Now, just as the financial sector remains largely obscure to the greater public, so, too, has the network culture that emerged along with the web, been subsumed within a larger framework of so-called digitalization characterized by platforms, opaque artificial intelligence, and largely invisible cloud infrastructures and services. This is the age of platform and surveillance capitalism, in which... nobody talks about networks anymore. The same fate seems to be slowly befalling the internet and the web. The latter, whose thirty-year anniversary was in March 2019, has come to be regarded as something as dreary as television, a view that has only intensified as the streaming model has claimed its dominance. According to Joel Waldfogel, consumers are now living through a new ‘golden age’ of the cultural industries. Certainly, if we are to believe the statistics, global revenue from films, books, games, and music, has never been higher. If this is a golden age, then it is one not so much for the users, as, ironically, for those intermediaries that the network paradigm once promised to get rid of by means of decentralization and end-to-end communication.
Kristoffer Gansing: Introduction: Network Means And Ends, in The Eternal Network, The Ends And Becomings Of Network Culture
