The Dead Dream of Democratizing the Means of Communication

While the rhetoric of the Internet as a great democratizer was everywhere in the market populism-dominated 1990s, and remained widespread many years after (with Mark Zuckerberg's vulgar PR hacks turning the revolutions of 2011 into a moment for corporate self-promotion) all this is little heard today. After all, in this age of advanced enshittification of the Internet of which anyone at all online is all too aware NO ONE WOULD BUY IT--all as our lobotomized media's remembrance of things past is invariably very selective as, while it makes a point of keeping certain national wounds permanently open for the sake of raison d'etat (like keeping a critical mass of the public frothing with fury to sustain support for illiberal, authoritarian, militarist, racist policies), it drops what is not serviceable to such raison down the Memory Hole, with those promises of yesteryear certainly that. After all, a reminder of the Internet we were promised would just make people even more furious with the Internet we actually got, where we are endlessly surveilled by Authority, endlessly lied to and manipulated by its spokespersons, endlessly exploited for money by those Authority serves, and yet left on our own to cope with the ever-worsening danger from cyber-criminals and their ilk ("Personal responsibility!" they tell us as we wonder just why it's legal for private companies to go around collecting and trafficking our most private personal information), the public bound but unprotected as the monopolists of Big Tech and the security state are the extreme opposite in a world where, just as in that book by Orwell that people love to cite but never read, it is becoming a mark of privilege to be able to turn off the telescreen.

Not only in hindsight but even at the time the contrast between the promise and the reality was fairly predictable. Even were one to overlook the essential naiveté of the view that technological change might somehow automatically bring "power to the people!" discredited so many, many times over the years, the truth is that the Internet was never very promising as a genuinely democratic medium, the interface more suggestive of broadcast than detailed interactivity, and the vastness and sprawl and mess of the web all but insuring gatekeeping that privileges the deep-pocketed and established in every way, all as no attempt at protecting the public was to be expected in a neoliberal-neoconservative milieu of corporate power run amok and a security state gone mad--and more than a few understood that at the time. The problem was not that they didn't speak up, but that their every utterance of the truth was drowned out by a thousand shouts of the lie--much as remains the case today, the cynicism about Big Tech pervasive and growing, but really meaningful discussion unlikely to be seen anywhere near the major platforms, whose staff as dutifully as ever earn their brass checks by making sure of that.

Still, people do talk about the disappointment. Many of them discuss how those who took the promise at all seriously and invested in it--the blogger or self-published book author attempting to speak directly to the world over the heads of the Big Media gatekeepers, for example--generally found themselves walking down a boulevard of broken dreams, as the elitist trash of the media-industrial complex and the middlebrow mediocrities who let it do their thinking for them bathed in the tears of the disappointed hopefuls. However, there is also the disappointment of the way that the Internet looked like a source of salvation in other ways of more than purely private significance. The combination of privatization, deregulation, creditism, financialization that saw the country's economy concentrated in ever fewer hands were making the already suffocatingly narrow and constrained bounds of what could be aired, or published only more so, and generally dumber in the process, as was all too evident across contemporary life from the servility of the brass check-collectors before the powerful in the news outlets, to the vapid trash on our bestseller lists, to an academic life increasingly characterized by arguments over the latter-day equivalents of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It seemed to some that the Internet might somehow afford some space in which to do better than that. Of course, that didn't happen either, couldn't have as things were, with the feared consequences, as what passes for our intellectual and cultural life has gone on getting more decrepit--enough so that some of the gatekeepers themselves seem to be openly worried by the situation, but without the slightest readiness to consider that they may have themselves had a part in that. Their kind never do, ever convinced that all the things amiss in the world are the fault of those they look upon as their inferiors, for in their warped world no one may ever attribute any of the responsibility to those who have all the power.