Reading this article today is quite fascinating, because I was either very young or not born yet for much of the early stages of the internet. It has made me wonder what it would have been like to be a working artist or in art school at the time that the internet was becoming more mainstream. I hesitate to compare the growth of the internet to the rise of AI in our daily lives, but I'm sure that there was a similar kind of resistance toward it as it was not as widely used or well understood.
The concept of Hacktivism is also very intriguing to me. Not only was there as surge of playful hacking pranks, but they were also utilized as a means of political or social change. However, the success of net.art raised concerns about the movement losing its rebellious, countercultural edge, as it risked becoming mainstream. Still, the internet's ability to host politicized, hacktivist art remained crucial, and artists continued to employ "tactical media" strategies to creatively subvert the growing dominance of commercial and institutional forces online.
Today, it feels like any effort of this sort unfortunately gets shrugged off because of the speed at which the internet consumes trends and news media. I fear we have become desensitized to most methods of creating meaningful change on the internet. I hope to be proven wrong, but it's hard to say how things will unfold.
