Is the internet dead? Are we?
Is the internet dead? Are we?
So you can stop asking me what my thesis is about
The overwhelming impression that you get when speaking to people about their experience of using the internet is as an almost malign, parasitic force in their lives. When talking to my students about whether or not the internet was making us stupider, or more distant from our friends and family the overwhelming answer was “yes”. Everyone here has had an experience like this, be it suddenly realizing you’ve wasted 30 minutes watching Instagram Reels, or the heartburn-like anger of having read something horribly offensive online. This is to say nothing of the content itself, more and more we are drenched with material that is so clearly designed to stimulate the feedback loops in our brain that its insulting. I don’t think I’m alone in these feelings, in fact, there is a conspiracy theory lurking around the internet that purports to explain this, like every phenomenon. This is the “dead internet theory”, the notion that a majority of the content and interactions we witness or take part in online are algorithmically generated by “bots”, seeking to farm more engagement, and ultimately data. This is a nightmarish fate, the beings and expressions we encounter when we open our search browser are inhuman, mimicking the utterances of millions of previous entries, chewed up and spit out by a predictive model, compelling us, in our own zombie-like fashion, to mindlessly consume. This is a sort of solipsistic nightmare for the postmodern subject, one where identity and even bodily integrity has completely collapsed, overrun by feedback loops of engagement.
My purpose isn’t really to conclude once and for all whether the Matrix is real, and all of the posts on my Twitter (I refuse to call it X) feed are bots, but rather to engage with this feeling and idea. Why is it that so many people feel this way about the internet, something that should be immensely liberating and energizing, yet seems to have failed in every aspect. From the failures of every progressive political campaign staged in part through the internet, to the utterly stultifying nature of “content”, the internet may not be dead, but it certainly feels like it is dying.
Our entire experience of the digital commons is organized and directed by algorithms, invisible intermediaries who are responsible for showing us certain content, based on what they predict will be most relevant. Hunt and McKelvey (2019) argue that algorithms function across a wide array of different informational contexts, such as creating content, managing information flows, or mediating interaction (p. 309-10). This infrastructural work places them as an informational gatekeeper, a sort of automated media and cultural policy (p. 310), controlling what is recommended, when and why. Some interesting examples of this include Spotify’s yearly “Wrapped” feature or Twitter’s notorious shadowbans, both of which reflect how algorithms are responsible for structuring your experience on digital platforms, and automating what can and can’t be seen, as well as telling you what should be seen.
I use the term “algorithm” as a singular here for the sake of convenience, but even this is inaccurate, algorithms function collectively, as part of a network of information. An algorithm can draw on a vast array of other algorithms, and often will create responses that can’t be explained even by experts. Danaher (2016) offers an uncomfortable example in the form of Amazon’s “chaotic storage algorithm” (p. 253) that they use to stock their warehouses. Vastly more efficient than a conventional organization system, this system is also completely incomprehensible to the individual workers using it, they must submit themselves to following the algorithm’s instructions. In this fashion, Amazon warehouse employees become those “dead appendages” of labour referred to by Marx and others. This stretches across every arena, as Fuller and Weizman (2021) explore, algorithms inform everything from targeted advertisments to targeted assassinations. As part of their ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel has admitted to using an AI in order to “produce targets” (Davies, McKernan & Sabbagh, 2023) for air strikes within Gaza. Its important to note that the distinction between AI and algorithms at this point is virtually non-existent, AI has been deployed in discourse around the subject likely in order to give these systems a more high-tech gloss. They are all narrow forms of “intelligence”, in that they are responsible for sensing stimuli in the world, and making decisions based upon that stimuli, whether it is to show you an adverisment, or greenlight the demolition of a neighborhood in Palestine.
The corollary of algorithms is data, the information generated by your use of the internet. When I choose to like a post on Facebook about E-Readers, this information is recorded by Meta. When I use Google to search for “best ereader 2022”, Alphabet will record this information. This is all data that is generated by my interaction with online platforms, and, as corporations realized, was an extremely lucrative resource (Srnicek 2017). Data is ubiquitous, being extracted from every possible facet of our day to day lives and interactions. Sadowski (2020) conceptualizes this arrangement as similar to that of the owner of a shopping mall, who in the non-digital world maintains a rentier-landlord relationship with the businesses within. The digital landlord doesn't just expect a portion of the value generated by the businesses within their cybermall though, they also expect a portion of the value generated by every interaction that is facilitated through the mall’s space.
“For every social interaction between people meeting at the mall. For every person who just browses and walks around. The mall’s owner takes their cut of the value generated. Whether that value is money added to the price of everything or data about human behaviours and preferences.” (Sadowski 2020, p. 569)
Data is a form of capital now, echoing Marx’s original M-C-M’ conceptualization of capital circulation. Firms aren’t interested in data for its use-value, but rather for the exchange value of its constant circulation (Sadowski 2019). Data is extracted from these social interactions between people at every juncture, and as Andrejevic (2012) recognizes, confronts us in the same way that the products of alienated labour confronts the worker.
As Felix Guattari predicted with uncanny prescience in 1984, if integrated global capitalism is allowed to stabilize, it will send “its tentacles spreading all over the world, it’s centers of decision-making tend to develop a certain autonomy in relation to the national interests of the great powers, and to constitute a complicated network that can no longer be located in any one political area” (p.263). This highlights that it is impossible to seperate the political, social and economic configurations from one another, they work in and amongst each other. This is, as Toni Negri (RIP) observed in 1992, the real subsumption of society by capital, “the mode of production has become so flexible that it can be effectively confused with the movements of the productive forces, that is, with the movements of all the subjects which participate in production”. I take this to mean all of the social actions that can be performed in this society are now part of its production, recognized as zones for the extraction of data.
These already have an immensely chilling effect on how we conceive of and use the internet, even if it’s not immediately obvious that all of our actions are fodder for the circulation of capital that we will never see returns on. They undergird an encourage an entire cultural and social superstructure, what Adorno and Horkheimer (1947) are referring to when they say the culture industry is “infecting everything with sameness” (p. 94). This is what Marcuse might call “technological rationality”, when the organizing logic of economy travels to the cultural world.
More than just this though, I think there is a deeper sense in which algorithms and the cultural world they generate are fundamentally alienating and dehumanizing. I began to develop these ideas when engaging with the excellent work of the cultural theorist Mark Fisher (RIP), most well known for his book Capitalist Realism (2009). I was particularly struck by some of his writing in his book The Weird and the Eerie (2016), and the elegant, but restrained connections he made to capitalism. In particular, Fisher identifies the eerie as:
“fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?[…] They also apply to the forces governing capitalist society. Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity” (p.11)
Marx himself says as much. He makes repeated reference to the vampiric nature of capital, and says “"The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" (1852, p.5). The connection here is obvious. What could be more eerie than the already subject-less agency of capital reified again into the algorithm? Lurking within our own actions, manipulating our desires, they are fundamentally eerie, and come with the same sense of disorientation and alienation. With a little imagination, Marx’s quote can be seen as a quite literal indictment of algorithms, the traditions of dead, bygone thoughts and expressions regurgitated by algorithms, weighing on all of our brains like a nightmare. McKenzie Wark (2019) puts it succinctly, “either your mind is erased and your body is another mind’s vehicle; or your mind is subordinated to the will of another power. Either way, your mind is not your own. It feels like some vile takeover” (p. 42).
This is part and parcel of a progression of objectification that has occured throughout the capitalist project, beginning with the subsumption of the “putting-out” cottage economies of pre-industrial Europe, and culminating with this vile takeover. Autonomist Marxists such as Toni Negri (RIP), Carlo Vercellone and Tiziana Terranova refer to this as the formal and real subsumption of labour, though looking at it with the lens of Fisher’s postmodernism gives it a distinctly eerie twist.
Maybe its not that the internet is dead, but really we are. Maybe its not that these new agencies without subjectivities are eerie, but we are all agencies without subjectivities. What is unsettling is the collapse of agency and identity that we all face, as we become increasingly irrelevant to our economic and social world.
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