The Way We Live (Online) Now

From the start the web had an exceedingly high ratio of would-be speakers to would-be audience--on social media at times, seemingly approaching one to one. The result was that the competition for web user's attention was so extreme as to call into question the meaningfulness of the concept of competition itself--the more in as what went on did not take place on anything resembling a level playing field, since visibility was purchasable, legacy media attention critical, and appeal to the privileged indispensable from the outset. However, the monopolization of online search, and the channeling of a very large part of online traffic through social media's platforms; the gatekeepers' increasing treatment of "non-brand" online "content" as a disgusting piece of schmitt ("the cesspool"); said gatekeepers' taking on the Ministry of Truth function of weeding out search results that might get in the way of Authority's "goodfacts"; their grubbing after ad-dollars on the basis of not taking users to what they are looking for; the advent of "answer engines" that search the web "so that you don't have to"; the way sites "defend" themselves against those engines' searches and artificial intelligence generally in ways that also made them less searchable by humans; the paywall fetishism and general copyright Nazism; the "algorithm changes" knocking small-timers down from their hard-earned places in the search rankings again and again with each quarter and then penalizing them again and again for their losing traffic; the explosion in the volume of "AI slop" online, against which everything made by everybody has to compete; the discouragement of the old-fashioned web user by the increasingly disgusting character of the experience, with all that has meant for the willingness to really search for what they want; among much, much else; have all but killed the chances of those gambling on the web letting them reach an audience through the magic of "discovery" and whatever grain of truth there ever was in the myth of "virality" that were ever the ordinary person's ONLY chance in the game, and sine qua non of any democratization of the means of communication. And that, of course, is before we look at the ways the war on the e-book, the audiovisualization of online life, the ever more thoroughgoing enshittification of blog syndication platforms, the growing brazenness of the Roderick Spodes of Silicon Valley about using their platforms to push their disgusting politics, made life tougher still for some (the self-published book author, those simply not willing to swap their blog for a vlog whether low-resourced or camera-shy or just really word-oriented, those whose interests are "niche" and intellectual rather than lowest-common denominator generally, and yes, the politically progressive, getting the worst of the situation yet again).

Indeed, I cannot think of a single development in the relevant decades that offered all these web users any help whatsoever, the Web Gods relentlessly closing doors without ever opening any windows en route to the Internet's Maximum Era. Yet even with all this having happened any blogger, etc. asking "Why don't I have an audience?"--for instance, to one of those answer engines--will not hear about these things. Instead those they find online will tell them that they must be doing everything wrong. They should have laid out the money for a fancier web site, and search optimization, and paid guest bloggers, and advertising--never mind whether any of this would really have been likely to bring a return, especially in a situation of declining prospects for everyone at the very game they are playing. Consistent with that pattern of victim-blaming and general gas-lighting that in America is called "optimism" and having a "good attitude" and commending which is the foundation of the racket we call "self-help," they pass off systemic failings as individual ones, while in that pitching of services whose sellers will get their money regardless of whether the would-be star makes any money or not from their use (as they will almost surely fail to do) turning a buck on their futile striving.

However, factoring into this there is also the way in which elites are invested in a particular view of "tech," for so long the great hope of neoliberal capitalism, whether its actual performance (their hopes for which would seem represented by the idiocies of the AI bubble), or simply its legitimation. Regarding that said elites can seem stuck in the market populism-hawking '90s, oblivious to how if Silicon Valley ever really represented something more hopeful to those less than in love with actually existing capitalism, something freer and more democratic and uplifting--not least, in its democratizing the means of communication--it has for many come to represent all that is most loathsome in it. No reasonable person denies that the Internet is a hugely important utility that has brought a great many benefits to the world (just picture yourself getting through the period when people weren't pretending there wasn't a pandemic without it), but it also seems that no reasonable person would deny that the terms on which we have got it have, on the evidence to date, also made it a far more useful tool for oppression than liberation as, besides its well-known combination of cyber-gangster's paradise with Orwellian surveillance nightmare that has left the great majority of the public as unprotected as it is bound, it has been an instrument of Orwellian social and political control as well. And far from this having been the "There Is No Alternative" inevitability apologists for and admirers of the status quo and its injustice, misery and brutality so constantly hasten to tell us it is, the fact remaining that, contrary to the stupid libertarian lie the ever downward-punching Establishment press repeats a thousand times before anyone else can get a word in, the "tech entrepreneurs" endlessly marketed to the public as latterday culture heroes TO WHOM THEY ARE INFERIOR actually made their obscene fortunes not by inventing anything, but, as an elementary grasp of economic history and theory shows to be far more likely, by sociopathically enshittifying what an earlier generation had invented not with the "venture capital" of businessmen who risked all to win all, but government-directed taxpayer dollars in a triumph not of the "INNOVATION!" unleashed by the market but of corporate welfare, monopoly power, rent-seeking and the general financialization/bullshitization of our economic life that Big Tech did so much to lead, with the unfortunate outcome to be seen all around us, online and everywhere else.