of Q1 we learn to stop the destruction and qualitatively revise the adaptation; we turn aside from the abyss; we start to tack away from it perhaps even at the last possible instant, a tangent at the event horizon. Even that is good enough. Then we start Q2 by gaining distance from dystopia. By Q3 we are out of the negative and start half-arch 1 of the good, and with Q4 we make the stable half-arch 2. Then do it again.
Yes we are all tired, Mancini, but we can take one breath. And if you can take one breath, you can write a poem, even a birthday poem. And even just one poem can turn the tide. 

Experience: it
doesn't specialize, doesn't
have to even try.

+
Of course, today's headlines confirm that SCOTUS is not going to bring US democracy levels back from the 1950's any time soon. They hold the levers and, by God, they're going to use them. They are truly cementing, with abundant help from their demagogue of infinite sleaze, the severe democracy reduction plan. How much will they let their side lose near-term? Maybe the House, probably not the Senate, and probably not the next presidency ? they trust the people that little. Red Fort Blue Fort.
Where voting has been diluted this far this fast, and democratic institutions reduced to rubble for the foreseeable future, the voices of dissent need a major novel to aid the cause of peaceful protest. Think Paine or Twain.
Such a novel doesn't have to be especially good, and certainly not perfect, but it must address the Second Cold War newly announced with China and set forth ways to minimize the duration and damage. It can't avoid the 1978 Truth Criterion Controversy or "Sparks" by Ian Johnson. It must also speed the transition of philosophy, the love of wisdom so to speak, both Eastern and Western to a center of gravity understood as Experience (see Lakoff and Varela, or Benjamin re Kant) not the specializations of Reason (rationality) and Authority (power), history's two clenched fists which still dominated all 20th c. phil. There will be much confusion and groping in the dark, but Jay's "Magical Nominalism" (2025) will get us started especially if boosted by his "Songs of Experience" (2005).
This new narrative, part imaginary and part fact, cannot look to Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche -- triple bane of the nineteen-hundreds -- but may consider Jung, Pater, and Tokarczuk. Nor can it be a novel of the post-tribane either, which is fully Bannonized. How could "voting is a fiction" not have been stolen by the far right?
Rather magical nominalism, which wasn't born yesterday, and Varelian cybernetics of experience neuronal and otherwise, along with mindful poetry and despecialized experience must inspire this new novel. Maybe you can write it, or one of your students or friends, or even a novel-writing computer program (though that's not really writing, is it, after all). I wrote a version I could send you free if you're desperate.
It must be a comedy, so people can see what sustainability looks like.
Plus meditate, today, as a reminder of what non-specialization really is, and celebrate Mindfulness Day on July 12 as best you can. 


+++++












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