Traversing the Spider’s Web: Total Digital Integration Under Lockdown
Feb 1 | Charlie Ridler
In the 2016 film Captain Fantastic, Ben Cash and his children are forced to leave their home in the wilderness and re-enter the post-industrial world from which they sought refuge. Sympathetic to their plight but critical of their idealism, the film ends in moderation. Cash’s children are better educated than their peers in “the real world” but harmed by their sheltering from mainstream society. In its final scene, the family sit and wait for the school bus to take them into an ideological wilderness, carrying them into a future of consensus and wage labour. It feels unsatisfying precisely because of its moderation; its gesture towards the necessity of breaking bread with the world, no matter how hostile you believe it to be.
Captain Fantastic resonates because it dramatises a scenario most people have humorously considered. Its warring tragi-comedic poles stem from a shared notion: the impossible suggestion of alternative. Despite everything that has happened over the last five years, the real “real world” still feels similar to that of the film. Any hints of optimism are either mocked or systematically destroyed. When radical societal change does happen (for example, the worst pandemic in a century) it serves mainly to accelerate pre-existing trends.
It feels unsatisfying precisely because of its moderation; its gesture towards the necessity of breaking bread with the world, no matter how hostile you believe it to be.
If ever there was a choice to go and live in the technological woods before COVID-19, it has gone. Lockdowns have taught us how utterly inadequate a replacement cyberspace is for human interaction and how hopelessly dependant we are on it at the same time. Today, you simply cannot afford to be a technophobe. If you don’t work, you don’t eat and if you choose to disconnect, you can’t work. And it’s not just breadwinning you do online. The internet is how you stay in touch with friends, partners and family. It’s where you get your information and how you experience culture. Mass digitalisation has become a multifaceted and all-encompassing hegemony. A consequence of hegemony is that it fades into absence.
The prevailing press consensus is that the internet has saved us from the worst effects of lockdowns, in allowing the charade of normality to continue. “Coronavirus may be deadly, but the internet will save us all”, led Tom Harris for the Telegraph back in March. Ben Quinn, Helen Pidd and Josh Halliday more recently reassured us in the Guardian that “pupils in England who have no access to laptops are designated as “vulnerable children””, by the standards of the Department for Education. Free, universal access to the internet, particularly in the age of its inescapability, is an important debate, one that should not be downplayed as merely aiding and abetting the status quo (let’s not forget that the status quo resoundingly rejected such a notion in 2019). But the shift in tone over the last decade, from talk of the internet as a usurping force, to acknowledging not enough people have access to it, does highlight how it is no longer an opt-in system.
Such is the history of technological innovation under capitalism. Like the motorcar before it, an agent of liberty and social mobility soon becomes a tool of their suppression. Neither is the political and social influence of Big Tech a particularly new issue. Nonetheless, in the era of coronavirus, these trends have become far more extreme.
Such is the history of technological innovation under capitalism. Like the motorcar before it, an agent of liberty and social mobility soon becomes a tool of their suppression.
One example of this is the recent debate surrounding influencers. As the UK lingers under house arrest, the Instagram elite jet off to Dubai to complete their “essential work”. Their job is deeply rooted in individualised aspiration. They make you feel inadequate, for money. But, as put by Diyora Shadijanova, they “have been successfully making their money this way for years; it’s the circumstances that have changed, not their morality.” More specifically, what has changed is that you can no longer look away.
For this reason, many of us feel the need to do just that. No one is aware of this more than Big Tech themselves. Facebook’s “deactivate” feature, which temporarily switches off your account but allows the decision to be reversed at a moment’s notice, exemplifies this. They have incorporated backlash into their design. Why would there be a need for this unless a significant number of users want to take social media breaks?
Sometimes even permanent deletion is not enough. Just over a year ago, I closed most of my own social media accounts. My reasons were more personal than political, feeling for some time that my use of these websites had been unhealthy. Worried about issues I was having with anxiety, my GP advised me to start a £49.99 annual subscription to Headspace, truly the mark of an institution so battered from years of austerity and consumerism that it is forced to outsource its mental health services to an app.
This was, of course, before the pandemic. Today I am once again the proud owner of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, not so much as to replace social interaction as for university. A not-insignificant amount of course details, channels of communication and job vacancies are available exclusively on socials. It is my responsibility to advertise myself on the labour market and the best way to do this is online. The consequence for noncompliance is unemployment.
So, we are individualised but lack individual will. This is reflected by much of our popular culture. Each day we spend under lockdown, the less certain the future of Britain’s nightclubs, music venues, cinemas and theatres becomes. Yet demand remains through individualistic modes of consumption, namely livestreamed gigs and straight-to-Netflix movies, because “take it or leave it” is not a real choice. Replacing the collaborative and social will no doubt set a cultural precedent for the post-COVID era, whenever that may be. Insiders seem to think the livestream is here to stay.
So, we are individualised but lack individual will.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 work Manufacturing Consent argues that flak is one of five filters allowing mass media in the west to act as propaganda. Newspapers shape their stories to avoid flak which could discredit them and harm their sales. Today, social media platforms thrive on flak because, to paraphrase Adam Curtis, angry people click more. As you tweet into the void, representatives from tech giants that laid the ground work for the Trump movement take their seats in Biden’s transition team. The implications surrounding the then-president’s recent social media ban change the more these platforms dominate the political landscape. They are no longer moderating one corner of a debate; they are moderating the entire debate. It is not Twitter’s recent actions that harm freedom of expression, but rather freedom of expression’s absorption by a small number of very large, unaccountable tech companies.
January’s storming of the Capitol Building showed that it is possible to use the internet to stage a demonstration powerful enough to shake the foundations of American democracy. It seems the far-right finds it much easier to organise online. The most immediate reason for this is how social media, particularly Twitter, connects them to figures with genuine influence, such as fascist sympathisers within the police and Donald Trump. But also to consider is the role of alternative sites like since-suspended Parler. What is Parler’s appeal when algorithms already provide us with a tailored experience of reality? Its users sought to thicken the walls of the echo chamber and their success made it the ideal platform on which to organise the riot. Contrasting narratives were no longer confined to a separate area, rather they did not exist at all. Mass demonstration on this scale becomes possible when based on a series of comforting mistruths.
This is far from an American problem. At least 14 UK Conservative MPs had profiles on the site, including Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove, Minister of State for Mental Health, Suicide Prevention and Patient Safety Nadine Dorries, Minister of State for Middle East and North Africa James Cleverly and Bobby Hill-lookalike Ben Bradley.
There is a deep anger bubbling up from oceanic trenches in the online deep blue in which we all now live. Without a genuine, organised counterculture, its expression is co-opted by those in power or limited to erratic nihilism. Billion-dollar hedge funds have been brought to their knees by a couple of thousand reddit users. Those driving the short squeezes seem to be guided by revenge. One user, u/ssauronn, wrote on r/wallstreetbets:
“To Melvin Capital: you stand for everything that I hated during that time. You're a firm who makes money off of exploiting a company and manipulating markets and media to your advantage. Your continued existence is a sharp reminder that the ones in charge of so much hardship during the '08 crisis were not punished […] This is personal for me, and millions of others. You can drop the price of GME after hours $120, I'm not going anywhere. You can pay for thousands of reddit bots, I'm holding. You can get every mainstream media outlet to demonize us, I don't care. I'm making this as painful as I can for you.”
r/wallstreetbets have realised they can collectively take advantage of unregulated markets by artificially inflating share price. But this, while fun to watch, is unlikely to lead to any long-lasting change to the system of exploitation producing the anger. That is, besides tighter gatekeeping of the stock market. Robinhood and Interactive Brokers have already restricted access to GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry, Express, Koss and Nokia.
Even the cities we live in are changing, metamorphosising under the immense pressure of total digital integration. In the late 90s, the dotcom bubble created the infrastructure necessary for today’s tech-dominated world. Without the thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable speculatively laid, delivery apps and social media would be unable to cope with the shear amount of traffic they now experience. The same thing is happening now. Share prices are fast approaching dotcom levels. Empty car parks and shop units are beginning to be transformed into enormous inner-city warehouses, ready to cope with instant demands from bedroom-confined consumers. The real cultural impact has not even begun. It will be felt in the coming decades.
The real world is unstable and confusing. But if societal change needed by so many is to come about, it must do so by the hand of a genuine community and in service to truth. Total digital integration makes this difficult because online you are fragmented and individualised.
The solutions to these problems are old ones: unionisation, more accountability in government and the press, an education system which prioritises self-care over increasing of your cash value on the labour market. These have always been uphill struggles and are made just that little bit harder by lockdowns, because of how much they rely on empathetic, human interaction. In the meantime, it is left to the individual to traverse the spider’s web. Their choices are limited, each seemingly less appealing than the last. There are no satisfying answers, only personal moderation. We are sitting and waiting for the school bus to arrive.
Recommended by Charlie:
Anything linked in the above article, plus:
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin Walter
Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
“Outages, traffic peaks and video quality: the internet during lockdown” by Melanie Mingas
“No Grand Pronouncements Here...: Reflections on Cancel Culture and Digital Media Participation'“ by Eve. Ng