Of Discovery and Digital Democracy

That an item presented without the backing of a major platform or promotional budget could be discovered, and by engaging the interest of readers online who share it with others, enabling it to come to wider attention--in the most extreme form of this, "go viral"--was ultimately the foundation of those hopes that the Internet would enable a democratization of the means of communication in any degree by giving those with nothing but their ideas, their words, their passions, their art, a chance to reach an audience on their own merits.

Of course Big Tech, Big Media and the political Establishment have warred against any such democratization from the very beginning. Of course, it is the case that their deliberate efforts were not the only thing that stood in the way of such online democracy. The mere crowding of the web over time, a process exacerbated by the proliferation of AI slop, was not intended to cut off the small web user's chance of discovery, just made it less likely in an incidental way. The shift of the web from lower-resource text to higher-resource audiovisual content has played a part was similarly incidental. Even the chokepoint capitalism of Big Tech that has seen it make visibility another commodity, and rig its algorithms to keep users on their crappy platforms by elevating some at the expense of everyone else, has been first and foremost about making money for their obscenely overvalued monopolies, rather than pushing bloggers to the wall. Nevertheless it has, alongside more deliberate efforts like the favoritism shown "brands" by Internet search, and the highly politicized campaigns against so-called "fake news," played a massive part in bringing the Internet closer to its Maximum Era--with the fact that so many powerful actors have a stake in the broad outcome diminishing any concern for the role they have played, and helping to eliminate any concern whatsoever for online democracy and the small-timers who set such hopes by it from The Discourse.

Today with that Maximum Era upon us, and indeed to go by the signs of collapsing Internet traffic for those small-timers the Great Internet Die-Off underway--it is in the nature of such a Die-Off that we wouldn't notice what was disappearing, because our noticing it had been foreclosed in advance, just as with the extinction of species the scientists never had a chance to catalog--the outcome may not be surprising. The hope that some technological change would largely suffice to bring "power to the people" has been raised again and again in modern times--and again and again disappointed as, within a society where power is highly centralized and exercised in authoritarian fashion, the latest technologies much more often tending to serve their purposes than to undermine them. (Consider how George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola sank much of their fortunes into the expectation that the means had arrived with which to take movie making away from the big bad studios and put it in the hands of the artists .) Still, that it has happened before, that there was reason to be skeptical, does not make the disappointment of the hope any less painful--all as it seems well to remember that in this case the promise of democratization was in itself an instrument of that centralized power, and indeed the "cyber-utopianism" of which we saw so much in the 1990s really just another flavor of the "market populism" that had the fascists of Silicon Valley pretending to all the world to be hippie flower children who just want to make the world a better place. Too few seem to recall that in this time in which it can seem the robber barons of Silicon Valley had never pretended to be anything but a bunch of swaggering Nazis--and those corporations inclined to do so went in for Market Populism 2.0 in the form of the Woke Capitalism that, reflecting the intellectual muddle of our times, the right was much more inclined to bring to the attention of the mainstream, as, as much as ever, the left was prevented from saying the obvious by its exclusion from the public square in that way that respectable opinion, without the slightest alertness to the hypocrisy and the irony involved, calls "free speech."