0716531c_rewilding_the_internet

The following analogy can be useful in understanding how the internet has become such a negative environment. How it has transmogrified from its original promise of a humanistic space that would facilitate the connection of individuals based on shared interests and values to an environment that is entirely mediated by capital, subject to control, censorship and the violation of privacy.

In the 18th-century in the northern German states, officials decided to rationalise the production of timber to enable more systematic extraction. (Clearly a product of Enlightenment principles of applying reason and science to agriculture similar to Jethro Tull’s invention of the seed drill and the suspension of three-field rotation to four-field all-round harvesting.)

Instead of a sprawling forest ecosystem that had developed naturally over hundreds of thousands of years, which allowed for felling without upsetting the continuance of the system, the forests were stripped and trees were planted in rows and grids with the arrangement designed to maximise yield and access. This would be broadly analogous to the factory-farming of chickens compared to free-range rearing.

For the first cycle it appeared as if this restructuring was a huge success. Yields were high and the timber was of excellent quality. This was a false dawn, however. The subsequent yields were a complete failure compared to the past. Fewer trees grew and those that did had a reduced yield and were subject to disease. The overall health of the forests declined precipitously.

What explains the initial success? It was made possible by the preceding centuries of free-range growth and husbandry. The seeming success of the new system was a product of the generations of investment in the natural ecosystem. This was exhausted in one cycle of the new regime.

Taking this back to the Web, the analogy is that the web was initially a natural ecosystem of different communities and technologies developing organically out of the original open and decentralised protocols. From this diversity emerged a formidably rich informational space.

Since then, the Web has become highly centralised and homogenised with a tiny cadre of corporations determining how individuals communicate, share and access information (Google for search, Android or Apple for phone, Twitter or Facebook etc.).

The initial fruits of this centralisation (just like the forest ‘optimisation’) appeared to be beneficial in the initial ‘heyday’ of the 2010s when social-media was new and full of prospect (the political benefits of Twitter and enriched public sphere, the ‘Arab Spring’, WikiLeaks etc). But this actually proved to be a nadir. The vitality on display was a product of the preceding era of the natural growth of the Web ecosystem.

This decline in quality should be apparent to any reflective user:

  • the saturation of advertising to the point where many websites are unusable
  • the confection of low-quality content to game ‘organic’ search rankings
  • the surveillance of users across sites and devices to enable the extraction of profitable marketing data
  • the censorship of political content for the ‘violation’ of bogus terms of use on social media platforms if it does not the serve the broader interests of capital and western imperialism
  • the saturation of pornography and dehumanising media more generally

Thbs has also involved the reshaping of Internet users themselves, from active and independent agents, to drone-like passive consumers of drivel engineered to maximise ‘engagement’ (the monopolisation of attention), where users are like the viewers of Infinite Jest. See, e.g TikTok and its clones.

There are many further points that can be made and ideas that can be extrapolated from this. Two examples:

  • the emergence of supposed ‘AI’ is going to lead to greater content homogenisation and the intensification of informational entropy as the technological mechanism consists in feeding the regurgitated content of the internet back into itself

  • reality itself has become infected by the disease that killed the Web (ecocide). The distinction between offline and online is becoming increasingly hard to draw (politics - the normalisation and ascendancy of the far right and subsequent destabilisation of western states)

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