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Title: The Internet as New Enclosure Author: CrimethInc. Date: June 10, 2013 Language: en Topics: internet, surveillance, enclosure, technology, capitalism, economics Source: Retrieved on 2nd December 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2013/06/10/the-internet-as-new-enclosure
Media transforms experience, memory, and communication into something
synthetic and external. In a media-driven society, we depend on
technology for access to these externalized aspects of ourselves. Books,
recordings, movies, radio, television, internet, mobile phones: each of
these successive innovations has penetrated deeper into daily life,
mediating an ever greater proportion of our experience.
Until the end of the 20^(th) century, mass media was essentially
unidirectional, with information flowing one way and attention flowing
the other. Critics generally focused on this aspect of its structure,
charging that it gave a small cabal tremendous influence over society
while immobilizing everyone else as spectators. In contrast, underground
media championed more participatory and decentralized forms.
Participation and decentralization suddenly became mainstream with the
arrival of widely accessible digital media. In many ways, the internet
offered a liberating and empowering terrain for new modes of
communication. Since the basic model was developed by researchers funded
by the military rather than the private sector, it was designed to be
useful rather than profitable. To this day, much of the internet remains
a sort of Wild West in which it’s difficult to enforce traditional
property laws. The ability to share content freely and directly among
users has had a tremendous impact on several industries, while
collaborative formats such as Wikipedia and open-source software show
how easily people can meet their needs without private property.
Corporations are still scrambling to figure out how to make money on the
internet beyond online stores and advertising.
Yet as more and more of our lives become digitized, it’s important not
to take it for granted that this is always for the best. Capitalism
thrives by absorbing aspects of the world that were once free and then
offering access to them at a price, and this price is not always exacted
in dollars.
We should be especially attentive to the ways new media are convenient:
convenience can be a sign that the infinite possibilities of human life
are being forcibly narrowed down. Indeed, these innovations are barely
even optional: nowadays it’s difficult to maintain friendships or get
hired without a cell phone and an online profile. More and more of our
mental processes and social lives must pass through the mediation of
technologies that map our activities and relationships for corporations
and government intelligence. These formats also shape the content of
those activities and relationships.
The networks offered by Facebook aren’t new; what’s new is that they
seem external to us. We’ve always had social networks, but no one could
use them to sell advertisements—nor were they so easy to map. Now they
reappear as something we have to consult. People corresponded with old
friends, taught themselves skills, and heard about public events long
before email, Google, and Twitter. Of course, these technologies are
extremely helpful in a world in which few of us are close with our
neighbors or spend more than a few years in any location. The forms
assumed by technology and daily life influence each other, making it
increasingly unthinkable to uncouple them.
As our need for and access to information increase beyond the scope of
anything we could internalize, information seems to become separate from
us. This is suspiciously similar to the forcible separation from the
products of their labor that transformed workers into consumers. The
information on the internet is not entirely free—computers and internet
access cost money, not to mention the electrical and environmental costs
of producing these and running servers all around the world. And what if
corporations figure out how to charge us more for access to all these
technologies once we’ve become totally dependent on them? If they can,
not only power and knowledge but even the ability to maintain social
ties will be directly contingent on wealth.
But this could be the wrong thing to watch out for. Old-money
conglomerates may not be able to consolidate power in this new terrain
after all. The ways capitalism colonizes our lives via digital
technologies may not resemble the old forms of colonization.
Like any pyramid scheme, capitalism has to expand constantly, absorbing
new resources and subjects. It already extends across the entire planet;
the final war of colonization is being fought at the foot of the
Himalayas, the very edge of the world. In theory, it should be about to
collapse now that it has run out of horizons. But what if it could go on
expanding into us, and these new technologies are like the Niña, Pinta,
and Santa MarĂa landing on the continent of our own mental processes and
social ties?
In this account, the internet functions as another successive layer of
alienation built on the material economy. If a great deal of what is
available on the internet is free of charge, this is not just because
the process of colonization is not yet complete, but also because the
determinant currency in the media is not dollars but attention.
Attention functions in the information economy the same way control of
material resources functions in the industrial economy. Even if
attention doesn’t instantly translate into income online, it can help
secure it offline. As currencies, attention and capital behave
differently, but they both serve to create power imbalances.
What is capital, really? Once you strip away the superstitions that make
it seem like a force of nature, it’s essentially a social construct that
enables some people to amass power over others. Without the notion of
private property, which is only “real” insofar as everyone abides by it,
material resources couldn’t function as capital. In this regard,
property rights serve the same purpose that the notion of divine right
of kings used to: both form the foundation of systems assigning
sovereignty. Some people believe passionately in property rights even as
those rights are used to strip them of any influence in society. It
could be said that these people are under the spell of property.
Similarly, when an advertising agent sets out to make a meme go viral,
you could say she is trying to cast a spell. If attention is the
currency of the media, gaining it is a way to cause people to buy
literally and figuratively into a power structure. The determinant
factor is not whether people agree with or approve of what they see, but
to what extent it shapes their behavior.
Digital media appear to have decentralized attention, but they are also
standardizing the venues through which it circulates. Beware entities
that amass attention even if they never convert it into financial
assets. The real power of Google and Facebook isn’t in their financial
holdings but in the ways they structure the flow of information. In
imposing a unitary logic on communication, relationships, and inquiry,
they position themselves as the power brokers of the new era.
Behind these corporations stands the NSA, which now has unprecedented
ability to map relationships and thought processes. Monitoring Google
searches, it is possible to trace an internet user’s train of thought in
real time. The NSA has even less need to convert internet use directly
into financial gain; the currency it seeks is information itself, with
which to direct the brute force of government. The role of the
surveillance state is to maintain the conditions for corporations like
Facebook to do business; the more power those corporations accumulate,
financial or otherwise, the more power flows back into the hands of the
government.
Until the Prism scandal, many people thought that surveillance and
censorship were chiefly employed in places like Syria and Tunisia. In
fact, most of the censorship technology those governments use comes from
Silicon Valley—and was first applied right here in the US. Since even
the slightest internet censorship presupposes effective and exhaustive
surveillance, it is a small step from regulation to lockdown. The more
we depend on digital technology, the more vulnerable we are to massive
institutions against which we have very little leverage.
This isn’t a criticism of technology per se. The point is that it’s not
neutral: technology is always shaped by the structures of the society in
which it is developed and applied. Most of the technologies familiar to
us were shaped by the imperatives of profit and rule, but a society
based on other values would surely produce other technologies. As
digital technology becomes increasingly enmeshed in the fabric of our
society, the important question is not whether to use it, but how to
undermine the structures that produced it.
To put this differently: proponents of internet freedom should ask
themselves whether that freedom is really compatible with capitalism and
the state.