Photo by Nery Zarate on Unsplash 

Having previously made the case that the infrastructure of the internet is a monopoly in serious need of anti-trust action and regulation, I want to extend these arguments to the content delivered by this infrastructure. Again, the idea is to look to past examples of effective regulatory reform – primarily, though not exclusively, in the United States.

And here is where the analogies for internet infrastructure and content diverge.

While the infrastructure of the internet has become a critical and essential utility for most of the planet, a significant amount of the content supported by that infrastructure is neither critical or essential. For every website operated by a municipal/regional government or public advocacy group, there are at least a hundred sites (maybe a thousand) on the same infrastructure that essentially just sell crap – but that’s not really a problem. There has been crap on the internet as long as there has been an internet, even before the web provided a convenient interface for finding crap.

The problem is the half dozen or so massive enterprises that aggregate that crap and use it to power social media platforms designed expressly to trigger a dopamine response that makes it very difficult to ignore them. The problem is made worse by emerging AI products that turn that dopamine-powered interaction into what amounts to a fairly intimate conversation engineered and fine-tuned to further encourage the response.

While Internet Addition Disorder has yet to be recognized by either WHO or the APA, that doesn’t make it not real. Tobacco Use Disorder wasn’t formally recognized until 1994, but that didn’t make the millions who had already died from smoking-related health issues any less dead – or make the Tobacco Industry any less guilty of making billions from exploiting addiction.

And while there is strong evidence that both cigarette manufacturers and social media platforms have gone to great lengths to fine-tune and enhance the addictive quality of their products, the consequences of those addictions differ. Smoking will definitely kill your ass, in a variety of horrible ways that directly derive physiologically from prolonged use of tobacco.

Internet addition kills in other, subtler ways. Most commonly and directly… suicide.

Social media induced suicides, most commonly among young people, are a fairly well-documented phenomena. Damage to self-esteem, online bullying, and isolation are all contributing factors, all of which could be mitigated if social media companies were as effectively regulated as tobacco.

But ‘death by internet’ is hardly limited to self harm. If the mob summoned by Donald Trump had had their way, there’s a reasonably good chance that former Vice-President Mike Pence might’ve suffered ‘death by internet’ on January 6, 2021. It is no exaggeration at all to say that Paul Pelosi later came even closer to such a demise.

And then there are the times that ‘death by internet’ wasn’t even remotely a near miss. People did die on January 6.

And while most of the responsibility for such acts lies with Trump and his enablers, it should be obvious that demagogues without platforms are relatively less dangerous. It should be equally obvious that the billionaire tech bros who effectively own the internet have no problem whatever platforming demagogues (just ask the Washington Post Editorial Board).

Of course, Big Tech executives claim that their products aren’t really addictive, the same way Big Tobacco executives told the same damned lies for decades. Despite the lies, tobacco has been federally regulated in the United States since 2009 and similarly regulated in the European Union since 2014. There’s no reason to believe Big Tech can’t be similarly regulated – particularly given that the Europeans are already working on it.

It should be made clear that calls for regulating Big Tech internet content in no way endorse legislative efforts to mandate age verification mechanisms in computer operating systems. Quite the contrary; there is significant evidence that these legislative initiatives are at least partly funded by Big Tech itself, in an effort to exploit hysteria and direct responsibility away from themselves. 

At least the legislators promoting this crap are genuinely ignorant of what an ‘operating system’ is, beyond the fact that their iPhones and home entertainment devices use them. No such ignorance can exculpate Big Tech. They know damned well that servers and workstations in foreign governments have operating systems as well. They are also well aware of how easily such efforts could backfire… they don’t just care.

Harking back to the accidents of history that paved the way for the current capitalist colonization of the internet, it once again bears considering what might have been if the last thirty years of American history had been less dominated by corrupt and ignorant Republican chief executives. Net Neutrality, as originally proposed in the Clinton Administration – and subsequently gutted under Trump – would’ve fixed a lot of this. 

While it is certainly too soon to speculate on what the Post-Trump era in American politics will look like, it is obvious to all but the MAGA faithful that there will be one. No matter how much the orange shithead may enjoy cosplaying as Jesus, he ain’t coming back three days after reaching room temperature. Once he’s gone… he’s gone.

And while there are no guarantees that either the Democratic Party will prevail against GOP vote fraud and manipulation already planned for November, or maintain whatever momentum they walk away with until the next election, it is highly unlikely that the pendulum of history will not eventually swing back – swing away from the current era of outright corruption, fraud, and oligarchic abuse of corporate power. The longer that swing takes, the more likely it will swing back hard.

When that time comes, there will be a narrow window of opportunity to fix at least some of this crap. It’s not likely that the second gilded era will be followed by the thirty years of progressive policy that followed the first. Things move faster, attention spans are shorter, voters are fickle and tend to be profoundly under-educated. In the present state of American politics, we are likely looking at a ‘progressive era’ of around two to eight years – if we’re lucky.

That’s why the strategy discussions need to happen now. The robber barons of Big Tech have gotten so comfortable and complacent that they are happy to share their fascistic visions in full view on their Twitter accounts. They are fairly certain their victims are equally complacent – and they might be right.

But an organized resistance can still prove them wrong. It’s not too late.

Not yet, anyway…