The Mirage of Cyber-Utopianism

These past many years we have heard a great deal about "cyber-utopianism." The conventional narrative is that the left hoped that the Internet would be a powerful tool for giving voice to the disenfranchised, and that they have since seen the dashing of those hopes.

It certainly seems that the left has been less than triumphant online, that indeed the right has prevailed here--and that this reflects how online life simply "works." (In propagating a message online it is easier for the established, well-funded actor with a substantial legacy media platform to promote a message which is already quickly apprehensible by the broader public, and to which an audience with the affluence, leisure and comfort in expressing themselves normally required for them to be very active online will be receptive--and that all of this has greatly favored the right.)

What is more open to question is that the left ever bought into the cyber-utopian conception--a claim that can seem implausible given that cyber-utopianism was a matter of "Big Tech" corporate PR, techno-libertarianism, "market populism" and the information age hucksterism in which they are all invested, and about all of which one would expect any self-respecting leftist to be skeptical, if not cynical.

For his part, Cory Doctorow makes clear that the generally progressive-tending activists with whom he has associated in organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation. Reflecting upon "Twenty Years of the Copyright Wars" he called what I have described here Facebook propaganda, all as he and his associates "were . . . terrified about how" badly the Internet "could go wrong," with the "revisionist history" of cyber-utopianism erasing their concerns and their efforts from the record.