Conference - Tactics&Practice #16: Are you a software update?
Are You A Software Update? Kick-off Conference 25 February 2025 Kino Šiška Trg prekomorskih brigad 3, Ljubljana Are you a software update? Are you compliant with your favourite platforms’ favourite terms and conditions? Does your content conform to community standards? Are your biases amplified by algorithmic biases? In today’s ecosystem of data realities, software tirelessly updates—silently determining what we do, see, or say. Connective and networked, it mutates and proliferates through algorithms, classifiers, and processes, narrowing the conditions of participation and governance. From the shadow banning of political movements to the weaponisation of content moderation, software has become a tool of domination, subjugation, and oppression. A reality-reordering device, it operates as a fascist operating system—where participation demands assimilation, and noncompliance risks erasure. As digital utopias lie long forgotten, platforms consolidate power under the guise of connectivity. Embedded in everyday subjectivities and desires, the fascist operating system takes root, diminishing the common ground between online and offline, surfacing at different scales. Lately, our online environment feels like a minefield of political distraction, manipulation, isolation, and consumption—fracturing collective politics while reviving reactionary dreams of the past. Engagement is engineered, emotions are manipulated to sustain participation, dissent is algorithmically suppressed, and visibility is dictated by profit-driven metrics. If resistance is continuously administered and co-opted, how do we navigate our entanglement with digital realities? What possibilities exist to move beyond resistance to forge new forms of action, agency, and collective organisation? Interrogating how the internet, as a constructed space, has come to dominate our understanding of the world, Are You a Software Update? confronts the pervasive influence of software systems in shaping our interactions and perceptions. Examining the shifting boundaries between agency and automation, the self and the system, the conference participants reflect on the fragility and exploitation of our informational ecosystems and ask where action and collective organisation can emerge within software systems that continuously update us.
