NM Live | LIL INTERNET for Vienna Digital Cultures Festival (2025)

Initially titled :::FEEL THE FUTURE:::, this lecture by Lil Internet is, in fact, more a eulogy for a fading era of the internet and its imaginaries—one that is being replaced by an entirely new structure of machine learning-driven networked media.The talk follows three threads: the pre-millennial concept of cyberspace, the post-millennial return of the cyber occult in the face of naive Web 2 optimism, and a mid-century anecdote about the myth of the Golem of Prague.It was written in the context of the festival’s theme, “Model Collapse” — wherein a recursive system experiences an extreme loss in quality due to persistently prioritizing the efficiency of form over the integrity of meaning — like PR slop writing, but for everything. Vienna Digital Cultures Festival was curated by Nadim Samman together with the Kunsthalle Wien and the Foto Arsenal Wien with support from the Autotelic Foundation, You can view a video courtesy of the Autotelic Foundation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oinLJMvb-UA