With or without you

Losing journalism and the internet in a single generation

Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers
by Andrey Mir (2020)

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff (Verso, 2022)

In Postjournalism, Andrey Mir’s best points are sometimes a bit overstated, but one feels that the emphasis is justified. Given just how smug and uncurious his implicit targets can be, it feels right. His book offers a fascinating history of journalism, what it does, who pays for it, and why they have done so since avvisi first appeared in Early Modern Venice. Along the way, he often takes aim at the self-serving myths of the Trump presidency (2016-2020), at the kind of the people who put “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the masthead of the Washington Post (where I worked at the time), and the class of professionals that insist that our work is both timelessly suprahistorical and urgently essential at the very moment that regular people have never trusted us less.

One of his powerful simplifications resonated with me, given my recent work. The people doing social-media-fueled insurgencies in the first half of the 2010s (Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Square, Gezi Park) and those doing them in the second half (culminating in Jair Bolsonaro’s election and then January 6) were doing the same thing. It’s just that urban millennials got on the internet first. At first, young and progressive people were using Facebook, so we thought the resulting paroxysms were good. Then more conservative baby boomers got on there, so we thought they were bad. Again, I think it’s more complicated than that, but Mir’s book is full of sharp little daggers like this.

For about ten years now I have been saying that journalism is at risk of disappearing. Not just that it’s getting worse, but that the very human activity as we know it may soon cease. When it does people will say they are doing journalism, sure, but it will really be marketing or propaganda. Mir focuses on the historic conditions that have made professional newsgathering possible. At some points, the public has paid for the news; the customer needs to buy the paper to find out what happened. At other moments, a political party or wealthy donor has paid for it in order to push their message into the world. During the 20th-century “golden age” of journalism, it was advertisers who primarily paid, so that they could get out their messages (to people who were also paying, a bit, for the news). The rise of digital advertising and social media destroyed this model. Brands find other, cheaper ways to reach us and trick us into buying their products, and no one is really paying for the news — you know what happened as soon as you log on to your timelines. If you elect to subscribe to a journalism outlet and legally jump the paywall, it is so you can read someone talk about the news in a certain way and, very likely, this decision is tied up with your ideological support for the publication. Whether we recognize it or not, this warps the incentives faced by reporters and editors at even the most proudly “objective” outlets, creating a vicious cycle. If you back a podcast on Patreon or pay for a Substack, you are now back in the role of medieval patron, making sure that work you value is produced for society or, increasingly, we find ourselves in the condition of the hyper-atomized contemporary subject paying for the illusion of friendship.

It is remarkable that there are so few books like Ben Tarnoff’s, and that this one did not get more attention. We have seen a sudden reversal in the popular understanding of what the internet has done to us. Fifteen years ago nearly everyone thought the networks would make the world more democratic and free. Now you can ask just about anyone — a teenage girl in Malaysia, your MAGA Facebook uncle, a renowned critical theorist in France — and they are likely to agree that the internet has made us all insane. I would place Internet for the People alongside Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley as crucial guides to what happened to us. Tarnoff rightly centers privatization in this story. The internet is the product of thousands of years of collective knowledge-building and technological advancements; more concretely, it was created by several decades of public-sector investment. Then in the 1990s, US politicians simply handed it over to private individuals, who use the networks to maximize their profits.

This is oddly similar to what happened in the former USSR during the same period. Over decades of struggle and sacrifice, Soviet workers built the industry and collective achievements that gave them the world’s second-largest economy. When their political system collapsed, a group of well-connected men simply seized the assets for themselves and began to exert profound influence over what was left of society. We now call those men “oligarchs.” If Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg were Russian, we would call them oligarchs, too.

Both Mir and Tarnoff point to the least-undemocratic powerful institution available, the state, as the only feasible solution. We need publicly funded journalism and public control over the internet. Mir thinks this simply is not going to happen. Tarnoff wants us to imagine that it could.