A Catalog of Formats for Digital Discomfort

<p>Due to physical distancing measures under COVID-19, we are finding ourselves in what can be identified as an increased condition of gathering on- line. This condition includes learning situations, as well as moments to share and exchange our views, analyses, approaches, results, prototypes and proposals in a wide spectrum of academic and para-academic situations. Through the imposition of closed, proprietary, exclusive and over-optimised commercial formats for so-called “webinars”, this situation is rapidly resulting in the settlement of a monoculture in mediated gatherings. GAFAM & co are taking over research and educational ecosystems, while turning all interactions into business transactions. It is therefore urgent to find ways to capture the damage of this cloudy landscapes, wider bandwidths, endless remote-working video calls and pervasive user-ization (the dominant tendency towards subjectivity-as-user-only). These are all elements partaking in an evident cultural and aesthetic flattening on platforms. These elements come to erase diversity, smoothly deepen structural dependencies and provoke relational precarity. They reproduce a techno-colonial regime that passes through deadly environmental damage and exploitative labour.</p>