[This is a first draft for an essay I’ve been mulling over writing for a while. I’ve played hard and lose with some historical accounts of the internet and some of the concepts aren’t fully fleshed out. Feedback is appreciated]

What are the material conditions of the internet? To talk about this, we need to make a distinction. The phrase “the internet” can be used to talk about many different layers of abstraction on top of the physical networks that exist in the material world. I will generally use “infrastructure” to talk about physical routers, servers, wireless access points, etc. and will generally use “platforms” to refer to the interactions, documents, websites, etc that occur on top of that infrastructure.

As infrastructure has increased in speed and efficiency across nearly all domains, platforms have been able to get increasingly complicated. Particular to our interests, the amount of change they were capable of handling has increased and become automated. We have come from static web pages, which were essentially digital books, zines, and flyers, all the way to Facebook, which is… well, it’s Facebook. The process of publishing and updating content has gotten easier and easier and importantly, the ability of platforms to curate and personalize that content has skyrocketed.

The language we use to describe platforms is currently very similar to the way we talk about public transport. You’re “on” TikTok and “on” your phone. You listen to music “on” a train or find a seat “on” a bus. However, the underlying infrastructure is much better described like a conversation. Your phone exchanges messages “with” a server. The idea that platforms seem to be neutrally-controlled means of transport driven solely by their pilots is misleading. The underlying infrastructure inherently involves servers as information brokers. Someone owns that server. Someone built and set up that server. Someone maintains. Someone (or thousands of someones) wrote the code that runs on that server. There is a good discussion to be had in leftist circles about networking hardware being owned in common. That is not my topic. However, I’d love to talk about it if anyone is interested (or if anyone is upset that I haven’t caveat-ed my statement about information brokers by mentioning mesh networks).

My point about this deceitful interplay between the “neutral” platforms and the opinionated infrastructure is that most people don’t even consider that the infrastructure exists. It has gotten so efficient and the changes has been gradual enough that, for most people, our interaction with “the internet” is with the concept of platforms and with nothing else. In the same way that we drive cars without worrying about the physics of combustion engines, we exist on platforms without worrying about TCP/IP.

It’s a sign of virtual abundance to simply expect infrastructure to exist and be passively confused when it malfunctions. As anyone who’s used Limewire will tell you, “stealing” a file by making a copy of it is not actually the same as stealing a car. The ability to reliably copy information without damaging the original information has led to an abundance of information and the ability to scale userbases into the thousands on a single server without slowing down the platform has led to an abundance of digital space.

Digital space is different from physical space in one key way: more than one person can occupy the same space at the same time. To be heard by an audience of hundreds of people would have previously taken enormous effort. Even gathering 100 people is quite the accomplishment for the average person and space is a major factor in this. Online, however, many of us now do this casually several times throughout the day. Getting 100 likes/favorites/votes isn’t common, but getting 100 impressions is actually quite common.

This means the major limiting factor for platforms is attention. The unit of attention for a long time with page views. You knew when someone saw your page, but you never really knew how long they stayed or which parts they read. Everyone got the same page, so every page view was roughly equivalent. This moved onto things like thread replies, active users, and posts per hour on forums. Writing, after all, takes more attention than reading, right? (This heuristic has never been wrong and has never backfired on anyone ever). Still, for the most part, everyone saw the same list of threads in the same order at the same time. These metrics worked well enough as people increasingly utilized platforms for social interactive purposes.

The major breakthrough here was tying content consumption to content production in a loop. If you want more attention, you need to not be boring and increasing the output of content over time has been the most common strategy. However, no one needs to eat online and therefore no one fears starving. A reciprocal ethos developed where someone expressing a desire for more content would be told to post more. A person wanting more engagement on their posts would be told to engage with others’ posts more. Thus, the heaviest users of that platform would be stuck in a social loop. Excuse the PMC mouthvomit, but this was essentially social gamification of the network effect. As content publishing was automated and content creation was “democratized”, the main differentiator in the quality of a platform was its users. There were people who would complain about formatting, layout, features, etc, but the userbase was always at the core of the experience.

Let’s take stake of where we’re at. We’ve fully automated the post-lurk cycle via social pressures. The owners of a website can get by with very little content creation and maintenance can also be largely automated (Not shitting on devops people here, they generally try to automate their deployments as much as possible). And entire social ecosystems have sprung up to discuss everything from model trains to obscure synthesizers to various NSFW subjects. Many of them are DIY groups dedicated to helping people troubleshoot fixing things they own or to teaching people new skills. They were creating things of value and giving them away for free. Occasionally you would hear a story about groups of strangers coming together to do extraordinary things. Things which they couldn’t have done on their own. In other words, people were organizing.

I don’t want to oversell this. The more productive organizing wasn’t common nor was most of it political. But if a group of people socialize often enough and develop a culture together, it becomes increasingly likely that some of them will do something beyond just hanging out and talking. “Organizing” in this sense of the word could apply to music scenes or to maker spaces or to book clubs. Things that require more coordination than just showing up and seeing who’s around. And once these groups form, if they’re making something of value, that creation process can be iterated on and improved by anyone in the group. This ability is, in my opinion, at the core of all human social value and creativity. This is the way that people invest in their communities and make their own lives better. These iterative processes become cultural usufructs which generate value with increasing efficiency. And it’s this organizing process that corporate social media has privatized.

What would you do if you were a capitalist who saw these forces and understood how they worked? All these people laboring for free. Low maintenance costs. All that attention going towards nothing productive (hobbys? ew). Obviously, you’d try to take control of that attention. And what better way to do this than with personalized feeds? It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. Abundance of information makes our ability to process that information a bottleneck as well, so curation was in major demand for people who were overwhelmed by having an entire encyclopedia indexed and searchable for free at any time. Of course, a capitalist creating a platform and “borrowing” all these established social mechanisms couldn’t resist heightening the force applied.

Here’s the bottom line: If Twitter disappeared tomorrow, any Twitter followers you hadn’t made redundant on another platform or in real life would be gone. They were never yours to begin with. Twitter lent them to you because it let them centralize more attention on their platform. And if Twitter decides what content you’re served, they will serve you whatever content keeps you engaged for the longest. If it makes you so furious you can’t disengage, all the better. And the celebrities who already garner a lot of attention in other spaces? Remember, attention is multiplicative. They will prioritize those people. They will lend them more attention than they will lend you. So the people who already receive a significant amount of attention will tend to receive more of it over time. This centralizes attention in the hands of the few. This attention calcifies into reputation and finally into actual capital.

Take a look at how Facebook events have decayed over time. They made them worthwhile so that they became a de-facto standard and then they kneecapped them by forcing you to pay. It’s the social equivalent of an exit fee on a free event. Remember, these are services that act as an information broker under the hood. They are inherently between you and your ability to organize online. And as social life becomes more and more online, they will be standing in between you and your ability to organize at all.

Anyway, I need to be done because the box won’t let me type any longer and I’m running out of time to write.