Digital Common Sense, Part One

What would Thomas Paine say?

“O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the Globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

— Thomas Paine, Common Sense

I think we need to go back and reconsider the Internet.

This is something I often find myself doing. Years ago, I started a hybrid company and nonprofit that sought to build a digital infrastructure for a holistic social movement integrating media, education, and a peer-to-peer social network. The project wanted to grow quickly, but we were starved for capital (unlike, say, Turning Points), and couldn’t survive. I learned a lot from that attempt, and I reflect on it often.

Our current digital infrastructure — controlled by private corporations and unfathomably wealthy tech oligarchs — is not, even now, the inevitable endpoint. It’s worth remembering that the internet remains a young medium: What it will eventually become is still undetermined. We can still transform it.

We’re fifty years into a communications revolution whose trajectory remains open, despite the dominance of current platforms and the infamous “network effect.” I agree with Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” Media technology profoundly shapes human consciousness, individually and collectively. Just as the drum, the fire, and the oral story were technologies for defining the structure of traditional communities, today the structure of our society is defined by online platforms, media networks, and applications.

According to political philosopher Antonio Negri, in post-industrial civilization the most important form of production is not anything physical but “immaterial production” (stories, images, memes, affective networks, applications) and, in a world of immaterial production, the most essential thing that gets manufactured and constantly re-imprinted is subjectivity itself. The Internet — as the all-encompassing digital ambience in which we live our lives — is the battleground for this ongoing “production of subjectivities,” which directly impacts political, ecological, and economic realities.

A lot of the destabilization and disorientation of our current sociopolitical crisis — including the rise of Trump — can be attributed directly to the architecture of platforms such as Facebook, which uses algorithms to manipulate how its billions of users see and understand their world. When all of the tech oligarchs attended the recent dinner with Trump and King Charles, I had a hard time deciding if Trump was actually their stooge, doing their bidding, or if they were Trump’s lackeys, scared of his power to break up their monopolies and arrest them. Perhaps the answer is, both at once?

I am not a Luddite. I still believe that the incredible power of digital tools and virtual networks can — under different circumstances — serve the good. In fact, I think we need to rebuild and recreate these tools so they benefit humanity and the Earth, instead of maximizing the power and profit of tech oligarchs and corrupt despots.

History offers some precedents. For instance, the printing press, invented by Gutenberg around 1440, was first used to disseminate religious scripture. Eventually, this new technology disrupted established power and transformed social relations. By making the Bible accessible in common languages rather than exclusively in Latin, it shattered the Catholic Church’s monopoly on scriptural interpretation. Within decades, this democratization of access catalyzed the Protestant Reformation—a political revolution as well as a spiritual one, redistributing authority from hierarchical institutions to communities of interpretation, leading directly to the English Civil War and other conflicts.

The revolutionary potential of print only amplified over subsequent centuries. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the same technology enabled the circulation of texts such as Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman—works that catalyzed movements of awakening and liberation, transforming the political landscape of the modern world.

The printing press didn’t just reproduce existing knowledge; it created conditions for new forms of political consciousness and collective organization that were unthinkable before its arrival. We could not have had the modern liberal nation state without a printing press which disseminated a shared context of news and information to the voting population. Similarly, we are still seeing the geopolitical impacts of today’s new media technology, the Internet, unfolding in real time. Despite current conditions, the eventual outcome remains unknown.

The internet has so far followed a different trajectory than the printing press, but the comparison is worth considering.

The Internet began with great idealism about democratization, peer-to-peer connection, and the free flow of information. At first, it seemed destined to have an emancipatory role in society, making the world, as Facebook said, “more open and connected.” Early internet culture often embodied genuine egalitarianism, gift economies, and knowledge sharing.

Over several decades, much of the internet’s infrastructure was captured by corporations. Profit-maximizing financial interests, working with the U.S. government, realized that the global communications commons could be privatized, optimized for profit extraction and societal control, rather than empowerment and participation. In Internet for the People, Ben Tarnoff writes:

The internet started out in the 1970s as an experimental technology created by US military researchers. In the 1980s, it grew into a government-owned computer network used primarily by academics. Then, in the 1990s, privatization began. The privatization of the internet was a process, not an event. It did not involve a simple transfer of ownership from the public sector to the private but rather a more complex movement whereby corporations programmed the profit motive into every level of the network. A system built by scientists was renovated for the purpose of profit maximization. This took hardware, software, legislation, entrepreneurship. It took decades. And it touched all of the internet’s many pieces.

As we know, these corporate-controlled platforms do not seek to empower us. Instead, they efficiently extract the maximum financial value from us.

Over the last decades, according to economist Yanis Varoufakis, we left behind traditional Capitalism and entered something different: He calls it “technofeudalism.” In this new reality, the people are reduced to digital sharecroppers or serfs, serving our wealthy network overlords. Our data and attention gets mined and harvested, outside of our control or oversight. The networks and media platforms we use constantly manipulate our behavior and colonize our consciousness via algorithms.

It doesn’t have to be this way — it shouldn’t be this way. In fact, we can still change it, if enough people care enough to do something about it, and if we find the requisite capital along with technical and mimetic capacity.

The Tragedy of Facebook as a Case Study

We are, now, all of us, serfs in the attention economy, our data harvested, our behavior manipulated, our minds colonized by secret algorithms. As Shoshana Zuboff observes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, “We thought we were searching Google, but Google was searching us.” Zuboff noted in The New York Times in 2020:

The debate on privacy and law at the Federal Trade Commission was unusually heated that day. Tech industry executives “argued that they were capable of regulating themselves and that government intervention would be costly and counterproductive.” Civil libertarians warned that the companies’ data capabilities posed “an unprecedented threat to individual freedom.” One observed, “We have to decide what human beings are in the electronic age. Are we just going to be chattel for commerce?” A commissioner asked, ‘‘Where should we draw the line?” The year was 1997.

The line was never drawn, and the executives got their way. Twenty-three years later the evidence is in. The fruit of that victory was a new economic logic that I call “surveillance capitalism.” Its success depends upon one-way-mirror operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of misdirection, euphemism and mendacity. It rooted and flourished in the new spaces of the internet, once celebrated by surveillance capitalists as “the world’s largest ungoverned space.” But power fills a void, and those once wild spaces are no longer ungoverned. Instead, they are owned and operated by private surveillance capital and governed by its iron laws.

The asymmetry between those who own the infrastructure and those who are forced to use it has become, along with skyrocketing wealth inequality, the defining power imbalance of our time.

The internet’s original promise of democratizing knowledge and enhancing human connection is mutating, over time, into its opposite. The digital tools that once seemed to be usurping in a new age of cooperation, openness, and shared prosperity have been co-opted, privatized, and weaponized. As a result of the social architecture and the design of these platforms, we find ourselves, more connected than ever in some sense, yet more fragmented. We are saturated in information (“info-tainment”), yet starved for meaning and truth. We’ve been corralled into algorithmic echo chambers that amplify our worst impulses while numbing our capacity for genuine deliberation and collective care.

Facebook is, of course, a case in point. In “The Largest Autocracy on Earth” (The Atlantic, 2021), Adrienne LaFrance realized that Facebook should be considered a hostile foreign power by the U.S. and other governments, actively working to “destroy democracy.” She writes:

This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations—China and India—combined.

To Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, they are citizens of Facebookland. Long ago he conspicuously started calling them “people” instead of “users,” but they are still cogs in an immense social matrix, fleshy morsels of data to satisfy the advertisers that poured $54 billion into Facebook in the first half of 2021 alone—a sum that surpasses the gross domestic products of most nations on Earth.

GDP makes for a telling comparison, not just because it gestures at Facebook’s extraordinary power, but because it helps us see Facebook for what it really is. Facebook is not merely a website, or a platform, or a publisher, or a social network, or an online directory, or a corporation, or a utility. It is all of these things. But Facebook is also, effectively, a hostile foreign power.

This is plain to see in its single-minded focus on its own expansion; its immunity to any sense of civic obligation; its record of facilitating the undermining of elections; its antipathy toward the free press; its rulers’ callousness and hubris; and its indifference to the endurance of American democracy. … Facebook sold itself to the masses by promising to be an outlet for free expression, for connection, and for community. In fact, it is a weapon against the open web, against self-actualization, and against democracy.

Facebook has shown us that humanity could quite easily have a well-organized planetary social infrastructure for forming communities, learning, sharing resources, and making decisions together, from local to bioregional to larger scales. But Facebook was carefully constructed it to maximize fragmentation, isolation, and addiction because those psychological states optimize for capturing people’s attention and increasing advertising revenue.

Facebook revealing the possibility of global connection while simultaneously frustrating its true potential, via fine-tuned mechanisms of control and alienation. This was the result of many deliberate design choices. The Facebook architecture was built explicitly to addict and divide, because those outcomes created financial value. Even something as seemingly minor as the lack of threaded discussions in comments to posts meant that having coherent, well-structured arguments became almost impossible. One of the main problems, on a systems level, is that internet users were never given a means of controlling their personal data, owning their digital footprint. This is something that the government could have mandated. It could still be the basis of a future iteration of the Internet.

New Tools Equal New Possibilities

As media theorist Douglas Rushkoff observes, “The question is not whether we have the technology to build better systems, but whether we have the will to prioritize human values over corporate profits in their design.” The technical capacity is not the limiting factor. What we lack is the collective understanding, the collective imagination, and the will to overcome the obstacles facing us in this enterprise. We also require significant capital and technical acumen that is willing to dedicate itself to an enterprise that will not maximize financial returns but instead seek to rebuild trust between people while restoring democratic participation with much greater shared social equity.

To accomplish such a transformation, we now possess tools that the early internet builders lacked. Blockchain technology could enable genuine sovereignty over identity, personal data, and transactions without requiring trust in centralized authorities. Artificial intelligence, despite its current deployment for surveillance and manipulation, offers unprecedented capacity for coordinating complexity at scale, facilitating democratic deliberation, and stewarding commons resources. These technologies are, inherently, neither emancipatory nor oppressive—they are tools that can be applied to bring about radically different social ends.

As internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee notes:

It’s understandable that many people feel afraid and unsure if the web is really a force for good. But given how much the web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the web as we know it can’t be changed for the better in the next 30. If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web.

Nothing prevents us from trying again, from building what should have been built the first time, if we knew then what we know now. What we need is not an improved version of the current tech feudalism, but an entirely different infrastructure—one built from the ground up on principles of sovereignty, cooperation, and democratic governance. We need to envision, and enact, an alternative digital commons — owned by its members, governed via community participation, and aligned with human flourishing rather than shareholder returns.

Envisioning the Alternative

Let’s, at least, start by envisioning how an alternative infrastructure would work — we can also consider how it might look and feel. If this exercise feels a bit idealistic or “pie in the sky,” that is okay. I am a huge supporter of Oscar Wilde’s ideas about utopia, which he expressed in his wonderful essay, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” where he wrote:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.

We easily forget that modern consumer society is a realized utopia, in its way. I am sure that human beings, from the dawn of history, yearned for a comfortable world of the future where their descendants could control the climate with the touch of a button, feed themselves easily, sample an endless bounty of goods and tastes from around the world, travel anywhere on Earth, and so on. Of course, we can now see the problems in that realized utopia, such as our disregard of the Earth’s ecological limits, and how we forced a consumerist monoculture on everyone, among many other issues.

For the sake of this thought experiment, I will call what we are envisioning, the “ProSocial Network.” I suspect, in practice, what we are talking about would not be one over-arching platform like a new Facebook, but more like modular smaller pieces that somehow fit together, hopefully relatively seamlessly.

The comprehensive alternative to today’s manipulative tech-feudalism needs to be built on three foundational pillars, each offering a genuine pathway toward reclaiming our collective sanity as well as our sovereignty. Next time, I will explore what those are.