Tech Won't Save Us - Privatizing the Internet Was a Mistake w/ Ben Tarnoff

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Ben Tarnoff to discuss why the problems with the modern internet, including its excessive concentration in the hands of a few companies and the way its dominant firms shape our interactions to generate profit, find their root in the decision to privatize the network. To fix them, that needs to be changed.Ben Tarnoff is the author of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future and the co-founder of Logic Magazine. Follow Ben on Twitter at @bentarnoff.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:An excerpt of Ben’s book was published in the New York Times.Victor Pickard wrote about the history of public media in Democracy Without Journalism.Newt Gingrich and George Gilder, once featured by Wired for their visions for the internet, have now become big crypto fans.The United States has terrible broadband access.Major tech companies are buying up undersea internet cables.Tarleton Gillespie wrote about the politics of platforms and what the term suggests.Jathan Sadowski compares platforms to shopping malls.Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about the predatory inclusion of the internet.Community internet has shown success in the United States, while provincial public telcos have a history of positive outcomes in Canada.Support the show

So long as the internet is owned by private firms and run for profit, ordinary people can't have the power to participate in the decisions that affect them. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And before we get to this week's guest, I have an update for you on the fundraiser that we did back in April for the podcast's second birthday. You might remember that fundraiser was designed to bring on a producer to take some of the weight off of my shoulders for making the show. And so I just want to give you an update that, you know, I have chosen someone. We have a producer now for the show. His name is Eric Wickham, fellow Canadian. Eric, welcome to the team. Paris, it feels so good to be a part of the team. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I'm very excited. You know, you have experience

working with CBC Radio, with local radio stations, with other podcasts. You host your own podcast as well, Big Shiny Takes, where I have been a guest, of course. And so, you know, it's good for me to know that after two years of having someone with very little sound experience, that being me, you know, just learn the basics, that finally the podcast is going to have someone who actually knows what they're doing to put the show together. I think you're being really hard on yourself because your show is amazing. I mean, I just actually finished listening to your last episode with Ed Zittrain, where he like lays into tech journalists in particular. And it's just like, it's such a fun listen every single week. So I'm, I'm happy. I get the opportunity to contribute to it, but, uh, yeah, tech won't save us rules and everybody listening

to this already knows that. So I appreciate that, but now everyone's going to criticize me and say, I just brought you on. So you could like kiss the ring and praise me, uh, in exchange for becoming a producer. That's why I got this gig. You know, I'm just really, really nice. But no, I'm really excited to have you as part of the Tech Won't Save Us team. That being, I guess, me and you now. Not a big team.

But yeah, I think it'll be great to finally have someone who knows what they're doing, putting the show together every week. I'm sure that the listeners will start to hear that in the quality of the show as you, you know, get started and stuff. So yeah, I'm just excited to have you on board. I mean, I don't want to I don't want to sound like I'm too much of a kiss ass now, but thanks for having me. Thanks so much, Eric. And now, you know, let's get to the episode. My guest this week is Ben Tarnoff, the author of Internet for the People, the Fight for Our Digital Future, and the co-founder

of Logic Magazine, one that many listeners might be familiar with. In this conversation, we talk about Ben's new book. And really, the core of that is how the problems with the internet that we have today, which we often associate with maybe monopoly or the exploitation of these tech companies, really finds its root in the privatization of the internet, which began in 1995, but is a process that has been ongoing for a number of decades. As Ben describes, it begins with the privatization of the pipes, of the infrastructure of the internet, of private companies taking that over. But then we have these major tech monopolies

that move the privatization up the stack, as he describes it. And that is what produces many of these problems, because all of a sudden, the internet is not something that is run for the public, in the public interest, a research network, also used by the military as well, but then become something that is infused with capitalist dynamics, with the need to turn a profit, and that shapes everything that happens on the internet. And so if we really want to solve those problems, we need to recognize that core fundamental flaw and start to rectify it.

So I think that this is a fantastic conversation with Ben. I think that you're really going to enjoy it. I always love having Ben on the show. You might remember he was on over a year ago talking about Luddism. So please enjoy. Before we get to the show, though, a reminder that if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it on social media with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, which is essential for hiring a producer like Eric, you can go to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus, where you can join over 500 people who are monthly supporters of the show.

So thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Ben, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks so much, Paris. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. Maybe I should for having me. Absolutely. Maybe I should have said welcome back instead. That's true. We talked about Luddism maybe a year ago, two years ago. Time has a way of kind of blurring together.

But that was fun. I feel like during the pandemic in particular, I've just completely lost the thread on time and knowing how long ago things were. Absolutely. I think we've all lost our sanity. Yeah. But, you know, obviously you're back on the show today because you have this new book coming out called Internet for the People, The Fight for Our Digital Future, which I really enjoyed and I think provides a really important perspective by looking at the privatization of the internet and the role and effect that that has had on the infrastructure itself, the World Wide

Web that we're used to using, and so many of the things that we do online. And so I want to dig into many aspects of that. But I want to start with getting some history on the internet itself, right? You know, this is a massive technical infrastructure that we're all used to using. We use every single day for the most part. But how do you define the internet? And how does it originally come into being? It's a good question because those two elements are related. How we define the internet has a lot to do with where the internet came from. And you might ask, why spend so much time thinking about where the internet came from?

Why does it actually matter? Because I think it actually helps us answer this surprisingly difficult question of what the internet is. We often kind of take for granted that we know what the internet is because we use it all the time and we talk about it all the time. But when you scratch the surface and dig in a bit deeper, it turns out it's actually pretty hard to define the internet in a concise but accurate way. It's very difficult to visualize. Many of the infrastructures on which

our lives depend are relatively easy to visualize. But what does one think when one thinks of the internet? You could think of fiber optic cables, data centers, and so on. Those are all pieces of the internet, but they're not exactly the internet in its entirety. So that's a long way of saying that to me, the history was useful in search of a definition. And the definition that I came up with is that the internet is fundamentally a language. It's a language that enables computer networks of different kinds to interconnect and to form a network of networks. And more specifically, this language is a protocol. Today, it's a protocol suite known as the TCPIP suite. But originally, when it was first invented in the mid-1970s, it was a single protocol. And what is a protocol?

A protocol is simply a set of rules for how different computers, in this case, different computer networks should communicate. This was developed in the mid-1970s by Pentagon researchers. There was a military pretext to this. Specifically, the military pretext was, we want to be able to stitch different networks together into a network of networks so that a soldier deployed in a theater of war could access a mainframe running a program somewhere back in the United States. It is specifically an attempt to project American military power through networking and through software. Yeah, no, I think that's a great definition of it. Because I feel like when we think about the

internet, we can think about many different things, right? The the World Wide Web itself, everything we do online can be considered the internet. For some people, you know, as we hear in the global south, where internet connectivity is not as widely available, there are people who think that Facebook itself is the internet, right? Or we can think about the cables and the actual physical infrastructure as defining the internet. So I think it's really interesting then to hear you define it that way, which I think is often not the way that we think of it. I mean, it's a difficult thing to scope properly. I mean, I just gave you this very confident

definition of this is what the internet is. But to step back and to feel less confident for a moment, one of the hard things about writing a book about the internet is that you don't really know where to draw the boundaries, right? The internet is entangled with so many other aspects of our everyday life. It's so integrated into nearly everything that we do at this point that it's hard to say where it starts and where it ends, actually. And that's a point that I try to make in the book, but creates certain scoping challenges when one writes about it. Because if one were to

try to write comprehensively about the internet, you would have a book that's 15,000 pages because the internet is everywhere and everything at this point. So we can have a definition of it, but that definition actually has certain limits in this age of a kind of ubiquitousness of the internet. But of course, that too is historical. I mean, the internet was not always everything and everywhere. It used to have some limits. So that's, maybe we should feel nostalgic for those limits, frankly. But you know, that's actually a fairly recent chapter in its history that the internet has come to subsume so many forms of human experience. Absolutely. And you know, especially when we think back to even just over a decade ago,

when the internet was really something that was, you know, on your desk, right, that you access through a computer that was not in your pocket and everywhere else that you went. And so there has been that significant change over time. But I want to go back to a particular point, which is obviously a key point for the book, which is, you know, around 1995, when the internet is privatized. And that, you know, obviously, the internet itself is developed largely through funding up to that point, is created through these research projects, the building of infrastructure that is funded by, in many cases, you know, US Department of Defense or other public institutions, but also to a certain degree, you know, the European institutions that are working on things as well. Tell us a bit about what happens in that period of privatization and how there isn't very much opposition to it or much of an alternative to this idea that privatization is the natural path forward for the internet. So as you said, Paris, 1995 is this major watershed year for the privatization of the internet. To understand the full impact of

it, it probably makes sense to try to fill in the backstory of what happened in the preceding decade. As I had mentioned, in the mid-1970s, this internet protocol is developed by Pentagon researchers. What happens is that this protocol turns out to be useful not exactly for letting the soldier in the Jeep in Vietnam access a mainframe in Northern Virginia. In other words, that original dream didn't really come to pass. But this protocol is useful for a somewhat more mundane task, which is interconnecting the various heterogeneous networks of the Defense Department. Because one of the virtues of this internet protocol is its extraordinary flexibility and robustness, that it can tie together networks of very different kinds into a single network of networks.

So as you might imagine, the Pentagon finds this quite useful and implements it internally in the 1980s. And this is when the internet goes from being a protocol to a place. The internet as a place comes into existence, specifically in 1983 supporting basic research, builds the new internet backbone and starts to subsidize various nonprofit regional networks that get sites, primarily universities and other research centers, connected to the internet. Long story short, by the early 1990s, the internet is mostly a tool for researchers and academics. They use it primarily to communicate with one another by email above all. It's the sort of thing that most people would have access to through a university campus. A typical American might use the internet for the first time when they go to college. Now, what happens is that the National Science Foundation needs to expand the capacity of the internet because a lot of people want to

get online. There's a lot of demand, but they don't really have the resources to do so. What happens is that moves up the timetable for what was always seen as the ultimate destination, which is privatization. And that's an important point. The federal government never had any intention of running the internet indefinitely. It was always planning to pass the internet to the hands of the private sector. But it happened to do so sooner than expected. The particular form that privatization took was very extreme because of industry influence over the process. To bring it back to 1995, this watershed year,

as you indicated, this is the year in which the National Science Foundation terminates its backbone of the internet. It shuts down its core artery, which was the heart of the internet, the heart of how data move from one end to another of the internet, and the private sector takes over. And this is, again, an important moment in the privatization of the pipes. But what unfolds over the remainder of the decade is what we know today as the dot-com boom. But what I think of as an attempt to push privatization up the stack so that the pipes have been privatized, companies can now make money selling access to the internet. The internet service provider business model is now possible on a mass scale. But now companies have to figure out how do we

make money not just from access, but from activity, not just from getting people online, but from making money from what they do once they're online. Before we dig into the implications of that, because I think it's really important and it's central to the book, I just want to go back to the point about privatization really briefly, right? Because you mentioned that the government had no intention of running the internet itself. I believe you mentioned in the book that the Air Force even tried to put it onto AT&T, I think it was, earlier, and they just weren't interested because they didn't see the profit potential in it. But I'm wondering, we've seen communications technologies and whatnot emerge at different

points in history, and the government responded to it in different ways. When television emerged, there was this idea, even though it was private broadcast companies that created the content and stuff, there was this idea that there should be a public service role to it, right? And there was regulations to ensure that that happened. But then when we look at the internet, okay, yes, it's moved into the private sector. But the kind of ideas that there should be some sort of public service goal or that these companies should be regulated to ensure that doesn't exist in the same way. And so I guess my question is, what role do you think that, you know, neoliberalism and the political climate at the time played in defining privatization

in the way that it ultimately took place? Well, another key moment in the 90s, of course, is telecom deregulation. And I think that speaks to your question pretty well. You have the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which undoes a lot of the regulation that was put in place by the act of 1934, of the New Deal Era Act, which inaugurated the modern era of telecom regulation. Internet privatization has to be seen within this broader context of a deregulatory political climate. You obviously have Clinton and the New Democrats. You also have, of course, Newt Gingrich's Republicans

in control of Congress. And Gingrich, as some of us have forgotten, was kind of a techno-libertarian at the time. I mean, he was featured in Wired Magazine and thought of himself as quite savvy on internet issues. So long story short, there is a broad ideological consensus here about the need to give the private sector total control over the internet, but also to deepen the corporate dictatorship over telecommunications more broadly. It's not just about the internet. It's really about the whole communications infrastructure. And that is a pretty big shift from the regulatory regime that existed before. You also alluded to, Paris, this tradition of public media, of carving out non-commercial

spaces on the radio and television and aspirationally on the internet. There is this longer tradition that we can tap into here. Victor Picard has written wonderfully on this, but there was a movement in the 1930s and 40s for a much more robust non-commercial sector on radio. Then, of course, in the 1960s, you have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting created, and by other countries' standards, still pretty weak. But at least we had some attempt to carve out a role for public media in the United States. Now, over the years, that's receded significantly. And obviously, by the time the internet gets privatized, nothing comparable is possible. to the legacy of public media for inspiration and said, hey, we've demanded to have non-commercial

spaces in radio and television. Why can't we do the same for the internet? Now, of course, those proposals go nowhere because the influence of industry is simply too strong. And there isn't, unlike in the 1930s and 40s, as Victor reminds us, there isn't a social movement capable of demanding it. And that's really the key point is that there are always good ideas. But if you don't have the social power to implement those ideas over the opposition of industry, you're not going to get anywhere. Yeah, I think that's an essential point. And just because you noted Gingrich, I'll also note it's been fascinating to see people

like Newt Gingrich and George Gilder, the libertarian, really Christian telecom analyst, I think he was, or lobbyist or whatnot, how they have kind of reemerged as supporters of cryptocurrency. Oh, gosh, that's too bad. Yeah. I think we'll touch on that later in the conversation. So before we dug in a bit further on the privatization issue, you were starting to tell us what the problem that privatization actually created in the internet was. And in the book, you write that the internet is broken because the internet is a business. The problems with the internet have been defined in many ways over the years,

but you identify the root of those problems in the ongoing process of privatization? Why is that? I think there are two answers. I think the first answer is that there are various downstream consequences of an internet that is organized around the principle of profit maximization. And those consequences are quite various because the internet is quite complex. So at the level of the pipes, we can think of the consequences of privatization being extreme disparities in broadband access and crumbling infrastructure. I mean, I talk about the United States in particular, but if you want to hear an astonishing statistic, in 2018, Microsoft researchers found that more than 162 million Americans do not use the internet at

broadband speeds. That's a staggering figure. The ones who can afford to pay and who have access to it, Americans pay some of the highest rates in the world, much higher than people in Europe or Asia, in exchange for awful service. I mean, average connection speeds in the world, much higher than people in Europe or Asia in exchange for awful service. I mean, average connection speeds in the United States, I think currently rank 14th in the world, so below Hungary and Thailand. And the reason for this is quite simple. The reason is because you have four firms that control 76% of internet subscriptions in the country. So it's a highly consolidated market. And these firms spend millions of dollars on executive pay packages, and they spend billions of dollars on stock buybacks and dividends. And what this means is that the exorbitant fees that

are extracted from the customers are being used to enrich executives and investors and not to expand and upgrade and maintain the infrastructure that delivers broadband access. So that's one downstream consequence of privatization at the level of the pipes. Now, when we move up the stack and we talk about the so-called platforms, they are so much more complex and they are entangled with such a wide array of social, financial, legal, political forces that the consequences are quite various. So I talk about a handful, but the list could go on.

So I talk in particular about the exploitation of app-based workers. You can think of Uber and Lyft and how in particular the internet makes possible these forms of enacting labor discipline at a distance through algorithmic management that absorbs new people into the labor relation while retaining or even enhancing managerial control over them. I talk about the algorithmic amplification of racism, sexism, and other oppressions, and in particular, how those are quite profitable for the platforms that conduce them. I talk about the proliferation of right-wing propaganda on social media and the symbiosis that the right has built with major social media companies like

Facebook, which have profited immensely from a very high engagement user base that is committed to spreading lies and elaborate conspiracies like QAnon. I mean, Facebook has made a lot of money from QAnon. You can think of it that way. So as you can see, it's hard to talk about all of the different downstream consequences of privatization because the internet touches so many different parts of our collective lives. But those are a handful. Now, if that's the first category, the second category would be something much simpler, which is that so long as the internet is owned by private firms and run for profit, ordinary people can't have the power participate in the decisions that affect them because those decisions are inevitably going to be made by executives and investors. And their decisions in turn will be narrowly prescribed by the parameters of the profit motive.

As I talk about in the book, capitalism is a strange system in that its ruling class does not exactly rule. They are in turn ruled by a higher power, which is the automatic subject of capital. I can use a phrase like that because we're on a leftist podcast. I don't have to dilute my terminology too much, but that's the crux of it for me. That even if those various deleterious social consequences were somehow eliminated or mitigated, this fundamental inequality would remain. Yeah, I think you put it so well. And I think that there are so many aspects to what you've described there that I want to dig into further. You know, I feel like we'll come back to that point on the role that capitalism plays,

even though that kind of infuses the whole conversation, really. But I do want to start with the infrastructural piece of it, right, which you call the pipes in the book and in your answer that time. And I think you begin the book with like a really wonderful illustration of the physicality of the internet and, you know, the cables that run through the ocean, you know, that follow the kind of telecommunications, the telegraph cables of the past, like, you know, these kind of preset routes that have been laid down for many reasons in the past to support different empires and different forms of political power and what have you. And, you know, maybe this is obvious, but like, why is it important to understand the physical manifestation of the internet and how privatization has changed that or ensured that it serves certain goals over, say, ones that it might serve if these networks were

owned and controlled by, say, public institutions or public corporations that are trying to achieve very different things, or at least I guess we would assume they would be. Well, why is it important to remind people that the internet has a body, so to speak, that it consists at least in part of physical things that you can touch and which produce carbon emissions when they're manufactured, for instance? I actually feel the conversation on this has shifted a bit. I think like 10 years ago or maybe five years ago, the idea that the internet was composed of things like fiber optic cables was somewhat more revelatory than it is now. Because at the time, it was easier to think of the internet as completely ethereal, as being misled by these metaphors like the

cloud. I actually think, as in many things with our conversation about technology, things have gotten a fair bit more sophisticated in recent years. So I think that there's more acknowledgement of the materiality of the internet these days. And of course, scholars have played a large role in this and in kind of highlighting the infrastructural qualities of the internet. But another piece that that lens lets us see is how the internet is layered on top of earlier networks. You see this quite explicitly with the physical infrastructure. You mentioned the beginning of the book, and I talk about an undersea cable named Marea, which ferries internet traffic back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. These undersea cables are typically laid on the same routes as earlier telephone and

telegraph cables, which are themselves in turn laid typically along the same routes as were taken by ships that were bringing slaves and spices and all sorts of things between the Americas and Europe. The physicality of the internet also lets us see how it's quite literally sedimented with these older layers of technology and technologies which, of course, are implicated in these larger projects of social control. I mean, that's the other point that I make at the beginning of the book, is that these networks, they don't just convey information, they also forge relationships of control, that they're implicated in these longer histories of empire and capital. So, we can place the internet within that broader history. Now, I think that raises a somewhat pessimistic note to offset the optimistic note that you ended your question with, Paris, which is if the internet is implicated and quite literally,

physically enmeshed with these earlier networks that have primarily served the interests of empire and capital, what hope could there be to, quote unquote, democratize them? I mean, is it possible to take these artifacts that we've inherited and put them to more humane ends? And that's an interesting question. I mean, I tend to think probably we can, but it's a question that I think is a genuinely complicated and difficult one and has consequences not just for how we think about building a more democratic technological world, but also the possibility of creating a post-capitalist society, right? So we're trying to stay with the internet and inevitably we're getting to capitalism, as is always the case. That's always how it works out, right? Especially when

you look at it from this perspective. You know, I think one of the interesting or worrying things that really comes out of the book, and especially like, I guess, just when you're reading about these cables and these infrastructures more generally, is, you know, you talked about how in the moment of privatization, we basically go from having, you know, obviously the NSF net is kind of the public backbone of the internet at that moment, this, this kind of publicly controlled network to then having five, I believe it is major backbone providers or major internet providers. And that doesn't really change. I think you say in the book that there's six now, but maybe I have my numbers wrong, like in the United States. And then, you know, when we look more broadly around the world at these infrastructures and at these cables that are really like the core of the internet, that are the internet in some ways that do facilitate these connections, then, you know, they used to be or were traditionally controlled by telecom companies. Sometimes they were public, sometimes they were private. And now increasingly, these major tech companies are the ones that are controlling the cables, building out the cables. And so I feel like that kind of suggests a real issue where, you know, I guess there are these ideas of like, you know, the private market creates more competition, right? Or whatnot. But what we see is just like a greater and greater monopolization and centralization of this infrastructure. And that doesn't seem to serve

the people who are actually relying on the network and I guess the ideals that we would hope that the internet would have. Yeah. I mean, look, as Marx reminds us, as Marx points out, there is a tendency towards the concentration and centralization of capital. And you see that with the internet. I mean, I spoke earlier about the intense consolidation of the market for internet service in the United States and that really happens over the course of the 90s and early 2000s. But privatization is kind of the event that sets those later events in motion. And it raises an interesting question because, you know, if we're talking about competition,

competition is often proposed as the master solution to the internet's problems. You know, there's been a lot of interest in anti-monopoly politics within the Democratic Party and even among many Republicans. And Biden has taken a number of steps in this direction. He's appointed Lena Khan to the FTC. He's got Jonathan Cantor, the antitrust division of the Justice Department. He's issued this executive order that directs federal agencies to pursue a number of pro-competition initiatives. And there are now two Senate bills that have been voted out of committee that are essentially tech anti-monopoly

measures that would take aim at so-called self-preferencing by tech giants. So anti-monopoly is having a pretty big moment. And part of the intervention in this book is to talk about why that's not enough. I mean, I have a certain sympathy and even some critical support for certain anti-monopoly measures, but that as a framework for understanding why the internet is broken and what would actually begin to speak to solving the core problems, I think anti-monopoly is not the answer. Yeah. No, I think that's a good point. And I think that we'll come back to, but since you mentioned monopolies, let's get to some of those, right? You know, the pipes are the lower level of the stack, as you described in your earlier answer. But then above those would be, I think, what we commonly call the platforms, but that's a term that you reject and explain as a framing that serves these major tech companies by making us think of the services that they provide in the businesses that they run in a particular way. And instead you call them online

malls. Why the preference for that term and what defines an online mall in your view? Well, I dislike the term platform and I hope I'm not being too kind of pedantic or ornery. As I get older, I have to be wary of my tendency to get too ornery. But the reason that I make so much of the term platform is because the metaphors that we use to think about the internet are really important. Because as we discussed earlier, the internet isn't something that we can visualize very easily. So the metaphors are our mental aids for thinking about the internet. The way that something like the cloud functions, it deeply influences the way that people understand their online experience.

So in other words, a lot is at stake in this question of what metaphors we use. And the reason I don't like platform as a metaphor is because it mystifies and obscures what these complex computational systems actually do to the benefit of the companies that run them. Now, there are a number of scholars who have pointed this out. I talk about Tarleton Gillespie in particular, but Tarleton makes this point in his work that platform suggests these values of openness, of neutrality, of a kind of levelness, if you think about a train platform. And it fundamentally obscures the active ordering role that these companies play in organizing our online lives, that they want to present themselves as neutral, as simply the platform upon which we have our social experiences or

other types of online experiences, but that in fact, they are intimately involved as sovereigns, that we need to think of them as sovereigns in legislating our online lives and in order to draw profit from it. So the alternative metaphor that I turn to with a help from the scholar, Jathan Sadowski, is the shopping mall. I think we can think of these complex computational systems that Facebook, Google, Uber, and others have created as the online equivalents to the shopping mall. What is a shopping mall? A shopping mall, of course, is essentially a corporate enclosure with a variety of interactions that transpire inside of them. Some of those interactions are social. If you were a suburban teenager, you probably went to the shopping mall

to hang out with your friends. Some of them obviously are commercial. You're buying and selling things in the mall. But they're all happening within this capitalist terrarium, let's say, this privately owned public space, as urban planners call it. And what the online mall does is it draws rents, and it draws monetary rents. If you think about a company like Uber, it's taking a cut of these transactions. But it also, and this is Jathan's point, crucially extracts data rents, which is to say everything that one does within the walls of the online mall, all of these various interactions that transpire within the walls of the online mall are having data manufactured about them. And that data can in turn be monetized. It can in turn be converted into money in a variety of different ways by building ad targeting systems, by building algorithmic management systems that can squeeze more profit from each worker, by training machine learning models to

build automated services like chatbots that can in turn open up new revenue streams or help companies cut costs. There's a lot of different ways that data can be made into money, but the extraction of data rents is the fundamental heart of the business model of the online mall. Yeah, I think it's really well put. And I think that the framing of the internet and these so-called platforms as online malls really gets to kind of the root of the problem, right? That these corporations are not just, like, they're not just services that we're interacting with, but as you explain, you know, we are within this enclosure where they are able to shape the interactions that happen, the way that we use them, the way that we think about what happens even to a certain degree, right? And recognizing that is essential to actually

understanding what is actually happening when we interact with these services and these companies. In talking about the mall, I think it was really interesting that you talked about or that you explained that when the shopping mall was originally conceived in the United States, there were high-minded ideals about what it could be, right? Recreating some aspects of, you know, European street life and things like that. But in this space, I guess, you know, for people who are increasingly in the suburbs, but then the ideals fall away and you just have the capitalist enclosure that is focused on commerce and making as much profit from people as possible. That becomes an exclusionary space, certainly, where some people are deemed to not belong in this kind of space because they wouldn't be spending money and shopping and whatnot. And I think it's also then interesting to look at that, to see how that happened with the mall, and to look at what has happened with the internet and how, once again, there were these

high-minded ideals, I think ideals that we still see repeated to this day in order to justify new technologies and new tech companies, but that really did fall away. And I guess we could say that that happened in particular after privatization and after there was a need to shape the internet to serve profit, first on the infrastructural level, but then on the level of the World Wide Web itself. And so you made the comparison in the book. I guess, how do you see that as illustrating how we think about the internet and what has also happened in the case of the internet and I'm sure many other systems and structures within capitalist life? Yeah, it's a good question, Paris. It's a difficult one to answer. Part of what you're

asking here is how should we relate to the utopianism that we associate, particularly with the 90s, the techno-utopianism, which had a long afterlife. I mean, I think it's fair to say that that utopianism persisted through the early 2000s and is perhaps only now starting to deflate with the so-called tech clash since 2016. There are a variety of positions one could take on this. I mean, I think one that I've seen commonly on social media is to say that the whole thing was always a lie, that it was always manufactured by kind of self-serving venture capitalists and dot-com executives that were kind of deploying it as an ideological justification and to some extent a mystification of their get-rich-schemes. I'm sympathetic to that view and you raised your hand, so I think you are a subscriber to that view.

Absolutely. Maybe it's just because I read Wired in the 90s a lot and was a believer in utopianism. Maybe the kind of hacker version of it, which was hopefully a bit more oppositional. I wasn't worshipping Newt Gingrich exactly. But the hacker scene around 2600 and Freak magazine, they had versions of that utopianism kind of transposed in a somewhat darker, more oppositional register. And that has stuck with me a bit, so that I'm reluctant to completely part ways with that tradition. Because also, there were so many interesting experiments in online communities back then that there isn't much space for anymore. I mean, I think one of

the things, you know, we can always talk about internet nostalgia. There's so much internet nostalgia out there. But if I can be permitted to have a little bit of nostalgia, there is something to be said for how much more heterogeneous the internet was back then. That before the rise of the online models, before consolidation of our online lives into these gigantic corporate enclosures, there were genuine experiments in finding different ways to connect with one another online. And maybe it's just because I spent much of my childhood in front of a computer using the early internet that I can't really shake the sense that there was something to that, that there was something worth saving there, that it obviously couldn't fulfill its grandest promises, but that nonetheless, there's something to salvage in that experiment.

I think that's fair though. I think it's okay to have some nostalgia for what was, even if maybe it's not always the most accurate reflection of what was going on, as nostalgia tends to be. But even as you say that, in the book, you also say that David Duke had a better idea of what the internet would become than John Perry Barlow in looking at what ultimately came of the internet and particularly the kind of way that the right wing was able to take advantage of it in the way that you describe in the book and that I'm sure many people have seen in reporting about Facebook and other platforms. There's also this concept that you bring up called predatory inclusion, right? Where the internet is positioned as helping all of these people and giving them access to these opportunities that they didn't have before, while at the same time, kind of extracting from them and making things, things worse, right by forcing them to participate in these capitalist structures. And I feel like this is still present today in a really big way. And there are still groups who want to believe in that kind of early utopianism or aspects of it that still use this kind of framing as we've seen with crypto to some degree, like this is going to

bank the underbanked, This is going to help the global south with remittance payments, things like that, when actually there's this much broader predatory aspect to it that is being hidden and dismissed because there are these small pieces of inclusion that people can point to as being positive. Yeah, predatory inclusion, I think, is an indispensable concept for thinking about how the modern internet operates. This is a term and an idea that I draw from the work of Tressie McMillan Cottom, although it's a term that appears in other contexts as well. I mean, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor uses it to talk about racialized inequality in housing markets. So, it's a term that functions in a variety of contexts, but the way that Cottam uses it is to talk about the political economy of the modern internet as being characterized by these attempts to include historically excluded groups, but on a predatory basis.

So, Cottam has spent a lot of time studying online colleges. A lot of the folks who attend online colleges are black women. So this is a group that has been historically excluded from higher education, which is now being included, but on predatory terms, because they're paying exorbitant rates, extortionary rates to these online colleges. Many of these online colleges are essentially scams. They're quite dubious in terms of the type of quality education that they offer and how they're fulfilling their promises to their students. And this is broadly a dynamic that we see all over the place. I mean, I think we've been talking about Uber. I mean, Uber, part of the pitch from Uber executives and certainly part

of the messaging around the whole Proposition 22 fight has been that people from groups with historically higher unemployment, African-Americans, for instance, can make money as gig workers. And this was a line that was pushed very aggressively and is still pushed very aggressively as Uber attempts to derail regulatory efforts. We see it in the case of these companies that go into the slums of the global south and find people to annotate datasets for machine learning. There's a company called SAMA, formerly known as SAMASource that does this in Kenya and other places. And they pitch it in this very inclusive rhetoric that, hey, we're bringing waged work to slum dwellers. So in other words, we see varieties of this dynamic kind of iterated throughout the modern internet, where the modern internet is – there's a kind of elasticity to it that it can stretch to include new layers into the wage relation, but only on predatory terms. Yeah.

No, I think it's hugely concerning, right? Like the whole concept of it and the way that it is utilized in this privatized internet to get some degree of like support or to try to put like a positive face on these really negative developments. I did want to switch gears a little bit though and go back to what you were saying about how this privatization works its way up the stack.

And in the book, you describe how that works really clearly from the 90s through to about today, right? Working through companies like eBay, Google, Amazon, Uber, how their innovations were really an extension of this form of privatization and the ability to make greater profit, to expand the power of capital, to increase accumulation on the internet. We don't have time to go through all those. I'm wondering when you look at that development and you look at the proposals today for cryptocurrencies and so-called Web3. I wonder if you see that as kind of an extension of this process, as another stage in this process, or as just some kind of scam that people are trying to make money on.

Well, I kind of hate talking about Web3 and crypto because there are so many other folks who are doing this work. And I'm happy to kind of just sit back and let them take this one. I just find it so boring to be honest. But I think the short answer is it seems like an attempt to, if not deepen the commercialization of the internet, find a different vein for it. I mean, this is – and again, this is not my observation because I'm not really the one doing the work on this. But when you think about Web3, it's essentially a branding exercise by Andresen Horowitz to talk about a variety of proposals for blockchain-based projects. And I think it's fair to see it as an attempt to create a new frontier of profit-making. I mean, one of the issues with the current internet as we've been discussing is that it's highly concentrated in the hands of a handful of firms. And that creates – it doesn't create a lot of room for this broader ecosystem of startups and venture capitalists.

Now, of course, that ecosystem will always be there and continues to exist. But one of the features of that world now is that these tech giants, they acquire a lot of startups on their own. So they're inclined to buy companies that could become competitors later, to buy companies for their talent, for their technology, for whatever. So if you're a venture capitalist, you need to be trying to find ways to open up new fields for prospecting because the apex predators like Facebook and Google are taking up a lot of the oxygen that would have fed you otherwise. So I think that's probably the best way to think about it. But I think to sound a more charitable note for a moment, the reason that this idea of decentralization appeals to people beyond the kind of small circle of folks who could actually make a lot of money from it is because it speaks to this deeper intuition

that something has gone horribly wrong with the internet. And that part of what has gone wrong is this intense concentration of power. And I think those are correct perceptions. Now, whether those perceptions are funneled towards Web3 projects or to a more sober-minded analysis of the political economy of the internet and what might be required to create a better situation is an open question. But I think that we can try to meet people where they are and make the case for why Web3 is unlikely to solve those problems. Yeah, no, I think that's a good assessment of it, even though you're not one of the people

who comment on crypto all the time. But summing up this kind of section of the discussion and things that are happening in the moment, in the book, you refer to Uber in particular, and you write that it's an illustration of how we've reached the Baroque phase of the internet's privatization where, and I'm quoting, capital is so abundant and the potential return so immoderate that investors can live on hope alone. I think we could see that with Elon Musk as well, though he's not always specifically a tech company in the way that we're talking about here. I'm wondering if you think that that has begun to shift since you wrote the book.

You know, we're seeing that interest rates are rising, that tech stocks are falling, that there's belt tightening even among some of these bigger companies. Do you think that we're finally moving away from this period or it's just an interruption that maybe we're going to go back to in the near future? Yeah, it's funny. When you're writing a book about tech, one of the things that you're constantly having to update in each draft is the market valuations of these companies. And I remember just constantly revising those. But I think the last time I touched the manuscript, it was before the bottom fell out. So, I have numbers in there

that are probably totally inaccurate by the time the book comes out. This is one of the many hazards of writing about tech. But yeah, I mean, there's been a whole new series of developments since I wrote this book, which is really interesting to think about, which is obviously with the Fed leading the way to a tighter monetary environment, there has been a correction, let's say, to use the term preferred by the financial press in the stock market at large, but in particular in tech, which has really driven the stock market gains large, but in particular in tech, which has really driven stock market gains of recent years. I think the question of whether this is a blip or whether this signals some deeper realignment is endlessly debated in the financial press and is not something I would dare to hazard

an opinion on because all predictions make you look silly in retrospect. But it does, I think, add a wrinkle to the story that I'm telling. Because in the passage that you quote, I kind of make this case that there's so much money sloshing around out there and the potential returns of getting in on the ground floor of the next Google are so great that for a while, investors were willing to put up with a company like Uber, which is just ridiculously unprofitable. truly comic degree in the hopes that it would finally find a way to lock in the kind of super profits of a Google. Whether that's over and Uber implodes or whether in six months, everything's back to normal, I couldn't tell you. The deeper story here, of course, is the kind of decelerating US economy over the course of decades and really the deceleration of economic growth in all advanced capitalist countries.

So all of this is happening against the backdrop of long stagnation, which has been unfolding since the 1970s and which, of course, created the conditions for this bubble and the dot-com bubble and all the bubbles. But I don't know. I wouldn't want to guess. And people tend to speak from places of motivated reasoning here. I know more than a few apocalyptic Marxists who think this is the final crisis. I doubt it. Somehow I doubt it. But who knows? I mean, crises are the health of capitalism. So this is how the accumulation regime finds its next phase, whether this is truly one of those moments of a paradigm shift or whether it's just a hiccup. We'll know. Have me on in a year and we can talk about it. I'm disappointed you're not ready to declare a dot-com crash 2.0 for me right now.

Well, there's plenty of people wanting to do that on Twitter. I mean, take your pick. Yeah. No, I'm just kidding though. But no, I think it's a great point. And I think I, you know, just to briefly touch on what you mentioned there, I think that one of the points that you make in the book that now the US economy has kind of been stagnating and decelerating for a long time. And tech has just kind of been one of these kind of areas of exception to that for a while is really interesting. And I think, you know, deserves more, more thought and like reckoning more broadly with like what is going on in the larger economic model. But I want to begin to tie up our conversation, right? As you mentioned before, competition is one of the aspects of the response to these problems

with the tech industry that we hear a lot, right? We need antitrust solutions to break these companies up to have more competition that is going to solve these problems, as well as that there's the regulation on things like privacy and whatnot that are positioned as the ways that we solve these problems. But as we were talking about before, you identify the root of these problems in privatization. And thus, your solution to that is to pursue a project of deprivatization so that we can begin to address these serious issues. So what is your vision for what a deprivatized internet would look like? So if we think about what the privatization of the internet was, the privatization of the internet was a process. It was not an event. We talked about 1995, but that was a moment in the process, a process that is arguably still going on,

although one that has achieved its primary objectives. The process of privatization programmed the profit motive into every layer of the stack. So deprivatization is an attempt to undo that process. Deprivatization is an attempt to create an internet where people and not-profit rule. It's an attempt to build cooperatively owned and publicly owned structures that can shrink the space of the market, diminish the power of the profit motive, and encode the practices and principles of democratic control. Now, that all sounds a little abstract. What might that look like in practice? So when we think about the layer of the pipes, and we do have to apply different strategies of deprivatization to different layers of the internet, we have to be a bit agile in how we think about the project of deprivatization.

It's not a monolithic project, just as the privatization of the internet was not a monolithic project. So what does deprivatization look like at the level of the pipes? Well, fortunately, we have a very good existing model in the form of hundreds of community networks all across the United States. What's a community network? A community network is a publicly or cooperatively owned broadband network that serves local residents. A lot of great examples of these, they could be owned by a municipality, they could be owned and governed by their members in the case of a cooperative. And there are a lot of very successful instances of these throughout the United States. Chattanooga

has one that's particularly well known. There are also a number of very successful cooperatives in rural North Dakota. Rural North Dakota has actually some of the best access to high-speed internet in the entire country because of its cooperatives, which is kind of an astonishing fact. Community networks tend to provide lower rates and higher speeds because they don't funnel money up into the hands of executives' investors. They're not there to simply fleece you and take the money and put it in someone else's pockets. They actually do invest in their infrastructure and they can prioritize social needs like universal connectivity over profit maximization. In the case of cooperatives, many of these cooperatives are so-called rural electric

cooperatives. And by virtue of the federal tax exemption they receive, they must guarantee democratic control over their operations. So they have to do things like hold regular elections for the board, for instance. So the point about community networks is it's not just that they're owned differently. It's that these alternative models of ownership makes it possible to create spaces of democratic deliberation and control. That if you want to create an internet where people are not profit rule, you have to create spaces where people can come together and collectively determine what they want to do with the infrastructure that is so essential to their everyday life. So in my view, community networks is not all we need because it's a somewhat local solution and

the internet is not purely local. It exists at a variety of scales and it also consists of, as we've talked about, the backbone, the deeper networks of the internet. But I think community networks are a very inspiring existing model that can serve as a starting point for how we can deprivatize the pipes. Now moving up the stack, the question of strategy becomes more complex because as we've discussed, life up the stack is more complex. Facebook is a much more complex company than Comcast. And Facebook and Amazon and Uber are much more different from one another than Comcast is different from Charter and AT&T.

So the so-called platforms, the upper layers of the internet are more complex. They're also more diverse. So our strategies for deprivatization have to adapt to those different conditions. We have to similarly be more diverse in our strategies. But to put it simply, what I propose is a two-pronged approach for deprivatizing the upper layers of the internet. The first is to erode the power of the online malls. And this is where I think aspects of the anti-monopoly toolkit can be useful. Break up the firms. Curb their power.

Institute public utility regulation, do whatever it takes to shrink their footprint, to shrink their power over our online life. But the second element of my two-pronged approach is that while we're shrinking the footprint of the online mall, we also need to develop a constellation of alternatives that can lay claim to the space that they currently occupy. So if we think about the online mall metaphor again, the idea here is that we need to break the walls of the enclosure and we need to seed them with a whole host of invasive species. Now, what might those invasive species be? What might those alternative online spaces look like? Well, once again, I look to existing experiments because my role is not really to come up with the blueprint of utopia and then have

people implement it. It's to try to see what are people actually doing right now? How is this impulse for a more democratic internet, an internet where people can determine the course of their own lives more clearly. Where is that impulse being expressed already? And so I point to a number of experiments in the decentralized web scene, in the platform cooperatives scene of things like cooperatively run, collectively governed social media sites, worker-owned and operated app-based services like ride hailing. And I point out that these experiments are, of course, insufficient, but they give us some imagination toward what an alternative might look like.

Now, for that alternative to become more robust, to become more of a threat, we need public investment, and we also need spaces where completely new alternatives can be developed by ordinary people just coming in and getting connected with the technical resources they need to build the online spaces that speak to their specific needs. So most of the hope that I have for deprivatizing the upper floors of the internet lies in unleashing the creativity of masses of ordinary people. But I think the existing experiments, whether in the decentralized web scene, the platform cooperatism scene, or a number of these other scenes, give us, let's say,

good materials towards imagining what that alternative might look like. I think it's always exciting to think about what an alternative web could be, especially one that serves publicly oriented goals. It is not just designed and shaped to promote data manufacturing, data extraction, however you want to term it, and really the extraction of profit for some major corporations. And so, you know, I think that is a really fantastic aspect of the book. And, you know, how you lay out some of these things that are being experimented with right now reading the vision for what a deprivatized web could look like is that it was very decentralized and drawing from a lot of these kind of, you know, decentralized ideas for what an internet could look like, not to say centralized solutions necessarily, but, you know, if we think about, say, public media organizations and how, you know, we have public organizations for that instead of smaller deprivatized solutions.

Or say if I look in Canada to what an example of a more publicly oriented telecommunications or internet system might look like, I might look at a public telecom company like we still have in Saskatchewan, where the prices are much lower, the services higher, particularly in rural areas. And so that's often pointed to as the example of what we should be looking at pursuing rather than a community oriented network, which is what has prospered in the United States. And I guess one final point, and you can respond to this broadly, is that one of my worries, I think, when I look at some of these decentralized proposals and decentralized solutions, is that they often come from people that have a technical background. And I feel like in some ways, because they come from people with these particular skills and this

particular background, they can be designed in ways that prioritize people with those skills and backgrounds, once again, rather than people who wouldn't have technical skills, wouldn't know how to code. And I think, again, we see this in the nostalgia for the early web. And again, like the type of people who would have been using the web early on would have been people with these skills as well. And recognizing that the web now is a space where a lot more people use it and use these services and wouldn't necessarily have the tools and the knowledge to engage with really kind of technical solutions to these problems. I guess I worry that some of these decentralized solutions could be a bit exclusionary in that way or could prioritize a particular type of person or skill set or what have you. I think those are just like a jumble of points on, you know,

reservations that I have with embracing a decentralized solution wholly and why I also think that maybe there's like, and you know, I think your book does recognize this, that there's some mix of like decentralized and, you know, centralized solutions and they're working together to a certain degree. But any reservations about just the focus on the decentralization, where that comes from, I guess? Well, there's a lot there, Paris. And I think there's two points in particular that I'd like to draw out. One is the extent to which certain schemes for decentralization seem to embody a kind of nostalgia for an internet that required a more technical skill set in order to use.

And I agree with you that that is a destructive sentiment, that the internet used to attract, obviously, a much more niche audience. It also tended to attract a more affluent and a wider audience. And one of the things that's happened over the course of the past two decades is the internet has become a truly mass medium. And to my mind, that's something to celebrate. I mean, the goal of deprivatization must be no less creative. The goal is not to make the internet difficult and obscure again, but it's to find a way to make it genuinely serve people's needs. Now, to this broader question of decentralization versus centralization, I think it is an important

point to make, which I don't see made very often in this conversation, which is that you cannot fully decentralize the internet, nor can you fully centralize the internet. The question is always what do you want to decentralize and what do you want to centralize? It's always a question of which components, which pieces of the internet would you like to centralize versus decentralize? Now, to my mind, the answer to that question always has to be made in response to the specific social and technical conditions at the layer which you're responding. So to my mind, the goal is inevitably going to be a mix of more centralized and more decentralized solutions. To give you an example,

let's paint a picture of the deprivatized internet of 2050 that our children and our grandchildren will enjoy. I hope we won't have to wait that long though. You're going to have to wait much longer. If Star Trek is any indication, we've got a terrible 21st century ahead of us. Yeah. So let's imagine this deprivatized internet of 2050 or 2150 or whenever the federation comes into being. And we have our deprivatized social media site, which is place-based. It's located in our community. It is federated with social media sites in the rest of the country and indeed with the rest of the world. So it's not isolated. You can exchange messages with people from all over the world. Essentially, it operates on the same principle as email. Gmail and Yahoo are separate email services, but because of the

ability to interoperate through open protocols, they can still exchange messages. So what is the virtue of this federation approach? The virtue is that because your social media site is located in your local community, governance decisions about something like content moderation, for instance, what kind of information is going to circulate on your site can be made in face-to-face democratic deliberative spaces. I see that as a virtue. In my view, the types of conversations that happen face-to-face are more conducive to a democratic decision-making process. So that's why I would want to make the governance of those structures local. But our story doesn't end there, right? Because

the internet is not local. So that community-based social media site may in turn be served by one of these community networks that we're talking about. And similarly, it has presumably a local governance structure where people from the community can come together to make democratic decisions about, let's say, investment choices. Where do we want to build out new infrastructure? Which are the different paths we want to take when we think about the future of the network and so on? But again, the internet is not local. So inevitably, that network which

serves that site, we're still at the level of the local, we'll have to connect to the deeper networks of the internet. We're going to have to get say to the backbones at some point. And those backbones can't be run by a local community because they exist at a different scale. So perhaps that backbone is run by some type of regional public sector body, or even a national public sector body, or even a kind of national federation of cooperatives if you're not feeling particularly statist. But whatever it is, that's a situation in which that backbone is going to exist in a much more centralized capacity because there's no way to decentralize those deeper networks. And we can think of a number of other cases where what we're going to see is a mix of interventions of the local, the regional, and the national. And the question is always going to be, well, what does the technology demand? And also, when we think socially and politically, how can we construct a situation that is most

conducive to democratic control? I think that was a fantastic answer to a very jumbled type of question that I threw at you. But no, I completely take your point. There's certainly going to be some mix of centralization, decentralization, somewhere in between for whatever comes in the future. And hopefully we do arrive at a deprivatized internet long before you predict, though I remain a pessimist like you do. Ben, it's always fantastic to chat. It's always great to, you know, read your incredible insights on the tech industry, read Logic Magazine, where, you know, you guys publish so many great thinkers on these topics.

And naturally, I recommend everyone go pick up your book and start fighting for a deprivatized internet. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Paris. Ben Tarnoff is the author of Internet for the People, The Fight for Our Digital Future, and the co-founder of Logic Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at Ben Tarnoff. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show

every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.