In the 2015 Jurassic Park reboot, Jurassic World, mayhem breaks loose in the island paradise and theme park with live dinosaurs, during which we briefly catch a glimpse of a pensioner desperately trying to save his two Margaritas. All the while, a cheesy pop song plays over the park speakers and proclaims »The Ever Elusive Future.« This guy's future is likely to be just that – elusive – as the dinosaurs proceed to wreck the island utopia and chomp up its human inhabitants. It's not a great moment in recent cinematic history, but this particular scene is interesting in the way it connects the colonialist utopia of a regained »Lost World« with pop-culture island romanticism and the flipside of that romanticism: the imminent catastrophe.

The island romanticism is provided here not only by the movie as such, but also by the inclusion of this old guy trying to save himself and his Margaritas. He is none other than pop singer Jimmy Buffett, who is not so well known outside of the US, but who has built an entire career on »island escapism.« His songs, such as »Margaritaville,« »Cheeseburgers in Paradise« and »Too Drunk to Karaoke,« are typically about languishing on islands on a diet of tequilas, sex and junk food and, most importantly, doing nothing special at all. Buffett is a veritable cult phenomenon – he founded a chain of »Cheeseburgers in Paradise« burger bars and is worshipped by his devoted followers, who, in a style reminiscent of the Grateful Dead’s »Deadheads,« call themselves »Parrottheads.«

»Island I see you in the distance, I feel that your existence is not unlike my own. (...) Island I see you in all of my dreams. But I'm a man with no means to reach your distant shore.«

»Dreaming of islands — whether with joy or in fear, it doesn’t matter — is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone — or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew...«

The first quote is taken from the lyrics of the Jimmy Buffett song »Island« on his 1981 album Coconut Telegraph. The second, though, is from Gilles Deleuze, who might be considered a proto-Parrotthead given the attention he gave to islands in his short 1953 essay »Desert Islands,« in which he discusses the ability of islands to organise existence as both particular and imaginary geography. In the contemporary cultural and political environment, following Brexit, the election of Trump and offshoring scandals, it seems as if we need to seriously investigate not so much the resurgence of Jimmy Buffet, but the apparently increasing desire of becoming-island and the different cultural contradictions that desire produces. This is not least particularly pertinent to the study of contemporary media culture, which represents both such desires and their contradictions and increasingly seems to wish to become-island unto itself. That this moment of the becoming-island of media is a conflictual one should come as no surprise, if we go back to Deleuze's understanding of the essential or originary state of an island as always deserted, whether humans indeed inhabit it or not. He writes: »[t]hat England is populated will always come as a surprise; humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an island represents. Islands are either from before or from after humankind.«2 Let’s transport this reasoning to media networks and to approach the becoming-island of media today. In order to understand my argument, it is important to make a brief media-historical recap. If, in the television age, the term »network« primarily stood for the broadcasting of content that was often seen as the opium for the masses (in effect a form of mass propaganda), in the internet age, the distributed network and its participative feedback paradigm has become hegemonic, completely reversing the marginal position once held by decentralised production while rerouting models of distribution around new centralities (read the big five: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple). In this new economy of cultural production – the post-digital one – no human can afford to be an island, and it seems nonhumans can’t either, as the Internet of Things promises ubiquity of information through connecting all (un-)living things.

It is in this context of hegemonic connectivity, then, that a certain »island romanticism« or perhaps »escapism« has resurged in the post-digital condition on a wide-ranging scale, from geographically existing islands that mobilise the renewed nationalist imaginaries of populations and their economies to the more metaphorical becoming-island inherent to practices of mindfulness, or even the return to analogue and offline media forms that promise a chance to disconnect from the command of incessant information flows.

The island promises disconnect, as it is an originary disconnected space – and it is perhaps this that attracts bodies that also already share a feeling of having been disconnected from the dominant structures of society, the island here allowing that feeling of disconnection to flow and grow stronger. But this disconnection is more than an emotion, of course, and in the becoming-island of media it also concerns an amplification of disconnect through technology. This amplification of disconnect is today used effectively in the propagandistic techniques of increasingly autocratic forces in the political landscape, performing constant disruption in a clash of elements. From a brighter point of view, such disconnect can instead lead to a renewal of business as usual and a commoning of interlinked islands. This might be what Nicolas Bourriaud had in mind when, in his 2009 essay »The Radicant,« he writes of »a new configuration of thought that no longer proceeds by building great totalizing theoretical systems but by constructing archipelagos. A voluntary grouping of islands networked together to create an autonomous entity, the archipelago is the dominant figure of contemporary culture.«5

In my short speculative argument, there are already contradictory versions emerging out of this figure of becoming-island. There is a strong nostalgic impulse which, in its most mean-spirited contemporary form, is exemplified by the rise of digital populism and its reliance on binary islands that promise to separate us from them, offering a means of escape and a return to better times. The Nostalgic Becoming-Island is a double-edged sword, though, and much like nostalgia itself is a strong driver of cultural production that revisits and re-interprets older forms for new conditions without necessarily being retrograde. This kind of feeling for (rather than the exact reconstruction of) the past has very much informed trends in the music of the last ten years, such as hauntology and hypnagogic pop as well as post-digital and post-internet art practices. This is also where the possibly more positive aspects of Bourriaud's »constructing archipelagos« come into play, as the cultural landscape after the net has become more like networked niches that are analogue as well as digital and into which the consumer/producer can plug into at will, rather than strictly separated and mutually exclusive subcultures.

The opposite of the above is a more alarming aspect of the becoming-island of media that we may think of as the sovereign Becoming-Island, defined by the exercise of absolute power in a separate, secluded state – for example by cutting off connectivity, by declaring a state of emergency, or by imposing a security mindset. An example could be the current drive towards so-called »digital sovereignty,« which scales from the rights and security of the individual to the state. Most often, though, it seems to be about securing the corporation or the state – as when in 2016 Singapore announced that they would be taking their government computers offline with the motivation of securing a critical infrastructure. As Clemens Apprich and Ned Rossiter assert in their contribution to the recently published transmediale reader Across & Beyond, participation and connection have become compulsive to the extent that going offline is now a privilege that may even become a necessity in order to protect critical infrastructures in the post-digital condition.6 Most often, though, the power to do so does not lie in the individual or in the networked »commons« but rather with political, economic, and cultural elites.

The exclusivity of the island as a closed-off space should lead us to consider other kinds of becoming that are less normative, such as queer or de-anthropomorphised islands, if we recall Deleuze's idea of the island as a space before and after humans – the »Jurassic Island« before and after the »Park« or the »World,« so to speak. Here the question becomes how to disconnect while reconnecting on other terms and the terms of others. In a dystopian reading, this might amount to nothing more than cynical offshoring schemes or freeports for tax-free trading – where a highly advanced global infrastructure of information, goods, and finance in the end amount to nothing more than increased separation and states of exception. However, artists and activists have always been good at appropriating exploitative structures to other ends, and as always this process will be fraught with contradictions as we face the becoming-island of media and its infrastructures. Can we establish a »Temporary Autonomous Freeport« that re-distributes resources to communities on trans-local scales rather than accumulate exclusive wealth? Or is this buying into neoliberalism the dismantling of the state? Are we increasingly reliant on blockchain technologies that are finally achieving efficiency in handling relations between online and offline communities, or are we seeing a new overstated belief in technologically mediated transactions, idealised as island-like spaces separate from human (supposedly corrupt) influence? Is the drive towards so-called »off the cloud« initiatives, DIY networking communities that develop their own post-Snowden networks for sharing information, an expression of the other kind of islands that we need for autonomously managing post-digital life, or should this rather be avoided as a form of nostalgic localism? The only thing that seems to be sure is that the emotional attachment to disattachment, which I outlined here as the desire of becoming-island, is on the rise today, whether as an escapist fantasy or an action towards forming new communities. The mediated realities that accompany these desires are as elusive as ever, but that does not mean that we should give up trying to give them a more tangible and expressive shape – even if your motivation is really just saving your two Margaritas.