How to Activate the Potential of Imaginary Networks

Abstract

I explore how imaginary networks provide us with meaningful models for alternative future networks outside of or beyond the internet. This essay mostly looks first at how media archaeology’s interest in uncovering media from the past to reimagine media in the future could lay the initial groundwork for seeing imaginary networks as alternatives to the contemporary internet. However, I find that media archaeology has a limited ability to understand imaginary networks; instead, complimenting it with Black radical thinkers such as Franz Fanon and Marxist thinkers such as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi gives us tools to imagine networks beyond the reach of global financial capitalism.