Tarnoff, Ben. n.d. Internet for the People.

Notes

In-text annotations

"Preface" (Page 11)

"Their world may seem strange, but it has a point of contact with our own. That hose filled with glass is ours; we put it there. It is a bundle of optical fibers that carry beams of light. The beams of light are bits of data, encoded as pulses. The bits of data are Facebook friend requests and financial trades, Twitch streams and supply chain analytics. They flow to and from the internet, irrigating the billions of computers that coordinate the global economy and, increasingly, our everyday lives. Here, among the eels, lies a major artery of the algorithmic age." (Page 11)

"There are many such arteries, traversing oceans and tracking continental coastlines, but this one is known as MAREA. It is currently the highestcapacity submarine fiber-optic cable in the world. It is co-owned by Microsoft, Facebook, and a subsidiary of the Spanish telecom Telefónica, which has leased a portion of its capacity to Amazon." (Page 11)

"MAREA is a reminder that the internet has a body. A body of glass, copper, silicon, and a thousand other things—things that have to be dug out of the earth and hammered into useful shapes, with significant inputs of labor and energy. Bodies are material; they are also historical. If the internet is not a place of pure spirit—a “civilization of the Mind,” as the cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow once called it—neither is it a place untouched by the past. It is entangled with history, and often in quite literal ways." (Page 12)

"These earlier networks were built for particular purposes and used for particular ends. The telegraph networks helped the British supervise and secure their colonial holdings. The telephone networks helped the Americans wage the Cold War, and a hot war in Vietnam. Both networks were essential for capitalist expansion and globalization: they aided in the creation of markets, the extraction of resources, the division and distribution of labor. And, as Starosielski explains, they were themselves shaped by even older patterns of empire and capital. Their cables typically shadowed the sea routes pioneered in previous centuries, routes that sped the circulation of cotton, silver, spices, settlers, and slaves." (Page 12)

"Connectivity is never neutral. The growth of networks was guided by a desire for power and profit. They were not just conduits for conveying information, but mechanisms for forging relationships of control. While the internet is more sophisticated than its predecessors, it continues this tradition. The internet is not just material and historical, then; it is also political. The submerged threads of glass that link one land-mass to another are, to borrow a metaphor from Eduardo Galeano, veins. Through them, wealth is extracted and concentrated, communities are dominated and dispossessed" (Page 12)

"On the contrary: an internet with a body, enmeshed in the past and in politics, is also an internet made by people. It is steeped in the struggles through which humans make their social worlds. “Progress” or “technology” or some other inevitable logic of development did not prescribe its present form. Particular choices brought us to this point. We have the ability, collectively, to choose differently." (Page 13)

"Since 2016, a mood of distrust has congealed around the large tech companies that dominate the internet. Often called the “techlash,” it has become a fixture of US media and politics. The belief that the internet is broken has become a new common sense. The brokenness of the internet is the subject of congressional hearings and New York Times investigations, executive orders and popular documentaries. It is something that, in a fractured partisan landscape, nearly everyone can agree on." (Page 13)

"the internet is broken because the internet is a business." (Page 13)

"An internet owned by smaller, more entrepreneurial, more regulated firms will still be an internet run for profit. And an internet run for profit is one that can’t guarantee people the things they need to lead selfdetermined lives. It’s an internet where people can’t participate in the decisions that affect them." (Page 13)

"The internet started out in the 1970s as an experimental technology created by US military researchers. In the 1980s, it grew into a government-owned computer network used primarily by academics. Then, in the 1990s, privatization began. The privatization of the internet was a process, not an event." (Page 14)

"It did not involve a simple transfer of ownership from the public sector to the private but rather a more complex movement whereby corporations programmed the profit motive into every level of the network. A system built by scientists was renovated for the purpose of profit maximization." (Page 14)

"A system built by scientists was renovated for the purpose of profit maximization." (Page 14)

"The process of privatization started in the internet’s basement, with the pipes. In the 1990s, the US government gave the private sector a network created at enormous public expense. Corporations took over the internet’s physical infrastructure and made money from selling access to it. But privatization didn’t stop there. The real money didn’t lie in monetizing access, but in monetizing activity—that is, in what people did once they got online. So privatization ascended to the upper floors, to the layer where the internet is experienced. Here, in the 2000s and 2010s, the so-called platforms arose: Google, Amazon, Uber, and the rest. These empires finished what the 1990s had started. They pushed privatization up the stack. The profit motive came to organize not only the low-level plumbing of the network but every aspect of online life." (Page 15)

"A small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone’s behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market." (Page 16)

"The internet wasn’t invented by a lone genius tinkering in a garage. Rather, it involved thousands of individuals engaged in a decades-long act of co-creation. It took collaboration, cross-pollination, and the slow, accretive work of building on earlier breakthroughs to generate new ones. It also took a lot of public money." (Page 21)

"Most of the innovation on which Silicon Valley depends comes from government-funded research, for the simple reason that the public sector can afford to take risks that the private sector can’t." (Page 21)

"The Cold War provided the pretext for this ambitious undertaking. Nothing loosened the purse strings of American politicians quite like the fear of falling behind the Soviet Union. This fear spiked sharply in 1957, when the Soviets put the first satellite into space. The Sputnik launch produced a genuine sense of crisis in the American establishment, and led to a substantial increase in federal research funding." (Page 22)

"Under private ownership, such a language could never have been created. Not only would the expense have been too great, the very idea of a free and universal medium cut against the grain of the commercial impulse to lock users into a proprietary ecosystem. It was the absence of the profit motive and the presence of public management that made the invention of the internet possible. Yet the internet would also reflect the institutional imperatives of the particular arm of the government that oversaw its creation: the military." (Page 23)

"This new system became known as the internet, with ARPANET at its center. The internet was born as a protocol; it would now become a place, one increasingly populated by civilian researchers—trading emails, accessing high-performance computers, collaborating, arguing. While the government created the internet, it was users who made it useful, who made it a place worth visiting." (Page 26)

"In this model, the river is useless without the tributaries that extend its reach. This is why the NSF, to ensure the broadest possible connectivity, subsidized a number of regional networks that linked universities and other participating institutions to the NSFNET backbone. All this wasn’t cheap, but it worked. Scholars Jay P. Kesan and Rajiv C. Shah have estimated that the subsidies to the regional networks, together with the cost of running the NSFNET backbone, came to approximately $160 million. Other public sources, such as state governments and state-supported universities, likely contributed more than $1.6 billion to the development of the internet during this period" (Page 26)

"The internet had thrived under public ownership, but it was reaching a breaking point. Skyrocketing demand from researchers strained the system, while the AUP prevented it from reaching an even wider audience. Meanwhile, the commercial networks were eager to expand without restrictions, and capitalize on the growing enthusiasm for the internet." (Page 28)

"The goal was to promote competition by creating a level playing field. More accurately, the field remained tilted, but open to a few more players. If the old architecture of the internet had favored monopoly, the new one would be tailor-made for oligopoly. There weren’t that many companies that had consolidated enough infrastructure to operate a backbone—there were five, to be exact. NSF wasn’t opening the internet to competition so much as transferring it to a small handful of corporations waiting in the wings." (Page 29)

"But the government, having controlled the internet’s main artery, had the power to determine what would replace it. By the early 1990s, the internet had clearly outgrown NSFNET, and the existing model was no longer tenable. For the internet to continue its evolution, a new arrangement had to be found. That arrangement could have taken many forms. Rather than exploring them, the government empowered industry to unilaterally dictate the terms of the transition. Naturally, industry insisted that the internet’s privatization was a precondition for its popularization—the only options, it seemed, were to preserve the system as a restricted research network or to make it a fully privatized mass medium." (Page 30)

"Although the details of Inouye’s proposal would’ve had to be worked out, the fundamentals were feasible, and the principles behind it had a long history. There was also a strong moral case. If anything, a public lane was the minimum of what basic fairness demanded: in exchange for the privilege of making a profit from a system built with public money, telecoms would set aside some of their capacity for organizations that served the public." (Page 32)

"The Plunder Continues" (Page 34)

"More than a quarter century has passed since the pipes began to be privatized. In that time, the internet has grown beyond recognition. It has become not just a mass medium but an essential infrastructure, analogous to electricity in the depth of its integration into billions of people’s lives. It has also gone global." (Page 34)

"Market concentration in the US is intense: just four firmsComcast, Charter, Verizon, and AT&T—account for 76 percent of all internet subscriptions in the country, and they actively collaborate to avoid competing with one another." (Page 35)

"ISPs, like backbone providers, face no obligations to do anything other than maximize their bottom line." (Page 35)

"Content providers like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft now own or lease more than half of undersea bandwidth. While these companies generally buy a share of a cable as part of a consortium, Google has been building its own infrastructure. Unlike telecoms, tech firms are not acquiring backbones in order to sell capacity, but to use them for themselves. As they continue to remake the global architecture of the internet, constructing vertically integrated digital empires that control both the pipes and the information inside them, they are remaking the internet remade by the 1990s into an even more privatized form." (Page 38)

"After decades of deepening private control, Americans pay some of the most expensive rates in the world in exchange for awful service. Average monthly internet costs are higher in the US than in Europe or Asia, according to a 2020 study conducted by researchers at the think tank New America, while the US ranks twelfth in average connection speeds, below Romania and Thailand." (Page 38)

"The reason for the pitiful state of US broadband is that the high fees extracted from users aren’t being reinvested to build better infrastructure, but to enrich executives and investors. Comcast’s CEO earned $36.3 million in 2019, and the company, along with the other members of the broadband cartel, has spent billions of dollars on dividends and stock buybacks in order to line the pockets of its shareholders. The big ISPs are essentially slumlords. Their principal function is to fleece their customers and funnel the money upward. They charge exorbitant prices for the privilege of using their deteriorating infrastructure because people have no alternative." (Page 39)

"Freedom isn’t free, in other words. It has certain material preconditions. If you’re hungry or homeless or sick—or if you’re shivering in a parking lot using free Wi-Fi to attend school online because you don’t have internet at home—it’s hard to lead a self- determined life. Securing those material preconditions isn’t simply a matter of personal will. It has to do with social choices about how resources like food and housing and health care are distributed. For people to get the things they need to be free, they must be able to participate in these choices. Thus the act of individual self- rule is always premised on the presence of collective self- rule. The power to make meaningful decisions about the course of one’s own life rests on the power to contribute meaningfully to the decisions that shape everyone’s lives." (Page 41)

"Democracy requires a richer set of practices and a wider sphere of control to be fully democratic. It must, as the theorist Stuart Hall writes, take place not just occasionally and within certain circumscribed zones but “across all the centres of social activity—in private as well as public life, in personal associations as well as in compulsory obligations, in the family and the neighbourhood and the nursery and the shopping centre as well as in the public office or at the point of production.” And, we might add, in the realm of the internet." (Page 41)

"Capitalism is a perpetual motion machine, driven by continuous accumulation. Profit powers this machine. Without it, accumulation comes to a halt, and firms go bankrupt." (Page 42)

"The pursuit of profit isn’t a choice, then. It’s a necessity. One of the strangest things about capitalism is the fact that the people who control the perpetual motion machine—the capitalists—do not really control it. They are like characters in a play. They have a role to perform. Different actors can perform a role differently, but the script remains more or less the same. Accumulation must continue, which means that profit must always be the primary consideration." (Page 42)

"Of the four firms that account for 76 percent of all internet subscriptions in the US, three also operate backbones. They could refuse to work with community networks, leaving them stranded. This is the legacy of privatization: a corporate dictatorship over critical infrastructure. Creating alternatives may be the only hope for community networks to achieve their full potential." (Page 56)

"When it comes to deprivatizing the pipes of the internet, three concerns in particular are likely to arise. The first is the potential cost of such a venture. How will we pay for it?" (Page 58)

"In the words of one Detroit Community Technology Project staffer, “We’re trying to close the digital divide by paying Comcast and AT&T, who are responsible for the digital divide.”" (Page 59)

"In his analysis of capitalist development, Karl Marx drew a distinction between the “formal” and “real” subsumption of labor by capital. In formal subsumption, an existing labor process remains intact, but is now performed on a capitalist basis. For example, a peasant who used to grow his own food becomes a wage laborer on somebody else’s farm. The way he works the land stays the same. In real subsumption, by contrast, the labor process is revolutionized to meet the requirements of capital. Formerly, capital inherited a process; now, it remakes the process. Our agricultural worker becomes integrated into the industrialized apparatus of the modern factory farm. The way he works completely changes: his daily rhythms bear little resemblance to those of his peasant predecessors. And the new arrangement is more profitable for the farm’s owner, having been explicitly organized with that end in mind" (Page 71)

"Email was more than just a useful tool, though; it represented a kind of spiritual transformation. Email helped humanize the internet. It made a cold assemblage of cables and computers feel inhabited. The internet was somewhere you could catch up with friends and get into acrimonious arguments with strangers. It was somewhere to talk about politics or science fiction or the best way to implement a protocol. Other people were the main attraction, and this quality would endure, and inspire new applications, as the internet expanded. Even the World Wide Web was made with community in mind. “I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together,” its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, would later write." (Page 72)

"social relationships have merged so completely with market relationships as to become indistinguishable. The internet is the instrument of this union; it brings people together, but under the sign of capital." (Page 73)

"Combining the community with the market was a lucrative innovation. The interactions that occurred in the guise of the former greatly enhanced the value of the latter. Under the banner of community, AuctionWeb’s buyers and sellers were encouraged to perform unpaid activities that made the site more useful, such as rating one another in the feedback forum or sharing advice on shipping." (Page 73)

"These systems would be called platforms, but what they resembled most were shopping malls." (Page 75)

"Back in 1993, the activist Jeffrey Chester had warned that the information superhighway would become “a virtual electronic shopping mall” if corporate interests had their way." (Page 76)

"The shopping malls of the internet are nothing if not privately owned public spaces. They are corporate enclosures with a wide range of interactions transpiring inside of them. Just like in a real mall, some of these interactions are commercial, such as buying clothes from a merchant, while others are social, such as hanging out with friends. But what distinguishes the online mall from the real mall is that within the former, everything one does makes data. Every move, however small, leaves a digital trace. And these traces present an opportunity to create a completely new set of arrangements" (Page 77)

"Google had discovered a way to translate its nonmarket interactions with users into surplus raw material for the fabrication of products aimed at genuine market transactions with its real customers: advertisers,” she writes. “The corporation thus created out of thin air and at zero marginal cost an asset class of vital raw materials derived from users’ nonmarket online behavior.”" (Page 81)

"The birth of the online mall, the rise of the cloud, the spread of the data imperative—these were the principal vectors for the deeper privatization of the internet in the decade or two after the dot-com crash. But there was another change that profoundly altered the shape of the network: its diffusion." (Page 93)

"In this respect, the internet resembles the shipping container, the simple metal box that revolutionized global logistics in the 1960s and 1970s. The shipping container made it cheaper to transport goods by streamlining and mechanizing what had formerly been a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, and this in turn enabled companies to farm out their manufacturing operations to subcontractors in whatever parts of the world goods could be most cheaply produced. And what the shipping container has done to much blue-collar work, the internet has done to much white-collar work." (Page 99)

"It “has created a massive globalized reservoir of human labor power for companies to tap into, as much or as little as needed: the ‘human cloud,’” writes scholar Gavin Mueller. This human cloud includes the immense “back office” maintained by large tech companies, which use freelance and subcontracted workers in low-wage countries to categorize data sets so that machine learning algorithms can learn to detect patterns from them. A “smart” system is able to know what a horse looks like, for example, because it has trained on millions of photographs that have been labeled, by a human, as having horses in them." (Page 99)

"The goal is a world where labor power can be conjured as painlessly as computing power, scaled to meet demand, and" (Page 99)

"then discarded—a human cloud of virtual machines in which the virtual machines are people." (Page 100)

"At one level, this bizarre state of affairs reflects the influence of venture capital, a popular form of financing that gives money to startups in exchange for equity. While venture is only one source of financing for tech companies—a larger share is made up from hedge funds, mutual funds, investment banks, and the bond and equity markets—it exerts special influence because of its close historical ties with the industry, and its influence can be seen in the way that many tech companies operate. As venture funds are designed to demand large returns, this hunger for hyperscale is passed on to startups in the form of an imperative to grow at any cost. Then, once the company has acquired enough market share, it can use its dominant position to achieve the profits that its investors require." (Page 100)

"A mere 18 percent of publicly traded startups valued at more than $1 billion were profitable in 2019. By comparison, about 80 percent of the firms that went public in the 1980s were profitable at the time of their IPO." (Page 100)

"Just because Uber is unprofitable doesn’t mean that certain well-placed people can’t profit from it. These are profits derived from speculation, not production. But in contemporary capitalism, profits from speculation are a primary means by which capital accumulation occurs. Since the 1970s, the US economy has become increasingly financialized. The financial sector has grown in size and significance while the productive sector has shrunk. Money made from moving other money around has become as importantperhaps even more important—as money made from making things. What Uber and other comparable companies offer, particularly in their early stages, are exceptionally lucrative linkages between financialization and the internet. Investors can ride a rising wave of paper wealth as the valuation of a firm grows, and then convert that paper wealth into real wealth during a “liquidity event” such as an IPO or an acquisition, regardless of whether the firm ever turns a profit. Data is an essential lubricant in this cycle, as it helps uphold investor confidence in the possibility of profitability." (Page 102)

"We might sort that story into three phases: the ascendant, the triumphant, and the baroque. In the ascendant phase, the telecoms took control of the pipes and defeated any attempt to impose a degree of popular control, such as the proposal for a “public lane on the information superhighway.” This victory laid the basis for the dot-com boom. The premise of the boom was that, with the pipes now safely in the hands of industry, privatization could be pushed up the stack." (Page 102)

"All of this adds a new dimension to the dynamics of data monetization. Data helps Google and Facebook sell ads and Amazon sell goods (and ads). But data helps Uber sell itself—which is to say, its equity. Data is converted into money through its interaction with the psychology of financial markets. This is the baroque phase of the internet’s privatization, in which capital is so abundant and the potential returns so immoderate that investors can live on hope alone" (Page 103)

"Moreover, there aren’t a lot of other obvious places for capital to go. Tech is one of the few profit centers left in an economy that has been decelerating for decades. In the 1970s, GDP and labor productivity growth rates began falling, and it’s been downhill ever since" (Page 103)

"For those who occupy or orbit these new zones of power, privatization is a success story. For those who don’t, the picture is more complicated" (Page 104)

"As privatization ascended from the basement of the internet into its upper floors, from the pipes to the so-called platforms, it programmed the profit motive into the network. This introduced a certain sameness across the stack: the purpose of both Comcast and Facebook is to make money. But beneath this sameness is a great deal of variation: Comcast and Facebook make money in quite different ways. The social consequences are also quite different." (Page 106)

"Comcast makes money by selling access to the internet. An accommodating regulatory regime, secured through decades of diligent lobbying, enables companies like Comcast to provision this access on maximally extractive terms. Investors are rewarded while infrastructure is neglected. The result is an acutely undemocratic arrangement. Poor and rural users have it the worst, but even those in better-connected areas often endure low speeds and spotty service. Connectivity, a precondition for the possibility of a self- determined life, is unevenly and precariously distributed. Meanwhile, communities of all kinds are denied the opportunity to participate in the decisions that affect them. These decisions are made by executives and shareholders, and are tightly delineated by the profit motive. Up the stack, where the online mall was born and took root, the situation is somewhat different. Here money is made not from selling access but by monetizing activity. But there are many kinds of activities being monetized, and they are monetized in several distinct ways. If telecoms are in the business of putting packets through a tube, online malls are a more varied species. They are also more complicated" (Page 106)

"Equally important is the limitless supply of money provided by investors, which can be used to bankroll lobbying, as well as to subsidize the cheap fares that undercut existing livery drivers like Schifter." (Page 107)

"An online mall is an assemblage of technical components, but the components are entangled with a wider set of political, legal, and financial forces. These entanglements are functional—they are what makes the online mall work. They are not a context so much as a medium, not a backdrop against which the online mall operates but the channels that it operates through." (Page 107)

"An online mall never exists in its “pure” form. It carries certain signatures—it is a middleman, a sovereign, and a beneficiary of network effects—and it is invariably devoted to the manufacture and monetization of data. But these characteristics are always expressed through the distinct institutional mesh in which a particular online mall is embedded—that is, through its entanglements. This explains how Google and Facebook and Amazon and Uber can share basic features while differing in their downstream effects. All are designed to make money from the upper floors of the internet. But the consequences of this pursuit, the imprints it leaves on the world, are fairly diverse. Even so, a common theme can be detected. 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 rewards upward and focus them in fewer hands." (Page 107)

"This shadow workforce is just as indispensable to the smooth operation of online malls as the relatively small number of direct employees who write the code and design the user interfaces. Yet shadow workers typically earn much lower pay and receive fewer to no benefits, despite working for some of the most profitable companies in the world. Sometimes, as in the case of social media content moderators who spend all day sifting through imagery of beheadings and child abuse, they also face traumatizing working conditions. They are made to bear the risks, while the rewards flow elsewhere." (Page 109)

"Cottom gives the example of online colleges. Online colleges are disproportionately attended by Black women, who take on large student loans they often struggle to pay off. The inclusion of a historically excluded group is achieved, but on predatory terms. This is a common pattern within online malls. Black and brown Americans who come from communities with persistently high rates of unemployment can make money as gig workers. Women kept at home by caregiving responsibilities can make money doing digital piecework while the baby sleeps. Slum dwellers in poor countries can make money labeling datasets. And so on: people whose lives and labor have been devalued through the historical and ongoing exclusions of racism, sexism, and imperialism can find a toehold in the elastic workplaces of the internet. The internet, by enabling firms to distribute work while retaining control over the distributed workers, has helped absorb more layers of humanity into the wage relation. But this is accomplished in such a way that reinscribes the prior exclusions. The livelihoods on offer are meager and menial, not to mention highly insecure. The excluded are included, but only on the condition that they absorb most of the risk and forfeit most of the reward." (Page 110)

"This is why Safiya Umoja Noble decided to call her book Algorithms of Oppression. Information in the early internet was mostly organized by humans; information in the era of the online mall is mostly organized by algorithms. Automation was central to Google’s value proposition from the start: since its dorm-room days at Stanford, the search engine promised a programmatic way to measure the quality and relevance of websites, rather than relying on human moderators as Yahoo! did. As Google moved offcampus and became a business, the economic advantage of this approach became clear. Human moderators were expensive; Google would let the algorithms do the work." (Page 112)

"What kind of tactics? Right-wing propagandists employ a variety of techniques. Just as “filter bubbles” can’t be relied upon to reflexively amplify whatever falsehoods are fed to them, there is nothing automatic about how the algorithms of social media promote reactionary propaganda. It’s not merely a matter of making one’s content sufficiently outrageous —“rage-bait,” as it’s sometimes called—and letting Facebook do the rest. This is not to deny that such content travels well. The digital enclosures of social media were built from the ground up to maximize user engagement. The more data that can be made about someone, the more “targeted” the ads can become; the longer that person spends on the site or app, the more ads can be served. Unsurprisingly, there appears to be a strong link between Facebook’s insatiable appetite for eyeballs and the extent to which its filtering algorithms favor provocative content." (Page 117)

"To say the truth is less tidy than commonly supposed does not absolve tech companies of responsibility. To say that algorithms and brains do not act as interlocking gears to form a single seamless apparatus of “polarization” does not mean that online malls are innocent. It means rather that we need better metaphors with which to clarify their complicity. This is where thinking in terms of entanglements can once again be useful. The online malls of social media are collections of technical artifactsalgorithms, servers—that are entangled with collections of social artifactslaws, markets, ideologies—through which they act on the world. One way to visualize the sum total of these relationships is, to follow a suggestion from the philosopher Félix Guattari, to see them ecologically. Ecosystems are full of feedback loops, cycles, and flows; organisms are ceaselessly interacting with one another and with the nonliving. Explaining how something happens within an ecosystem—the death and decomposition of an organism, say—requires examining the many interactions that have coincided to produce it. Something similar is required to explain how rightwing radicalization happens online. The internet is part of the answer, but only a part." (Page 118)

"Yet the political economy preferred by the New Brandeisians isn’t a particularly radical departure from the present. They still want an internet ruled by markets, albeit one where markets are competitive rather than concentrated. The pursuit of profit would remain the organizing principle, but profit would be pursued by smaller and more entrepreneurial firms. And they believe that such a restructuring would go a long way toward addressing the concerns raised by the techlash" (Page 124)

"Making markets more regulated or more competitive won’t touch the deeper problem, which is the market itself. The online malls are engineered for profit-making, and profit- making is what makes them inequality machines. The exploitation of gig and ghost workers; the reinforcement of racism, sexism, and other oppressions; the amplification of right-wing propaganda—none of these diverse forms of social damage would exist if they weren’t profitable. It’s true that these damages can be softened somewhat, and that larger firms can soften them more easily than smaller ones. But here too the market sets limits: Facebook can only spend so much on content moderation before its shareholders revolt. More importantly, its addiction to engagement, and the symbiosis with the Right that this addiction has engendered, is the very basis of its business model—which creates the problems that content moderation is supposed to address. The comparison that comes to mind is the tragicomedy of coal companies embracing carbon capture: it would be easier to simply stop burning coal." (Page 125)

"A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few, and the rule of those few by an imperative that is hard-wired into capitalism: the imperative to accumulate. Mark Zuckerberg is probably the most powerful man online, thanks to a shareholder structure that preserves his control of Facebook. A social network of more than 2 billion users is more or less a personal dictatorship. But even Zuckerberg can’t defy the imperative to accumulate; shareholders would punish him in the form of a falling stock price, and, if it got bad enough, competitors would put him out of business" (Page 125)

"Email—the internet’s original social application—works the same way. Gmail and Yahoo Mail are distinct services with distinct features. But users can still exchange messages, thanks to shared protocols. The fact that these protocols are open and nonproprietary is a direct consequence of the internet’s public origins. Privatization has pushed things in the opposite direction: online life increasingly takes place within monolithic enclosures where interactions are governed by secret and proprietary algorithms. “Protocolizing” social media would break the walls of these walled gardens, and turn them inside out." (Page 129)

"Libraries have a further advantage: they are full of librarians. Librarians are the original information workers. They retrieve, classify, curate, and contextualize information, and they do so not for profit, but as a public service. This is a service that is sorely needed in online spaces. As Safiya Umoja Noble notes, it is significant that funding for public libraries has fallen as Google and Facebook have grown. We have outsourced “our knowledge needs” to the online malls, which satisfy those needs according to commercial imperatives that inevitably compromise the quality of the knowledge provided. Librarians are the ideal antidote. Joan Donovan has called for ten thousand librarians to be put to work “building systems for curating timely, local, relevant, and accurate information across social media platforms" (Page 130)

"In the process of trying to solve their problems with technology, people came to realize that technology often fell short of solving their problems. Politics was needed." (Page 137)

"What kind of campaigns might materialize today? If online malls are defined by their entanglements, then they can’t be dismantled without also unraveling the social phenomena they are entangled with. This might take the form of building unions among app-based workers, or reversing the runaway financialization that has underwritten the rise of the tech giants. It might mean working to weaken the material foundations of the Right. There are many possibilities, but one thing is clear: to remake the internet, we will have to remake everything else." (Page 137)

"The nostalgics are no less numerous today. Their main object of mourning is the “open web”: online life before it got enclosed by online malls. In those days, the story goes, the internet was freer, more creative. It revolved around open protocols, not proprietary algorithms, and no single site or company was too dominant. It had a “culture of serendipitous tinkering,” says internet scholar Jonathan Zittrain. It resembled a gritty, eccentric metropolis, says cultural critic Virginia Heffernan. These are the characteristics being killed by the corralling of the internet into walled gardens—what Heffernan describes as “suburbanization.”" (Page 138)

"Nostalgia never paints a reliable picture of the past. In this case, however, the past isn’t even past. A hundred eulogies later, the open web lives on: the online malls haven’t destroyed it so much as hijacked it." (Page 138)

"As for whether the result is more “suburban”—boring—this claim is equally hard to sustain. Online malls are fascinating places. They are places where people make culture, do politics, launch movements, forge identities, cohere communities. Black Twitter, as the work of scholar André Brock, Jr. has shown, is one of the richest cultural repositories on the internet. Nostalgia for an internet before all this is also nostalgia for a time when fewer people used the internet, and when its users tended to be whiter and more affluent—an internet that was, for these reasons, much less interesting." (Page 139)

"In his history of the English working class, the historian E. P. Thompson describes the political power of nostalgia, something that the Luddites, those machine-breakers of the nineteenth century, put to good use. The Luddites are best remembered today as a group of textile workers who destroyed the machinery that was throwing them out of work. But they were also thinkers, and they circulated their thoughts in poems, proclamations, petitions, songs, and letters. On the one hand, they lamented the disintegration of their social world under the advancing hurricane of industrial capitalism. On the other hand, they sketched an image of a new society, one in which “industrial growth should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of profit be subordinated to human needs,”" (Page 139)