Tips for Radicals

How capitalism is turning the internet against democracy? How can we turn it back?

If you enjoy stories of the internet’s potential for social change, and prefer ones that transcend the common celebrant/sceptic binary, you should check out this article/book.

A central point is that technology isn’t good, bad or even neutral. Technology can’t be separated from power relations that exist in the economy and society. It will “amplify the dynamics of the existing social and economic system”. Technology under capitalism will tend to reinforce domination and inequality, unless there is a serious class challenge against who has power and why.

The internet has a great potential to create open spaces “for interaction not dominated by the enclosures, ad hominem violence and commercialism of the web as a whole” – but it’s not inevitable.

To defend the commons, we first have to understand it — the physical factories with low-paid staff behind Amazon, the copyright-holders that stifle debate about meaningful and new forms of compensation, smartphones tying workers to the office, the “immaterial labour” dialogue that addresses current Western struggles whilst often ignoring workers made invisible by familiar industrial conditions, and the parallels between corporations control of the internet and the control of the map by imperial powers in the 1800s.

This article is a great start!

For other articles on the internet and its woes/joys, see the Tips for Radicals internet and technology tags.

WHY SOCIAL MEDIA ALONE WON’T SAVE US

I found an article the other day, Insurgent Anarchism: the power of networked resistance, that (sadly) epitomises a major issue I’ve got.

I mean, a few ideas in it got my goat - that corporatism is ruining capitalism (as if it’d be fine without it), that representative democracy is efficient, that ideology isn’t a good thing, rape denial in the case of Julian Assange - but the specific one I’m talking about is how activists often talk about digital spaces.

The article takes one of the two common positions: that online organising beats offline organising (without qualifiers). Some big issues with that:

Problem 1: a lack of power analysis

There’s often no analysis of the corporate ownership of social media and its use in surveillance, or of state control of the internet for that matter. Our networks formed through such channels are entirely dependent on the whims of the channel owners.

Problem 2: assuming the internet is an egalitarian utopia

When talking about “viral” content, what’s often ignored is how who we listen to is grounded in the interlocking oppressions of our society, and how it’s often white dudes who dominate the “popular” online content space.

People often praise anonymity as a great equaliser, and how it removes people’s direct prejudices. What’s often unrecognised is how anonymity doesn’t necessarily have an effect on (a) how internal baggage can be carried over from living in an oppressive society (b) how those prejudices are often displayed overtly anyway and can be amplified by the perpetrators’ anonymity e.g. unchallenged sexism in  many online communities. Just look at the deluge of hate against Anita Sarkeesian.

Social media didn’t kick-start the Arab Spring. Protests in the Western Sahara in late 2010 saw little social coverage. There had been years of tireless organising in Egypt - of workers, non-workers and students - and a number of strikes that helped create the momentum before Tahrir Square was occupied (more on that).

Part of this stems from Western activists thinking that we can achieve the goal without doing the long and dirty leg-work. Sorry, but probably not.

Problem 4: fetishising organic networks over organisation

A lack of organisation and a lack of ideology isn’t necessarily a good thing. Spontaneous and loose networks forming around issues works sometimes, but so does old-school face-to-face organising. They’re both valid tactics, they both have their uses in different situations, and they both have flaws e.g.  ”do what thou wilt” individualist anarchism can be uber-problematic.

Online work can often inflate individualist tendencies - after all, it’s often you sitting alone behind a computer, regardless of how many people you’re talking to. Loyalty and long-term connections are still valuable, even to digital-savvy anarchists (well, not if that article’s got anything to do with it).

Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. I love open source/FOSS movements (tackled more in the article before this one), I love the internet and see big potential for it as an educational/mobilising tool.

What I don’t love are knee-jerk “internet good, non-internet increasingly irrelevant” analyses.

I think I need to do a companion piece on the “fuck internet action” people too…

For other articles on the internet and its woes/joys, see the Tips for Radicals internet and technology tags.

We’re losing the war over control of the internet.

…and I don’t mean the digital rights/net neutrality war (though that’s not doing great either). I mean the war over territory online i.e. who’s got how much space.

On the one hand, social media is becoming more corporatised than ever, with examples such as Facebook’s new promoted posts feature - basically, they don’t show your page posts to even a tiny fraction of the page fans, and they want payment to reach an extra percent or two - meaning that smaller organisations/groups are priced out of getting content on Facebook whilst big companies get a bigger proportion.

The never-that-democratic* platform of social media has become less even, with money becoming more and more of a factor.

On the other hand, big companies have the resources to invest in their web presence and dark arts like ‘search engine optimisation’ and ‘large-scale social data mining’, making sure their content is seen everywhere and targeted based on your personal details, whilst we struggle to even build working websites half the time. As the gulf between out of the box websites and tech-savvy creations grow, so does the gap between big corporates and small radical groups.

What can we do about it?

…I dunno, tbh. I’m gonna try and compile more how-tos for digital tech-y stuff. That’s a start.

*obviously big corporate social media sites whose business model is to sell your details for cash were never going to provide an actually democratic organising space, but some people often forget that and call them things like ‘horizontal’

For other articles on the internet and its woes/joys, see the Tips for Radicals internet and technology tags.