Mediafutures Maria Korolkova
Media has always had an ability to shape the future. Marshal McLuhan ([1964] 2001) famously predicted that we all would live in a global village back in 1960s, Lev Manovich called new media “theory of the present” (2001: 6) meaning that this present will inform the century ahead, and even media archaeologies dig deep in the underlayers of media technologies of the past in order to better understand what await us ahead (Zielinski 2006; Sobchak 2022). What can then speculations on mediafutures tell us about today, about the challenges we are all facing in 2022—and the ways to deal with them? Simple Future: Web 3.0 Metaverse, blockchains, NFTs, decentralised technology and token-based economics. —Web 3.0 promises to be a paradise of freedom, acceptance, diversity and shared knowledge. Yet, only at the first glance. As Ben Tarnoff argues in the forthcoming The Fight for our Digital Future (2022), the modern internet is broken because it is owned privately and run for the purposes of profit maximisation within the flameworks of global capitalism. Johnny Golding, Martin Reinhart and Mattia Paganelli (2021) echo Tarnoff in their take on modern approaches to data and new system of knowledge. They too, like us, believed in “a fruitful explosion of knowledge from the world wide web”, in knowledge that after decades of Cold War “would be available to all at any time in the future, unrestricted and free of charge” (Golding, Reinhart and Paganelli 2021: 8). Yet, at best, event with the modern technologies, there seems to be “an endless undermining of established knowledge-structure-production sites, including universities, art schools, science labs” (ibid.), which often fail to defend themselves. The solutions to this is still in the future—and seems simple enough: to deprivatise the internet, to democratise professionalism, to diversify the knowledge production systems. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone’s behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It’s time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now, and that is a simple future of Web 3.0. Future Continuous: Medianatures Media is hardly just about capitalism and its technologies—furthermore, “media is hardly just about media” (Parikka 2019: 251). The continuous future of understanding media in 2022 cannot be separated from the systems of nature, and the way "nature is embedded in the cultural understanding of life" (ibid.). A longstanding binary opposition of culture and nature is thus united through media and mediated through continuous exchange. Any talk of the environment today immediately transferers in a network of social, political, ethical and aesthetical dimensions (Parkikka 2019; Guattari 2000; Braidotti 2006). This paradigm has its roots in Donna Haraway’s notion of Naturecultures, which 17
