matterofimagination

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[interview with Lori Emerson]

#interview, December 09, 2025

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ANYA: The book has a very beautiful title, Other Networks: Radical Technology Sourcebook. What does the word “radical” stand for in it?

LORI: That's a really good question. I think I'm trying to get people to start using the word imagination, to exercise their imaginations, and to think well beyond and outside of the internet, which, in my experience, is actually very difficult for people to do. So radical in terms of something utterly different. Radical in terms of the political implications of trying to imagine and do something beyond the internet.

ANYA: When you sent me the book, at that time I was also reading works by Cornelius Castoriadis, a European philosopher who wrote about radical imagination. And the two books really resonated with me.

LORI: I’m also interested in calling up the use of radical imagination as it’s being used in Afrofuturist circles, Black radical thinkers and scholars. I tend to feel that Western thinking, dominated by white people, may have run its course. When I go back and read Black radical thinkers—so far, I’ve only gone back to the 1950s—the vision they present is full of possibility and potential and not overburdened by critique. I really think this is something we should all be paying more attention to.

ANYA: I can only agree. So maybe a more general question: do you have any memories of how you first came up with the idea for the book?

I’m especially curious about the format, as the book is structured not like a standard academic book, but like a catalogue―you call it a source book. I imagine it as something you want to flip through and open at random pages, to get inspiration from. It invites a nonlinear reading experience. How did you come up with this combination of topic and format?

LORI: A lot of it is informed by my background in experimental poetry and poetics. My PhD is actually in experimental poetics from the University of Buffalo. Most people aren’t aware of the history there, but for a long time it was the place to work with experimental poets who were deeply invested in exploring the materiality of language, the materiality of the written word—pretty much any and all avant-garde practices, including self-publishing. The common refrain in the program was always: How do we write in a way that reflects the things we’re talking about? It was very much engaged in trying to walk that fine line between academic scholarship and whatever falls outside of that realm. A poet named Susan Howe has written these incredible experimental poetry books that are also rigorous works of scholarship on Emily Dickinson, the Puritans, and early American literature. So that way of thinking has been with me for, I don’t know, almost 30 years now. Academia being what it is, I’ve just never felt like I had the opportunity to enact not only my philosophical beliefs but also my political beliefs.

Since I got tenure—I think in 2015—I started to think: well, if I could do anything I wanted, what would it be? And I began thinking about all the things I’m interested in: alternative histories, Foucault, media theory, the idea that history is nonlinear and multiple and branching. This academic way of writing that’s linear and rigid, moving neatly from one point to another, wasn’t expressing the complexity and the branching quality I wanted to explore. It just wasn’t expressing the complex and messy ways in which history is constructed, archives are constructed, and those gaps in the archives. So Other Networks became something emergent, something I’d been thinking about since probably 2016. Back when Twitter was a great place to be—a place I used for thinking out loud and testing ideas with other like-minded people--I started tweeting about how I wished I could write a book whose form reflected its content, something close to an artist’s book that would still be scholarly. One of the editors at Anthology Editions, Mark Iosifescu, got in touch with me and gave me an opportunity to pitch the idea. It was the most incredible opportunity—one I may never get again, and one most people never get—to just be absolutely free to write and think in whatever way I wanted.

ANYA: I must admit, I really enjoyed that section where you explained why your book has no strict taxonomy. You try to position quite different networks in a kind of flat way, as equally important or interesting in relation to each other. This also means that you bring together networks that were real (or, better say, materialised) and networks that were just imagined but were never built. How did the idea that they belong together appear? Was it an obvious choice, or did you have to debate it somehow? And what does such a perspective bring?

LORI: The taxonomy was also very emergent. I had an initial idea of what the taxonomy might be; for example, I had categories for speed of transmission, approximate carbon footprint, and a few other ways of organising. But once I really dug into how all these networks worked, into their underlying material infrastructures, I realised the taxonomy had to shift. In the end, I tried to organise it in a way that was shaped and determined by the networks themselves, rather than by some abstract idea of how they ought to be organised.

I don’t recall exactly how the imaginary networks section began, but if I had to guess, it probably started with the memex and Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu, which I’d known about for many, many years and had been very fond of. I knew that the memex never existed, but it embodies many powerful ideas about how to share knowledge that have been partially realised in little bits and pieces across lots of different networks and network structures.

So, the memex and Project Xanadu got me thinking about the probably obvious point that there is no dividing line between real and imaginary. Or even between imaginary and material. Whatever is imaginary can eventually materialise in some way. Thinking this way opened up a whole new horizon: being able to talk about imaginary networks alongside real ones, to talk about networks that were never realised, partially realised, short-lived—this whole category of speculative networks that I find compelling and beautiful.

I haven't fully figured this out, but it is interesting how there are speculative networks that are described in technical detail by, say, inventors or engineers, and then there are also speculative networks you find in science fiction or fantasy. These realms almost never speak to each other. One of the things the book does is record my experiments in bringing together fields that rarely overlap: art and engineering, for example, which almost never talk to each other in this context. Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum, for example, could easily appear in a science-fiction novel or a fantasy world, but instead it usually gets relegated to its own separate niche.

ANYA: For my dissertation, I’m writing a chapter on Computer Lib by Ted Nelson, and I find it a really interesting case that shows how hard it is to divide the real and the imaginary. He coined the term hypertext, which came into existence, even though Xanadu never did. So, it’s very manifesting in a way—he creates categories that then come into being.

LORI: You know, you make me realise I always used to think Ted Nelson's love of neologisms was so entertaining. But I understand now that he was trying to push forward a totally different way of thinking about things—one that the English language couldn't quite account for. A way of thinking that wasn't just purely in his head but lived somewhere in that blurry region between an idea and a tangible entity that exists in the world.

ANYA: Yes, maybe sometimes we need innovative words. I believe Thomas Streeter, a cultural sociologist who studied the role of Romanticism in internet history, said that Nelson was trying to re-enchant computers. In this way, it was a very practical way of re-enchantment—he just created a new vocabulary around them.

LORI: Exactly. And yet, ironically, even though he does believe in enchantment, he’s also one of the crankiest people I’ve encountered.

ANYA: Speaking of the imaginary, I am curious about how you connect the focus on imagination to your interest in media archaeology. I’m based in Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin now, and here the media-archaeological tradition is very strictly focused on the materiality of media. I had a chance to briefly meet Wolfgang Ernst and found his perspective quite curious―he suggests that when we look at media technology, we should strip away everything not necessary—and by this he means the ideas, design, marketing—the usual imaginative layers around media. Only this way can one get close to the material arrangements of mediality. I am not sure I agree!

And your approach is a good example of how it can be different―you bring those layers together, making no divide between the material and the imaginary. Do you see the imaginary networks in your book as an outcome of media-archaeological work? How would you describe your approach?

LORI: That’s a great question. Yes—Ernst would probably disapprove of my approach. His model of media archaeology is, to me, very German; it has a distinct history and cultural context that I don’t think it maps neatly onto the U.S. or Canada. That became especially clear to me around 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protests and the brutal police murders of young Black men in the U.S. I was viscerally confronted with how absurd—and even deeply offensive—it would be to teach an approach to technology as if these cultural aspects could simply be set aside, even if only temporarily for the sake of exploring a hard materialism.

Ernst’s work is often used as a representative of media archaeology, but it’s just one iteration of media archaeology. He has given us the tools to perform interesting and powerful thought experiments, trying to delve into what could be the consciousness of the machine. If we can imagine setting aside human consciousness and human perception, what could the machine speak to us or reveal to us? That's compelling, lovely, and valuable in its way, but I think it is only appropriate at certain times and for certain places. And while Ernst and I have a lot of respect for each other, eventually, I think I align myself a little closer to Siegfried Zielinski's approach to media archaeology. His approach is a bit more poetic, and it also openly acknowledges and even embraces the cultural, human element.

That said, what still is appealing about media archaeology is that it isn’t fixed; it’s very fluid and flexible. There’s no single methodology. I wouldn’t say that I call what I do “media archaeology” anymore, but it definitely still influences the way I think. One way it continues to shape my work is through its powerful insistence on attending to the underlying material determinations in media and infrastructure. Not that everything is deterministic, but there is always some materiality at play.

I’m still very much invested in figuring out the material underpinnings of imaginary networks—the material elements that make an imaginary possible or plausible. Some imaginaries are incredibly specific in their material visions, again, like Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum or George Orwell’s World Brain or many of Ted Nelson’s ideas.

ANYA: I think that's quite a big interest for us at Matter of Imagination: how to find a middle ground between technological determinism and social determinism. There are so many traditions that either ignore the cultural/imaginary aspects or ignore the fact that ideas are embedded in and supported by materiality. And when you work on the history of the internet, as Natalie and I do, you constantly run into the need to combine the two, and the question is how to do that.

In this sense, your work is really inspiring. Maybe a more technical question: as a thought experiment, imagine a student interested in studying imaginary networks. What would you recommend as sources? What kinds of materials should they look at?

LORI: Ah, this is such a good question. There is an essay about imaginary networks that came out recently, where I developed my thinking a little bit better. There, I draw on Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi talking about the future. One thing that I've noticed is that the most compelling writing about the imagination is very often about the future. Berardi is often trying to explore the possibility of imagining a future beyond capitalism. And while he never quite gets there, he is perpetually trying. He ends one of his pieces by saying that we have to imagine that it's possible. Otherwise, why bother getting up in the morning?

I also pull on Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism”, but I am often left with the sense that the European white Marxist way of thinking seems to stall out at a certain point. It wants to imagine something otherwise, and it wants to be able to imagine a better future, yet it never quite gets there. As a result, I like to put these thinkers in conversation with Black radical thinkers such as Franz Fanon and Amiri Baraka because their work starts from an assertion that a change of imagination actually creates new physical realities. There's a chapter in Fanon's A Dying Colonialism where he talks about Algerians refusing radio for so long because they associated it with their colonial rulers until they heard about anti-colonial uprisings in Morocco. This created the possibility of overthrowing their oppressors, which then led them to start picking up radios, which they'd never picked up before, and using them to orchestrate anti-colonial uprisings. I think this is such a profound example of how a change in imagination can produce a material change in the world.

ANYA: Thank you, that’s a great reading list for the winter holidays already!

I was recently rereading Paolo Bory’s book The Internet Myth, where he has this one statement about networks, and I was curious whether your material supports it in any way. He writes that when we look at the internet history, we actually have many different histories and diverse network projects. But behind all the diverse projects, there is a network ideology―this idea that we just need to build the right network, and it will solve the problems. In your empirical work, did you notice a historical moment when something comparable appears?

LORI: This probably answers your question in the most indirect way, but what I’ve noticed is a gradual consolidation of power from the late 19th century to the 1960s. It accumulated around massive corporations that seemed less interested in solving problems and more intent on creating monopolies over a single type of network. Most of this drive to consolidation, of course, is profit-driven, but a lot of it is also driven, I suppose, by a belief about what a network should be and what a network should do that requires a huge investment and massive resources. There also does seem to be a distinct moment, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s, where network-building it's no longer about, say, some guy in Germany who has an original idea about a television--where one person can perform demonstrations of their latest inventions, perhaps attract a few investors, and so on. Instead, the networks are the domain of large corporations like AT&T or Bell. Or networks are the domain of large government entities in Europe that are also trying to create massive infrastructure to support networks that serve as many people as possible.

ANYA: To finalise, I want to ask you about the audience you imagined. You make it clear that the book is oriented towards a broader audience, and you mentioned artists as an important social group which has the capacity to test the potential of networks. In this way, Other Networks is definitely not a purely academia-oriented book. I was wondering if you had a kind of ideal imagined reader or a couple of different types of readers about whom you think it would be great if they read your book. I mean, not particular people, but social groups―maybe tinkers, engineers, artists? Whom do you have in mind there?

LORI:Since Twitter ceased to be a place that I wanted to be a part of, I've moved to Mastodon and found a nice home there with usually non-academic people from around the world who are intellectually curious, who just want to know how things work, and who want to live a better life. These remarkable people are all working jobs they view as fairly mundane, but in their spare time, they're researching the history of the telegraph with me or exploring how micro broadcasting works. We're swapping facts and stories and digging up unusual sources.

So, to answer your question, whether a reader identifies primarily as an academic, as an artist, as an engineer or something else, the primary readership for my book is these people who have to work hard to find time to learn and be curious.

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To cite this interview: Emerson, L., Shchetvina, A. (2025, December 09). TITLE [interview with Lori Emerson]. Matter of Imagination. https://matterofimagination.neocities.org/blog10

Do you have any critique, response essay pitches, general comments, or (literature) suggestions after reading of this interview? Do not hesitate to get in touch with us!