Although the Internet was created in the United States as a measure against the Soviet nuclear threat, the ideological wave that popularized and instigated the motion of its growth was one of idealistic peace and collective governance. On one hand, the Internet liberated the reserve of power that governments and corporations defended so ardently, effectively empowering civilians with unforeseen powers of collective action and naturally emergent associations outside the purview of traditional structures. On the other, it accelerated the spread of caustic ideologies, misinformation, and the corporate instrumentalization of users. While corporate interests have warped the transformative beginnings of the internet, I argue that the Internet has done more good than harm, especially considering that the web hasn’t yet wandered beyond redemption, leaving its humble beginnings untouched below the layer of industrial soot. 

 

Good

The internet was marched forward by dreamers who anticipated a globalizing world and envisioned a central role for the individual in its collective governance. In 1997 cyberlibertarian political activist John Barlow yawped in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace to the “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel... You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (1996) Emerging from an era of international conflict, of world wars and cold wars, a grim and inescapable image of the world was beginning to form. Citizens of the globe would forever be caught in between the interests of those who held power. Bound to their duty as pawns to be deployed by governments when the next opportunity for political or economic expansion presented itself. The internet offered a space outside the jurisdiction of governments that “grows itself through our collective actions” and founds its legitimacy on “our own Social Contract” (Barlow 1997). Barriers to knowledge and information were broken down, financial instruments of self-empowerment were developed, and collective action was embraced.  

 

Digital spaces gave way for collective action and systems of power outside of the peripheries of civil societies and governmental institutions. In 2010, Facebook played an instrumental role in aiding the revolutionary efforts of the Arab Spring. In Egypt, anti-establishment content could be freely published on the platform without fear of government censorship and mass protests could be organized days in advance without fear of informants hampering these efforts. Ultimately, Facebook was hailed as a liberating tool that was essential for the removal of President Husni Mubarak from office (Zuckerman 2006). Cyberspace offered the means to organize on unforeseen scales which couldn’t be supported in physical spaces. Moreover, platforms such as Facebook being the private property of the corporation meant that it offered users a legal safe haven from unjust laws so long as Facebook haven’t chartered them themselves. It must be noted that corporations have become increasingly authoritarian over the platforms that are secondary to their profit interests. The vehement repression of Palestinian voices during the ongoing genocide of their people, has undermined the credibility of platform corporations as legitimate governors of cyber spaces. 

 

In Lessig’s Code (2006) he argues that the internet Internet encoded a new set of laws that hinge on the charters of corporations as private actors. The claim for cyberspace would be unavoidably free. While laws can be passed that place pressures on corporations to moderate harmful content, the First Amendment protection of users’ speech would the base code in the architecture of platforms. Not only do governments lack the legal capacities to rule over cyberspace, but they also have little real sway over the behaviors of users on the net. Any efforts from governments to censor harmful content would be forced to slash into the rights of regular user content and unavoidably interfere with their rights (Zuckerman 2006) The direction of this digital Anthropocene would thus be self-ordering and built from the bottom up. On the other hand, the shape that this invisible hand of cyberspace was thought to create at its inception devolved into quite the opposite. Just because governments were thrown out of the kingdom did not mean that corporations wouldn’t take on the mantle of “New Governors” (Klonick 2018). These corporate interests metastasized into a digital sphere that seeks to enslave users rather than liberate them. 

 

Bad 

Contrary to popular belief, platform algorithms are far from neutral and carry with them coder’s biases, and corporation’s financial and diversity interests (West et al, 2019). Given that corporate interests lie formally with increasing revenues, algorithms that suggest material to users have been designed to capture the widest scope of attention in the most cost-effective and efficient manner. It did not take these algorithms long to recognize that shock value and the promotion of extremist content such as antisemitic conspiracies amassed consistent audiences (Townsend 2020).  These platforms amplify the opinions that lie on the periphery of moral acceptability, the opinions with shock factor capable of more effectively drawing you in, and by doing so create a peculiar environment in which destructive content, along with fabricated stories rather than truth, is more readily demanded and supplied. Misinformation and disinformation spread like wildfire not only because they’re more effective at capturing your attention, but also because without the proper regulation, algorithms will prioritize user attention over offering accurate information. 

 

 These corporate interests have aided in the spread of caustic ideologies and misinformation on an unprecedented scale. They have also found that a more efficient way of maintaining user attention is to recommend content specific to their interest. As harmless as this sounds, the result has been the polarization of user feeds into islands of political inclinations based on their pre-existing political views. By classifying users into echo chambers of a “distinct and insulated media system”, the impact on democracies has been detrimental. These corporate algorithms eliminated spaces where individuals with different political views can reach an understanding, withering the sort of Rawlsian public reason or Habermasian deliberation of free market places of ideas which ensure that democracies are well informed. Not only have these efforts cannibalized western politics, but it has also deformed the media into hyper-partisan sects as a consequence of their attempts to remain responsive to market demands (Marwick and Lewis 2017). 

 

A second phenomenon has risen from this marriage of corporate interests and governance over the architecture of digital space, what Shoshanna Zuboff calls Surveillance Capitalism. In Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism, she describes a new form of capitalist interjection in our quotidian lives. Platform corporations have designed their platforms to siphoning and instrumentalize user information for a profit. Quickly, this has devolved into a “raw-material extraction operation” with the goal of automating and instrumentalizing users to befit the wishes of these profit-seeking machines. Algorithms are now encoded for the purpose of not only attempting to “know our behavior but also shape our behavior at scale”. Large organizations such as Google and Facebook mine individuals’ profiles like commodities for sale, and scale their operations and revenues by modifying the herd of users’ behaviors through platform designs that trap attention and guides it through increasingly sophisticated models of influence (Zuboff 2020). The dreams of the cyberlibertarian founders of the Internet would quake at the sight of this enslavement of human potential. However, there must yet be hope for this cyberworld.  

 

Initially, it was believed that governments would represent the tyrannical threat to cyberspace and the freedom of its users, that threat came from the “private, self-regulating entities” that exercise their sovereign powers over a system characterized by its “lack of direct accountability to its users” (Klonick 2018).  Section 230 of the US Communication Decency Act grants the architects of this digital nation, platform corporations, the freedom to govern according to whichever “values they want to protect - or to protect no values at all” (2018). In 2012, the US congress in efforts with civil societies and social activists proposed a bill that would effectively tackle online piracy and protect artists’ rights to distributing and monetizing their art. If passed, this bill would mean that Google would be charged with the costs of content moderation, as well as lose a significant portion of revenue. In response to this threat to their bottom line, the corporation posted a banner on their search page that read “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the Web!” Shortly after, congress was met with a barrage of angry web users raising their hands at an establishment peeking its nose in cyberspace it has no right to approach (Kolbert 2017). Corporations continue to hide behind the guise of the initial wave of anti-establishment liberation that the Internet provided, however, it is becoming obvious that an obvious need for government protecting might redeem the web. 

 

Weighing the Scales

While the list of harms that the internet has imposed might seem to be overwhelming, they all share a common denominator, the intrusion of capitalist corporate interests in the governance of a public realm. However, it is important to recognize, that the Internet nevertheless continues to be a public realm. The value of such a feat of human collection outside the traditional power structures of governments and hierarchical institutions is immutable. In 1938, a reading of Orson Wells War of the Worlds was broadcast publically on the newly invented radio. This lead to mass disarray as listeners believed this was a real broadcast announcing the visit of aliens. Listeners were yet to adapt their world view to this newly emergent technology and yet the consequences seemed limitless. The Internet itself wasn’t the source of harm, but rather the culprit was a world struggling to adapt their world views to a technology with the potential of being a remedy for a lot of our social ailments. 

 

On the other hand, this argument of the Internet’s goods outweighing their harms rests squarely on the assumption that we can resolve these harms. After all, a harm is only a harm so long as we don’t have a solution for it. If the internet is redeemable then what we’re left with is a powerful tool for effective, genuine social change and collective empowerment that repatriates the forces of globalization to the motion of the general will. Some solutions might be Taylor Owen’s promotion of a broad framework that requires “ experimentation, iteration, and international coordination”. This view argues self-governance is insufficient, and that there is a need to create incentive structures that reorient corporate interests towards the promotion of the well-being of the entangled digital and physical spaces (Owen 2019). What is certain, however, is that there is a dire need for governmental intervention at the least, or more aptly coordinated policy setting at the core of digital governance. Berners Lee, the founder of the internet proposes a Contract for the Web which invited multilateral coordination for resolving the ailments of the internet. It calls on governments to break barriers to transparency that have been lifted in front of public data registries, thus making the data information economy accountable and accessible to citizens and impacted actors. It also includes solutions for remodeling the digital architecture to be more inclusive and accountable to issues of race, sex and religion, as well as promote more positive content (Sample 2019). By virtue of its mere presence, the internet has done more good than harm when we take into account the potential it continues to carry with it, assuming we can rid it of the transient parasites which knaw at its heel. 

​













 

Citations:

Barlow, J. P. (1996, April). A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

​

Klonick, K. (2018). The New Governors: The People, Rules and Processes Governing Online Speech. Harvard Law Review, 131, 1598th ser., 1600-1670.

​

Kolbert, E., & Heller, N. (n.d.). Who Owns the Internet? Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/who-owns-the-internet

​

Lessig, L. (2006). Code. New York: Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

​

Marwick, A., & Lewis, R. (2017). Media manipulation and Disinformation online. Plaats van uitgave onbekend: Data and Society Research Institute.

​

Owen, T. (2019, November 04). The Case for Platform Governance. Retrieved from https://www.cigionline.org/publications/case-platform-governance

 

Sample, I. (2019, November 24). Tim Berners-Lee unveils global plan to save the web. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/24/tim-berners-lee-unveils-global-plan-to-save-the-internet

 

Townsend, M. (2020, August 16). Facebook algorithm found to 'actively promote' Holocaust denial. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/16/facebook-algorithm-found-to-actively-promote-holocaust-denial

​

West, S. M. (2019). Discriminating Systems, Gender, Race and Power in AI. AI Now Institute, 1-33.

​

Zuboff, S. (2020). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York: PublicAffairs.

​

​

Zuckerman, E. (2013). Cute Cats to the Rescue? Participatory Media and Political Expression. Youth, New Media and Political Participation.