At the conclusion of his masterwork analysis (summarized here), Cory Doctorow poses the question: “Is enshittification just capitalism?” And then answers it with a resounding “maybe”.
While I appreciate his nuance, I’m not sure I share it. The goal of what Doctorow describes as a “a new, good, internet” (essentially, “the old, good internet”, just keeping the current idiot-friendly social media user interface) is not likely to be obtainable without fairly sweeping social reforms that are going to require a head-on rebuttal of the last sixty years of pro-capitalist propaganda and apologia.
While Doctorow is no apologist for capitalism, neither – in my view – does Enshittification go nearly as far in critiquing capitalism as I personally think necessary. Capitalism essentially colonized the internet, just as thoroughly as any Central American or Mideastern country that wound up with a pro-capitalist puppet regime, just as thoroughly as it colonized the American psyche, just as thoroughly as it hollowed out the U.S. Republican Party… and made it fair game for a fascist conman like Donald Trump.
This is not to say that the GOP has always been fascist. Its last honest president, Eisenhower, was OG antifa – and famously warned against the military industrial complex he’d helped to create. However, there has been an authoritarian streak in the Republican far right just as long as there has been an isolationist streak in the same quarter. The party’s steady rightward shift over the last forty years, coupled with its steady shift from encoded ‘dog whistle’ racist overtures to outright bullhorn embrace, made its current sad state almost inevitable.
Nor is capitalism inherently fascistic – it just tends that way, absent a strong regulatory environment managed by democratic (the principle, not the party) institutions. Those institutions were already fairly weak by the time hanging chads and a corrupt supreme court gifted us with the disastrously and determinedly capitalist president George W. Bush. They have only grown weaker since.
Fascism, on the contrary, is fundamentally dependent upon capitalism… and always has been.
Among the many things that might’ve been had Al Gore prevailed in the 2000 could very likely have included a better regulated internet (anything, of course, would have been an improvement over the current unregulated mess’). No, Gore never did actually claim to have ‘invented’ the internet, but he was heavily involved in the policy discussions in the Nineties around what was then described as the ‘information superhighway’. It is absolutely reasonable to assume that a President Gore would have built upon this early policy framework.
Instead, we got George W. and an unregulated ‘gold rush’ that resulted in major telecommunications companies being permitted to develop and operate the internet’s infrastructure as their private property, bankrupting smaller providers in the process. By the time social media effectively became the internet’s default user interface, the companies responsible for creating it were subject to even less regulation — making the enshittification of the internet as inevitable as the fascist takeover of the GOP.
It bears repeating that none of this had to be inevitable. The core technologies of the modern internet, the TCP/IP peer-to-peer networking protocol and the hypertext transfer protocol (AKA the World Wide Web), were both developed as public resources and publicly funded – in the first case by the U.S. Defense Department, in the second case by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
The entrepreneurs who developed products to run as added abstraction layers on these core technologies have as much right to profit from what they developed as 19th century robber barons were entitled to profit from building railroads and early electric grids, as entitled to profit as 20th century entrepreneurs who further expanded communication networks and public services.
But as much as the current robber barons like to paint themselves as latter-day Thomas Edisons or Alexander Graham Bells, they have a great deal more in common with the exploitive colonial capitalists of United Fruit Company or Standard Oil. The tech bro oligarchs have lined up behind the deranged and fascistic Donald Trump much the same way oil company executives were once all too happy to line up behind the likes of Francisco Franco or Benito Mussolini (at least until it became politically inexpedient and there was money to be made fighting fascism instead).
Behind the press release mythology of Tony Stark-esque billionaire genius innovators lies the truth that the Elon Musks, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Theils of the world are simply children of privilege who were able to purchase and claim as their own the innovations of others. They are rentiers, not innovators, and the rents they collect are based on unregulated access to other people’s personal and proprietary data. The platforms they’ve built have become the essential communications infrastructure of the entire planet – and is operated as the private joint fiefdom of a half dozen or so of the worst human beings on the planet.
And this is where I somewhat part company with Cory Doctorow.
While we are 100% in agreement that regulatory legislation is required to reign in these massive tech companies, I tend to see this as part of a larger exercise in decolonization. Let’s start with the obvious fact that platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are running on top of what is most definitely a world wide web of digital commons. If those of us in the United States were so fortunate as to see the current version of the Gilded Era give way – as did the first – to a progressive era of trust busting and regulatory constraint, the overwhelming likelihood is that the robber barons would simply move to some other oligarch-friendly totalitarian state (Russia, of course, comes to mind) and continue to exploit anorexic teen-aged girls from their new safe haven. As Thomas Jefferson observed, “Merchants have no country”.
The merchants of internet colonization are currently engaged in their most ambitious theft of the digital commons yet, in the form of what is marketed as ‘artificial intelligence’. The adoption and rapid growth of this technology has been one of the most impressive developments I have ever seen, regardless the extensive evidence that it is a financial bubble waiting to pop – an impending collapse that will make the dot-com boom/bust of the nineties/2000s look trivial by comparison.
I do not particularly take issue with the technology itself of what is more accurately described as ‘large language models’, but I do take issue with how that technology is being applied. There is no small probability that, by the time the bubble pops, AI will have become the new default interface of the internet, taking over from mobile device-based social media apps the same way those apps took over from the World Wide Web itself. Once that is the case, what’s the likelihood that the AI companies will consider themselves every bit as much too big to fail as large banks did in the financial crisis their own lack of regulation created?
World wide problems require world wide movements. The top-down efforts at digital sovereignty and digital privacy currently happening in EU countries and elsewhere are not going to be enough. In the same way indigenous people in past eras have taken back what is theirs from colonialists and imperialists, people of the world in this era need to take back what is theirs.
We need to decolonize the goddam internet and get rid of the goddam billionaires. Not ask nicely, not wait for political technocrats to take on their donor class, not suffer further abuse as our lives and livelihoods are squandered for the enrichment of privileged pricks. We need to fight the power.
And we need to do now… while we still can.
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