Hypothes.is: Playing With Digital Texts’ Expandable Confines

Once upon a time, some groups of friends and colleagues experimented with unfamiliar ways of using the web as a means for collective discussions, through the interpretation of textual materials. This is the kind of unknown story, one of which has taken place far away from the spotlights of the platforms – in the intimate secrecy of online communities of amateurs. Amateur, in French, comes from aimer (to love) and in this case, it was political philosophy in its broad sense that we loved, and shared as a sort of disinterested interest.

Drawn in from various backgrounds by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler as part of different projects, we did not only discuss politics and philosophy in Parisian café terraces. We took what was to become our shared memories and their batch of anticipations back home, to continue to individuate together via textual and computational means. For groups that came to be scattered around Europe, especially during the COVID period, these collectively individuating practices of online spaces came to be crucial to nourish the links that were so abruptly suspended by lockdown, and challenged by Bernard Stiegler’s death.

Our digitally and textually-mediated conversations were made possible through the web annotation tool Hypothes.is: a discreet browser plugin escaping the confined spaces of social media platforms to extend to the totality of the World Wide Web’s pages (at least, the ones available in open access). A ‘layer over the web’, as they call it in this very enthusiastic, Californian-advertisement-style video, which will better convey the original ‘dream’ that this tool tries to realize:

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