The Fragmented Past: Spectacle 2.0

The fragmented future has become something of the fragmented past.
Darcy DiNucci, a user-experience web designer, was an augur at the turn of the century, prognosticating what the next era of the Internet would be: the social web, or Web 2.0, as she affectionately named it.
Web 2.0 would be “understood not as screenfuls of texts and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.” As Jia Tolentino explains in Trick Mirror,Web 1.0 had “few search engines and no centralized social platforms, [and] discovery on the early internet took place mainly in private…pleasure exist[ing] at its own solitary reward.” In contrast, Web 2.0 would be everywhere, mobile, and extremely public.
DiNucci presumed that the clunky Internet of the nineties that cheapened the boundaries of space and time, drawing in flocks of curious and enthusiastic people eager to connect and share, would soon be replaced. And its replacement would usher in the era of the social.
Darcy Dinnuci’s Web 2.0 gave birth to the social network, the personalized search engine, and the Internet of Things. The modern Internet, the Internet of the 2000s, was characterized by its push away from anonymity and towards the personal. As Tolentino says, “personal lives were becoming public domain” and “a pastime had turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist.”
This new web of user-interaction allowed the consumer to become the producer. And with its turn away from the anonymous and towards the identified, each user on the web was given a voice — connected with a face in the real world. Web 2.0 was sold as an extension of the early intendedpromise of the early Internet. As Fred Turner puts it, this version of the web imagined a democratic utopia: “decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free.”
Keyword here being, “sold.”

Web 2.0 to Spectacle 2.0
Digital media theorist Felix Stalder urges us to look behind the scenes. “If we look at the front-end, the social media of Web 2.0 may well advance semiotic democracy, that is, ‘the ability of users to produce and disseminate new creations and to take part in the public cultural discourse.’ However, if we consider the situation from the back-end, we can see the potential for Spectacle 2.0, where new forms of control and manipulation, masked by a mere simulation of involvement and participation, create the contemporary version of what Guy Debord called ‘the heart of the unrealism of the real society.’”
While the Internet is sold to us as free, transparent, and public-oriented, it works upon a closed and opaque system behind the scenes, built to serve corporate interests. Web 2.0, rather than fulfilling its promises, has instead ushered in a new era of the web. Spectacle 2.0.
Stalder is careful not to follow in the footsteps of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who famously stated that the ‘medium is the message.’ Stalder does not believe that the technology of new media itself has allowed for Spectacle 2.0 to happen. “The social meaning of the technologies is not determined by the technologies themselves; rather, it will be shaped and reshaped by how they are embedded into social life, advanced, and transformed by the myriad of individual actors, large institutions, practices, and projects that constitute contemporary reality.”
Rather than serving as a solution to the powerful corporate conglomerates of old media, new media has simply allowed for their operation in more silent and, unfortunately, invasive ways. And the ways in which the Web has been so deeply embedded in our lives is a product “less of functionality and more of accessibility.” User accessibility is the sole reason for our internet infrastructure being nearly free of direct costs. Users are what the privatized web wants. Because user access means user data. And user data…now that’s the money maker.
Virtually all of the privatized web’s revenue comes from advertising. “[C]ompanies go to great lengths making sure that traces are generated in a manner that they can gather,” so that they can personally tailor our ad content to sell to us more effectively.
We as digital subjects are subjects of the most extensive social research. Everything we do online generates data. From a simple Google search, Google collects your search terms, the location of your phone, and even the apps you have installed. Scrolling on Facebook allows Facebook, Inc. to record how long you read some content and how quickly it takes you to scroll over others. Spotify can learn something about your mood based on what you’re listening to — maybe you’re depressed if you’ve been listening to a lot of Radiohead lately.
Sure, more personal advertising content allows for a better user-experience, but the consequences of this experience must be acknowledged. We are subjects of surveillance. And who we allow to surveille us has deep economic, social, and political consequences. Platforms like Facebook and Google have monopolized the market due to their efficacious way of advertising and, beyond that, their immediate knowledge of human networks and desires authorizes great power.
But why should we care what some loser at Facebook thinks about us? So what if we sacrifice a little privacy for convenience?
Well, because the same social media platforms that we use to connect with friends, stalk old high school classmates, and share links from the New York Times to fulfil our weekly quota of political activism are the same platforms that provide data for surveillance tools. For example, Geofeedia, a social media monitoring product like Hootsuite, was marketed to law enforcement as a tool for monitoring activists and protestors. (This especially becomes interesting when we learn that Geofeedia was specifically used to target activisits of color. ) Because of vague, dynamic privacy policies, and lack of legislation to protect the user, the user remains unprotected and websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram can give our data to whoever they want, no matter what the consequences. Why should they care when the price of data greatly outweighs the cost of a few legal fees?
The high value of data only leads to the need for more of it. And in order to get more of it, users must be totally plugged in. Website platforms are in the business for our attention and they are winning. Social media applications are built in the same vein of slot machines and capitalize on their ability to distract and abuse our attention.
As we surrender our privacy, we surrender our autonomy.

A Society of Control
We now live in what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls a society of control. What is being sold as freedom and openness is simply a mirage, a ploy to convert more human persons to the digital.
Whereas with our old infrastructure we could understand the cages of our confinement, with the digital, we are unaware of the ways in which we are being monitored and controlled. In order to hold on to our autonomy, we must fight for our privacy. We must fight against the historical consolidations of power that co-opt the language of freedom, finding a new mode of revolution and resistance for this moment of Spectacle 2.0. Educate yourself on how to protect your digital privacy. Join movements and sign petitions with the American Civil Liberties Union against uses of your data that you are uncomfortable with. Contact Congress and the FCC and voice your concerns.

