Anya Shchetvina: Internet manifestos workshop

Anya Shchetvina is a cultural and media scholar and a PhD Fellow in the “Literary and epistemic history of small forms” research group (Humboldt University of Berlin), writing her dissertation on the history and theory of internet manifestos. She used to coordinate The club for internet and society enthusiasts and the Internet Beyond conference. Beyond these institutional contexts, she is nurturing an open-format research initiative and blog called Matter of Imagination.

During her visit to the CDN, Anya will lead a workshop titled:

Literary and technical history of internet manifestos: A data-session

Digital narrative is not just about literature being affected by the internet. Experiments with digital literary forms also have the power to influence how we think about the internet itself. This is evident in the history of internet manifestos: texts that emerged in artistic and activist circles and were published online, aiming at changing the ways in which we think about the internet’s role in society. Dozens of internet manifestos started appearing in the 1980s across BBS systems and still regularly emerge today, attempting to bring contemporary social movements together around shared values and goals. But with the changes in literary practices and available technologies, writing itself changes. The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (1996), for example, was written as a conventional linear essay that could have been sent both by fax and to a mailing list. Later manifestos focus on internet-specific possibilities and experiment with the interface, hyperlinks, or collective writing. For example, the Critical Interface Manifesto (2015) was published as a wiki, and The Tech We Want Manifesto (2024) was published as a Google Document open for editing. In this way, manifestos of the digital appear to be important artifacts existing between technical, poetical, and political worlds. I invite participants to join me for a data session in the format of a collective mapping of the literary and technological history beyond particular examples of internet manifestos. We will open up with a brief introduction to the history of manifesto writing on and about the internet and then, by making use of our collective knowledge, Wikipedia, big sheets of paper, and sticky notes, we will come together with draft a timeline of processes and publications that worked as a context for manifesto writing experiments.

What to bring: curiosity, some energy to brainstorm with other people, and a laptop.