Socialism, internet style
How the web will transform the world—again
BY Brian Joseph Davis
The single greatest development with the internet this past year has nothing to do with code. It has nothing to do with geek executives drowning in blow and Buffy box sets, and nothing to do with any product that starts with a lower case “i.” It’s been a shift in how the public perceives the ’net. Thanks to peerto- peer programs, and contributor sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube, as well as millions of blogs, the public has realized that “net” is short for “network.” It’s as if the Pavlovian association of passivity before a glowing screen—learned from decades of television viewing—has been shaken off.
In those dismissals of internet trends that appear every few months in the dailies, most get it wrong. These hubs of snark, passion, insight, cat photos and rampant spelling errors are not storming the gated community of print journalism and criticism. There’s no reason to. Instead, a mobile base camp is being set up next door to do something far more radical than journalism. People are analyzing and editing the raw feed of life for themselves—a small social transformation in the developed world, but one that will dovetail with other, mammoth transformations.
Racist stand-up comedian Michael Richards, for example, had what was left of his career halted by the dissemination of a video that old media would never have touched. Spreading the video wasn’t the action of a filthy, heartless mob. It was the kind of filthy, heartless—yet fair—mob with checks and balances that musician Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields worked with when he was able to defend himself against spurious online charges of being a racist (for admitting during a music conference to liking the song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”). By responding on blogs and online radio, Merritt was exonerated and a dialogue regarding voice, music and race flourished— none of which would have resulted from a newspaper article on the subject. Granted, most of the information shared in these communities amounts to graduation-party puking photos and homebrew karaoke videos, but so what? The inability to understand such charms has always been a disease particular to the fourth estate and it doesn’t take away from the power of the internet. As well, for every Rupert Murdoch-owned MySpace, there are 100 sites that aren’t.
Sites like Wikipedia and YouTube and participatory policy development like Creative Commons, as well as online applications like Google Docs, have all recently been collectively dubbed “Web 2.0,” but the principles behind these works are what the internet was built on. Using online applications and being a stakeholder in websites positions a user as part of something else—something like society—in a way that the alienation of everyday life usually keeps that person from attaining. In terms of the computer itself, these principles will ultimately annihilate the idea of a computer as an expensive TV that you fill with expensive, proprietary programs—a consumer object that, until recently, was absolutely meaningless to the majority of the world’s population.
This is the kind of internet now snaking its way to the developing world, sometimes in the form of projects like One Laptop for Every Child (cheap, hand-cranked laptops with mesh networking capabilities) and, more realistically, in the form of hacked wireless powered by heisted electricity, as is increasingly common in squatted metropolises around Jakarta and Lagos. Here the internet will connect with that other social transformation: the urban population of the planet now outweighing the rural population. As urban theorist Mike Davis has pointed out, the shift toward superslums and megacities means the superpoor will be talking to one another in a way they haven’t before, and what they have to say could amount to a second age of socialism—comparable to the birth of the metropolises of the industrial age. There is no telling what difference wi-fi and webbased applications will make there, but at least this is certain: The story will be better written this time around, as the internet is not a challenge or add-on feature to conventional media—it’s the world itself, written by us, with profit-based media only a small organ within it. Control save.
