At Can We Start Again there was a complete absence of the usual Silicon Valley grin.
Nobody was promising to “disrupt” my breakfast. Nobody was trying to optimise my emotions or harvest my attention span like wheat from an exhausted field. There wasn’t a billionaire in a black turtleneck explaining why replacing human relationships with subscription services was somehow liberation.
Instead there were synthesizers humming quietly in dark rooms. Pigeons. Homemade websites. Strange little browser extensions. Experimental orchestras. Queer archives. Artists who spoke about protocols as though they were medieval myths instead of invisible corporate laws.
It felt less like attending a technology festival than stumbling across a resistance movement disguised as an art exhibition.
Act 1: Technology has become a dirty word
The Phreaking Collective had gathered hundreds of us beneath the improbable title Can We Start Again?, and for the first time in years the question didn’t sound naïve. It sounded necessary.
Technology has become a dirty word because we’ve confused it with the companies that currently own it. Somewhere between dial-up internet and algorithmic capitalism we accepted the absurd proposition that Google, Meta and OpenAI were synonymous with technological progress itself. We handed over the imagination of the future to advertising companies and then acted surprised when the future arrived covered in adverts.
Every swipe. Every click. Every heartbeat measured by a smartwatch. Somewhere, somebody is invoicing your existence.
We’ve mistaken extraction for innovation. Can We Start Again? proposed something far more dangerous. What if technology wasn’t the problem? What if capitalism’s version of technology was? That possibility hung over the entire festival like electricity.
The launch of Phreak Mag Issue 002 felt less like publishing a magazine than distributing samizdat literature inside occupied territory. Around it drifted ambient performances from Xie Kim and fellow musicians that dissolved the industrial edges of the building into something softer. The music didn’t demand attention. It created permission to think. Which is increasingly a revolutionary act.
Oliva Ema and Atay Ilgun spoke about Instruments of Euphonia and the strange cultural addiction to apocalypse. Ilgun rejected doom not because catastrophe isn’t real, but because surrender has become fashionable. He invoked Apocatastasis, not an ending, but restoration. History as spiral rather than collapse.
It struck me that we’ve become addicted to imagining endings because endings require nothing from us. Beginnings are harder work.
Melissa (Yunzhi) Li’s performance lecture, From Concrete to Cyberspace, wandered through “reflective nostalgia”, the kind that doesn’t fantasise about returning to the past but asks what unfinished dreams might still be rescued from it.
That distinction felt vital. The early internet wasn’t perfect. It was chaotic, amateur, frequently ridiculous, but it belonged to weird people. Now it belongs to shareholders.
Later I spoke with Li beside her extraordinary installation: an explorable 3D world overflowing with AI-generated debris collected from the internet like toxic waste washing ashore. AI advertisements. Fake influencers. Synthetic enthusiasm. Entire ecosystems of counterfeit humanity.
She wasn’t generating the slop herself. She was preserving it like an archaeologist documenting pollution.
When I asked whether AI content was becoming harder to detect, she nodded. More worrying, she explained, was the erosion of trust itself. Even authentic work is increasingly suspected of being artificial. The poison spreads beyond the fake images into our ability to believe anything at all. Her virtual landscape had no ending.
“You just get lost,” she smiled.
Act 2: Pigeons and Caravaggio paintings
We’ve all been getting lost online for years. Only now somebody has bothered turning the experience into art. One of my favourite work in the exhibition: Pigeons!!!, is a Chrome extension that simply adds pigeons to websites. Magnificent.
Finally someone has deployed advanced computational systems toward a genuinely worthwhile objective.
Nearby Xach Hill had built an enormous digital plant from seventy-one LED panels. The organism climbed down the architecture like ivy reclaiming empire. When sections died the decay infected neighbouring panels until technological mortality became visible, beautiful even.
Machines rarely admit they’re mortal. Artists insist they are. Elsewhere protocol art explored the invisible rules governing digital life while Liquid Editions transformed markets into artistic media. Tiziana Alocci designed futures through absent data, imagining information that has never existed. Another work converted planetary movement into sound, reminding everyone that turning mathematics into music predates Silicon Valley by several thousand years.
Act 3: Concertos and ringtones
The real revelation arrived on the final day. Experimental music filled a cavernous hall where hundreds gathered on the floor without chairs, without hierarchy, without hurry. Nobody checked notifications. Nobody filmed everything. People simply listened.
The London Community Laptop Orchestra performed alongside cellists, guitars and synthesisers. Concerto for Strings & Alarms fused Nokia ringtones with classical composition until forgotten notification sounds became liturgical bells. It was absurd. It was magnificent. It felt ritualistic.
Looking across the room at bodies sitting cross-legged in silent concentration I suddenly thought of Caravaggio. He could have painted this gathering. Replace the apostles with programmers and experimental musicians. Replace divine revelation with open-source software. The posture remained the same. Communion.
Even the conversations about lesbian web spaces carried that sense of recovery. Kitty spoke about One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, rescuing forgotten GeoCities pages before they disappear forever. Molly Soda’s Desktop Dump excavated personal computing histories that corporate platforms quietly erased.
Memory itself has become an act of resistance. One delightfully virtual arcade cabinet invited visitors to literally construct a Hot Take. Which, frankly, is a more honest model of social media than anything currently operating in California.
Walking back into the London night I realised the festival had quietly performed a trick on me. Most technology conferences worship the future while treating human beings as inconvenient biological hardware awaiting software updates. Can We Start Again? did the opposite. It treated people as infinitely interesting.
Technology merely became another material for community, play, beauty and argument. For one weekend computers stopped behaving like surveillance devices and started behaving like musical instruments. The internet stopped resembling a shopping centre and became a commons again. Perhaps only temporarily.
That’s how every better world begins. Not with another platform. With a room full of strange people refusing to accept that this version of technology is the only one available.
The corporations tell us there is no alternative because alternatives don’t maximise quarterly returns. Artists know better. They’ve already started building one.
Epilogue: Other places
Thanks for reading. If you have enjoyed this update from me then you may enjoy me talking about films and TV on my podcast, Moderate Fantasy Violence. The latest episode can be found here. In it, my co-host Nick and I discuss the final season of The Bear and new film The Sheep Detectives.
Or you might enjoy my recent videos about Solarpunk art on TikTok, where I explore what makes this newly emerging art movement so important right now.
I’m also hosting a feminist punk night called Gender Fuck on the 30th of July at The Distillery in Tottenham. We have four excellent acts led by women and non-binary people playing. Get your tickets at the link above.
Until next time
Alastair JR Ball