I watched the matrix again recently and it reminded me of just how horizontal the internet and ideas about the online space were in the 1990s and early aughts. Would highly recommend a re-watch if you haven't seen it in a while!
Back then, in our bedrooms, we could create different identities for ourselves (largely based on curiosity / persona experimentation, rather than trolling), hang out in 'lounges' in simulated worlds. it was a space for weirdos, coders and maybe I'm viewing it with rose tinted glasses but those early days invoke what Derrida talked about when he wrote about deconstruction - being possible to read intertextual slippage in home-made urls and the re-use of data present on home-made websites. The horizontal-ness allowed for boundless opportunities for interpretations because we were creating our own 'homes' and 'visiting' others online.
Now, we have been streamlined into accessing the internet via platforms and even our search engines exist as a hierarchy. There's absolutely something there when you talk about youngsters today finding a home in fascism - maybe because it's information presented to them rather than what they've actively searched for.
Students I teach now have to create 'mind maps' before writing essays to articulate how they have reached the idea and point they're making. I'm interested in the evolution of Digital Gardens for internet users. For now, what is revolutionising my internet use is bogglingly simple - the Bookmarks tab.
It reminds me of the newspapers in Mexico in the late 1990s, which, along with radio and television, maintained right-wing and pro-government positions. There were few places in the media where official positions were questioned. Some newspapers and news programmes seemed ridiculous to me because they had so much advertising. This situation seems like a repeat of that, but on steroids.
Interesting article. I’m slightly surprised at the emphasis you place on business/marketing/corporate control compared to political, which almost seems tagged on at the end. While it’s true that marketing drivel now fills much of social media, the really insidious control is the suppression (or removal) of politically inconvenient content coupled with the massive ramping up of reach of those expressing ‘desirable’ views. We all experience on X the deluge of ‘pro-Palestinian supporters are Hamas’ and ‘there is no hunger/genocide/shortage of supplies in Gaza’ from accounts we do not follow. Similarly Meta very clearly suppresses political content and quietly removes some (e.g. deleting evidence of war crimes).
Assange warned of this some years back, in particular the ability of the internet to re-edit content to suit current political policy in a way that cannot be done with books or newspapers.
While the descent into marketing tat rather than sharing ideas is a terrible waste, it seems to me that the conversion into a tool for political manipulation is the much greater danger to society.
That said, it’s an enjoyable, thought-provoking piece.
A final thought: the time seems ripe for a new exchange of ideas platform outside of corporate/political control. I’m sure very smart people are working on this right now. Let’s hope they succeed.
you ought to read paul starr's creation of media, focuses on the american side of the development of the public sphere, though its fairly liberally minded and uses economist jargon such as constitutive choices. its discussion of the western union's telegraph monopoly and bell labs' is more important to the playing out of the internet as public utility / intellectual commons vs private control of infrastructure. musk is akin to jay gould in that regard. the state ran post office is now an abberation in american politics, every other communication technology has come about via private ownership and has thusly been used to those ends.
i mean nobody even talked about the anti net neutrality legislation this year even though it was reddits biggest bugbear in 2017. im more concerned with the existence of databases (which as we learned from the database animals book are all based upon pornographic categorization) and the way in which cultural knowledge is diffused amongst enthusiasts. if the public sphere only allowed for the intermingling of new and old elites, and the culture industry captured the minds of the truly universal "public sphere" then my only hope is that annas archive will be able to freely give access to all information to all but no one will care to read it.
Your article reminded me of the Indian government's crackdown on independent journalism. Here are my rambling 1 AM thoughts on the connection between political and corporate interests and the taming of the internet in India.
The most infamous example is the 2022 takeover of NDTV by Gautam Adani, a close ally of the BJP and the second richest man in India. The takeover by Adani followed years of harassment by the central government; their TV channel was at one point banned for threatening national security (an action soon reversed by the Supreme Court), and after that failed, the Central Bureau of Investigation conducted a blitzkrieg of raids on NDTV offices for fraud allegations that were soon dropped after the Adani takeover. I used to lean on NDTV's website as a credible news source; ever since the Adani takeover, their website has more celebrity news and barely any critical coverage of Indian politics.
The assault on independent journalism on the internet continues today. Several police cases have been filed against Siddarth Varadarajan, a founding editor of The Wire, for his critical reporting on the government; many of the cases invoke Section 152 of the BNS that criminalizes acts endangering the "sovereignty, unity, and integrity" of India -- vague wording that enables this kind of vindictive police action. One of the police cases was provoked by an article quoting India's defense attaché to Indonesia, when he explained how decisions made by the central government led to the loss of fighter jets to Pakistan in Operation Sindoor. Given that the offensive content consisted of quotes from the government's own man, it seems clear that the police case was entirely vindictive.
Adani Enterprises filed a defamation case against The Wire and many other independent journalists for their critical reporting on Adani's business dealings; the central government eagerly cooperated with the lawsuit, ordering these journalists to take down several articles and videos, many of them merely citing the SEC's own allegations of Adani committing securities fraud.
With time, The Wire and similar outlets might meet a similar fate to NDTV. The BJP and the massive conglomerates backing them have found a winning strategy for 'vertically' reorganizing online journalism to favor their interests.
Your article focuses on the internet in its capacity for individuals to socialize and express themselves, but I think you've pinpointed an analogy that can go much further to touch on the internet's facilitation of independent journalism as well. There are countless countries that attack press freedom, but the case of India is special because it was, until recently, a largely functional democracy with many safeguards to protect press freedom. The strategy taken by the Indian government can serve as an example to authoritarian leaders across the world; in the US, Trump has already started using lawsuits to attack news outlets he dislikes, and Trump's corporate allies are further accelerating the process of media consolidation in the GOP's favor. This formula of "lawsuits+corporate acquisition/merger" will rapidly restructure the media landscape in not just India but many countries that used to comprise the liberal world order.
I saw a comment below critiquing your focus on corporate control of the internet vs political control -- I would argue that the two are intrinsically linked and can not be considered separately. The takeover of NDTV in India and, more recently, the merger of Sundance and Paramount reveal how corporate and political interests are increasingly in sync and collaborating to tame the internet.
Open systems feel egalitarian only until scale forces hierarchy back in. Once attention, money, and visibility are centralized, participation quietly turns from dialogue into spectatorship.
I think that the semi-planned street demonstration has actually become vertical. I've experienced organizations who use the police to maintain control of the march, yellow vest people at protests throwing people that act out at the cops, spontaneous chants shut down by the person with the megaphone. The street protest is a structured place now which generally means a far less effective protest culture. I've only been to one truly unplanned protest last summer after attending lots. (Not saying where).
The first step the millennial ad salesman took toward building hierarchies was to flatten the distinction between who you are IRL and who you are online. I worked at a social network (we called it an "online community") in 03-04, and this was the distinctive mark of Facebook, even before it opened up beyond college students: you had to offer proof of your offline personhood & sign up as yourself. Prior to that, no one knew you were a dog on the internet, etc. I've always felt this to be a huge milestone/shift few recognize the importance of. Thank you for connecting all these dots...I still mourn the techno-optimist era.
various types and patterns of control. this way or that, natural law always seems to loose from the bullies in the sand pit. when I was young we watched Monty Python a lot (still on television then) and which coIncided with reading Habermas and Weber in University. it's when I began to see that Empire needs well-educated worker-drones to maximise profits, while at the same time this nibbles away at the elites' apparently not-so-all powerful position. it makes for a painful equilibrium.
I watched the matrix again recently and it reminded me of just how horizontal the internet and ideas about the online space were in the 1990s and early aughts. Would highly recommend a re-watch if you haven't seen it in a while!
Back then, in our bedrooms, we could create different identities for ourselves (largely based on curiosity / persona experimentation, rather than trolling), hang out in 'lounges' in simulated worlds. it was a space for weirdos, coders and maybe I'm viewing it with rose tinted glasses but those early days invoke what Derrida talked about when he wrote about deconstruction - being possible to read intertextual slippage in home-made urls and the re-use of data present on home-made websites. The horizontal-ness allowed for boundless opportunities for interpretations because we were creating our own 'homes' and 'visiting' others online.
Now, we have been streamlined into accessing the internet via platforms and even our search engines exist as a hierarchy. There's absolutely something there when you talk about youngsters today finding a home in fascism - maybe because it's information presented to them rather than what they've actively searched for.
Students I teach now have to create 'mind maps' before writing essays to articulate how they have reached the idea and point they're making. I'm interested in the evolution of Digital Gardens for internet users. For now, what is revolutionising my internet use is bogglingly simple - the Bookmarks tab.
It reminds me of the newspapers in Mexico in the late 1990s, which, along with radio and television, maintained right-wing and pro-government positions. There were few places in the media where official positions were questioned. Some newspapers and news programmes seemed ridiculous to me because they had so much advertising. This situation seems like a repeat of that, but on steroids.
Interesting article. I’m slightly surprised at the emphasis you place on business/marketing/corporate control compared to political, which almost seems tagged on at the end. While it’s true that marketing drivel now fills much of social media, the really insidious control is the suppression (or removal) of politically inconvenient content coupled with the massive ramping up of reach of those expressing ‘desirable’ views. We all experience on X the deluge of ‘pro-Palestinian supporters are Hamas’ and ‘there is no hunger/genocide/shortage of supplies in Gaza’ from accounts we do not follow. Similarly Meta very clearly suppresses political content and quietly removes some (e.g. deleting evidence of war crimes).
Assange warned of this some years back, in particular the ability of the internet to re-edit content to suit current political policy in a way that cannot be done with books or newspapers.
While the descent into marketing tat rather than sharing ideas is a terrible waste, it seems to me that the conversion into a tool for political manipulation is the much greater danger to society.
That said, it’s an enjoyable, thought-provoking piece.
A final thought: the time seems ripe for a new exchange of ideas platform outside of corporate/political control. I’m sure very smart people are working on this right now. Let’s hope they succeed.
you ought to read paul starr's creation of media, focuses on the american side of the development of the public sphere, though its fairly liberally minded and uses economist jargon such as constitutive choices. its discussion of the western union's telegraph monopoly and bell labs' is more important to the playing out of the internet as public utility / intellectual commons vs private control of infrastructure. musk is akin to jay gould in that regard. the state ran post office is now an abberation in american politics, every other communication technology has come about via private ownership and has thusly been used to those ends.
i mean nobody even talked about the anti net neutrality legislation this year even though it was reddits biggest bugbear in 2017. im more concerned with the existence of databases (which as we learned from the database animals book are all based upon pornographic categorization) and the way in which cultural knowledge is diffused amongst enthusiasts. if the public sphere only allowed for the intermingling of new and old elites, and the culture industry captured the minds of the truly universal "public sphere" then my only hope is that annas archive will be able to freely give access to all information to all but no one will care to read it.
I think this text goes in the same direction https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-big-tech-killed-online-debate
Your article reminded me of the Indian government's crackdown on independent journalism. Here are my rambling 1 AM thoughts on the connection between political and corporate interests and the taming of the internet in India.
The most infamous example is the 2022 takeover of NDTV by Gautam Adani, a close ally of the BJP and the second richest man in India. The takeover by Adani followed years of harassment by the central government; their TV channel was at one point banned for threatening national security (an action soon reversed by the Supreme Court), and after that failed, the Central Bureau of Investigation conducted a blitzkrieg of raids on NDTV offices for fraud allegations that were soon dropped after the Adani takeover. I used to lean on NDTV's website as a credible news source; ever since the Adani takeover, their website has more celebrity news and barely any critical coverage of Indian politics.
The assault on independent journalism on the internet continues today. Several police cases have been filed against Siddarth Varadarajan, a founding editor of The Wire, for his critical reporting on the government; many of the cases invoke Section 152 of the BNS that criminalizes acts endangering the "sovereignty, unity, and integrity" of India -- vague wording that enables this kind of vindictive police action. One of the police cases was provoked by an article quoting India's defense attaché to Indonesia, when he explained how decisions made by the central government led to the loss of fighter jets to Pakistan in Operation Sindoor. Given that the offensive content consisted of quotes from the government's own man, it seems clear that the police case was entirely vindictive.
Adani Enterprises filed a defamation case against The Wire and many other independent journalists for their critical reporting on Adani's business dealings; the central government eagerly cooperated with the lawsuit, ordering these journalists to take down several articles and videos, many of them merely citing the SEC's own allegations of Adani committing securities fraud.
With time, The Wire and similar outlets might meet a similar fate to NDTV. The BJP and the massive conglomerates backing them have found a winning strategy for 'vertically' reorganizing online journalism to favor their interests.
Your article focuses on the internet in its capacity for individuals to socialize and express themselves, but I think you've pinpointed an analogy that can go much further to touch on the internet's facilitation of independent journalism as well. There are countless countries that attack press freedom, but the case of India is special because it was, until recently, a largely functional democracy with many safeguards to protect press freedom. The strategy taken by the Indian government can serve as an example to authoritarian leaders across the world; in the US, Trump has already started using lawsuits to attack news outlets he dislikes, and Trump's corporate allies are further accelerating the process of media consolidation in the GOP's favor. This formula of "lawsuits+corporate acquisition/merger" will rapidly restructure the media landscape in not just India but many countries that used to comprise the liberal world order.
I saw a comment below critiquing your focus on corporate control of the internet vs political control -- I would argue that the two are intrinsically linked and can not be considered separately. The takeover of NDTV in India and, more recently, the merger of Sundance and Paramount reveal how corporate and political interests are increasingly in sync and collaborating to tame the internet.
Nicely, sadly put.
Open systems feel egalitarian only until scale forces hierarchy back in. Once attention, money, and visibility are centralized, participation quietly turns from dialogue into spectatorship.
I think that the semi-planned street demonstration has actually become vertical. I've experienced organizations who use the police to maintain control of the march, yellow vest people at protests throwing people that act out at the cops, spontaneous chants shut down by the person with the megaphone. The street protest is a structured place now which generally means a far less effective protest culture. I've only been to one truly unplanned protest last summer after attending lots. (Not saying where).
The first step the millennial ad salesman took toward building hierarchies was to flatten the distinction between who you are IRL and who you are online. I worked at a social network (we called it an "online community") in 03-04, and this was the distinctive mark of Facebook, even before it opened up beyond college students: you had to offer proof of your offline personhood & sign up as yourself. Prior to that, no one knew you were a dog on the internet, etc. I've always felt this to be a huge milestone/shift few recognize the importance of. Thank you for connecting all these dots...I still mourn the techno-optimist era.
various types and patterns of control. this way or that, natural law always seems to loose from the bullies in the sand pit. when I was young we watched Monty Python a lot (still on television then) and which coIncided with reading Habermas and Weber in University. it's when I began to see that Empire needs well-educated worker-drones to maximise profits, while at the same time this nibbles away at the elites' apparently not-so-all powerful position. it makes for a painful equilibrium.