The internet is a problem; on this point many critics and users seem to agree. It enervates, isolates, and distracts; it makes our children anxious and unhappy; it divides us socially and politically. But what kind of problem is it exactly, and what kinds of solutions does it admit of? Is it a policy problem requiring regulatory overhaul? Or is it something deeper: a technological regime whose warping of our attention, identities, and relationships represents an entirely new way of being in the world?
In a recent book, A Web of Our Own Making, philosopher Antón Barba-Kay plants his flag firmly in the latter camp. Not only is the internet not a mere policy problem: “The impulse to confront technological problems primarily through national politics or through technological fixes,” he writes, “is itself at once an unavoidable feature of our time and a symptom of its sickness. These are problems that cannot be addressed wholesale so long as we continue to deny that we must change our lives.”
By contrast, the journalist and internet activist Cory Doctorow argues in his own recent book, The Internet Con, that many of the problems of today’s internet could be solved by legally requiring platforms to open up their proprietary systems to make them compatible with third-party hardware and software—what he calls “interoperability.” He believes this change would foster genuine competition and choice, and give users alternatives to the isolating, addicting, surveilling, and exploiting internet we are burdened with today.
Of course, there’s no reason these two approaches can’t be complementary. We can, at the same time, challenge entrenched power online and question the extent to which the digital world we’re building into—or in place of—the real one is desirable or humane at all. Still, since we are in the middle of one of the most confusing, transformative, and destructive technological shifts in human history, it is worth asking: Should we put our highest hopes in changing the internet or in changing ourselves?
In a podcast interview, Doctorow explained the idea of interoperability (“interop”) by noting that “you can put anyone’s butter on your toast; you can wear anyone’s socks with your shoes.” Simply put, interop is the compatibility of different products and services—their ability to play nice with each other. It may come as a surprise to anyone who has tried to switch from a Mac to a PC, Android to iPhone, or Twitter to BlueSky, but tech, Doctorow writes, is “intrinsically interoperable.” That is, all computers are by nature universal—they are, in technical terminology, “Turing complete.” If your refrigerator has a computer in it, it can technically run Adobe Photoshop or World of Warcraft (it may take eons, but it will eventually boot it up). This means that the many incompatibilities, “switching costs,” and “walled gardens” users of digital technology encounter are manufactured artificially and enforced by legal regimes. For example, there are no technical reasons why it shouldn’t be easy for you to migrate your photos, data, and messages from one social-media application to another. In fact, in the aughts Facebook created a tool to do just that, making it much easier for MySpace users to switch. But when Google’s social-media venture Google+ attempted to lure users away from Facebook, Facebook disabled such tools and did everything in their power to keep users locked in.
Doctorow presents the defeat of interop as part of an anti-competitive legal and regulatory regime that, since the 1980s, has given its blessing to merger after merger and encouraged corporate concentration in every sector, including tech. Monopolies are enabled by lax antitrust enforcement and protected by intellectual-property law. Here, Doctorow’s narrative departs crucially from received wisdom that attributes platform monopolies wholly to “network effects.” According to this conventional explanation, the internet “naturally” produces monopolies because the more people are on Facebook or Amazon, the more attractive it is to be there oneself, whether you are creating or consuming. But that’s only half the story. Network effects, Doctorow writes, do help tech platforms “get big,” but “high switching costs” are what allow them to stay big.
Captive users translate into huge profits for firms like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon. These companies spend most of their money, Doctorow contends, not on improving the products they offer, but on consolidating, buying up competitors, and locking in users, sellers, and advertisers. Once both users and suppliers are deprived of alternatives, platforms like Amazon proceed to systematically scrape all possible value from both parties, making platforms more exploitative and less user-friendly—a process Doctorow has memorably termed “enshittification.”
Thus, Amazon search results are now filled to the brim with ads and products of dubious value, while sellers pay up to 45 percent of their revenue back to Amazon in junk fees. Meanwhile, Amazon’s monopolistic destruction of brick-and-mortar stores has left consumers with almost nowhere else to go, even as prices rise and quality falls. Google search is similarly polluted with ads and misleading or useless results. Meta packs Facebook and Instagram feeds with content we don’t want to see but that is finetuned to manipulate our attention. Meanwhile, Meta and Google’s ad duopoly effectively destroyed the business model of high-quality journalism. Finally, through various legal maneuvers and proprietary gimmicks, Apple compels its iPhone customers to upgrade regularly, generating unconscionable environmental waste while raising prices and preventing users from freely fixing and modifying their phones.
We who have been reduced to the status of “users” have little choice but to accept agreements we know invade our privacy, contribute our attention and data to platforms we despise (or at least claim to despise), and shop with corporations that mislead us while mistreating workers and vendors.
To raise and maintain their walled gardens and the high switching costs they produce, tech firms turn to a variety of legal strategies. These include what Doctorow calls the “thicket” of intellectual-property laws that have been created for digital technology by intensive, international lobbying efforts, as well as standards-setting practices also controlled by industry insiders. He is especially critical of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
In the early days of CD-based gaming consoles, companies like Sega and Sony used software locks to block third-party games whose makers had not paid the requisite licensing fees to gain access to the console. But these locks were easily overridden—both by those who violated copyright by pirating games and by hobbyists who simply wanted to make their own games for the platform. The DCMA changed the law, however, by banning all circumvention of digital locks, regardless of whether the circumvention facilitated copyright infringement. At a stroke, the hobbyist game designer became no less criminal than the digital pirate.
“The DCMA thus protect[s] business models, not copyrights,” Doctorow writes. It allows big firms to lock users and vendors into proprietary systems and extract fees and markups from both parties. Putting digital locks on devices costs next to nothing and criminalizes any use of the product that would have to bypass the lock. Today, lawnmowers, electric shavers, printers, and even medical technology like ventilators use these locks to ensure that these devices are repaired or refilled only by the manufacturer-approved parts and technicians. And tech companies like Apple use the DMCA to tie their devices indelibly to their own products and services, including their app stores.
In addition to unfair copyright laws, Big Tech legal teams take advantage of patent and trademark regulations. One of the most outrageous examples in the book involves the lengths to which Apple goes to prevent independent repair of the iPhone. A large chunk of Apple’s profits comes from people replacing broken iPhones that could be easily repaired with replacement parts. To ensure old phones can’t be repaired or harvested for repair parts, Apple uses patent law to prevent the third-party manufacture of replacement parts, and it negotiates deals with recyclers to ensure that used phones are completely destroyed. Most gallingly, it prints a miniscule Apple logo on internal parts so that its lawyers can argue that harvesting replacement parts from discarded phones is a violation of Apple’s trademark. The lawyers claim the logo creates the expectation that these recycled parts have been recertified by Apple.
In sum, a slew of laws written and passed at the behest of the industry, combined with inexhaustible legal resources, allows tech firms to stifle potential competitors and bully hobbyist tinkerers. These firms grow and solidify their positions in the marketplace not through innovation, economies of scale, or even network effects, but through lobbying and lawyering.
Doctorow’s solution is what he calls “Competitive Compatibility”—or “comcom” for short. It would involve rolling back all the legal protections that have allowed tech firms to block interop. Comcom would allow programmers to override digital locks without fear of lawsuits, to design software without paying exorbitant market entry fees to Apple and Google, and to make the big guys’ apps and devices work with those designed by the little guy. The result, Doctorow claims, would be a freer, fairer, more diverse, and more innovative internet, with fewer giants extracting rents and more small firms using one another’s software and hardware. This would be more like the early days of the internet, before it was commercialized and subjected to an international legal regime created by, and favorable to, the biggest players.
Doctorow’s book is especially useful in reminding us that the internet we ended up with wasn’t inevitable. It was the product of an era of unprecedented cooperation between big business and big government, where revolving doors breached the boundaries between regulator and regulated. Doctorow thinks that most, if not all, of the problems we associate with the internet today—surveillance, exploitation, enshittification—are downstream of that fact.
Still, a skeptical reader may wonder if there’s not another set of problems endemic to the internet. Yes, Meta’s monopolistic practices no doubt make the problems of social media—attention manipulation, isolation, narcissism—worse, but would a more vibrant market of social-media platforms really do much to redress the distortions of human sociality that are now associated with them?
It’s these problems that Barba-Kay takes up in A Web of Our Own Making. His thesis is that “digital technology is our first natural technology.” By digital technology he means not only the internet, but any tech engaged in “measurement, programming, and processing that, by issuing standardized electronic information, may be integrated and exchanged within a single, widespread network.” In other words, the vast and expanding tangle of computing, tracking, and communicating devices we’re all enmeshed in. Barba-Kay calls this technology “natural” because it doesn’t merely introduce new tools to improve daily life, but reconfigures it, changing the way we do almost everything—to the extent that we sometimes “must make a concerted effort to remember how we did things ‘before.’”
Digital technology achieves this naturalness both by its design and by an implicit ideology. Barba-Kay quotes Apple’s former chief designer Jony Ive, who describes the ideal product as “magical,” “strangely familiar,” and “exceed[ing] your ability to understand how it works.” More and more our devices become effortless extensions of our own wills; like body parts, they fade into the background of our conscious experience. Meanwhile, the data that digital technology scrapes from our online activity is presented to us as neutral and objective: it doesn’t judge; it doesn’t tell us to do or not do anything. But, as Barba-Kay points out, this neutrality is often only superficial. Selection is always involved—why this data?—and it almost always implies some course of action. As the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has written, “It is all but impossible to keep track of the number of steps one takes in a day without being tempted to increase or optimize that number.”
The design and the ideology are mutually reinforcing. The information that digital technology collects and collates takes on a quality of self-evidence, allowing a form of irresistible—i.e., “natural”—influence. This is what Barba-Kay calls “control through quantification.” This control is not only exercised from the top down but integrated throughout the system. “The platform is a great panoptic mirror in which, by regarding each other, we see ourselves.” Most distressingly, digital technology turns attention itself into something that can be measured and used to measure social value. It is not just that “likes” on a social-media platform become a proxy for value; “we are tempted to identify them with social standing and value itself.”
Doctorow understands the internet as a technological development on the same level as the advent of radio or television—something that can be brought to heel by sensible regulation. For Barba-Kay, however, digital technology’s naturalizing features set it apart. “[M]ore than just another episode in the history of tools or media,” he writes, “it represents a culmination of the history of technology as such.” Because it presents itself as a neutral executor of our desires, embedded seamlessly into our daily lives, yet capable of transforming what and how we value, digital technology cuts across and transfigures everything we do. It combines the features of a tool (like a hammer), which extends our abilities in a discrete domain, and those of a medium (like a book), which translates the world to us, with particular features highlighted or downplayed. We use social media, for example, as a means for expressing ourselves, but it also informs our self-expression through accumulations of data. In collapsing the distinction between tool and medium—between what we act with and what we act within—digital technology acquires powers vastly exceeding those of any prior technology.
A Web of Our Own Making teases out the implications of these new powers in a number of different overlapping domains, including identity, media, and personal relationships. Here, I will focus on just two: politics and religion. Barba-Kay rejects the idea that, because it increases possibilities for participation, exposes abuses, and removes barriers to the flow of information, the internet is inherently conducive to democracy. While the internet does expand opportunities for political expression beyond traditional media, Barba-Kay, quoting from Tocqueville and Arendt, contends that the mediating structure of law and representation is necessary to make political expression meaningful and effective, and to head off the worst dangers of mass politics. “Political immediacy,” he writes, “converges with total tyranny.” The absence of mediation online—Barba-Kay calls it a “medium of missing middles”—facilitates the devolution of political opinion into two extremes, a liberalism insisting that universal norms trump local differences and a reactionary blood-and-soil nationalism.
Some have argued that if the internet lends itself to any particular kind of political system, it is not democracy but the technocratic despotism one finds in China. Barba-Kay follows this reasoning up to a point. Liberalism depends on and fosters norms and values that he associates with print culture: “A distinct boundary between private and public life,” protection of free speech, and a public sphere where ideas are debated on their merits, independent of personal identities. Digital technology undermines these norms. Boundaries between public and private are broken down since “the media of private life are themselves public”; free speech is increasingly seen as a threat to safety; identities become the basis not only for the positions one holds, but also for the facts one accepts as true, all but eliminating the possibility of good-faith debate.
In its place, new forms of algorithmic public-private administration are offered to police the public sphere. Thus, there are affinities between digital technology and the technocratic methods of control in countries like China, which take advantage of the internet’s surveillance capacity, data analysis, and predictive power to control their populations and destroy the possibility of genuine public life, while delivering efficiency and economic growth. “Technical convenience,” Barba-Kay writes, “contains...an intrinsically authoritarian principle.” But he rejects the idea that our technology dooms us to totalitarianism. China’s project of control already faces serious challenges, and Barba-Kay doubts “the total depoliticization of the world’s largest national population” is sustainable in the long term when it has digital means for communication at its fingertips.
He finds the Arab Spring to be a more instructive example of politics under digital technology. The movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, among other countries, exhibited an effective capacity for circumventing state control, coordinating protest, and expressing cross-national solidarity, but democracy has not taken root in most of these countries. “While the internet is easily conducive to widespread upheaval,” Barba-Kay writes, “it does nothing to settle the longstanding conditions by which institutions, laws, and habits cohere into form.”
While the internet’s “missing middle” destabilizes our politics, it also introduces an implicit understanding of human beings and our place in the world. As Barba-Kay puts it, “Digital technology is the concrete expression of our contemporary metaphysics.” He thinks it makes sense to speak of a “religion of technology” not because we worship tech instead of God—though he does describe the Apple Store as a kind of “postmodern temple”—but because digital technology offers a particular vision of the perfectibility of humankind. This vision is bipolar: tech stretches us between the absolute necessity of technocratic “solutionism” and the absolute freedom of unlimited human choice. Contradictory though they may seem, these ideals have a lot in common: they infantilize us while denying our reliance on other people; they “value” above everything else total freedom from all pre-existing values; and they appear as obvious or natural goods, which need no grounding in any particular tradition. But their value neutrality is illusory: tech is remaking us in its image.
Barba-Kay’s critique of tech shares a great deal with the critiques of an increasingly atomistic liberalism that so-called communitarian thinkers—such as Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Charles Taylor—have been making since the 1970s. In fact, Barba-Kay seems to be suggesting that the internet is a machine for producing a kind of “hyper-liberalism,” to repurpose a term John Gray has used. It doesn’t just accelerate preexisting tendencies toward unbridled technocracy and individualism; it naturalizes them, making them appear as self-evident values by embedding them in everyday practices. We accept them not because they’ve won out in an argument but because, like animistic gods, they condition experience in the “natural” world in a way almost beyond questioning.
A Web of Our Own Making is full of evocative and insightful turns of phrase. “[T]he contrast between the virtual and real is itself a virtual one”; “data sorts us into boxes but we also climb into them ourselves”; “Uber owns no cars; it is car choreography”; “to die is the opposite of being online.” But the book’s thesis is, as Barba-Kay himself admits, extreme. And, as he also admits, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for hope. Still, he defends this rather pessimistic form of philosophical criticism, even claiming that “our hatred may prove our best hope for understanding.” It may be useful to estrange ourselves from the internet so that we can better examine how much human nature is being reshaped, if not deformed, by it.
Of course, practical exigencies demand that we act in the world as it is, and the view from afar may obscure certain particulars. One particular that figures prominently in Doctorow’s argument but not in Barba-Kay’s is the economics of the internet. Where Barba-Kay takes as his subject the internet, Doctorow targets this internet—the one emerging under a particular neoliberal order that coalesced before its rise and informed its development. Barba-Kay accepts the conventional wisdom that the internet is monopolized largely because it’s simply “more convenient that few winners take most or all.”
But why assume that today’s internet is the only internet we could have? Barba-Kay is at pains to steer clear of a “crude determinism” that construes technology as a monocausal source of our changing values and social structure; it is, for him, both constructed and constructing. Yet, with phrases like “the guiding design underlying modern technology as such,” the book doesn’t offer much in the way of contingency. Without imagining ways the internet could have been different—if, for example, it had emerged in more genuinely democratic times—it’s hard to see how it might become different in the future.
Nonetheless, Barba-Kay’s central point that a fixation on policy solutions is more symptom than cure is well taken. Such a fixation entrenches the kind of technocratic thinking that is at the root of the problem. Of course, we can’t abandon politics, policy, and law for some kind of opt-out or spiritual cloistering from the world of technology. But we should put first what belongs first. An understanding of what it means to be human—even though it may remain imprecisely defined and contested by different groups and traditions—must underpin any effective common resistance to a technological regime that is, as Barba-Kay rightly insists, fundamentally dehumanizing. A technocratic politics that insists that the world of moral value remain quarantined from public life leaves us defenseless against both the rapacious greed of large corporations and the insidious values embedded in the technologies they produce.
A Web of Our Own Making
The Nature of Digital Formation
Antón Barba-Kay
Cambridge University Press
$29.99 | 275 pp.
The Internet Con
How to Seize the Means of Computation
Cory Doctorow
Verso
$19.96 | 192 pp.
