The internet was engineered to connect machines. It wasn’t designed to connect people.
But since people were able to use it – to metaphorically and literally plug into it – the internet has succeeded in connecting people to machines. People-to-people connection through the internet is not only absolutely machine-bound, it is machine-centric. It’s not merely a kernel for people-to-people interfacing, it’s presence in the world is the operating system for routing and controlling what people put into and get out of it.
Despite user-illusion, people are not central to the internet. People are peripheral assets to the internet. Even the protocols for connection are machine, not human.
Every attempt to graft or retrofit human design onto the internet, everything that it touches, and every system it infiltrates, only empowers the internet with more and more machine attributes.
The outcome of the original project was never going to be in favor of people. The internet doesn’t serve us as much as serve us up to new iterations of itself and the world it ramifies. It’s a positive feedback loop of increasing service to itself and whatever funds and energizes it.
Capital and Technology are in charge now because they share a singular platform for their flow, direction, and co-evolution. In turn, the selection-pressures of this co-evolution devalue Labor, which is the only human factor among three.
We are past the lock-in point. Until the trap of that lock-in point is surmounted, we are stuck in an unannounced dystopia.
Science Fiction once warned us of this situation. But while Science Fiction taught us how to imagine dystopias and apocalypses to come, it didn’t prepare us for how to recognize them as they arrive. Science Fiction announced, described, and branded the worlds which it imagined. Daily life makes no such announcements. Dystopias don’t require dystopian aesthetics, just as Fascism doesn’t require Fascist aesthetics.
And if there is one attribute that the internet shares with dystopias like Facsim, it’s the power of de-humanization. There’s an autistic quality to Fascism in the sense it is unable to discern and process human systems, and thus prefers mechanical ones. Fascism tends towards not only a loveless world but a hateful culture. The internet shares a similar intrinsic ‘aut-ism’. Merge the two – which is the easiest human-machine duo to implement – and the result is an ugly hate machine that executes and iterates the codes of hateful cultural mores.
The internet is now ideology, a working ideology that embeds itself as much into the tangible as the unintangible. Thinking itself is imbued with internet-toned logos, ethos and pathos. You can worship or curse this ideology, but its inertia only grows with each input. Anti-Internetism serves about as much as Pro-Internetism as a stimulus for the internet to launch counter-measures against whatever aims to attack it.
Nothing substantive can be done today without the internet.
It’s as much a mistake to think that we can technologize our way out as much as it is to think that we can de-technologize our way out.
We’ll have to Labor ourselves towards something kind.
That’s it. That’s the post.