I’m tired of the libertarian culture on the internet
The internet has always had libertarianism as its underlying<br>ideology, or at least for a very long time.<br>It was<br>declared in various manifestos — and for some observers, it was<br>painfully clear where the<br>ideology was guiding the internet. In this essay I want to talk<br>about specifically the cultural aspect of this ideology, and how it<br>affects my experience of the internet. (sidenote:<br>There might have been many ideologies in the<br>beginning, but this one is the one that won out. )
I wrote before about CJ the X’s account of what they call libertarian<br>culture, where the most important part of a person’s identity is<br>their unique individuality, as opposed to different groups they<br>belong to. Libertarian culture at its extreme sees group belonging —<br>or even just having to interact with people, as something<br>authoritarian, chains to be cast off.
The internet, seen through this cultural lens, is very<br>libertarian. CJ demonstrates this in their video by showing an ad<br>from the 90s for a computer with internet capability that appeals to<br>individuality.<br>It paints the city as something dark, inhuman and monstrous; endless<br>queues through dark corridors; store clerks are living corpses that<br>represent authoritarian bureaucracies. You can flee all this with a<br>computer so you don’t ever have to leave your home. The internet<br>comes with the promise of being able to accomplish your errands<br>without interacting with other human beings, and to socialize<br>without chaining yourself to others. It promises to complete the<br>suburbanisation that has been going on in physical space. (sidenote:<br>You can tell it is old because they cannot imagine<br>inscrutable bureaucracies being in the computer. The computer cannot<br>be a force for autocracy, it is liberatory in its very nature. That<br>idea feels… quaint today. )
Quoting matduggan<br>from the article above:
The point of all this technology is personal liberation. Anything<br>that gets in the way of the individual maximizing themselves be it<br>government, regulation, social obligation, your annoying neighbors,<br>is an obstacle to be removed.
With the internet we are unfettered by communities and can pick<br>and choose our identities and interests, tailor-fit our experience<br>to perfectly match the things we like.
This is something that is still embedded in the internet today,<br>of course in Big Tech services but sadly also in many of the<br>nonprofit initiatives that try to become their alternatives. The<br>former because it allows them to amass more power, and the latter<br>because they are uncritically reimplementing the services of Big<br>Tech.
More concretely, this ideology manifests itself in various<br>platforms and protocols. Social media recommendation algorithms<br>create a personalized feed just for you. You don’t have to know<br>anybody or associate with any particular group of people to have<br>content served to you, you just have to nod or shake your head and<br>the algorithm will do the rest. It will give you a unique experience<br>with a blend of posts based on whatever makes you stay longer on the<br>screen.
Platforms like Mastodon that want to be an alternative to Big<br>Tech, or the blogs and RSS readers that predate it, also follow this<br>logic. They don’t have recommendation algorithms so you have to<br>interact with people, choose who you associate with, but that is<br>done on an individual one-to-one basis. The posts still get churned<br>through an individualized feed that is unique to you all the<br>same.
It all leads to a very fragmented experience that is described so<br>well by Bo Burnham in Welcome to the Internet from his<br>comedy special Inside:
See a man beheaded, get offended, see a shrink<br>Show us pictures of your children, tell us every thought you think<br>Start a rumor, buy a broom, or send a death threat to a boomer<br>Or DM a girl and groom her, do a Zoom or find a tumor in your—<br>Here's a healthy breakfast option, you should kill your mom<br>Here's why women never fuck you, here's how you can build a bomb<br>Which Power Ranger are you? Take this quirky quiz<br>Obama sent the immigrants to vaccinate your kids<br>It is fragmented and it’s very hard to tell if there are social<br>circles and where its boundaries lie, contexts blend into each other<br>into a feed as if we are feeding some omnivorous livestock. Even if<br>it doesn’t have to become as extreme as in the song — particularly<br>on timeline based feeds like Mastodon or blogs, the experience is<br>still similarly fragmented and mushed together. My Mastodon feed for<br>example, has news of Israel’s latest war crimes right after a cute<br>picture of someone’s cat; acquaintances and friends are similarly<br>mixed with famous people and complete strangers. Other people have<br>very different feeds, but I suspect it will contain similar<br>contrasts.
This chaos also makes it harder to have and follow conversations.<br>When people are talking in my feed it is shown out of order and<br>interspersed with a bunch of other things, perhaps a fragment of a<br>different conversation that...