Toward the end of September 2022, the Iranian government decided to block internet access in response to the increasing protests for the murder of Mahsa Amini. While the decision further establishes this policing strategy as an efficient tactic to obstruct the right to assembly throughout the globe, the strategy’s recurrence tells us something about the internet’s popularity.[1] That is, something beyond the obvious sense that structures so much of our contemporary lives: on the opposite side of that quotidian popularity, obverse to the billions of social media profiles and trillions of dollars moved in online transactions, rests the people and the potential of their coming together. Amid all the pessimism that the contemporary digital landscape induces, at times it’s hard to recall that the internet held the promise of better lives not so long ago. A horizon of free exchange of information or the potential for the kind of collective power associated with the Arab Spring are just two examples among many that portended the advent of an enfranchising technology. In Internet for the People, Ben Tarnoff expounds the cluster of changes that curbed or dissipated some of these expectations, narrating the internet’s history from its inception in military and academic circles to its grim present. Most pragmatically, Tarnoff offers explanations and solutions for the internet’s deterioration during these last decades to recover and protect its popularity as a gathering space for people.
The internet’s bare-bones story begins in 1977 with a van filled with computers emitting the first bundle of data, known as a packet. Traveling thousands of miles across several interlinked networks, the packet contained instructions that would guarantee the data’s arrival by communicating its destination at every network it passed. This packet was an incipient version of the internet as boundless digital chatter: “The internet is fundamentally a language,” Tarnoff tells us, “a set of rules for how computers should communicate” (6). The historical context of this nascent language explains it as an offshoot of the Cold War and the US government’s worried spending after Sputnik’s launch, which occasioned the creation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—owners and drivers of the van. This is a crucial episode in the internet’s biography: its birth and infancy were driven and funded by the government. For such a colossal undertaking, it couldn’t have happened otherwise: DARPA “commissioned research from the country’s most talented computer scientists at a scale that would’ve been suicidal for a private corporation” (8). In turn, the internet was shaped with a collaborative intention in mind, stressing its communicative nature as “a free and universal medium, rather than a patchwork of incompatible commercial dialects” (9). And here we arrive at one of Tarnoff’s central premises: “Under private ownership, such a language could never have been created” (9). In other words, the inconceivable amounts of concentrated wealth that the internet now allows could not have been possible without public spending and public access.
As Tarnoff has it, his narrative is an unusual manifesto “in the sense that it tries to make something manifest, something that so far has not been very visible: the story of the internet’s privatization” (xv). After DARPA, the internet’s story follows the broad strokes of the neoliberal genre: inept and opportunistic statespersons turning public resources into for-profit private enterprises. But Tarnoff’s aim in making this story manifest also suggests how the internet’s hypervisibility, its capacity to generate and spread immersive realities, has prompted an occlusion of its own history, mystifying its own process of becoming. In making this story visible, Tarnoff’s account excels in its clarity and pedagogical approach to technical jargon. The latter is best displayed in two of the book’s rhetorical merits. The first is the simplicity with which he addresses the complex elements that interact to constitute that boundless phenomenon that we know as the internet—along with its problems. “There is no bird’s-eye view of the internet. That’s why metaphors matter.” Tarnoff tells us with deft troping, “Some things are too small to see without a microscope; others are too big to see without a metaphor” (xiii-xiv). Although the internet is best understood as a language, throughout Internet for the People, Tarnoff repurposes an oft used figure to represent the intricate structure of the internet as an architectural design rising from a basement to a roof. Inasmuch as an architectural structure is more susceptible to appropriation than a language, Tarnoff’s parallel metaphors for the internet exhibit the tension between the constraints of its material reality and the openness of its potential as an adapting system. Structurally, at the very base, we encounter the pipes, the actual physical foundations that sustain the network: transoceanic cables and servers encompassing the globe. To exemplify these foundations, Tarnoff introduces MAREA, “the highest-capacity submarine fiber-optic cable in the world” crossing the Atlantic (x). Yet here we also begin to catalog the reasons for concern, as we learn that this most essential infrastructure resting on the ocean floor is already in the hands of Microsoft, Facebook, and a subsidiary of Spain’s Telefónica, which leases part of its capacity to Amazon. The story of the internet’s privatization is one of expanding appropriation from foundation outward.
The next level up in the architecture takes us to the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the companies that bought the government’s infrastructure to sell internet access to the population. In the US, 76% of the market is controlled by four ISPs—Comcast, Charter, Verizon, and AT&T—whose modus operandi is: maximize profit, neglect the infrastructure’s upkeep, and seemingly above all, fuck the users. Yet here Tarnoff begins to infuse his narrative with some optimism: the big ISPs’ disinterest in regions where profit isn’t substantial, such as rural areas, has generated voids where communities can come together and set up public organizations to provide internet access. That is, ISPs for the community, not profit. Such was the case among the residents of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who chose to build on the 1935 acquisition of their electric supply from private hands and turn their internet service into a public one in 2010. The Gig, as their ISP was named, charges “reasonable rates for some of the fastest residential speeds in the world,” making online access a priority (40). Beyond the Gig’s relative fame, Tarnoff points to similar initiatives across the country, quoting the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s estimate of “more than nine hundred communities across the United States [that] are served by publicly or cooperatively owned networks” (40). Tarnoff shows how, adjacent to the big ISPs’ monopoly, rests another instance of the internet’s popularity, with people coming together to organize and guarantee the right to access it.
A significant shift occurs as we ascend through the internet’s structure, reaching the entities we’ve come to associate with platforms, such as Facebook or Amazon. The story of the internet turns drastically with eBay, the platform that would come to transform how internet companies conceived profit. This structural transformation, initiated by eBay, led to the historical emergence of the online mall as a strategy to monetize all online social interactions. The online mall recasts the virtual community that thrived through the 90s in message boards and chat rooms as a mall where “social relationships have merged so completely with market relationships as to become indistinguishable” (81). This is the shift responsible for the internet we know today, an internet that continues to bring “people together, but under the sign of capital” (81).
Here lies the second merit that stands out in Internet for the People: the specific kind of historiography summoned for this narrative. Beginning with eBay in the 1990s, Tarnoff’s history holds as its spine the succession of companies and platforms that have altered the algorithmic ecosystem by developing new ways of making a profit, that is, by further altering the internet’s initial infrastructure for private gain. Tarnoff interprets this capacity for adaptability through the Marxist lens of subsumption, which, for Marx, described the expansion of capitalism across the globe. Marx distinguished between two types of subsumption: formal subsumption registered the incorporation of practices and activities alien to capitalism that, however, had not been completely assimilated into the logic of capital, while real subsumption suggested a complete transformation of labor into a capitalist logic. From this perspective, the story goes like this:
The internet of the mid-to-late 1990s was under private ownership, but it had not yet been optimized for profit. It retained too much of its old shape, and its old shape wasn’t conducive to the new demands placed on it. Formal subsumption had been achieved, in other words, but real subsumption remained elusive.
Accomplishing the latter would involve developments at a variety of levels—technical, social, economic—that made it possible to construct new kinds of systems. These systems are the digital equivalents of the modern factory farm (78).
Further mobilizing Marx’s distinction, Tarnoff categorizes these stages of development and adaptability in three phases: ascendance, triumph, and baroque. The ascendant phase took place with the privatization of the internet’s infrastructure in the late 1990s, thereby securing ownership for telecom corporations. The triumphant phase unfolded in the early 2000s, as privatization expanded through the internet’s architecture. The key modification in this phase comprises the incorporation of “big data” technologies, such as machine learning, to monetize online interactions by capturing, organizing, and selling the information they produced. It’s hard to gauge the relevance of this shift because it’s hard to gauge the immensity of this information, but consider the endless capture of data that not only your computer, but every device you own, continually generates and sends to companies that profit from it. Now multiply that by around four billion, the number of worldwide internet users. This is not only Facebook’s, Google’s, and Amazon’s model—to name the most pervasive names in this triumphant stage—but that of other hundreds of corporations whose profitability was such that they were acquired by these larger companies.
Such acquisitions are part of what pushes the internet’s development to its baroque phase, in which companies are appraised not in terms of the value of the data they produce but in terms of the estimation of the value such data might produce. Here, the paradigmatic case is Uber, an unprofitable company that “loses billions of dollars each year” (119). In a sense, there’s a farcical quality to this baroque phase that follows the tragic privatization of the internet and the shift from profits for users to profiting from users—in this case, that farce carries the name of venture capital. By injecting money into startups in exchange for equity, venture capital has played an important role in the rise of the privatized internet, reaching a point of paradoxical investment where money loss does not diminish valuation. Although Uber isn’t the only example of this (“A mere 18 percent of publicly traded startups valued at more than $1 billion were profitable in 2019” [120]), it serves as a clarifying model: while the money that Uber makes from each ride is not sufficient to cover its costs—hence its losses—its valuation is assessed by speculating on the amounts of information it collects from its transactions. “The hope is that manufacturing large amounts of data through the internet will, through the magic of machine learning and other modes of analysis, lead to optimizations that boost revenue” (121). Whether this magic actually delivers is beside the point for investors, who manage to cash out on their initial investments with thousandfold profits.
Complementing this record of capitalist adaptability, Internet for the People doesn’t lose sight of the other half of this equation—the other half of its title— tracing the concomitant exploitation of workers in the US and the rest of the world in turn. Here, Tarnoff builds on a burgeoning field of journalistic and academic research on the occluded consequences of wealth accumulation derived from the internet. For example, Tarnoff references the concept of ghost work, coined by anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri, to define an “especially large and especially global” type of labor: “From Kenya to India to the United States, workers are hunched over monitors, being timed on how quickly they flag a ‘dick pic’ or classify a photo of a dog. They are the human automata that automated systems, or systems that appear to be automated, are built on” (132). This process is intrinsic to that initial innovation brought about by eBay that has served as the model for every profitable platform since and is in turn central to Tarnoff’s diagnosis, the online mall: much like the Automaton Chess Player, the monetization of every single user interaction relies on the exploitation of labor and its simultaneous occlusion behind the disguise of automata.
Online malls, whatever their particular entanglements, are inequality machines. More specifically, they reallocate the existing distribution of risk and reward. They push risks downward and spread them around. They pull the rewards upward and focus them in fewer hands (129).
Online malls, in turn, have an inherent systematicity that automatizes so much of the users’ behavior, they “organize online life through a particular architecture, and that architecture makes certain choices for us” (155). The ease of flow with which racism and xenophobia circulate through the internet has a lot to do with such automation. Tarnoff addresses how oppression is also encoded into the internet’s own architecture, introducing scholar Lisa Nakamura’s research on digital racialization, whereby xenophobia informs the internet’s constitution through a process she has termed cybertyping: “Images of race from older media are the analog signal that the Internet optimizes for digital reproduction and transmission” (quoted in Tarnoff, 135). In other words, cybertyping means that “Oppression became not only digital, not only networked, but algorithmic” (135).
There is another sleight of hand at play here. Implicit in this architecture is a kind of sovereignty that pretends it doesn’t exist, one which rules through virtual structures it designs and implements.
Only in exceptional circumstances—a high-profile user is banned, an obtrusive new feature is introduced—does the sovereign reveal himself. Most of the time, the “community” appears to organize itself. It is essential to the success of the social media mall that users behave as if their behavior is entirely their own, while being induced to behave in ways that are maximally legible to automated systems that track and analyze them, ultimately for the purpose of selling ads (96).
Yet, following the same architectural conceptualization he has developed throughout the book, Tarnoff reframes the problem to unravel possible solutions. “To make new choices—to create spaces where we can make those choices collectively—we need new architectures” (155–6). Grounding this idea of new architectures, Tarnoff offers examples of decentralized online communities which rely on shared protocols to exchange messages freely, such as the open-source social media platform Mastodon. But these architectures aren’t strictly new ideas, but rather a return to the organizing concepts that made the internet popular—email, despite relying on distinct servers (read Gmail, Yahoo, etc.), operates through nonproprietary and open protocols (a shared language). Returning to a reliance on shared languages, Tarnoff points out how “‘Protocolizing’ social media would break the walls of these walled gardens, and turn them inside out” (159).
While we imagine new architectures capable of restoring the internet’s enfranchising horizons, historicizing the internet serves as a reminder of its pre-privatized origins, of the resources that have not been fully assimilated into capitalism’s logic. As the residual points to the emergent, an open space to convene beyond the online mall becomes much more manifest, suggesting the foundations of a shared language on the other side of the internet’s privatized popularity for people coming together.
Notes:
[1] This strategy takes on diverse forms each time it is implemented: Russia’s throttling of Twitter during protests in support of Alexey Navalny, India’s restriction of mobile internet access, then restoration only to 2G in Kashmir, Myanmar’s military junta blocking mobile internet access altogether. Access Now, a non-profit human rights organization founded in 2009, developed the project #KeepItOn to provide a record of shutdowns throughout the world as well as an annual list of upcoming events threatened by likely censorship.