We Are Not Sick is a hybrid lecture/music performance by Geert Lovink and John Longwalker. Combining a diversity of text-, image-, and music-genres, the project reflects on the encroaching sadness provoked by social media architectures.

Through this project they push for new modalities in both music and critical theory, to shake up both the dance floor and the lecture circuit. Utilizing a range of electronic musical genres for maximum reach, the Sad By Design album is not a soundtrack to a book of theory but rather a new attempt at expressing those same themes, using the same words but achieving different vectors of critique. Sad By Design is a ‘carrier wave for critical theory,’ crafted over two years of refining our answer to the question of what this new ‘critical music’ hybrid feels like to experience.

Open for interpretation

All of the tracks from the album are available for remix on the Internet Archive!

Not interested in stopping there, the recorded theory is carefully cataloged and processed, providing a database of phrases and words that are available to all to incorporate into their own art in a raw form or through the use of custom sampler instruments that are also released for all to use.

who

Geert Lovink is a media theorist and internet critic, working at the Institute of Network Cultures, calling foul throughout multiple eras of Californian Ideology.