Autonomía digital y tecnológica

Código e ideas para una internet distribuida

Linkoteca. Ben Tarnoff

Internet for the people

Imago voragine.net
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Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it?

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn’t always like this—it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today.

The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone’s behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It’s time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

Ben Tarnoff on nostalgia, imagination, and deprivatizing the internet

Imago voragine.net
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Many movements throughout history have looked to an imagined past, and indeed actively constructed an idea of the past, in order to envision a better future. And often there’s a lot of political utility in making people feel as if they’ve lost something—a set of rights, a set of freedoms—that they now need to reclaim. Even if it’s not entirely clear if those rights or freedoms existed.

It’s also important to point out that internet nostalgia is a constant of internet history.

What if we could feel nostalgic not really for those previous eras of the internet that the onward march of privatization has obliterated—whether GeoCities or Myspace or even farther back—but what if we could feel nostalgic for the missed opportunities, for the forks in the road that could have gone a different way, for the the points in history in which privatization was deepened when the internet could have evolved in a different channel? Then perhaps nostalgia could be an aid to the social movements that will be necessary in order to deprivatize and democratize the internet.

We use the internet in the privacy of our bedrooms, or in the glow of our smartphones. What if our experience of the internet could be a more collective one, and one that brought us into relationships of solidarity and mutual support with other people in our community? So to that end, I think what the Equitable Internet Initiative is doing could provide a promising starting point for thinking about connecting differently through the internet.