What the Web of Today Teaches Us

Rather than some gigantic cyber-agora where wide, deep, societal participation makes the shape of the web and of its traffic a reflection of genuine consensus the Internet has proven to be an essentially broadcast-type media, gatekept by a handful of profit-driven corporate colossi, all as resources, the leveraging of legacy media, and the support of the more privileged part of the public, decisively affect what is likely to be seen on it. Especially with past success being rewarded with greater visibility and vice-versa, such that those rich in the "attention economy" get richer and the poor poorer; and the increasing elusiveness of success for the newcomer and small-timer as the web fragments, and the pattern of usage becomes less exploratory and involved in a way making "surfing the web" a thing of the past (don't expect comments or backlinks for your little blog these days); the result is that a small number of well-resourced platforms may be increasingly monopolizing Internet traffic, the story going that a mere hundred domains account for ninety percent of all activity as the part played by the smaller fry dwindles, and these indeed seem to be going extinct amid the Internet's "Maximum Era."

Unsurprisingly the discourse is no more democratic now than it was before, as indeed the web is dominated by those who dominate everywhere else, with a predictable result the fact that they have succeeded in making it another prop to their power, enabling them to that much more thoroughly dictate the political agenda (the web has been very useful indeed to those who wanted the culture war with its obfuscations and diversions to be at the center of political life), and rehabilitate extremist views previously thought permanently marginalized. (Remember the talk about a post-racial era when Barack Obama was elected President? Don't see anyone talking that way now, do ya?) Still, it isn't just leftists and liberals who have been disappointed, those on the broader right endlessly feeling themselves betrayed by those personages and institutions to which they lent their support, online as in other places. The result is that those who championed cyber-utopianism--I suspect, much less a view of liberals or the left (or any sort of grass-roots right for that matter) than the propaganda of corporate PR in the '90s (before woke capitalism there was market populism--would seem to have earned every bit of the contempt that those skeptical of the stupidities they talked held for them, with even those who are not dissenters, experiencing the general enshittification of online life. Alas, I suspect very few have learned the lesson, let alone shown the mental capacity to remember its significance as the successors of those who foisted that particular dreck on the public perpetrate the frauds of the present day in a world falling apart.