Mini-Theory Blog: Escaping the Garden

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Culture Crash

I think it’s important to talk about the social and political implications of Elon Musk and his backers buying Twitter, chasing their critics away, and transforming the platform into the social media equivalent of “The Daily Stormer.” I’ve written about this frequently, and noted in multiple published blogs that I believe enacting this scheme was the principal reason for his acquisition of the platform. Now that Twitter is mass-deleting Tweets from a period of historical significance to journalists, teachers, and other observers, I think it’s also important to place the platform’s rapid implosion in the context of a larger shift in online media of all types towards “walled gardens”; propaganda chambers totally controlled by a billionaire ruling class that is right now boiling your children to death so they can keep doing capitalism.

This makes the slow death of Twitter, and the ravings of its omnishambles fascist owner, a sort of very public case study for a larger phenomenon that includes the destruction and commodification of much of our online information environment. This includes the creation of walled online gardens on social media, paywalls, subscription walls, various aspects of surveillance capitalism, AI plagiarism-based “content creation,” and so forth. Everywhere we turn, access to reliable information is being commodified while simultaneously passing into the direct control of an unelected, unaccountable ruling class that is demonstrably paying to push fascist ideology, and fascist movements in our society through captured political systems and yes, media of all types.

Discussing how we got here is a topic too large for this blog post, but the simple truth is that billionaire fascist supervillains now own all the concert halls, so they feel empowered not only to pick which songs we’re allowed to play there, but to commodify your presence, and perhaps even charge you for the privilege of consuming their now tightly-controlled propaganda.

Presumably you don’t need to be an anarchist like myself to understand why that’s a very bad thing; one need only look at the recent election and presidency of a fascist reality TV show billionaire to demonstrate the disastrous consequences of freely distributed fascist propaganda in the politically ignorant environment of American society. Despite these ominous portents however, I think the tech billionaires, media magnates, and would-be tyrants have made a major miscalculation; one that ultimately forgets why they wanted to create propaganda machines out of news websites and social media platforms in the first place. Namely, they are assuming that you simply don’t have any choice but to participate in the information economy they define, on platforms and websites they control.

This is of course demonstrably false; from the existence of Mastodon and the fediverse, to all manner of grassroots forums, blogs, and websites, there is in fact already a whole world of informative, genuine, and publicly-sourced online content at your fingertips – chances are, you’re reading this post on one such platform, right now.

Unfortunately, as people were frolicking for well over a decade on larger corporate sites and platforms, while the slow boiling frog of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshifitication” rolled onward, an online culture formed that really isn’t prepared for this moment. We like big corporate sites, we like having news fed to us, we like getting all of our important information in the same place. Consequently, those of us who don’t want to be fed fascist propaganda – or be charged for the privilege of consuming it – aren’t yet prepared to subvert the billionaires’ ambitions of digital hegemony by recolonizing that space with our own content.

Collectively, we need to transform life online from a culture of rote consumption into a culture of person-to-person information distribution. Anyone can start a blog, join an independent forum, or get a fediverse account. If we want an information economy that isn’t dictated by fascists and folks who’ve happily sold us out to billionaire supervillains setting the planet on fire for profit, we’re going to have to learn to prioritize documenting, distributing, and publicizing the truth ourselves. This isn’t a fire and forget media environment anymore, if it ever was. This will require effort, organization, and above all, an emphasis on the critical thinking required to separate truth from propaganda in real time, or we’ll simply replicate the debased networks we’re all now seeking to escape.

Creating this type of culture shift in the online information economy will not be easy, but we already have evidence it can work. The free and open internet of the 90’s that oldheads still wistfully recall was built like this, and if they did it on dial up modems, surely we can get there in our advanced online culture as well.

 

– Nina Illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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