Is the Cyber-Utopian Delusion Finally Passing?

I remember all too well the foolish cyber-utopianism of the '90s, not least that aspect of it that held it to be some great leveler, with the weak on an equal footing with the powerful in cyberspace.

I do not think there was ever a time when I took it seriously--it smacked too much of the "market populism" that Thomas Frank so skillfully analyzed in the first of his quadrennially published big books for the broader public, One Market Under God.

Yet, like a great many ideas that are at best dubious to begin with, and repeatedly exposed for what they are--of which there have been many in this "information age," not least the idea of an information age itself--it not only endured but remained conventional wisdom. It has been helped in this by the fact that as PR for Big Tech it was just too good to let go, and that Big Media itself has been so bound up with Big Tech as to have essentially the same interests. (Consider how MSNBC, in line with its original ownership, stood for "MicroSoft-National-Broadacasting-Corporation," all as Apple and Amazon and Netflix are simultaneously colossi in both worlds.)

Still, the critiques did continue to appear, and as happens when analysts have had both more time and more data to examine, become more scientific in character. Yes, such analysts have found, the digital age did diminish the cost of disseminating information.

But getting the information you put out there in the cacophony of the media world is another thing. It requires more than just "putting it out there." It has to be put in front of people, relentlessly, a game that, just as before the Web, favors those with vast resources operating in a top-down fashion, with an audience able and willing to pass on the word; those who have at their command a big, well-funded machine able to count on the deference of affluent, leisured supporters with round-the-clock Internet access self-confident about expressing their opinions publicly (like the executive who has a desktop in front of them in their office as against the supervised manual worker, who may not even have broadband access at home), especially if, rather than trying to carry on a debate, they emphasize driving home a consistent, simple message (preferably one that fits into a meme).

And of course, the dynamics of search engine and social media algorithms would seem to amplify the effect--things that get more clicks put in front of more people and getting still more clicks and more exposure in a virtuous circle, as those who had a weaker launch get the opposite, spiraling downward into obscurity.

As Jen Schradie has observed, all this has favored the digital activism of the rich, powerful, established against those who are not.

The most talked-about significance of this has been political--the way that it seems to many that the Internet is dominated by the right, and in particular certain quadrants of it. Yet it also speaks to the difficulties of those in any situation where there is such an imbalance of resources--such that I again find myself thinking of the hype that surrounded self-publishing a decade ago, in which it was imagined that lone writers with nearly no resources could, at least to the point of making a living, compete against the ever-more concentrated and inaccessible traditional publishing industry. I suspect that at this point many have learned that the odds of that were never what the hype-mongerers made them out to be--and if anything have only got worse since.