Semiotext(e), ISBN 978-1635901689, English, 216 pages, 2022, USA

How internet has reached the current status? To understand it beyond the vagueness of abstract global labels (like “Web3”), and to give context and history to the real current condition, Tiziana Terranova (interviewed on Neural #65) has compiled a series of essays, with new introduction and brief conclusions for each of them, published between the late 2000s and 2010s, a crucial period of networks’ transformation. Her usual lucid and groundbreaking analysis can be appreciated over the years, from the early critique of the online free labour (before social media) to the kind of subjectivity that produces value in the post-digital economy. In a sort of reverse order, the long introduction reconstructs the dynamics that led to the current status of internet (doubling also as a terrific internet history, politics and economics crash course). Here the texts range from an analysis of the current predominating “Corporate Platform Complex” (CPC, a service of privately owned platform services), to an impersonation of a “runaway Artificial Intelligence in the footsteps of […] Ghost in the Shell”, to the concept of the internet as a “residual technology”. In a handy pocket format, After the Internet is a compelling reading to understand and reflect on the trajectory underlying the conceptual infrastructural status of the current internet.