December 2020, I woke up from a strange dream. The strange thing about it was its form; the dream was scrolling - literally; I dreamt in small squares of images and text, as though my bad doom scrolling phone habits had now reached the very depths of my subconscious.
The dream was a pivotal moment in my life. When I woke up, I deleted my Facebook account and decided that I had to confront the logic of surveillance capitalism that was slowly but surely engulfing and numbing my mind. I decided to turn my virtual struggle into a film.
Animation made for the series by Mathias Rodriguez Bjerre aka Zerosum.G
“Another World” is the result. It’s a documentary series made for the internet, and today the first episode premieres — on YouTube, TikTok, and here on Substack.
The ambition was to make something that was both true to the YouTube video essay genre, while also drawing inspiration from the essay documentaries of the past — an amalgamation of Chris Marker/Werner Herzog and EmpLemon/blameitonjorge.
During the COVID lockdown I became obsessed with a certain anarchistic Minecraft server called 2b2t that has existed for 15 years. It was infamously known as “The Worst place in Minecraft”, due to its uncompromising and hostile user base and extreme difficulty. Yet, what I saw was quite the opposite; a truly inspiring online place where people were completely re-inventing what playing Minecraft is, and the result was a virtual world with its history ingrained in the very landscape in a way I had never really seen before.
The landscape of 2b2t
I realized that 2b2t was the perfect contrast to mainstream social media — and that this contrast could be turned into a compelling narrative for my documentary about virtual worlds.
On 2b2t, I met the player ‘MemeWoman’ aka ‘Dargon Man’ — a British high school kid on a strange quest. His mission was to build a house at the center of the 2b2t server, a place that has been continuously ravaged for over a decade, and where any kind of construction is almost instantly destroyed by other players.
MemeWoman wanted to challenge the server’s destructive tendencies, and so he just kept on rebuilding his house every time it got destroyed. I found his project very beautiful. I thought of it as a performative artwork.
‘Another World’ sheds light on the strange corners of the internet - and treats them as inspiring works of art.
The amazing collaborative artwork “R-place” from 2017
—
‘Another World’ is also the result of all the culture theory I digested during my seven years at the University of Copenhagen. I went to university out of necessity - but left deeply inspired by the likes of Bruno Latour, Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Manuell Castells and many more.
The threshold for getting a kick out of the likes of Bruno Latour can be pretty high, though - it’s not an easy read. But I hope that ‘Another World’ will work as a kind of gateway drug, tempting people to dive into some of the powerful theories that help us understand what’s going on in the world right now. Without that understanding, resistance is futile.
I will use this Substack to elaborate on the research behind ‘Another World’ - and share the texts and videos that have inspired me the most.
I hope you will follow me on this journey.
Sincerely, Søren Peter
—
Further reading/viewing:
The virtual world is just as real as the physical world. This is a main tenet of the series, and also the main point in the text “The Virtual and the Real” by philospher David Chalmers from 2017:
The concepts of both space and time change as our societies change from industrial to informational. This is laid out with formidable foresight by sociologist Manuel Castells in the seminal work “The Rise of the Network Society” from 1996:
Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Space is increasingly defined by flow, by currents – of electricity, capital, information, of bodies, of stimulations, and space shapes itself according to these flows, and thus consists less and less of geographically anchored places – places where people can stay, make homes - but of flow systems, wires and channels. The important contextual point: the vaporisation of space is not confined to the virtual, and there are surprising parallels between underground subway systems and the infinite scrolls of social media.
The linear, measurable, sequential, rational, universal and predictable time of the industrial age shatters in the age of information. The network society instead gives rise to a collage-like experience of time, where the present dissolves into constant shifts, gaps, and loops. Castells calls this ephemeral eternity — a kind of “immediate always.”
Here, I want to contextualize with a meme:
Introduction to 2b2t:
