ACFM - ACFM Trip 35: The Internet

Episode Date: August 6, 2023

In this bumper Trip, the gang survey the totalising modern phenomenon that is The Internet. Nadia, Keir and Jem dredge up their early interactions with a primitive web and explain how the dream of free and open communication was displaced by closed networks of e-commerce and data harvesting. Following Keir’s recent Microdose episode with Malcolm […]

Hello and welcome to Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my friend's Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And Pierre Milburn. Hello. And today we're talking about the internet. So guys, why are we talking about the internet today?

There's a couple of reasons I think. Well, for me, anyway, for me, my relationship with the internet is going through a bit of a strange turn. A lot of the platforms I interact with have gone shit as Corey Doctro has started talking about it recently. And the most noticely, Twitter getting Elon Musked, etc. But like a lot of the other platforms as well, Facebook's unusable. Amazon is increasingly a pain in the ass

and basically not doing the functions that it originally attracted people to it. So it's almost as if a particular model of the internet, like platform capitalism, has reached its shit stage. And so it could be in crisis or not. Then the other reason I think it's interesting to talk about it is more foundational to this podcast. One of the reasons we started talking about this sort of stuff, acid communism and originally acid cobbinism,

was this idea that acid capitalism is in some ways one of the sort of hegemonic ideologies of our time. And that comes out of this whole idea of where the internet came from and personal computing came from. People have talked about it as the California ideology, etc. This sort of melding of... countercultural ideas with, like, right-wing neoliberal economic ideas. And I think that story has come under crisis to some degree

because some of the prominent figures around Silicon Valley are no longer these socially liberal and economically conservative types. They're Peter Thiel's and Elon Musk, who are much more associated with the far right, in fact, white nationalism, in fact, in some cases. What about you, Jeremy? Yeah, yeah, all of the above. And I think it's, I mean, it's always interesting to try to think about the internet, if only because it's so difficult to separate out discussion of the internet today from

all the rest of our activities. You know, it's an interesting thing right now into the social sciences and some parts of the humanities that people still want to sort of run courses or create academic posts which are focused on digital media or, you know, digital society. And on the one hand, it's obvious why people would do that. It's really, there's a really important topics, but it always raises this question, I think, has to, well, what aspects of society or media or culture is now not digital or is not part of the internet in some sense? It's not incorporated into it. So I think it's an interesting intellectual exercise to ask yourself if you can even isolate the internet as a phenomenon from everything else is going on around

us and that we're living through. I think in some ways you can and in some ways you can't, it's always an interesting topic to think about. Yeah, definitely. So I'm also interested in looking at the internet in a different way, I guess. So I'm interested on the effect of this. I guess actually quite similarly to what you just said, Jeremy, in fact, the internet and the effect of it on our everyday lives. So I'm really interested in what it does to our sense of self and what that means for

us as both political actors and there's agents of change in the world. What does it do to our brains, but also like how do we use it to help? or hinder like organizing. And I do think, when I was thinking about this as we're preparing for the show, I do think that we are at a point in history of just being able to have just enough distance from the thought of the kind of internet's inception to be able to look back and perhaps analyze the effects of this technology has had on us and our existence as human beings. So that's kind of, in a nutshell, I guess why I'm interested in talking about the internet. But before we get into the meat of the show. I just want to remind listeners that we now have a newsletter.

If you haven't signed up yet, please go to navara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter, where you will find all sorts of bonus content from us. You'll be getting the newsletter after each new trip episode. And for more music and less chat from us, you can follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Just search for or ACFM. And then finally, to support us to continue making this podcast, please support our hosts, Navarra Media, for as little as one pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support. So without further ado, let's start talking about the subject of the internet. So I think we wanted to start off by talking about our own relationships to the internet and kind of how we

experienced the internet being digital migrants, the three of us, which obviously makes sound very old. But there you go. Who wants to go first chatting about that stuff? Yeah. So the digital migrant bit is we grew up whether the internet didn't exist or if it existed, we didn't interact with it, basically. And so we can remember the time before, just about before personal computing, I don't know. And then before the internet and then we've lived through various waves of the internet, it's changed form very, very dramatically. I think also, interestingly, like the stories about what it is and where it's going have also changed quite often. I think it'd be interesting to get into that later. But my first, I distinctly remember my first

interaction with the internet because my friend Boff, Boff Warley, invited a load of people around to his house to show us the internet. He showed us, like, gave us a sort of lesson in, like, TCP slash IP protocols and these sorts of things. Were you looking at web pages or Usenet? Yeah, it was Usenet. Yeah, he was like these sort of things. But like the World Wide Web was just coming online and the first browsers were there. So we also sort of got introduced to that.

But it was, yeah, Usenet news groups. And my first interaction with the internet was dominated by subscribing to email lists on list serve, basically, which is, I suppose it was a platform, wasn't it, I suppose. I've got another funny anecdote, actually, about when I joined Facebook relatively early on because I was working as a teacher, you know, basically, I was doing a PhD and working as a teaching associate at the politics department in Leeds. And one of the, this, I had a seminar on a Thursday, I think, and the students from that seminar set up a Facebook page called the Kea Muttonshops Millburn Appreciation page. because I had big mutton shop sidebones at the time. How many episodes have you been waiting for to share that fact with our listeners?

Well, I've been trying to crowbar the topic of the internet in, so I could tell people that it's been taking me five years now, so I'm glad it's come around. But that's why I had to join Facebook to sort of work out what was on there, basically, and make sure they went bad mouthing me behind my back. Yeah, so that sort of, that I can remember my first interactions with it, And like the shock of like, when you sort of realize that all of a sudden lots of like texts and stuff like that, you couldn't have access to. So that's in the early internet in particular.

Lots of texts you couldn't have access to before really hard to track down were suddenly available. I remember that being a big thing. And then, you know, I really remember distinctly when the rise of things like Napster and file sharing apps, that was this real shock moment as well of like, God, you can now access anything for free. This is amazing. This is like the completely different world to the world I grew up in. I was thinking about this. I thought this was a really interesting question for us to look into because it's got me thinking about the difference between internet in your pocket and internet per se. So similar to you here, my initial story with the internet involved my friends dragging me to a computer.

So this was in my second year of university and I was 17 in my second year of university. university. And my friend convinced me to set up an email, and I didn't understand why this would be useful. I'd never seen the internet, and I'd never interacted with it. So she took me to the computer lab, and we tried to log into what used to be excite.com to set up an email, but then we couldn't figure it out. So I think we used hotmail, and I got my first email address in 1998. And this got me thinking about what I was using the internet for. And by this point, you know, I had, we had bought one home computer for us at home. It was dial-up.

Everyone who knows the dial-up sound is definitely a thing of the 90s of that era. But we had one home computer and the thing that the internet helped me with in the 90s was being able to communicate at a faster rate with my friends abroad. So this is the only thing that the internet was useful for me in the 90s because I had so many friends abroad. I was living in Egypt. So instead of letter writing, which is a big thing that I was doing when I was growing up, I was writing a lot of letters to my friends.

We could now email each other, and this seemed like a crazy new technology to be able to have. But that's really kind of, that's phase one. That's the only interaction that I had with the internet. I wasn't really, I was a gamer, but on Nintendo, which wasn't online. Really, I kind of didn't interact with the internet much beyond that. Then there was phase two, and I think this is as far forward as 2007 or 2008, when I set up my first Facebook and Twitter accounts. And until then, I hadn't been on, you know, there wasn't any social media.

I was kind of, I do remember MySpace and remember really liking it. And also like you, Keir, I was on email lists, like activist email lists by that point when I was living in the UK. But I still wasn't using the internet, I guess, that regularly for personal use. I was still printing out maps and stuff to find my way around London. But then the Egyptian Revolution happened, and Twitter became really important in 2011. By that point, I was pretty hooked on Facebook, but didn't have the self-awareness of social media addiction. I ended up blogging about it later and now I have a lot to say about social media addiction

and sense of self and some of the stuff we'll talk about later. But then 2014, 2015 came online dating. And that was another sphere of which it became quite, like I'd never experienced this before. And suddenly there was this whole world of dating which was mediated online. And that's part of, I think, phase two, like Facebook, Twitter and OKCupid for me between 2008 and But I only really got a smartphone in 2010, and I still wasn't kind of using it in my pocket. And then I think phase three for me is when I had the internet in my pocket. And that changed a lot in terms of my communication.

And going back to the original point that I was making, things like, you know, anyone who's a listener to the show who has family abroad that's not in, you know, America or Australia where you can still call relatively cheap is a comparison. game changer to be able to call abroad through the internet and be in touch with your family through the internet because previous to that and until the early 2000s you had to go to a corner shop, buy a card for 10 quids, scratch it out and use the home phone or whatever or the mobile to be able to call your family or friends in an affordable way. And this changed it because suddenly you can make phone calls abroad and not pay exorbitant amounts of money. What about you

Jeremy? Well, I'm often conscious that as a white man from, well, from the sort of lower ranks of the public professional classes, you know, public sector professional classes, but having climbed my way up a bit, I'm often conscious I'm sort of the subject for whom the internet was created, really. I mean, I often feel like the internet has made possible and has done loads of things I really wanted to be possible even before it existed. And when I was a kid, you know, we lived in Atlanta for a couple of years when I was a kid, because that's where my mum's from, when I was age between 9 and 11. And I made a couple of really good friends there. But then once we moved back to Britain, I was living in Scalmersdale, it was very, very difficult to stay in touch because like transatlantic phone calls in those days were incredibly expensive.

So it's really, really difficult to be in touch with people. And we used to write to each other and we used to like record audio cassettes for each other. But I remember one time writing a letter to a friend in which. I imagined as a sort of little story that I was using this new technology which enabled you to write a message and have it appear in front of the person somewhere else in the world immediately, like instant messaging, which I just sort of was imagining as a thing that could be possible. I mean, it was possible, actually. I mean, instant messaging was possible technically. It was happening in, you know, some places from the 60s if you had access to, you know, university computer labs. But, and that said, that was a really big deal. And then I guess our house, you know, my shared house in the 90s was like the first

house outhold I knew, like to get online. I had a demon internet account. Anybody listening is old enough to remember what that meant. I had one of those as well, actually. And, yeah, I was using email and that for all those sort of things. But I was also, I remember by the early 2000s, I kept saying to people that I ought to put myself forward as a research subject for people who were interested in e-commerce. because I was a really early adopter of things like Amazon, actually.

I'm really sorry to say it, but I have no nostalgia at all for the era of bookshops and record shops. Like the amount of time, the amount of my life, like in my 20s, I felt like I wasted, like schlepping around town, going to record shops and book shops, looking for a record or book they didn't have. It was just, you know, incredible. Snow is going to be so disappointed to hear this, Jeremy. I know. I know. I'm sorry. I have no nostalgia for it. Because it just, it literally, it was like a whole big, like those whole things I've done in my life. Like probably most of the sort of DJ and sort of dance promotion and stuff, I literally, I just

couldn't have done like if, if it wasn't for the internet, just because of the amount of time one had to spend, like as an academic or someone looking for records, just schlepping around shops, it just took too much time. And of course, you know, that's what it's all been designed for. It's all been designed to facilitate, above all, people of a kind of international, professional class, elite, you know, being able to pursue their interest and spend money, you know, without having to, you know, dirty their hands by participating in sluggish local communities, as would be represented by, you know, local bookshops or record shops or whatever. You know, when I was a teenager, I thought that the most exciting thing one could possibly do would be to produce

a magazine of some kind. And then we're now living in a world and it's just everybody can produce their own magazine that's been on the internet, in effect. And that's what blogging is. basically. And obviously I was using email and all the email lists for activism really early. I really self-consciously resisted. I think we probably talked about this when we did the episode about technology and talked about social media. I very consciously resisted social media actually for a long time because I'd already had some experience of how sort of compulsive just participating in forums and things could be. Also, honestly, though, it was just being like quite close-friend with Mark, you know, Fisher who was like had

become, you know, I mean, he's become, like, famous now as his critic of the internet, but that's part of the internet culture. That's because he was such a kind of internet addict that he has such a social media addict, that it really sort of, you know, took over his mind for a while. And that was a sort of cautionary tale for me. So I didn't get on any social media really in terms of participating until 2014. And that was only because I had a book to promote and my publishers wanted me to. But by that point, for example, in my little club night, Beauty and the Beat had already had its fortunes completely transformed by Facebook, by the fact the social media made it possible to promote something like that without having to rely on

the conventional intermediaries of the listings magazines, which I'm sure I've probably talked about this before as well, but, you know, internet theorists, media theorists talk about one of the key roles of the internet being disintermediation, you know, the removal of what had been conventional intermediaries between a broad public and various kinds of, producer and retailer, whether it's people sending books or records or whatever. And you couldn't run a club night in London, like without the good timeout. Without timeout, exactly. And the people writing the time and it was like the fortunes of my little club night were completely dependent on the mood of whoever was writing the timeout listings that week. And there were some people

working at time listings who liked us. And there was one guy who absolutely hated us because he thought we were earnest hippies and he hated that. So the fact that we were. The fact that we able to disintermediate, that was incredibly sort of liberating. That brings us to this question that I mentioned earlier about what Corey Doctro's talked about, the enshittification of the

platforms, basically, the more going shit. Is that could you, can you still promote a club night on Facebook? I think you'd have to pay for it, basically. So that's, I think it's an interesting one. That experience of like, of freedom of like this disintermediation

or, you know, the removal of mediating institutions and they're basically their replacement by platforms. Do you know what I mean? Because that's what a platform is, basically. It's a mediating institution between two. Normally the way they would think about it is like customers and buyers, something like that, basically. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

We didn't really think about it that way for a little while because they were removing the barriers towards the connections between customers and sellers or something like that. But this is Cori Doctro's argument, is that there's a sort of built-in dynamic to platforms where they will recreate or erect increasing barriers between the two sides of that, the two sides of that being mediated,

buyers and customers, or whatever. They'll increasingly interfere with that and fuck it up, basically. There was a point at about, you know, the 20,000, 7,000, 8,0009 where the internet still felt like a commons. It still felt free. Yeah. And now I think what you're saying is it's not. Because it's only, they only, they only became established within the platform economy that you had to, that the only way to make it make money was through advertising. That only became established around that time.

You know, before that, they weren't sure. like Google and Facebook, like we're just sort of not sure how they were going to make money from it and whether there was going to be some other way to do it. And it's only around 20, 2005 to 2010. It's during that period that they all came to the conclusion

who actually it's going to have to be an advertising medium. That's the only way you can make money with this stuff. So it was free. It was sort of a commons and then they didn't come up with any better way of making money from it.

It goes in this cycle where it starts to interfere more and more and more were the usability that attracted you in the first place, you know what I mean? Which is like a monopolization sort of strategy, like stuff like Amazon, etc., would run at a loss, you know, run at a loss for ages, or they would have lost leaders, etc.

And of course, like, you know, companies like Uber, et cetera, delivery who have never made a profit. They probably never will, do you know what I mean? They don't have a route to profitability of those companies. They rely on like larger and larger sort of inputs of venture capital. But the point is the goal that you're trying to get to is like a monopoly. So you get, you get people to join Facebook, you offer somebody which is

attractive and useful. But once you've got them there, then you can turn your attention to the people who are trying to sell it to, and then you sort of become really useful to the, to the companies who want to buy the adverts, or perhaps the companies who are selling to Amazon, etc. And then once they're locked in, we're all get locked in, all of the attention of the platform is to sort of cash in. And the way you cash in is like basically to erect more and more barriers that you have to pay more and more for Twitter Blue. So I think like 25% of all the cost of sales goes to Amazon basically. You know, it's just incredibly difficult environment in which to sell things.

And like, you know, their search engine on Amazon, you know, more and more, it's like, you know, what you're getting is not things that their algorithm say you might like. It's the things that people have paid the most to do. And increasingly like the services or the products that they actually physically own themselves. You know what I mean? Like there's almost like a built-in cycle. And the reason we're really aware of it at the moment is because Twitter's doing a real speed run on it because of Elon Musk, basically. Well, we can talk about Elon Musk and what's going on with that another time.

There's also like a business model issue that, you know, Facebook has specifically Facebook. I think my understanding is that Twitter's always had a bad or not very successful money-making strategy, which is why, you know, business strategy, which is what, Elon Musk is trying to turn around and that's what we're experiencing on the user end. But Facebook has a problem, which is that it has saturated the market, that they do not think that they've reached, I think, something ridiculous, like half of the world's population. And there's a whole other half, which are both China and people who are not related, not linked up to the internet at all, which they don't think they will be able to reach and or make money out of.

so therefore advertising and messing with the algorithms consistently has become central to their business model of how they're going to make money and therefore why we see some of the effects I think you're talking about Kia about what you're calling. Is it in shittification or just shittification? I was wondering why it's not just shittification but in shittification makes it sound more makes it sound more academic I suppose. Yes I don't know why it's called and shittification. It's because it's an ongoing process perhaps. Right, I see.

Yeah, but like with Facebook, I find Facebook completely unusable these days because I wanted what I wanted Facebook and I used to use Facebook as what it was originally sold out, which was like a micro blogging site. And in fact, Twitter in particular was sold as a micro blog site where you could just write your own posts. People could follow you and then whoever you followed,

you'd get to see what they produced, basically their pictures or their texts, etc. And that's what Twitter was. always supposed to be in particular, and more and more, it gets replaced by, you know, no, we want algorithms which sort what you see, so you don't see, you know, you don't get to see what you follow, et cetera. You get to see what we give you. Originally, that gets sold as, you know, we're going to use our algorithms to put in front of you what we think you would really enjoy. Basically get to see a repetition or of what you already watch, etc.

or you get like driven down a sort of rabbit hole of more and more extreme content, these sorts of things. But increasingly in things like Facebook, that's not what you get. You know, you get whatever seems to produce most profit and recirculate the surplus within the sort of the ecosystem of Facebook, basically. You reminded me of this point. I think it was about around 2014, 2015, where I think Facebook's, um, algorithm was not so sophisticated. And it kept making this mistake to me and my friends who were at

the time talking about the Egyptian Revolution and like Arab Spring and various different posts like that. But it kept giving us content ads to do with like Islamic dress. So we kept getting like hijabi clothes and whatever and like, you know, burkini ads and stuff like that. And we just all thought it was really funny because it clearly showed like the total stereotyping and misaligning of Arab with Islamic stuff and anyone who knows me knows that I'm not a big fan of religion at all. But I remember it was like a phenomenon at the time. There was a point where anyone who said anything to do with the Middle East was getting that type of ads. And there was that point where clearly that was still being tested out. But it must work at

some point, you know, the clickbait. Yeah, I mean, I think the problem for Twitter in particular is Facebook was, I don't think it's right to say it was its original conception was as micro-blocking site. It was a social networking site and it's the idea was... It's more that I was using it as a micro-blogging site. But I think the thing with the social networking is, well, it was basically a site for

people to maintain contact with friends, acquaintances, family and share news with them and make plans with them. And in the process of doing that, you generate loads of data about your lifestyle, which can then be harvested and used for advertising. Twitter is a sort of micro-blogging

site, and it doesn't really work. It doesn't really generate the level of data about your likely propensities as a consumer that Facebook does. And so, Facebook's really good. Apparently, you're 10 clicks. It's 10 clicks. Yeah. Like 10 likes. Sorry, if you like 10 things, then Facebook finds out more about you than most your close friends know about it. Yeah, that's what they say. So, so yeah, Twitter has got a problem really, because Twitter became this sort of, you know, cacophonous public sphere in which people were mostly talking about public issues rather than personal issues, but that isn't a reliable guide to people's consumption habits. So they haven't been able to make nearly as much

money off advertising as Facebook. That was one of the big changes in Facebook's algorithm as well, wasn't it? It was that it really downgraded discussions of public issues or links that went outside of the Facebook meta ecosystem. Yeah. Like really downgraded that and then photographs, personal photographs will be really up graded, etc. And so, as I was used, you know, but most of my stuff is discussion of public issues and links to interesting articles, et cetera, et cetera, you just basically, it's not of any use to me anymore. One of the interesting things about this, this like, in shittification process, it does

highlight, you know, the corruptive influence of capitalism. just to put it, gross form. If you had some sort of public or commonly owned or commonly governed version of any of these apps, they basically wouldn't have to change, you know. What people want from me was pretty clear. You know, if Twitter could get taken over by its users, perhaps you'd have, you know, there'd be discussions about the level of moderation, etc. But like there's not this drive to sort of like maximize returns, etc.

Do you know what I mean? You know, we should go back and talk a little bit about the internet. But, like, there was no reason why the internet was always going to go in this direction. Do you know what I mean? So there was the French Minutel system which predated the internet. In fact, I think it's in 1970s and into the 1980s. To 80s and 80s, an 80s, an 80s, yeah, 70s would be a bit early, wouldn't it? In which, you know, basically it was a means of, you know, you could connect up various things.

But it was basically, it was a state-provided service. still ended up with a lot of porn and sex hookup pages. A lot of things on military. I'm pretty sure with it. Yes, yes. I mean, yeah, I mean, porn has been one of the drivers of technology, you know, internet technology, basically.

I mean, you're right, of course. I mean, you know, it's the interaction between the form of the social network and the logic of capital accumulation is what produces the effects we're talking about. the phenomena as we now experience it. It's not, it's not inherent to the technology. I think we should play internet friends by Knife Party, which includes the fantastic lyric, You Block Me on Facebook, and Now You're Going to Die, which is a electronic, quite industrial, quite painful for the ears type sound, but I think it kind of emulates a lot of like the mental frustration and a fizzing brain you get from too much scrolling through.

through social media. And you blocked me on Facebook and now you're going to die will be the title of the newsletter that we'll send out. So sign up now. You blocked me on Facebook. So one thing that I'd really like to talk about is about dopamine addiction and dopamine addiction at scale. So the way that I observe this in the world is, you know, there's more and more articles being written about this stuff. It's something that at least in my circles, which are probably

not representative, you know, of most people. There are discussions where people are aware of, you know, the kind of click dopamine addiction hit that you get from, you know, checking social media, etc. So I first read about this stuff properly and then I started, it really affected how I saw Facebook and when I went off it and I don't go on it and accept ones every two weeks still, since I started reading up on this stuff in 2016. I read a book by Daniel Levitin, I think, called The Organized Mind. And, you know, there's very few, like, majorly pointed statements that are made in that book. But I think I remember even from memory, I'm going to say page 17, second paragraph down,

I might be wrong, I haven't got the book in front of me, but, like, he basically says consistently scrolling on social media is, you know, a pathology, like it effectively is an illness. And I actually never read about it in those terms until then. Now this stuff is like widely out there. So I'm just wondering, like fast forwarding like six years or six or seven years since I read that stuff and it was a bit of a revelation. Like what level of consciousness is 21st century Britain in on various different aspects, you know, different social groupings, how aware are people of that? kind of addiction to consistently checking your phone and touching it in your pocket like, you know, 50 times a day or whatever. My sense is people are are conscious of it, but don't

do really have what to do about it. That is my sense. My sense is people are pretty conscious of that to it. I don't know. I think most adults, I know, seem to be source of conscious of it and slight and wanting to sort of resist it, although not resisting it successfully. And kids, it really depends on whether their parents can point it out to them frequently. I know my kids are both conscious of it and constantly wanting to just surrender to the addiction and getting cross about being told they're addicted and telling each other they're addicted.

So it's a discourse in our house, but then I see other kids who clearly their parents don't seem to have, it doesn't seem to have occurred to them before one moment to suggest they might not want to just look at their phones for 12 hours every single day. It's different with my family because I'm the most, I'm by far the most addicted to social media than the rest of my family. So I'm the big child in my family.

I don't think it's a child thing. I think it's like the same as, you know, it's the same as cigarettes. Like that's how I see it. So, you know, there was a point where you used to like, wake up in the morning, reach over for your box of cigarettes and light a fag in the same way that people reach over for their phones. Now, I'm very sympathetic that this is a phenomenon, a reality for people. but I'm hoping that there is a future

when the vast majority of people are able to say oh shit man I feel really sorry for you that you have your phone in your bedroom you know and I'm you know I don't know do you guys have your mobile phone in your bedroom because I abandoned that six years ago oh yeah within easy reach how else am I going to know what time it is

Nadia by having an analogue analogue alarm from Argos that's the biggest excuse the most common excuse. It's always within easy reach, basically, and I do tend to pick, to get it and look at Twitter first thing, before I get out of bed. He's got to see if I've tweeted anything

important. Of course. I would expect... What has Jeremy Gilbert said, what has Jeremy Gilbert said, what has Jeremy Gilbert said, is very, very an important thing for every single listener, I'm sure. But no, but the reason I bring it up is like, is, I'm

trying to problematize my own value judgment, because I have quite a strong judgment, because I'm speaking at it from a certain vantage point and knowing the way that it affects me. So I would never ever allow my phone or any technology or any screen anywhere near my bedroom, anymore, ever, unless there's some kind of emergency. But my phone stays, you know, in the living room. But maybe this is not the case for everyone, but I can't help but see it through that kind of like in the same ex-smoker kind of view. Do you see what I mean? So I'm trying to like understand,

And is there a way that somebody can have their phone next to them and waking up and check Twitter? And it not affects on a kind of, on a libidinal level, you know, on a on a visceral level, like how the hormones are pumping through their body. You said I mean. In a way, when I talk about this stuff, there's part of me that's going, this is really important. We should spend hours talking about this. You know, I want to like create lectures on this. And there's another part of me that's going, why is it that as a. adults, these things have such control over us. Like I think the children, the issue with addiction

and children is like a huge one, but I see it as a slightly different subject, you know, even though like it's the same forces we're talking about. But we're our point in history where our relationship to the internet, you know, there's so many more things to talk about in terms of the internet, the stuff that we mentioned before, communication, all of these things that allows us to do, being able to get almost any information at the tip of our fingertips, like all those amazing things about having the internet. But yet the overwhelming thing is the fact of how we've been locked into these forms of addiction and therefore how important digital hygiene is. We all know people that are on a really bad end of, who have really

bad digital hygiene, who consistently share absolute rubbish to either you as an individual or this trigger sharing, who are like constantly sharing things in group or like spamming or whatever, like in a way that you would never take a leaflet and just randomly shove it down your neighbour's letterbox like, you know, 20 times a day,

but people do it digitally. You know, will there be a turning point for this? This relates us back to the whole platform and shittification sort of thing as well, isn't it? Because, you know, that's sort of like trying to get this sort of like dopamine hit, etc. where you get a like, etc.

These sort of, that sort of gamification element of social media. That sort of dopamine addiction thing, that is part of the central part of the inshittification that comes from the particular mode of platform capitalism we have. I mean, we'll talk about this later on, but like digital hygiene, these sorts of things are really useful just for us to cope with things. But we basically need social solutions to these sorts of problems.

Do you know what I mean? There's more and more, you know, people who are doing more extreme things on the internet, which I would make a value judgment, are harmful, especially with young women in terms of, you know, airbrushing and like wearing various different things or whatever on Instagram to get attention and to get likes, because that's how you're seen as validated. So, so like this has, this has had like a really, really dangerous effect on people's sense of self at scale. And the link between, you know, the use of those platforms in terms of how it relates to imagery and, you know, satisfaction and feeling liked and feeling valued in the world, like, is huge.

The obvious comment to make in relation to that is, look, Instagram did not invent the male gaze. It didn't invent, you know, narcissism as a compulsory mode of subjectivity for young women. All of these are things that feminist critics and theorists were writing about, not just in the 70s, when Laura Mulvey starts writing about the male gabin cinema, they're writing about it from the earliest days of psychoanalysis, for example, the early 20th century, like before even de Beauvoir, we like to talk about a lot. So, I mean, it's to be expected at the intersection between,

like, advanced capitalist individualism and quantification and those existing logics of self-commodification and narcissism, that compulsory narcissism, I'm calling it, that feminist critics were talking about from the 1920s onwards with these new technologies, it's totally to be expected that what's going to happen is those technologies are going to latch onto those pre-existing behaviours and seek to profit by intensifying them,

absent a very conscious social, political organisation, movement, effort to resist that. So I think that is clearly not something inherent to the tech, it's also totally predictable, inevitable that the tech is going to exacerbate existing power differentials unless there's a really self-conscious effort to make that not happen. But of course, you know, it's only fully resistible by some other mode of social organisation. And these are all reasons why it's important to understand that Instagram is only going to stop trying to make as much money as it can by working with the grain of some of the most toxic features of capitalist patriarchy once it stops being an organisation which is

committed above all to capital accumulation. But one could have predicted this in advance. I don't think any of this is at all surprising on some level. Well, I mean, speaking as an influencer myself, it's not just the tech, is it? It's the wider sort of, you know, the wider structure of work these days, the whole fucking hustle culture, all of this sort of stuff. It's not just the tech. It's like the wider world of work and the need to sell yourself and all these sorts of things. So, yeah, I mean, this is not solvable, I think. But it's a bit, a little bit, like a lot of the discussions here, you know, the sort of individual things that we do and try to get like, you know, practice different different sort of techniques in order to like minimize the harm of these things are really useful. But like, you know, basically it is a political project to try to change not just the technology, not just the platforms, but the wide.

the socio-economic setup that they fit into, do you know what I mean? So we thought we would play Get Off the Internet by Le Tigre from, I think the second album. I think it's very early. Kathleen Hanna is exhorting us to get off the internet and it's only about 2001. I don't think we've ever played La Tigra before. They're really fantastic band. Feminist punk-pop incorporating creative use of electronics, late 90s, early 2000s. They're one of those bands I always thinking like in a different,

And better worlds, they became massive, and there were loads of bands imitating them that are household names now. But we didn't get off the internet, and here we are. It feels so 80s, or early 90s, to be political, where are my friends? I'll meet you in the street. Destroy the right wing I'll meet you in the street Get off the internet Lots of this toxic behaviour

was also available pre-internet And it's like dispersed around the media Do you know what I mean? So a lot of the I'm worried about some of the sort of moral panics Around the internet Around you know spreading toxic views

Go read the sun I am as well I really am actually because I mean I think you know the toxic masculinity stuff the moral panics around people like Andrew Tate it's not that Andrew Tate for example isn't someone we should be concerned about and challenge but the internet has also

normalized like feminism as a political identity for young women in a way that frankly you know from like the mid 90s until the 2010s you know it was a routine thing for me to ask a room full of students like are you a feminist and like none of them would say they were and especially girls wouldn't say they were, you know, it was that whole thing of it being

this sort of prohibited identity. And what changed that was online kind of youth culture and normalising feminism as an identity, honestly. So I'm really, I am really wary of the moral panics because my observed, what I've observed is that there are all these toxic features of online culture and contemporary culture. But, you know, the culture, like, pre-internet culture wasn't, fucking, wasn't great. I mean, I take your point, but there are some, but on the sharp end of the scale, you know, is that even an expression? I tend to get these wrong. I don't know. What sort of scale are you using?

I don't know. I don't know. I get all the English idioms wrong. Right. Okay. So, so, so on the extreme level, more people have access, like more men have access, and, you know, young men have access to extreme porn. Like, this is a fact. right, to extreme porn. So while I agree all sorts of really fucked up shit has happened all over the world, you know, with men subjugating women to all sorts of shit, and this existed in magazines and videos and VHSs in, you know, cedey little shops or whatever or on the top shelf of your newsagents or whatever, this was still not accessible to endless numbers of people, right? So while I, you know, don't want to underestimate

any human being's ability to differentiate between seeing something that is a performance to, you know, how they engage in social relations in real life, it's definitely had an effect that, you know, women being subjugated and being treated like objects in a kind of really harrowing way, being viewed by men and boys on scale, like, that's had an effect. that must have had an effect on like how men view women. Like, I can't believe that it hasn't. It's not so much that we're talking about, okay, well, the internet has allowed people to access some stuff that they had before.

It's about the quality of that stuff as well. So it's about, you know, it's not just that there's lots of sex on the internet. It's like what kind of sex? Because what kind of sex sells? It's like, you know, I have an Instagram account simply for work. So the only thing that I follow on it is like, you know, real estate and destinations in the Middle East that I do copywriting for. And because I'm female, presumably I've put this on, like whenever I open Instagram, I don't see those things. If I press on the search bar, I get a set of really extreme, like, weight loss bodies and kind of pro-anorexia stuff.

I've never clicked on any of this, but I still get it. So that's the stuff that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the extreme ends of like body modification and, you know, of effectively kind of rape culture being normalized. I think one of the big changes is that, like, yeah, young boys have grown up with this, well, and young girls as well, haven't they? Young boys have grown up with, like, access to pornography of all sorts of kinds from very early ages. We just don't know what the effect of that would be over the long term. That was one of the things that didn't happen beforehand. But when I say I'm always a little bit skeptical, it's like, there was a thing going around the other day of, I can't remember, Samantha Fox, who was this sort of page three girl where they, in the Sun newspaper, they'd show women's breasts, etc.

And they, you know, they were showing her naked at the age of 16, et cetera, on these sorts of things in the 1980s. I mean, that's so mild, though. It's so mild. Like, it's so, compared to now. No, it's like, in terms of the imagery of it. thing at the age thing. Of course, but now you're getting thousands of women who are being trafficked. You know, the trafficking industry for porn hub or whatever. The massive campaign against porn hub has been really important for this.

Like, you know, don't get me wrong, like it was still like fucked up shit to be on a train and sitting next to someone who's like got paid three open. But now, I don't know if this ever happened to you because it's definitely happened to me and my friends, you'll be on the bus and some guy sitting next to you watching hardcore porn on the internet. No, I've never seen that, no. Right, so maybe it doesn't say next to you. Do you think that's a performance for you or something like that? I don't know. I don't know.

I've never seen that. I've never seen that, that's all. That's, it's, it's, it's fucked. The question is partly, was the internet only ever going to be like this? How much of the, it's negative features are built into it? And that partly raises the question of, well, where did it come from in the first place? There are different ways of tracing the history of the internet, although there's a fairly well-established story about how it came about

because there was relatively few people in institutions involved in initially constructing it. But it's possible to emphasise different elements of the story when thinking about what its social, political, economic character has been. if you could pin it down to sort of like two competing images of what the internet would be like one of them would be as this huge marketplace which arguably it has turned into and the other one is like that it would be some sort of based on a sort of gift economy in some sort of way do you know what I mean those two versions of the internet have sort of come up and like people have tried to push them in different ways going throughout the history of basically pre-internet as well

you know, the sort of like birth of the personal computing, then, you know, the model of software development, then like the model of what the internet would look like, which also, you know, feeds back and influences the model of software development. You can talk about all of those things, I think, of like, as these two competing modes of, like, of social organisation, which does to some degree link back to the sort of qualities of personal computing and then networked personal computing, which, talk about the internet. I think it probably is worth going, just going, you know, going back to the beginning of all of that to some degree. Because I think we do have to rehearse this sort of

like the California ideology sort of story, partly because it is interesting, but also because we're going to problematize it in some sort of way or think about, you know, what were the hopes of the people of that time and has it turned out that way now? Mostly it hasn't actually, mostly like, you know, a lot of the people who had hopes for the internet as like a democratic space or, you know, even as a space of a marketplace, really, a sort of like free marketplace with like small producers and like this idea of like Jeffersonian democracy, which refers to like, you know, it's small sort of perhaps artisans or whatever. Yeah, well, it's important to stress for all that, isn't it, that the internet begins as an experimental network of computers. in the United States in the 50s and 60s, which is largely being sponsored by the military, but is located in the emerging computer science department

and a few big universities. It comes out of the MIT computer labs, where pretty much the entire modern computer industry can trace its roots back to the MIT computer labs in the 40s and 50s, and to a slightly lesser extent, their equivalence at Stanford, which is the main focus of Malcolm Harris's book,

who you interviewed for the microdose through a company this episode. But that mid-year itself is one which is really, you know, it's politically, ideologically, institutionally, always, always already extremely ambivalent and complicated. So the big wave of intensive military research, which gives rise to modern computing is happening during and as part of World War II, so it's part of the Allied fight against the Nazis,

it then very quickly becomes adapted to the conditions of the Cold War. But even the Cold War itself is a complicated phenomenon. I mean, there's no question that today we have to look back at the Cold War and say, look, this was basically a struggle by capitalist against communism and against any radical form of democracy to the extent that that threatened to enable communism. The claims made by cold warriors that they were engaged in some sort of struggle for freedom against tyranny was total nonsense. It was disingenuous nonsense from beginning to end.

I mean, the other thing to say about that, though, is it's also a battle of the, overshaping the process of decolonisation and the anti-colonisation. Well, it's the question of whether decolonisation is going to lead to democracy and socialism. Yeah, basically. Yeah, exactly, yeah. But also, but even, but within the Cold War establishment, there's a really, there is a really marked differentiation between a sort of liberal wing, who think the way to fight communism is to create generous welfare states and liberal democratic institutions. And a right wing of the Cold War establishment that thinks that's all, that can only ever lead to communism.

basically. So you can't have any of that. You've got to suppress that wherever possible. And then into that mix, I think you've got to put the fact that, you know, the core people at the heart of the computer industry and computer science and the 40s 50s onwards, they were often motivated just by a sheer fascination with the technical possibilities of computing. They were pretty much indifferent to what these political or social outcomes might be. And so it's complex and ambivalent, you from the beginning. And then the internet itself, on the one hand, it's always got close connections to the emerging private computer industry,

but it's also, it's essentially a publicly funded and publicly created institution. There's this really interesting book by Benjamin Peters called How Not to Network a Nation, is an American historian, and he makes this interesting argument that the reason the Soviets failed to, to create their equivalent of the internet was because there was all this competition between rival technicians and bureaucrats. And the reason the Americans managed to do it

is because they behaved like, the way he puts it polemically is they behaved like socialists. They behaved all these university departments and computer scientists and military installations coordinated their activity together without trying to control it, without any one person trying to benefit too much from it. And that's how they actually, and they had all this state funding.

And that's how they actually managed to, that's how they actually managed to successfully construct it. So there was this, you know, part of the, one of the features of the internet from the beginning was that the idea was that it would network military installations and key university departments in a distributed way. so that in the eventuality of a nuclear war, it would not be possible to take out the whole network

by attacking one centre. So a sort of horizontal, non-hierarchical, decentralized architecture was arguably built into it right from the start. And then the question of, well, what does that mean to have this decentralized, non-hierarchical architecture at your disposal is a permanent question around the nature of the internet?

And obviously, people with different ideological, political agendas have got different ideas about what you use this totally decent, this necessarily decentralized network for. Do you use it for spying on your population? Do you use it for buying and selling stuff? Do you use it for creating the true democracy of the 21st century? And that ambivalence is there pretty much right from the start, I think. And I think that's one of the problems with any narrative historical account, which tries to say, well, it was always really one thing. It was always really just a tool of Cold War repression, or it was always really a feature of neoliberal,

of incipient neoliberal marketization, or it was always, it should have been, you know, the harbinger of a new radical democracy, and then it got corrupted, because it was always ambivalent, it was always unclear what it was for. It was always an experiment, wasn't it? It was always an experiment.

So, you know, there are computer engineers at MIT who just think, who just think it's like a fantastic, like experimental thing, and they're not really interested in what people are going to do with it. And there are people in universities who think you're going to create this sort of knowledge commons, which is going to massively intensify the capacities of advancing human knowledge. And there are people in the military who think it's a useful tool for coordinating military endeavors and from quite early on can also see its surveillance capacity. So they're all there.

They're all saying that's the thing that it's going to be for. I mean, one way to think about that is there are different sort of logics at play, basically, you know, and people are sort of caught up in those logics. They're sort of using those logic. So one of the arguments that people use around like ARPANET, which is like the military sort of network that predates the internet, is that like a lot of these researchers, they were saying, well, we know how to get funding. You've got to say it's got a military use, but in fact, they were particularly bothered about that and they were researching something else. And something else you said, Jeb, about how all of these computers, bods at MIT, they were really interested in exploring the technology in some sorts of ways. So one of the roots of that idea of personal computing and then the internet as like expanding the commons,

etc. One of the roots of that is just the habit of those technicians, do you know what I mean? So there's a debate that happens or a struggle that happens around how software gets developed and whether you can charge for software. So you have that the operating systems and you have free software, which

also becomes known as open source software where basically nobody owns it and it's free as in anybody can access the computer code and they can change it for to suit your own needs, etc., if you have the technical skills, unfortunately, is the limit to that. And one of the key figures in that is this guy, Richard Stallman, who does the really early development of GNU, which later become GNU Linux, which is this open source operating system, something that, you know, and it develops into this mode of production in which loads of people can participate in this thing

without necessarily, without somebody understanding exactly where it's going. And so different ways of dealing with a particular problem will branch off and the one that succeeds best will flourish and they have one will wither, that sort of idea. So nobody's really in control of it. And like where that idea comes from, that doesn't come from like an ideological commitment

to socialism or communism or something. It comes out of, that's just the way that people were doing things when, in the early days of the computers, you know, basically all of the software, which was then on, like, printed out cards, et cetera, punch cards and these sorts of things. And, you know, all of that was, it was the custom that you would share that freely because the point was to explore the technical possibilities. Do you know what I mean? There's a very famous letter that Bill Gates creates where he sort of says, you know, I've created this program called Basic, everyone's sharing it. that's not fair. I don't want to make a lot of money, but I need to recover my costs, etc. And that's sort of like the birth of the commercial software industry, basically, people point to. So that's in the 70s, just for people who don't know. We've moved on from the MIT

lab to the 50s into the 70s. That's the moment when people are starting to think it's a real commercial possibility that there'll be a market for personal computers rather than just big institutional computers and yeah Bill Gates more or less invents sort of the modern concept I mean he arguably invented modern concepts of IP I mean as we'd always we've had copyright since the 18th century but he pretty much invents the idea of imposing a copyright style IP regime on computer code and that is how which up to that point indeed it had been quite alien to the the practices of the software development because they had come out of a culture of essentially a lab science culture, in which it was generally assumed that scientific advances were defractive in the

public domain. Yeah, and you see this coming back, this sort of battle coming back over and over again. We could talk about Tim Berners-Lee, who invents the sort of the HTTP protocol. Actually, that's redundant. That protocol is redundant, isn't it? He invents HTTP, which is the protocol that the World Wide Web runs on, basically, and he gives it away for free because his ideas, it needs to be taken up and run with. But like to go back to the free software story, you know, when the software industry begins to emerge and like you get intellectual property,

but also people just like the operating systems for both Mac and for Windows, they become enclosed so that you can't get access to them and change them so that you can alter them in some sort of way. That's one of the motivating things that creates this whole movement, the free software movement. where somebody like Richard Stallman, who's working at MIT,

you know, he stays up all night for like, you know, a month after month, like writing in this huge process of writing the kernel for a new operating system. His motivation is that, like, this is interrupting our practices, the practices of trying to explore this and trying to explore the potential of this and trying to get as many people involved as possible sort of idea. There's this technical sort of, logic going through it. There's this sort of, you know, commercial logic or capitalist logic,

which is sort of going through it as well. I mean, we could also just talk about the modes of thinking that feed into this as well. You know, you could go back to the development of cybernetics, you know, and systems thinking in the post-war, yeah, the post-World War II era. In some sort of of ways that the idea of cybernetics is to try to remove conscious control to some degree, to try to have not a command economy or a market economy, it's something in between. I mean, there's a sort of cold war logic to that sort of cybernetic thinking as well, which feeds into this. And then there's all sorts of other ideas that go into it, or modes of thinking that go into it. And that's where you come across stuff like the California ideology, basically,

which is this idea that part of the counterculture is very concerned or thinking about personal augmentation via technology and how that actually follows on a little bit from personal augmentation, perhaps through experimentation with psychedelics, or even like, you know, personal augmentation through practices such as meditation, et cetera, what some people talk about as the personal revolution, and how that sort of mode of thinking feeds through into particularly early computer culture. I think Timothy Leary, who is a big sort of like acid guru, in the 90s, he says that computing is,

like computing in the 90s is the same as acid in the 1960s or something like that. I thought we should play for this episode, some tracks from musical scenes or genres

which really were enabled by and existed partially or entirely on the internet. I mean, in a way, that's just all music after about 2002. So maybe it's an arbitrary classification. Maybe that's the only thing, all these tracks are going to have in common. But one of the first is such scenes, actually, it was the very early Grime scene. There's this entirely predictable mythology about Grime now,

that it's this street music that comes from the council estates, and it was the sound of underground raves. Whereas actually, the very, very early estate, of Grime, the music wasn't that popular with a lot of its, what you might think of, its organic audiences. You know, I was teaching lots of students from East and South London councillor states on a music programme amongst other things at that time. And I was interested in Grime and my colleague at the time, Steve Goodman, better known as Code 9, an academic from a even more privileged, or considerably more privileged social background than me, I think, was really

into Grime, but none of these teams went to Grime because that was the moment when the kind of music they were going out to was either UK Garage or just what was called a funky house at the time, which a sort of US influence clubhouse. And Grime didn't really become very popular with those audiences until a few years later. I remember around this time being on a trip to, probably the same trip I've mentioned before, to California and being in San Francisco and getting taken to this really hip-cool club where this was only the early 2000s, where the club night was streamed online, and this was like a really radical thing to do.

And having a chat with some guy, a white, upper middle class, Bay Area guy at this club who heard that I was from East London and started talking to me about grime, and all the grime artist he was interested in. And his relationship to it was the internet. So that early grime, the very early grime scene, it was this network of basically, you know,

avant-gardeist intellectuals who could appreciate the formal radicalism of the music and a very small numbers of local fans of the artist in question. So it's really interesting to observe that. Anyway, the absolutely classic seminal, early instrumental Grime track before it was even called Grime when the artist in question would have referred to this style as Eskie was Wiley Eskimo. We could play some, an example of the genre that has come to be known as hyperpop. It's one of the genre that has come to be known as hyperpop. It's one of the several kinds of music. actually, like lo-fi that you can say are all basically synonyms for bedroom laptop pop of a particular kind. And an early, I think from about 10 years ago now, very popular, interesting

example of that was Hi by Hannah Diamond, which producer Chow tells me, never having been listening to the lyrics, is actually about fanciing someone online. But in my mind, it's an interesting example of Hannah Diamond's sort of hyperfeminine aesthetic, which almost carries that hyperfemininity into sort of cybernetic territory. We don't want to be alone in my bed room. Party messages. Yeah, won't ring. I don't want to be alone in my bedroom.

On the internet. Waiting to say. Hi. We could also play from around the same time. A track from Grimes' first album, Grimes, becomes famous, has become famous mostly for being Elon Musk's girlfriend, but I think in some ways, again, her sort of experimental bedroom pop exemplifies internet, laptop, musical aesthetics in some way that we could play Oblivion. all the time

I will wait for every I'm always looking straight and thinking, counting all the hours to play in the mid-90s that California ideology is this quite short essay written by Richard Barbrook

and... Andy Cameron? Yeah, in the mid-90s that goes on to become quite influential within so media studies and then wider critiques of internet culture. And it's responding to the fact that really up until that point, up until around the mid-90s, most both academic and sort of journalistic discourse around emerging internet culture

and Californian Silicon Valley cyber culture was pretty much uniformly celebratory. What was coming out of things like Wired Magazine was cheerleading for the emerging take industries, but also most of what had been coming out of academic commentary on it was very much informed by a sort of casual postmodernism, which was excited by the possibilities of the internet, both in democratising communication, but also in the ways that, for example, a lot of online communication at that time was potentially or even necessarily fairly anonymous. So people were liberating themselves from any fixed sense of personal identity by

using multiple avatars on Usenet, you know, not Avatars, using multiple handles on Usenet groups or whatever. And the Californian ideology essay was a repost to all this stuff. And it said, its basic argument was, well, actually what's emerging out of Silicon Valley is this fairly coherent ideology that synthesizes some elements of the most individualistic strands of the counterculture, the 60s and 70s, with a socially liberal wing of neoliberalism, which has already manifested itself politically in the form of Clintonism. To the extent that Clintonism was politically liberal,

and it was politically liberal if you were a middle-class gay person, not if you were a poor black person. And it recognises that synthesis, and it's really pointing out the extent, to which it's quite complicit with emergent forms of capitalist ideology. I think one reason, I think actually I have to say it's really difficult for people reading it now who didn't live through that moment to properly get their heads around it. Because in 1995, it was still quite a novel thing to note that it was possible to be

a social libertarian of some kind and yet to be completely complicit. with neoliberalism, because the form of neoliberalism, certainly people in what I like to call the Atlantic Anglosphere, America and Britain, had lived through, was the form, you know, typified by Thatcherism and Reaganism that combined neoliberalism with a strict social authoritarianism. Things had already been a bit different in New Zealand, for example, but nobody was paying attention to that in those places. So basically, a lot of people in 1995, whether you're talking about media, cultural studies, academics or just casual members of the public, they sort of assumed, well, if you're in favour of gay rights, as it still would have been called at the time, then you can't also, but then you can't be in favour of privatising schools, because those things just don't go together. That's privatising schools is like a Thatcher Reagan policy and they're really homophobic. And it wasn't really until people, have lived through the Clinton administration and then the first few years of the Blair government,

to be honest, that it became widely appreciated. Oh, actually, you can be fully on board with a neoliberal socioeconomic program, I mean, economic program and political program, and still be, in some regards, comparatively socially liberal. So the fact that it was part of the culture of Silicon Valley or Silicon Valley's most visible cultural manifestations to be quite self-consciously liberal, even culturally libertarian, the fact that that didn't mean they were necessarily progressive in any other sort of way, it was something that really needed saying, and it was really novel to say it, it was really important to say it at that time. So it was a really powerful critique. I think lots of really bad readings of that California

ideology essay went on to inform the views of people like Adam Curtis, who just want to construct a narrative according to which hippies like personal computers and that helped neoliberalism and that shows hippies were always just all neoliberal's anyway. But as always, that was a really bad reading and we've talked about that kind of thing on the show loads. I think it was really powerful. And I would say, I mean, broadly speaking, I think that Californian ideology hypothesis has been really, really borne out by everything that's happened over the past 20 or years, 30 years. Because, for example, the psychological Pichidliate Renaissance, so-called, especially in the States, has very much gone hand in glove

with the increasing global hegemony of Silicon Valley, as Alex Williams and I in our recent book, Hegemony Now, argue that Silicon Valley is in effect the culturally hegemonic fraction of global capital. And it's because of that, really, rather than just because of the imminent brilliance of psychedelics in their culture, that, for example, psychedelics have been more or less normalized amongst important and influential social groups in places like California because they were always part of this culture of Silicon Valley. And of course Malcolm Harris in his book does a very good job of demonstrating the genealogy of the really the extremely right wing and are both libertarian and economically libertarian

but socially conservative wings of Silicon Valley culture as exemplified by. people like Peter Thiel, the guy who created PayPal, and he does a really good job of showing this genealogy, which can trace their thinking all the way back to very early manifestations of Californian capitalism in the 19th and early 20th century, when it's integral to the development of Californian capitalism was still a hideous, you know, genocidal war on indigenous people, for example. So he does a really good job of showing that.

I think it's important to understand that, for example, in 2020, over 80% of the political donations made by Silicon Valley companies, institutions or individuals went to the Democratic Party rather than Republicans or Trump. So it's still the case that that Californian ideology, I would say, was pretty, I think that, I think Barbrook's analysis it's still really nailed, like what an emergent common sense of a key fraction of capital. And it is still the common sense of most of the people there, I think, in a way which is really important to understand, I think. The other thing that goes on as well is, you know, so we were talking about the Clinton era, et cetera, with the socially liberal aspects of it, of course, and the same with Blairism to some degree. gay marriage was actually

Alsborn, Cameron, wasn't it? But, you know, equalizing the age of consent was the big thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But of course, like Clintonism is, it goes along with this incredible expansion of the prison industrial complex, you know, which in some ways you could say,

Christ, if you looked at it that way, it would be this incredibly authoritarian moment. Do you know what I mean? And I suppose part of what goes on is as the sort of face of Silicon Valley changes, you basically start to pick up different aspects of that history. Do you know what I mean? And sort of say, well, these are more important, this is less important. I thought the bit that Malcolm Harris kind of made several points, I mean, little bits of like little vignettes that I, you know, stuff I'd not heard of

before, I didn't really understand the relationship between, you know, colonial settler populations and, you know, the building of Silicon Valley. I thought that was really interesting, the stuff he said there. I mean, and maybe it's misrepresented in terms of the scale of it, but I thought, oh, that's a link that I'd not thought about before. Yeah, well, it's not misrepresented. There's no question that, you know, that form of settler colonialism is foundational to American capitalism.

I mean, not just in Palo Alto by any means, right across. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just specifically, specifically in terms of how it relates to the logic of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley. That's the bit. And the argument about like the California being, what was the expression he used? Like it was like the last first or whatever

because it was kind of the last. Yeah, the last would be first, yeah. Yeah, yeah, which I thought was really, you know, I never thought about the South Africa and Israel connections to investing in that area of the world. And I think, you know, makes total sense. And it allows you to see geopolitics and the relationship to, you know,

those kind of industries in that part of California in a different way. So I thought that was enlightening. Yeah, I thought so too. That was very, very persuasive. I mean, the other thing Malcolm brings up, a lot of listeners, you should go away and listen to the very good interview that I conducted with Malcolm. Well, the other things he brings up is this is the centrality of like eugenic thinking, particularly around Stanford University.

One way which we can interpret that is that one of the other. the ways in which this sort of what people might call personal revolution or this sort of like focusing on the self, these technologies of the self and how they feed through into technologies of the technical or technical technologies is that like that sort of like eugenics mode of thinking is one of the ways in which that personal revolution can go. Do you know what I mean? So the question is are there ever ways in which it can go, which I think there are. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that's an important point. I think we need to elaborate it though. If anybody doesn't know, I mean, eugenics is the pseudoscience of racial purification.

So it was this huge idea in the late 19th and early 20th century that very early genetics and evolutionary theory, but also completely racist theories of civilizational development and the experience of colonialism and imperialism from the victor's point of view. All of these things converge to create this pseudoscience, which said, well, the really important thing about having a successful culture, or a successful civilization, is that you have to maintain the high quality of your racial stock. And that means you basically want people who have any form of disability who aren't good at really hard work

or who aren't very clever. You want them to reproduce as little as possible. And you want the people who are good at all of those things to reproduce. I mean, from a contemporary vantage point, it's just like a comedy, extreme comedy version of just, contemporary meritocratic thinking. You know, the same way rich people today love to tell themselves and everyone else, they're rich because they deserve to be rich because they're better at things and people who aren't rich. This was the winners of global colonialism telling themselves.

So, yeah, we didn't just like brutalize and genocide all these populations because we were lucky enough to be the first to invent guns. No, it's because we're like genetically better than they are. And we've got to make sure we stay that way. And we've got to make sure we stay that way. story. And the point is, of course, the way that kind of translates into a kind of individualized version of that story, early 20th century eugenics is sort of anti-individualist. It really thinks that you have to just forego the interests of individuals for the good of the population. That's how it translates into fascism. The good of the race, I think you'll find. Yeah, for the good of the race. But then the way it translates into this sort of individualized version of itself in the late

20th, an early 21st century is because, well, you can, you can, once you become obsessed with ideas like self-optimization, like, you know, doing your microdosing with your acid and doing your mindfulness and doing your yoga and doing your highly complicated gym training and doing your weird sleep exercises and drinking your, and taking your super vitamin stacks and all this stuff, all for the purpose of becoming the best you you can possibly be, then that can easily slip into the idea that, well, if maybe if some qualities are inherited, maybe if some of what makes me good at running or coding or anything else is genetic, then maybe actually, you know, I ought to be selecting a mate on a genetic basis. And maybe actually it's not a coincidence

that so many of the other people who are like, you know, really good on all these, you do really well at all these things I care about look a lot like me. Maybe actually my capacity is an upper middle class white man to self-optimise myself isn't just a function of my economic privilege. Maybe it's because like I'm a upper-middle-class white man and upper-middle-class white man are inheriting advantages genetically. So yeah, it can. That self-optimization model, it can take on this eugenic character, can't it? I mean, that is the point at which a certain element of Silicon Valley self-optimization culture today does shade into neo-ugenic thinking precisely in in the, and that is the ideology embraced by people like Peter Thiel and a certain strand of

Trumpism in the United States. So I spent ages there elaborating a point you made really quickly, but I thought otherwise it might be lost on people. No, you elaborate it very well, yeah. And we could pin it down a little bit more about the contemporary eugenics in Silicon Valley, you know, in a sort of like focus on, on like protonatalism or basically having lots of children, the right sort of people should be having lots of children. Yeah, like Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was obsessed with the idea.

He didn't have any children, but he was obsessed with this idea of like replicating himself by having loads of children with women who would have to be, you know, physically and intellectually perfect. He never got around to doing it, because he couldn't get anyone to do it. He couldn't get any of these, like, apparently super high, super IQ, super beautiful women to agree to have his babies, but he tried.

Well, I mean, Elon Musk as well. Elon Musk has got lots of children. Nobody knows how many children he's gone. Perhaps that's got what's going on with Boris Johnson as well, actually. He's probably too thick to realise it. I wonder if any of this relates to the new Trad Wife Resurgence move, but maybe it's not. I haven't done my research on whether tradd-wife vibes, of a lot of which, which is mediated online, is kind of specifically or particularly California, whether it's more

Midwesty. I'm not sure. I am not sure. Yeah, I mean, I think it does fit, it fits into that general, that general sort of idea or conspiracy theory around, that Muslims are outbreeding us and that the left have got a conspiracy of white genocide to replace white people with, non-white people, that sort of idea, basically. And that fits into that trad wife and that the role of the woman would be to have, stay at home and have children, basically. There's an excellent book came out a couple of years ago on all this by a Ben Little and Allison Wynch called the New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism. Celebrity tech founders and networks of power. It's a fantastic book, which is precisely about the resurgence of deeply reactionary

thinking on gender within this right-wing fraction of the broader tech fraction of capital. They trace very clearly exactly what we're talking about, and exactly what you intuited, Nadia, that indeed precisely what we're talking about, it does also manifest itself in these patriarchalms because they use exactly the same logic is these tech bros who look around and they observe an industry in which women are still a minority, and they say, oh, it's not true. That's not because of patriarchy. It's because of genetics. And women should simply embrace their role as mothers and housewives, which is what they're genetically and evolutionarily suited to. So, yeah, you're absolutely right that it does shade into trad wife stuff totally. Yeah, but what's interesting

about the trad wife stuff is that at least, you know, at the front of it, what is being perpetuated by is women who are, you know, talking about the virtues of staying at home and dressing in a certain way and being obedient to their husbands, like on Instagram and TikTok, like there's a huge movement. And that's the bit that I don't know how it like specifically links back to Silicon Valley. But you're right. I mean, it makes sense that it would. And of course, it is kind of related to white nationalism and all sorts of things. Well, you're right. Geographically, I'm sure it is more popular in the Midwest than California. I mean, all the voting patterns would suggest that. But if we're talking specifically about Silicon Valley, like, as an actual place, of course, I mean, yeah, that fraction, that section of Silicon Valley represented by people like Peter Thiel, they see themselves as a dissident section of their own class fraction.

They see themselves, they see themselves as dissenting from the Californian ideology in their embrace of what they see as much more realistic and much more powerful ideas. such as neo-ugenics and such as, you know, traditional gender roles. I mean, Peter Thiel, who, Peter Thiel is on record as saying women shouldn't vote. Women should never have been given the vote, for example. So, so it's both. In some sense, like the overlords of this stuff have their offices in Palo Alto, as Malcolm Harris book makes clear. But, yeah, their political followers are the people who actually voted for Trump,

who are much more distributed amongst out in the Midwest. I think we should play telephone thing by the fall. Why? Well, it's sort of about telephones and about surveillance. It's not a close enough list, a close enough excuse to play a fall song, I think so. I hear you telephone thing I'll hear you This is a regular feature of This is a regular feature of Jeremy Gilbert sings the hits I can only sing a song song in a mancunian accent

That's what we've now established. We should play telephones and rubber bands by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra who are a sort of avant-pop. I think you'd probably call them ensemble most active in the 1980s and 90s, I think. I just like the song. Perhaps we ought to turn a little bit to what we do about all of this.

I know we've talked a little bit about it before, but, you know, how do we get out of this? How might we get out of the current model of the internet? While we do that, I think that also takes us back to the history a little bit because there are waves in this history of the internet in which people have imagined or proposed different models of how the internet could develop or what the potential of the internet is. So one of those is we could look back a little bit of the history of free software and how that went into the development of models such as like Wikipedia, basically, in which people sort of contribute in a decentralized manner,

you know, in which nobody's in control of how it develops, you know, and there's sort of all protocols about, you know, people debate about how Wikipedia can be edited, et cetera, these sorts of things, a process of continual debate. And sort of like, probably like 10 years ago, I think there was this idea, this idea of like commons-based peer production. And so free software, Wikipedia, these sorts of things, this idea that it brings us back to this sort of like gift economy idea.

The thinking behind it is the reproduction costs of digital property as opposed to like physical property. The reproduction costs of it are so low, so near to zero that they're negligible, which allows sort of like a gift economy or even like, you know, various versions of what we might think of for cyber communism, like basically the growth of commons, the commoning and all this sort of stuff. you know, that sort of model has sort of fallen away quite a lot now. You know, that's not the way that most of the internet went,

of course, Wikipedia said exists, etc. But you could put that sort of idea of what a platform could be next to platform capitalism. Yeah, I think that's right, yeah. I mean, I think the history of free software and the history of social media platform, I think it illustrates some interesting features of the relationship between capitalism and commons always. And it's something I've said in stuff that I've written and it's derived from other people's thinking,

although I don't know anyone else who's formulated it in exactly those terms, is that, well, capitalism always has to create these contexts within which there can be a kind of maximisation of collective capacities. And, you know, it sort of has to create commons sometimes. I mean, the most basic example is just creating factories, which are never commons, but they are sites of collective,

kind of massive intensification of people's collective productive capacities, which then have to be disciplined into producing saleable commodities. But I think under certain circumstances, capitalism sort of has to enable commons or commons, it has to allow commons to emerge so that it then has stuff it can commodify and can extract from. And, I mean, open source software is an absolutely classic example. Open software becomes possible. I mean, you were saying this, Kim,

you're preparing the show, but it's not an accident that it comes out of Scandinavia and California, basically. It comes out of context where in which, either because there's loads of venture capital money sloshing around, or there's a highly developed social democratic state, there are some people you have the opportunities to just sit around and mess around with code and not even really worry whether they're going to get paid for that bit of code a lot. The outcome of that is the Linux operating system, which I don't know if it's true to say really, it hasn't retreated. It's become so ubiquitous as the basis for institutional computing.

Perhaps like the utopian thinking that went along with it has retreated, put it that way. Because it's, yeah, it actually is really widespread. Well, I would also say that, I mean, a lot of software is free, or it comes with hard. I mean, it's hardware that's not free. It's hardware that's really expensive. A lot of software is free compared to the prices people had to pay for it like in the 90s, or it's incredibly cheap. So I think it has had a real effect actually

I mean really I mean the situation we're in now today where like if you want to use even a proprietary package like Microsoft's office not that many people have to pay for it and if you do have to pay for it it's not very much that situation I think was brought about

because of the pressure from open source and free equivalence because a package like word cost the equivalent like in the late 90s it cost you the equivalent of the, you know, hundreds of quid today. It costs lots of money, that stuff, if you weren't getting it cracked. So I think it has had a really big impact.

Richard Stormont also had this line that free software is free as in free speech rather than free as in free beer. So it's like it's the free, it's the ability to participate, the ability to use the software any which way you want is the key thing rather than the free as in you don't have to pay for it. But the fact that Linux is like free or incredibly cheap that will obviously have an effect, you know, the free are very cheap, alternatives will obviously have an effect on the price of software as well. But you're also, it's also true, but I said this when we were planning the show,

from the point of view of someone who's taken an interest in things like the free software movements is the 90s, it's really disappointing and it is something I'm surprised by actually that there still isn't a really widespread, widely used, that domestic implementation of Linux. If you're an enthusiast, you can install an operating system on your computer like Ubuntu, which is the most widely used, sort of graphical interface,

Linux implementation, but you've still basically got a no coding to be able to do anything with it. And that's partly because it's just never had the level of institutional support, development support, that would have been necessary to make it really a proper marketplace rival for macOS or Windows.

And I remember when, you know, Corbyn was lead with the party, I was talking to people involved with policy for the party, and that was something I suggested at once a day. He's like, one of the policies should be the government will sponsor. It's basically turning Ubuntu into a proper commercial, a proper rival for Windows and MacOS. Because that could quite easily happen. Like, it wouldn't need that much investment.

And it's never happened. Yeah, can you imagine the savings of like universities not using absolutely awful. Microsoft versions like Teams and all that stuff. Absolutely, yeah. Another scene that really emerged and became synonymous with the aesthetics of internet culture, again around 10 years ago,

really, it was Vaporave. I don't even know the name of this track. It's always written in Japanese letters. I don't know how you pronounce it, but it's the track that became very famous, very famous on YouTube, and it was partly because the graphics for it was so distinctive.

and the artists were calling themselves Macintosh Plus. I think that's right. I've only ever known it as that Macintosh Plus track on YouTube. So I don't even know what its proper name is. Do you understand it's all in your hands? It's sure. Another really recent example of an internet identified music scene with SoundCloud rap,

the most famous exponent of that would be the now departed XXS Tatassion. Again, as Chow pointed out when we were discussing this, quite a number of the most prominent SoundCloud rappers have been accused of very serious forms of abuse and we don't really want to be necessarily promoting them. Charles suggested we play a little pump track. We could play his track Elementary. I've been selling bread, said, elementary.

I've been hitting lit, said, elementary. Elmary. Bitch, I'm a little pump, trapper of the century. That's got a bitch a little pop trapper of the century Almerry Almerry Alimary Alamary

Almeri Marry I've been serving Brits and like the Furry Gray I've been counting bassballing like our D away Music, it's really interesting that soundclab rap It's taking hip-hop or rap

in the direction In some ways it's been heading in ever since around 1994 and it's completely moves away from sort of the dance floor or genuinely beat-driven music towards something much more abstract, something almost willing itself into a kind of internet disembodiment, which is compelling, if also quite depressing in many ways. Isn't part of the vision for democratizing the space, either that everybody knows how to do coding.

Like you're taught maths, right? Because there's a massive, you know, there's a massive divide between people who can relate to the internet in that way and people who can't relate to the internet in that way. And of course, the one thing that we haven't mentioned is like the reams of people that exist in Britain today that actually. don't have access to a smartphone and don't have access to the internet in the first place. I mean, I work in a local library often, and there's reams of people of all sorts of different ages who have to come in and use a computer. So that's the first thing is that I think as a matter of in terms of policy, like if we're going to say that we think some form of the internet is still going to exist in the future and there isn't going to be, you know, we're assuming

there isn't going to be an apocalypse where there isn't an internet, then what are the policies that need to be in place for people to be able to access it, whether it's kind of cheap broadband or, but then there's the problem of extractives and mobile phones, right, and the cost that that has, like, to the planet, etc. So there's all sorts of like different considerations. Like, do we want everyone to be able to code? Like, is this a necessary skill? Is it a language that people need to understand if we're going to democratize the space? And what are kind of the goods and services? Because the discussion that we've just had has been, or that you guys mostly have had has been about like things around software. That's like super interesting. So for me there's

kind of two areas. It's like what do we want in terms of software and what do we want in terms of training and what do we want in terms of like rights around that sort of stuff to have a democratized internet space? And then the second thing is what is the regulation if any, if it is even possible or what is the legislation or regulation to be able to mitigate for the effects that are being instilled into the design of platforms in the first place that are creating an experience in terms of how we interface with the internet, which is perpetuating addiction and, you know, dopamine responses and effectively are making us ill on a mass scale. Because it's those two things, isn't it? Like, you know, there are uses of the internet which are not about, you know, you want to go

into the internet because you want to research something, you want to go on the internet because we're recording a podcast like now, you know, you want to have a Zoom meeting, whatever. Those are not the addictive spaces, but the vast majority of the time that people are on the internet, it involves some kind of like, you know, or maybe not the vast majority, but there's, you know, and then there's that sphere of, like, addiction and illness as well. I think it probably is the vast majority, actually. I think, yeah, interaction via social media platforms is probably the vast majority of interaction. I think you're right. And this is something that we didn't talk, we haven't talked about, which is probably for,

you know, another episode now, but that whole, the creation of like what information, the understanding of what information is and the blurring of kind of like fact and opinion and all of these things that have been perpetuated through these platforms trying to create, you know, spaces of, you know, angst and anger rather than discourse and understanding, etc. So there's all of those things to think about in terms of the future of the internet. Well, I think, yeah, you're completely right. And I think this is, one reason this is such an interesting subject is because it's one of the social phenomenon or sets of social phenomena today about which you can most clearly say, everything that's cool about this stuff doesn't originate with capitalism.

Everything that's cool about this stuff originated with government-sponsored Blue Sky research. You know, this is something that always shocks people when you make the point, but the modern personal computer, pretty much everything we recognize in it, the screen, the keyboard, the mouse, the internet connection was all developed by the late 60s. And it was developed in government-funded computer laboratories. The good things about social interaction platforms, things like forum models, which I think are still really great. Things you see today exemplified by Discord service, for example, which I think is a great way of people communicating with each other. Lacks a lot of the drawbacks of social media with its compulsive permanent feeds that you have to keep up with or get lost in.

All that stuff doesn't come from capital, doesn't come from institutions that were primarily oriented towards indefinitely. capital accumulation. All the stuff we're complaining about, all the stuff we don't like comes from institutions pursuing relentless, endless, endless, unlimited capital accumulation. And so it's quite clear that the answer to that question is, you know, how do we have the good stuff without the bad stuff? It has to be taken out of, has to be extracted, to be removed from capitalist social relations, either through some program of general mutualization, turning all these companies into giant co-ops or through governments constructing alternatives to them.

So I think there's no question. At the level of political demands and political policy, we're never going to get the internet we want and the internet we deserve unless governments recognise that that should happen and that it won't happen without them acting and without them intervening. Perhaps another way to sort of reframe that,

And which brings us back to Corrie Doctro's enshittification. I get to say that word one last time. Insuffification of the platform's argument is that what he's talking about is the thing that people actually want are things which are the sort of affects and the qualities of commons, basically. Do you know what I mean? That's what they're, that's what's attractive. Yeah, totally.

And what's going on with the incitification of the internet of the platform. So I've got to say it one more time is basically that corruption of the commons by by capitalism. And also by our logic of colonialism. It's something I've realized that I should have mentioned earlier. And it really lines up with the Malcolm Harris thesis. You know, one of the most interesting books on the politics of the internet and social media I've seen over the that's been published over the past few years is a book by Nick Caldry and Ulysses Ali Maas, his co-author. And it's called The Cost of Connection, How Data is Colonizing, human life and appropriating it for capitalism.

And their argument is that the logic of enclosure, the logic of privatisation, the logic of data harvesting, which saturates the platform economy and the social media economy, their argument is that is fundamentally a colonial logic. It's a logic of appropriation, a primitive accumulation and enclosure. And it's, I hadn't thought, I hadn't thought about that properly before this moment, but the Malcolm Harris argument that the logic of Californian capitalism was all. always a colonial logic. It really sinks up with their argument in a very interesting way. That whole, like, you know, the idea of a colonial logic, that fits with the commons idea.

Do you know what I mean? The idea of like the enclosure of the commons, the idea of like terra nullis where there's nothing there. So let's just go in and grab it sort of idea. That basically what people are after is the commons or the things that come out of something which is a commons. What you need in order to have a commons that's sustained is, you need people who are going to do the work of commoning. And the work of common in it is like governing, deciding on the rules by which that commons is maintained. So that might be a way of addressing this problem of,

do we all need to become coders? So, well, no, but, you know, what we actually need is mechanisms by which we can decide what we want from these platforms and guide their development, basically. So that will definitely involve coders, but it doesn't necessarily have to involve coders. Sorry, it doesn't necessarily have to mean that we all are coders because we can be working with coders who, you know, and have some sort of that democratic governance over these platforms, do you know what I mean? Which does lead us into things such as platform co-op alternatives to the platform, which do exist.

You know, there are, there are nascent versions of these. So it's a really interesting experiment in London called Wings, which is a food delivery co-op, basically, and it's an alternative to deliver. It can exist in London because the margins are really high. It would quite hard to compete with Deliveroo outside of those real core areas, etc. So it's got limitations on it because this is a self-generating sort of co-op, although they are working with the local council on that. Because the big problem, of course, is with platform co-ops is how do you get the kinds of capital, the kinds of money to compete with the big platforms who are prepared to,

a lot of the internet music we've been playing to me is yeah it sounds like laptop music and it kind of lacks any quite consciously lacks any connection to an organic embodied community and this is something this isn't just an old person talking like a lot of my music students and they're early 20s make the same comment about a lot of this kind of music but one artist who I think has managed to integrate some of the sonic distinct sonically distinctive quality of a lot of internet-era music with a more kind of organically embodied

and effectively compelling sound is the British producer, vocalist, artist, FCA Twigs, although I think she's based in the States now, who I think is really one of, to me, is really one of the artists who makes me feel some sense of hope for contemporary experimental pop music in various forms so that we can have a, we can have a, track from E.K.A. Twigs, most recent album of this track would be Ride the Dragon.

What do we think are some positive developments in recent years, if anything, about because it seems to me that one of the things that's happened in the past couple of years with the relative decline of the social media platform. The return to the newsletter. Yeah. For example, the ACFM email newsletter. Oh, that sounds interesting. How do you subscribe to that again?

You go on the website, I think. And I'm sure there'll be a link in the podcast. But, yeah, substack, for example, is an example of the email coming back as a technology. And I mentioned Discord already in passing. The popularity of Discord servers, I think, is because they're the latest iteration of the forum as a social technology. And forums have an honorable history going back decades. And forums have real advantages over social media feeds because the whole point of them is they archive chat they archive threads so you don't have you can go look at it whenever you want you don't have to

be constantly checking to see if you've missed something or to keep up with something so all forums I think are a fantastic technology for facilitating various kinds of long-term group discussions and you know discord servers which were initially just for people to play games together on I think have become really popular because they are the latest implementation of that basic forum technology. So I think we have been seeing a little bit of a retreat from the more toxic forms of platform in the form of things like Twitter and, you know, Facebook with their relentlessly addictive, compulsive feeds back into forms of communication, which let people decide when they want to engage, how much they want to engage. And I think that does indicate

that, you know, there is still a degree of progressive potential. I love that, like, I would point out that what's missing from that is like the public sphere element some sort of replication of the public sphere element and if you were going to talk about forums which were like in the public sphere you'd probably point to Reddit as like this absolute classic example you know which is in fact

very very useful finding out how to do things and these sorts of things but that itself has just gone through a process of minor and shitification and in fact it you know because they changed the way in which the forums operate and that provoked a moderator strike actually people were refusing people who moderated really good

really really really popular Reddit said that they would refuse to and put up any new content until Reddit changed its policy so I think that's the problem that's the thing that's missing whereas you know I do think it's really useful this idea of like people are going back to newsletters etc because you can have some sort of control you have direct control over who gets those who gets that information, whereas you don't have that on Facebook, you don't have that on Twitter anymore. Sorry, that's really destroyed your nice ending as a positive ending. What do you think, Nadia?

The things that matter to me with the internet are probably about those two things. The questions are for me, what are the sorts of platforms and what are the sorts of spaces of interactions that would, A, help humans create strong and sustain strong bonds, in, you know, whether mediated online or in real life, and what helps humans see themselves as agents of change? So that might sound a bit abstract, but I think, you know, it's basically the opposite of scroll mania and getting lost in indefinite threads and feeling like you need to constantly be updating things and the kind of like cheap, cheap performance interactions. So I think, you know, like email lists and newsletters and, you know, that way of, like you mentioned, Jeremy,

being able to archive threads and go back and think about it, but also to be able to, like, contact people individually and have some sort of forum for, like, having a discussion about it is quite good. So I think, like, you know, the development and popularity of things like Zoom during the pandemic were actually really important for people to be able to keep in touch. I don't think I don't think I want to see a world where relationships are mediated entirely online. I think human beings need IRL and they need touch and they need their other senses to be stimulated in terms of being healthy. And I think that has ramifications for, you know, like how we we are able to develop and see ourselves as political actors. So I don't have, I don't quite have a vision, but I know something that's better than, you know, in shittified, platforms when I see it. And I think, you know, a newsletter is probably a good place to start, and forums, some sort of genuine space for discussion.

Go ahead.