Dot Com-munism: Rejecting the corporate web & building an internet for the people
In this piece, Cian McGrath looks at the changing relationship between the left and the internet. The left has utilised the internet to develop consciousnesses, organise protests and effect change. This piece argues however that we need a deeper analysis and asks what an ecosocialist internet would look like?
We are in a time of significant change within Capitalism, as companies use the internet to ‘mine’ a seemingly limitless ‘new oil’: our personal data. From being a mere channel of communication for text and images, we are now in a new phase of the internet as an all-encompassing aspect of our lives, with all that power increasingly in the hands of a few big tech companies.
While the left has critiqued these new giants, as well as the climate impacts of their data centres and the human rights abuses of these companies, this critique has tended to be shallow, and case-by-case. We need to perform a deeper analysis of this imbalance of power online, the convergence of internet use on a small number of dominant platforms and the impact this has on ordinary users. Central to pushing back against this consolidation of power online is casting aside and confronting liberal assumptions about regulating tech platforms. This includes rejecting tha argument that these giants ought to be considered ‘stakeholders’ in fixing problems of hate and misinformation which they have helped to spread online.
Agitation and The Algorithm
The socialist left has built a presence online, posting both educational and agitational content, predominantly centred on elected representatives and media platforms such as Rupture, Rebel Telly and Left Bloc. We have produced popular agitation on Facebook, Twitter (now X), Instagram and more recently TikTok. At times this has been a mass audience and contributed to mass movements on issues like the water charges and the 8th amendment.
However, this reach online is not guaranteed or permanent, and we could be ‘deprioritised’ in these algorithms at any time. More worryingly, as we have seen, these algorithms can promote misinformation and fascist lies, as we have seen spread on Twitter, amplified by their pay-for-views service ‘Twitter Blue’. Far from the internet becoming a sort of ‘digital commons’, democratising the world because we all have equal access, instead control of the flow of information has perhaps never been more vulnerable to the whims of a tiny few companies,.
The Internet and The Commons - Problems of Power Online
The importance of challenging power online cannot be overstated. Today’s world-wide-web is an increasingly privately owned and controlled space, but that was far from a predetermined outcome, nor was it accidental. As Ben Tarnoff’s Internet for the People expertly details, from the research through to building the infrastructure, the development of the internet was publicly funded and much of it publicly owned. The ending of public control required what Tarnoff calls ‘privatizing the pipes’, which began in the US at least with Clinton’s government in 1997 ‘formally committing the federal government to a market-dominated internet, one in which ‘industry self-regulation’ would take priority.’. In Ireland similarly, we have seen decades of ‘national rollouts’ of broadband which, through cronyism, incompetence and deference to private interests have been doomed to fail.
From here, today’s internet developed; the majority of internet use is increasingly funnelled through an ever-fewer set of websites; Google, Amazon, Twitter, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Microsoft. Even where smaller platforms gain popularity they are either bought up (see Instagram and WhatsApp), remain reliant on Google’s Ad service or at the behest of the all-powerful ‘algorithms’. Thus, the development of the internet has led to monopolisation - not the decentralisation promised.
These ‘big tech’ corporations are far more than just online companies and require special analysis.What has emerged is the concept of the ‘online platform’, which in principle means any intermediary between users or users and content online. Their tendency to monopolisation is explained nicely by Srnicek who says that the companies ‘deploy a range of tactics to ensure more and more users come on board’ and they expand not by creating novel services, but by cannibalising already existing services and providing them to users at a low or no upfront cost.
‘By providing a digital space for others to interact in, platforms position themselves so as to extract data from natural processes, production processes and from businesses and users’ - Srnicek, Platform Capitalism.
To understand these platforms more holistically, we should consider what is being processed and exchanged by them. The algorithms which drive these platforms serve a single ultimate purpose, that being the generation of as much profit as possible. There are minimal legal obligations on what these algorithms can or can’t do and minimal public input into how they are run. But what exactly do they do?
From the perspective of an ordinary user on these platforms, one might think that you are in a sandbox of infinite possibilities to meet one’s own desires, but the reality of the user experience on such platforms is very different. The purpose of platforms being an ‘open house’ catch-all service is not merely to attract as many users as possible, but to then further extract value from users by breaking them down into individual data points, information which remains under the ownership of these platforms.
The platforms use these points of information to train the algorithm to know how to get you on the app, keep you on the app and, if you dare to leave, get you back on the app. In the long term, they want to build reliance on the platform, and this process isn’t just informed by your actions, but rather all those in similar demographics to you, such as area, age, race, gender, sex or beyond. This information is privately owned and privately controlled for the sole purpose of maximal profit.
What this amounts to is the power for platforms to cultivate and shape its own audience, both through nudging the users towards certain profitable behaviours and recommending content to capture and keep their attention. Thus when we hear cries of ‘polarisation’ or other such ideas as a result of social media, any analysis that treats these platforms as a neutral party to communication on their platform is misguided.
The access such platforms have to our information, social relations or our sources of entertainment was increased by the Covid-19 pandemic, and so was their ability to shape these relations. The rise in misinformation and moral panics isn’t incidental, anger is very profitable for these platforms. When Elon Musk decided to once more open access to racists, transphobes and neo-nazis, the decision was motivated by personal financial greed.
The turn taken by Twitter is a relevant example. Yes, Twitter has always had the power to decide who it lets on its platform or not, but up until recently they were also the sole arbiter of ‘authenticity’ on a platform that was used to get access to breaking news. There was no public input into who was considered worthy of this badge of authenticity, and thus when the bottom line was squeezed, the blue checkmark of authenticity itself was turned into a product to be bought
This cuts to the heart of the inadequacy of liberal talk of ‘regulation’ of these internet giants: you can’t control what you don’t own. The controls to swathes of public participation have been entirely privatised, the attention and interests of ordinary people have been turned into data points which are privately owned and exploited and access to information is centrally controlled and regulated in the interests of maximal profit.
The platforms cannot be considered as serious about tackling any of the number of problems that exist online, or offline - nor should they be and thus comes the power and importance of marxist analysis in shaping and changing the internet.
Dot-Communism: the fight for a green and red world-wide-web
The potential for such analysis, centred on an alternative vision has remarkable potential, and does not require a huge departure from our current positions. The Irish left has been remarkably strong in identifying the problems associated with Data Centres for example, as being a massively excessive use of natural and communal resources, for the benefit of private profit.
The excess extraction of natural resources has been well-identified by the left, particularly People Before Profit representatives and activists have consistently raised questions about the usefulness of such a waste of resources. This gets to the heart of the primary contention we as the left must have with these platforms.
The creation and provision of internet services under capitalism are of course reliant on an overzealous extraction of natural resources, centred on the fallacy that all technological innovation in the free market is to the benefit of wider society. There are a plethora of examples where the spend of resources exponentially outweighs any sort of practical utility. The need for data centres has however been under-analysed, that being the hoarding of data for the purpose of making these systems more sophisticated and efficient at making more money. Much of this information is information on ordinary and individual users which is hoarded and value is extracted from is seen as the cost of ‘online participation’. The action and value of this extraction is however increasingly invisible and often out of the control of the end user.
In a recent issue of Monthly Review, Jason Hickel provides us a basic means of how we can best consider technology,
‘It is about how technology is imagined and the conditions under which it is deployed… We must take care to ensure that our visions of technology are not polluted and constrained by capitalist assumptions and world views. A better technology is possible.’
If we are to truly embrace technological development in our degrowth socialism, we must be ambitious and brave in setting out our alternative. The mischaracterisation of eco-socialist arguments as being anti-technology or primitive are rarely well-founded, but to truly break free of such allegations offering alternatives that, per Hickel, are ‘empirically feasible, ecologically coherent and socially just’ must be at the centre of our arguments against for-profit development of the technology. There is no better place to start than considering what the internet might look like in a socialist society.
How can we regulate speech on a truly public platform, not a quasi-public one offered by Twitter, when privately controlled terms of service are no longer a sufficient justification?
What would a social network that isn’t seeking to capture maximal attention from you at all times look like?
Could the reform of RTE include scope for an ambitious ‘public streaming service’, akin to an online public library for the arts?
What is the capacity of an environmentally just data storage system? Has the transition away from physical photographs towards seemingly infinite ‘cloud storage’ been a destructive change?
Cian Mc Grath is a PhD Researcher in Dublin City University with a focus on defining key concepts in internet regulation. He is a member of Dublin South Inner City branch of People Before Profit, part of the RISE network and Rupture website co-editor.