Death to the Internet!
Long Live the Internet!
Net neutrality, cultural decay, the corporate web, classism, & the decline of western civilization — all in one convenient essay!
Internet culture is spiraling downward, and fast! You’ve probably noticed how toxic it’s become. Hard not to. Awash in banality, narcissism, and vitriol, perhaps it can’t be saved. But to understand why, we must delve deeply into the Matrix. No pills, just stories.
Once upon a time, and not so long ago, there was a burgeoning digital landscape full of enthusiastic programmers, excited hobbyists, fascinated designers, and seemingly unending possibilities. This incorporeal mindscape was populated by idealistic and ambitious creations in all directions. Experimentation was rewarded, users were generally supportive, creators were excited, and the experience was exploratory and generally gratifying. It was a fun time to be online: that first decade of rapidly expanding mainstream internet.
But like the determined spread of the Sith Empire, that whimsical land has been slowly and insidiously transformed into a corporately regulated Sarlac pit of marketing, kitsch, surveillance, bullying, shaming, trolling, mob-justice, echo-chambers, and many millions of unhappy netizens wasting time at work or avoiding their families in the evening, distracted for a moment at the airport, in a car, at screens around a restaurant table, or walking down the street. While the technology and access improved, the quality of the culture has peaked, now drifting away listlessly.
So how did we get here? It’s difficult to imagine, when shackled in the Cave –er, I mean: plugged into The Matrix– that other better possibilities exist. Even now it’s a struggle to clearly remember that ecstatic time of positive internet esprit de corps before money and narcissism utterly dominated the culture. Those ancient ‘90s to early oughts before endlessly aggressive advertising, encyclopedic terms of service, incessant tracking, the constant need to register everywhere, subversive clickbait, the legions of trolls, threats of doxxing, careers ended by a single tweet, and all those untiring spam bots which attempt to plague every digital inch of it.
Difficult to explain to anyone under twenty-five who did not directly witness the foundational times. Or anyone over twenty-five who did not participate. Or to anyone right now who uses only Facebook and Amazon. That lost age has become the Old West of the internet: a brief memory before once verdant lands were dominated and overrun by exploitative business interests and ignorant bumbling settlers. You can’t go back, and there’s no museum for an experience. That early culture was ineffable and fleeting. Not unlike, say: the concept of lifetime job security, which no longer even seems plausible.
Now, of course, plenty of happy and creative people still use the internet (at least, to like, buy an appliance or a book or something) but they don’t make up most of internet culture; that majority of online participation which sets the social standards, creates the original content, and is now broadly, inescapably corralled by social media. Those who spend more than 20 hours a week actively participating online (like me) who are forced into the corporate tide, or relegated to the sluggish unknown hinterlands.
So what if net neutrality ended and the ISPs fast-laned the internet tomorrow? That supposed doomsday scenario of internet freedom. What would actually change? Well, some corporations would negotiate with some other corporations for some money and we’d be mostly using the same services anyway: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Google, Yahoo, Netflix, etc. In fact it’s already happened and probably is right now, and not much actually changed. The two sides of the internet business machine need the other: bandwidth & content — only they disagree about each others’ share of the profits. Yet assuredly, the sections of the internet which make money will continue to function just fine.
When was the last time you saw an independent website hosting its own video? Or someone using a homemade blog structure? Or even an entirely custom homepage? This isn’t 1998 — the internet ages in dog years, or faster. How expediently does the average privately-hosted homepage load these days? Not fast. Not like any mainstream site. Not hardly faster than it did 10 years ago. Not even much faster than 20 years ago when I hosted my first webpage off the 486 in my dorm room. Most of the independent internet is still quite slow and fragile, unless it’s based upon a popular peer-to-peer network or paying extra for expensive corporate servers. Internet service providers and hosting companies already institute an informal disregard for net neutrality. Because if you want the speed and capacity to compete with the big boys, you have to pay. These days when a small random site gets linked to by something giant like Reddit it often goes down quickly. The “hug of death” it’s called because it happens so often. I’ve even seen it happen to university sites, which used to be some of the strongest on the net. This current version of worldwide cyberspace is not resource egalitarian, and it never has been. Its only real democratic truth is quasi-decentralization. Which is good for protecting networks against nuclear war and digital traffic jams (for which it was designed) but not actually great for universal access, availability, diversity, autocratic protection, and free speech.
There’s also an even more unsettling issue: the World Wide Web has (IMHO) jumped the shark. The original killer-app of the popular internet — the formative, adaptable, easy, and basic resource of free expression is no longer improving or innovating. It is, at best, holding steady.
Meanwhile certain parts are getting distinctly worse. Much of it has manifested into a confectionary treadmill designed for consumerism, time-wasting, trolling, irrelevant debate, porn, and cat photos. About as mindless as we used to complain of television before its recent subscription-based occasional renaissance — or like being stuck talking to that one guy at the office whose opinion you hate — or what Times Square used to be, and also what it currently is. Add in a slide show of your aunt’s boring trip to the Barbados and all your friends’ kids’ first days of kindergarten and it’s become downright mind-numbing. A mostly inane, often spiteful, generally escapist, giant database of partial misinformation designed to waste the time of homebodies, bored office workers, and popularity-obsessed narcissists.
Now, as if this current reign of banality wasn’t bad enough, it’s also being constantly monitored by both governments and corporations to track and profile everyone in case you’re a terrorist, a political dissident, or a person who might soon buy a dishwasher. It’s no longer a secret and yet we allow it with a shrug. Are these not reasons to at least be worried? Do they not signify a cultural downslope?
Let me continue by way of personal anecdote:
I’ve been using some kind of computer nearly continuously since about 1984. And I’ve not been wholly off the internet for more than perhaps a month since ‘94. I’m just about the right age to have witnessed the entire PC revolution while growing up. It’s been fascinating, and I’ve loved most of it.
I’ve had an unabashed affection for every computer I’ve ever owned (even that frustrating Pentium III laptop which overheated all the time). And I’ve been excited for most new developments in the industry: new processors, new OSs, and new applications. In the pre-mainstream-internet days I was an ardent BBS user, ever since that wondrous day my mom bought me a blazing fast state-of-the-art 2400 baud modem. I’ve participated in most of the varied manifestations of the online communal discussion forum and played numerous networked games from MUDs onward. I haven’t had an actual TV in years.
Everything used to be changing so quickly. It felt like every new development was only six months away. For a long while if you used any program or piece of hardware for about four years it became not just old, but obsolete. Certainly that was an inefficient hindrance, yet it was also an excitement. In this last decade that cycle has slowed down dramatically.
I definitely don’t miss needing to upgrade hardware so often, especially since its construction and speedy obsolescence is morally problematic, but truly new software and fresh exciting design had always been a pleasure: those incorporeal manifestations of pure imagination and diligence.
It’s difficult to say when precisely online culture became the equivalent of that seminal crappy Happy Days episode, but I think it’s reasonable to use the untimely death of Aaron Swartz as a poignant and symbolic break from the past. It serves to mark the finality of a certain level of innocence, and that’s why his story resonates. Because when a young techno-optimist and general internet-enthusiast kills himself at least partly because of institutional pressure over intellectual property rights, then truly: this is no longer a hobby.
Anyone who’s been on the net for more than a decade has witnessed the continued growth of a giant corporate infrastructure now worth untold billions (not to mention the priceless levels of cultural, business, and personal integration). It has in many ways become that ubiquitous noir cyberspace which fiction once predicted. So that brief glimpse of a futuristic DIY grassroots digital revolution seems laughable and jejune — which probably signifies its truest death: the demise of the pure idea. For when even institutions of higher learning, supposedly designed for the betterment of broad knowledge and culture, are so financially invested in protecting their coveted yet incorporeal 1s and 0s they sue a kid and drive him to despair… well something has gone awry.
So how did this come to be? How did we go from a generation of passionate programmers, excited hobbyists, and idealistic developers having creative fun in a newly digitized space into an entrenched moneyed infrastructure that holds sway over life and death? Well, if you know anything about capitalism it shouldn’t really be a surprise. Profit motives turn social power and cultural influence into commodities to be hoarded. By assimilating any new social movement, the businessmen have learned to resell niche originality back to the larger masses of latecomers, thereby popularizing a bastardized and simplified version of the originating culture — only now tweaked in such a way as to make money. This has happened innumerable times to innumerable minority cultures. Most often to the socially disenfranchised. The pattern is: generate pioneering originality — get ripped off by mainstream exploitation. The newly remade forms do work, but the compromises always weaken the founding conception. We get the benefits of core innovation, only filtered through the mesh of top-down profit-driven control.
In some ways it’s miraculous our current internet even got set up in its core open style at all. I’d imagine an alt-history cold-war-winning USSR would not have developed their global computer network thusly. And by letting it take shape organically, at least for a while, our government’s own snooping and the commercialized exploitation of the system were delayed for a few years. Instead of instituting a network easily controlled, regulated, and monitored, they were forced to adapt to what became popular. So we got an unregulated creative sandbox for a while, which does at least still plague authoritarian regimes. But of course they managed in the end once they realized the potential, as authority and money generally does.
But if you study the history of modern computing, despite its often originating military and business motivations, you’ll find repeated instances where the management had no idea what was actually occurring as passionate engineers designed new technologies simply because they saw a possibility or thought it was cool — or because they read imaginative sci-fi novels — or believed in the positive growth of humanity through science and technology. This is often the way new freedoms gets constructed: under the noses of authoritative institutions who don’t immediately realize they’re being subverted. Coincidentally, it’s also how the United States of America came to be. And we still emotionally venerate this process, even as controls and blocks are constantly placed upon it.
Need we wonder why the book “Nineteen Eighty-Four” remains so relevant? Even thirty years after Steve Jobs commemorated the futuristic date by ironically pretending to destroy the entrenched corporate power structure. The same man who turned out to be one of the most proprietary-minded technologists ever to influence popular computing culture. The person who cemented the sale of style over utility, which continues to unendingly trick people. Selling the trappings of refined taste instead of core pragmatism. Like how the classic campaign to “Think Different” fetishized intellectual and artistic rebellion in order to ironically sell a massmarket consumer product. And it worked amazingly. People have been strongly influenced to desire a unique personal experience and an individualized version of success instead of a shared communal growth. So in this fragmented and increasingly de-localized culture, everyone becomes the protagonist of their own little narcissistic adventure instead of a powerful collective assisting each other for the greater good. And because not everyone can be that one-in-billion genius, much existential disappointment has been ingrained once it was set as the highest goal.
This is advantageous to business interests because unsatisfied people are more susceptible to the sale of solutions to combat unhappiness. And this emotional and cultural development also makes it easier to dehumanize others, to be jealous of their successes, and feel left out when not receiving high accolades. Creating the much lamented vicious cycle of kindergarten graduation ceremonies and participation trophies which has wrought the most egotistical generation ever recorded. It also has an oligarchic benefit of justifying power held in the small circles of the moneyed class, because success, even if born into, is often assumed to be deserved.
So it’s no coincidence that wealthy special interests have gained massive control over democracy by incentivizing and preaching the supremacy of individual gains over communal interests. Unlike a more simplistic fascism, this grants minority power to the upperclass by motivating the populace to work hard towards individual goals and individual distractions without requiring the classic top-down crushing social conformity which is more obvious and easier to fight. Instead, the insidious dreams of grand individual success, in spite of all contrary indications, keeps everyone’s broader rewards lowered. It’s like a lottery for human desires: many pay in and get essentially nothing while a tiny few win it all so as to demonstrate it is supposedly possible. Justified elite power is the cultural root of corruption, as Thomas Jefferson ironically understood, and must be fought with repeated revolution.
We all recognize a nebulous natural cynicism these days found not only in the post-apocalyptic and zombie fictions so symbolically appealing to our collective unconscious, but also in the simple facts of a historically deadlocked legislature, a rampantly scare-mongering media, the rise once again of an excessively wealthy upperclass, and the corruption of debt-based higher learning. That last being perhaps the most intellectually disheartening, as the ivory tower repeatedly demonstrates its moral bankruptcy by a reliance on horrific levels of tuition, exploitive wasteful sporting, shoddy oversight of publishing, general lack of moral center, and a scattered vision for the future (pigeon-holed rather correctly by conservatives as often out of touch). Much could perhaps be excused by the inevitable corruption of institutionalization, but where is the forethought of previous generations? Why must we rely on impulsive social media and a polarized profit-oriented mass media for our appraisals of the future?
If Obama’s unpredictable election proved anything it’s that positive ideological movements are so frightening to the moneyed establishment they’ll foster complete obstruction to thwart even the simple belief that hope and change are actually possible. Generating cynicism aids complacency, because it’s difficult for a person dealing with all their own daily struggles to constantly study the complex system and renew the idealism required to force political change, especially during periods of nominally acceptable economic stability. Revolutions are motivated by hunger and heavy oppression, generally years after the slow and determined rise of a stratified class system (a pattern which has plagued us since the dawn of civilization).
For thirty years now capitalism’s trickle-down variant has been systematically attempting to recreate an intransigent system of wealth and privilege. Conservative propaganda has assured us that if the rich succeed, everyone benefits. But how long must this ludicrous delusion be perpetuated? Is not the entire history of civil humanity a testament to the popular misery of allowing an upper class minority to rule? This should be especially poignant in a country which was designed to break hereditary dominance and unrepresentative power. Yet here we are again, watching civilization repeat its famous pattern, locking the populace into hard work and distraction without sharing in the full rewards. America chugs along with its bread and circuses, like a late-season Happy Days episode, where the original magic is gone but the characters continue acting out a hollow version of the thing we used to love and cherish. So goes sitcoms… so goes the world wide web… so goes civilization…
The rise of an entirely corporate internet is just one more idealistic casualty of allowing the amoral dollar to inform every aspect our lives. Market efficiencies, so touted by the right, can generate competition between otherwise possible monopolies, but function best only in fields of limited and uncoordinated resources. They are not necessitated to everything, and especially something as nearly immaterial and gigantic as cyberspace, where supply and demand do not function normally; a place where capitalism has often struggled to find what it can sell. Where demand has to be generated artificially with subtle and disguised viral marketing to trick and deceive us. The newest things you didn’t know you needed but all the cool kids have. Since wealth expands to dominate all emerging cultural forms, it works to control even the nearly limitless virtual environments formed of patterned energy and communal human consciousness.
In the same manner that liberty gets subsumed for security, creativity often dies upon the altar of sales. Advertising’s goal is convincing and deceiving, not compassion. It is the art of propaganda and should constantly be doubted. Excessive needs, worries, and calamities are fostered so that new cures and products can be sold. Just as rulers create fear to limit freedom, so corporations must generate the need for increased consumption.
Cultivating social anxiety can make warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, terrorist watchlists, illegal foreign prisons, preemptive perpetual war, pushbutton murder by drone, and being bathed in x-rays at every airport seem incrementally acceptable. If you pile on the impediments slowly, and each seems necessary at the time, they morph into those inevitable and accepted hassles of modern life. Such as how general anxiety generates the sale of status items, snake-oil cures, distracting entertainments, and self-help regimes — it’s the creep of supposed necessity. Just like websites becoming overrun with advertisements, click-bait, registering, tracking, profiling, and endless general noise. In return for which we get increasingly bland and controlled services. With all these small losses, the cultural whole is diminished.
The western world has an increasingly strange definition of freedom in the 21st century. Instead of the freedom of choice, privacy, opportunity, financial security, or independence, it’s the freedom to exploit that we grant the most liberty. Merchant-run cultures repeatedly demonstrate that to gain wealth it’s often more effective to lobby the government or trick your fellow citizens rather than produce anything uniquely useful. Especially since truly new and helpful items come along only rarely. Otherwise demand must be artificially generated. One perfect example is how the advertising budgets of pharmaceutical companies outstrips their R&D spending. To me this is utterly mind-boggling. We allow increased commercial propaganda and the lobbying and corruption of our medical professionals, in exchange for a decrease in our own health. No one wins except for the wealthy owners of the companies.
Yet we remain under the delusion of freedom and it’s often trumpeted by the already successful. But if continual control is desired by the ruling class, why would the concept of a meritocracy still even be championed? Certainly they love to proclaim its existence as a core democratic concept, and yet it’s not in their best interests to be supplanted. The trick here is that since nepotism underlies much of the ruling world, the potent myth and uncommon example of a rags-to-riches story shrouds the much broader truth of general collusion. For every Oprah, there are a million Not-Oprahs.
It’s not unlike the classical concept of karma: a seemingly helpful moral guideline, which in practice helps keep a class system in place. Because if your current social position can be blamed on the fault of your ancestors instead of a product of inherent restrictions in the power structure, then you can’t really complain. Your lot in life is a direct punishment for decisions made in previous lives. So internalized shame keeps caste divisions cemented.
Of course in the west we don’t want to hear it was the fault of our past lives that we currently fail, yet we’re totally willing to believe the fault is entirely in our personal character. Our self-help industry thrives because clearly: the problem is always you! You are flawed and unworthy of success unless you’re highly driven and talented enough to dominate those around you and compete for a limited amount of elite spots (which of course you deserve though).
Our subconscious desperately wants to believe in a just world, even when it’s repeatedly proven not to be. For those in power this justifies their often inherited position. While those without power are given the assurance that on talent alone they can succeed. Yet we all know life is not fair. We tell this to children all the time, while still not believing it ourselves.
As social structures solidify, new opportunities lessen. Those in power hold on to it, gaining continual political and financial sway (the new term for which is the 1%). Although particularly in America, the last 150 years have occasionally countered this inevitability as fresh sources of wealth have repeatedly been generated from previously unknown economic sectors (traditionally called New Money because the class distinction was so important). Yet these opportunities were only acquired through brief windows of new technologies and/or the byproduct of cultural conquest in which less developed areas or original inhabitants were repeatedly excised or exploited as cheap workers and new markets for cheap goods.
So what happens when the pace of technology slows? Or when there are no new lands to manifest destiny into? How will each rising generation find a way to make themselves rich amidst billions of other desirous poor and the tiny amount of people jealously guarding their already huge share? Civilization has repeated this uneven situation before, and each time it fosters an entrenched class system, a degradation of the poor, and an eventual violent bloody uprising.
But surely there are alternatives to elite corporate moneyed governance and restricted cultural control. Even without requiring the full-scale socialist revolution so supposedly unpalatable to Americans. We can start with the structural elements. Like instead of debating which mega-corporation has priority over the fastest internet and its distribution, there might be municipal or community run services. A plan which would place no restrictions on the free market, only offer a more easily accessible alternative for something everyone desires. As we clearly prefer a federally-funded national highway system to a patchwork of locally administered private toll-roads, so too with the internet. The benefits of living in a wealthy country should not be squandered on reinforcing a monied class who wield massive influence. That’s been the design of most civilizations since the Pharaohs. The modern internet prospered exactly because it became an accessible egalitarian open standard — the greatest universal communication tool which humanity has yet devised. Only now we’re losing its core cultural benefits, piece by piece, like so many other aspects of our lives which must conform to the overriding domination of the marketplace. Perhaps the truest American Exceptionalism should not be in reserving prosperity for an upper class who already control so much of our resources, culture, and legislation (and by extension our frighteningly gigantic military which traditionally supports worldwide capitalistic expansion) but on providing people with a wealth of options, stability, and infrastructure to thrive without the demands of the corporate plutocracy.
Sounds kinda radical though, doesn’t it? That’s how you know it’s gotten bad — how our cultural progress has slowed. Those innovations which originally came from a commingling of private and public sources have been co-opted by increasingly consolidated business interests and their gigantic advertising/convincing budgets. Such that we’re now accustomed to hagiographies of lauded billionaires being depicted as creative heroes (their dickish tendencies portrayed as only flukes of their brilliance). Yet for every cult of personality and additive corporate innovation, there have been innumerable blocks placed on general progress. Since money is generated from control, proprietary technologies and exclusive content have been the bane of independent developers, hackers, and hobbyists since the start. The continual expansion of corporate-owned copyrights and patents helps consolidate power. When you pay for the laws to be written in your favor then you win, it’s that simple. Whereas each time a high-quality open platform emerges, innovative independent development occurs ecstatically. Unrestricted diversity grants freedom of choice and stimulates creativity, whereas consolidation creates limitations and bureaucracy. Humans have a deep desire to work on projects which have a personal meaning and for which they have passion, regardless of possible gigantic salaries and/or the lottery of stock options. NASA is a perfect example. Highly-coveted governmental positions in an organization which has produced some of the most amazing technical achievements in all of human history. Is there any better example of goal-driven communal spending? Every passing decade in which no one continues to land on the moon further proves the miraculous nature of that accomplishment, a singular triumph in the entirety of all homo sapiens achievements.
The greatest thing about the personal computer revolution was the democratization of previously elite technology spread into the hands of nearly anyone. Even the simple expansion of classic telephone technology into its current broader wireless version has been extremely helpful to the developing world. Yet still, core altruistic projects such as open-source software and standardized platforms are often not in the best interests of profit-oriented corporations whose shareholders covet any source of low-effort income. When they do support them it’s merely a way of outsourcing free work in order to aid their eventual bottom line. Because actively limiting control over fundamental social, cultural, and political resources is the foundation of a class-stratified wealth-oriented society in which restricted access grants prosperity and privilege for select powerful groups. Current online culture is becoming a direct reflection of these trends. Instead of in-depth creative development, competitive social media marketing is a fight for domination, a virtual king of the hill, wherein the reputation of personal branding — the marketing package of the self — is precisely groomed to wrangle that fickle tyrant of popularity and its notoriously short attention span. The greatest systems of control are ones in which people exploit themselves and yet believe it’s in their own best interests.
Perhaps it’s merely my delusions, my own wrecked idealism which generates any notion of shared prosperity, communal development, and open access instead of capitalistic exploitation and exhaustive interpersonal competition. But it was seeded in the brain of a dorky kid who experienced that brief glimpse of a prosperous digital future wherein technology creatively aided instead of emotionally debased the public. Where both originality and distinctiveness generated excitement and popularity, rather than showy exploitation and advertising. I even miss those old garishly chaotic, yet occasionally resplendent custom Myspace pages which represented the users’ individuality and ingenuity instead of the core sameness of an unchanging blue/white Facebook conformity. You hated or loved them, but at least they were unique. The only good I can see in the cultural decline of the World Wide Web is that maybe this 20 year distraction will become less potent and we’ll refocus on more necessary goals. But I’m not holding my breath.
Now back to cute animal photos.
