The internet can do for us what the printing press did for the protestant reformation: we can learn to communicate, work together and solve problems that affect our communities, especially problems that relate to power.
So why hasn’t it? Why is it that even with a technology as equalizing and revolutionary as the internet, do we still live under the thumbs of the wealthy?
Who Holds Power?
Most people want to believe that those in power earned it. In the early days of human history, it was often done through religion. God (or the gods) said I am the divine ruler of this nation, so deal with it dudes.
Sometimes, these leaders gained support by fighting in wars alongside the soldiers they commanded. Plenty of US military personnel became presidents and politicians this way.
At the end of the day though, those with power have money. They have enough money to make more money, to pay soldiers, and to run local economies to their benefit. It doesn’t matter if you like them, they can say and do whatever they want and they’ll get rid of you if they deem it necessary.
Unfortunately for us, this is still how it works. We’re conditioned to believe that it’s to our own benefit, that our leaders run these armies and police forces so that society is safe and happy from threats, external and internal.
We’re told our rights are protected, and that there are places in the world with far less rights and protections than what we have, so we ought to be grateful. In any case, you’re alive and able to support your family. What does it matter anyhow?
Good Leaders
Ideally, the people being lead agree on who leads them. After all, If you were part of a group project that accounted for the majority of your grade, you wouldn’t want just anybody to lead the group. You’d hope, at the very least, they knew what the assignment was and had the basic skills to get it done.
In a perfect world, leaders stay in power because they do good for the people they lead, and the people support them.
In practice, society/economics/politics (whatever you want to call it), is a lot more tumultuous, and as leader, you get used to a lot of privileges you couldn’t bear to live without. Holding onto power by any means necessary becomes the center of your life.
You basically have two strategies:
- Try to be a good leader anyway and reinvest the money you get from the people you lead into the services and infrastructure they enjoy. You may not live lavishly, but the people adore you.
- Use the money to live lavishly and limit what people can do to remove you.
As it so happens, people in power keep doing the second thing.
Limiting The People
When you have a lot of money (and I mean a lot), you can control the information people receive. You don’t have to control all of it, just enough to cause infighting within the people you lead. If they’re busy fighting each other, they won’t unite to fight against you.
Back then, you could buy media coverage and hope that people spread that information through gossiping about it. It wasn’t like anybody who disagreed with you could realistically garner enough of an audience to dispute your authority.
Enter The Internet
Once blogs allowed people to write about their experiences and share it with a much broader audience, traditional power structures were threatened. Now people didn’t need to get their news from a highly edited and well established newspaper.
People could share legitimate criticisms of businesses, current events, and political figures, and there was very little money could do to squash these voices…
…until social media.
Enter Social Media
If social media was a person, social media would be the kind of person who finds a way to stand outside the door of a soup kitchen and charge admission.
When social networks first rolled out, they might have offered a unique structure for connecting with people you knew in real life, but it quickly devolved into a bizarre sort of human farming scheme.
They realized they could make tons of money by keeping you tethered to their sites, feeding you advertisements every other second that you were there. They realized they didn’t just have to show you what your friends were sharing, they could show you things they knew would make them more money.
But people would click off if you only showed them paid for ads. After all, no one watches television to watch commercials, right? You’re there to watch the television shows. And if the television shows are good enough, you’ll sit through hours of advertising without realizing it.
If we apply this analogy to social networking, well… you wouldn’t even have to produce the television shows! Just give a tiny fraction of profits to the people creating engaging content for you to keep them creating (they’ve been doing it for free this entire time, imagine what they could do if they think they can make a living off of it).
Profit Motive
If all you care about is profits (and under capitalism, that is all you’re supposed to care about), it doesn’t matter what content people are making. The only thing that matters is the content that keeps people on the platform, or that makes the company money.
Here’s are the kinds of posts that might do that:
- Posts that praise the platform and its founder(s)
- Posts that normalize government giving power to big corporations like yours
- Posts that make people comment a lot (including negative comments, or arguments)
- Posts that cultivate parasocial relationships
If your social media platform can locate and highlight these kinds of posts, you could count on your pockets being filled with money.
Conversely, there are posts that might harm a social media company:
- Posts that unite people through working class solidarity against big corporations that exploit them for labor and consumption
- Posts that criticize your platform and founder(s)
- Posts that criticize government actions that help big corporations
At the end of the day, a company doesn’t care who uses their platform as long as they aren’t being threatened. If they they find potentially disruptive users, instead of kicking them off the platform, they can implement algorithms and features that limit the total amount of impact they could potentially have. Users are playing by the company’s rules after all.
Algorithms Take Away Choice
In the early days of internet creation, people would find people they liked and follow their work because it appealed to them. As social media companies have become bigger and bigger, they’ve gradually taken away a user’s ability to choose what they see.
Nowadays, people will click or tap into their app and be shown what the algorithm thinks they’ll like. Most of the time, it’s garbage – stolen memes with AI voice overs or television show clips. If they keep scrolling, they’ll see content from people they never followed or subscribed to.
Echo Chambers
The other unfortunate side effect of social media being the predominant form of connecting on the internet is the formation of echo chambers. If people are likelier to stay on a platform if they interact with people who have the same beliefs as them, then the platform will give them content populated by those kinds of people.
Users look for echo chambers themselves. Truth Social and X have become echo chambers for the right and BlueSky seems to be an echo chamber for the left.
People might not want to interact with those who have radically different beliefs and values from them (and understandably so), but it’s a barrier to solidarity. In order for people to challenge authority when it’s being unfair, there is no alternative to solidarity.
Artificial Intelligence
Social media companies are using the posts you make to train their generative AIs. For years, social media companies have made money from content generated by users who shared their work on the platform willingly. All the social media company had to do was monopolize the place where people could put their work.
But with AI, social media companies can copy user generated content and produce content without relying on people (who they’d sometimes pay with a small portion of ad revenue). Users don’t really have an option to opt out – if their work is on the internet, it’s easy for an AI to find it somewhere online and copy from it.
So What Can I Do?
If you’re going to use social media, connect with people on issues that matter. There are social media content creators who pour their hearts and souls into arts and causes that they believe, but there’s also a lot of fluff. Reward those who are doing their best to fight a system designed to squash us down.
Start a blog/comic/website and bring people away from social media. People are getting into a sort of fatigue with the kinds of things they see on social media – half the content you’ll find on social media is either stolen, unoriginal, or meaningless. We need to work together and give our communities a meaningful alternative.