The internet is not broken

Another week, another hang-wringing opinion piece about the collapse of society due to the pernicious business models of the online platforms. This time, it’s William A. Finnegan, writing for Persuasion on Substack, who manages to connect several dots to not only describe the slow decline of all that is good in the world since the internet was first put into our grubby hands but also blame the companies that have facilitated our virtual lives.

It’s an impressive intellectual leap, in the literal sense of him creating an impression, but I am not sure I can join him in his conclusions, even though I too lament the loss of the hopeful, pioneering and generally positive experience of the internet in the late 1990s, and the sense that we were about to enter into a new era that would embody the idealistic belief in science and technology we had when we were kids as a result of watching reruns of Star Trek on the TV and poring over books about how our lives would be improved immeasurably by the next leap forward in modern life (leaving aside whether there is even such a thing as progress).

Back to Finnegan’s think piece. He states that what we all failed to understand in the 1990s was that more information “didn’t just empower truth.” “It empowered noise. It empowered fraud. It empowered delusion.”

He goes on to say that the “old gatekeepers—newspapers, broadcasters, publishers—were slow, biased, imperfect” but that “they maintained a basic filtering function.” “When they fell, what replaced them wasn’t a pure marketplace of ideas. It was a marketplace of outrage. And that’s where the real enshittification began.” (Enshittification, he notes, usually refers to the user experience of a technology, which tends to get worse over time, but here is is talking about society as a whole.)

Finnegan then states, correctly, that the mission of the algorithms that power the online platforms is to maximise engagement, and that that is driven by “our base instincts: outrage, fear, tribalism.” These, he claims, are the “most limbic, least rational parts of ourselves.” I have to take issue with that, however, as there is nothing particularly irrational about outrage, fear and tribalism when a person believes they are threatened, or even under attack, and that is how many, many people feel at the moment. Whether they should, rationally, be fearful in the current circumstances in which most Western Europeans and North Americans find themselves is an open question, however.

I am also not sure that algorithms that are designed to passively, blindly increase engagement without questioning the nature of that engagement are to blame when it is, in fact, the people who create content that stokes fear and division who should be held accountable for what they say. Or should they be held accountable? Or are they simply reflecting what humans already think and feel?

Finnegan says that, in the past (always better, always warmer, always kinder than now, of course), the preachers of fury, as he would have it, “faced real limits,” in the form of networks, advertisers and public standards. “There was still friction. Still lines that, if crossed, could end a career. You could be ‘mad as hell,’ but not everything automatically made it to broadcast.”

(This statement of course grossly underrepresents the presence and influence of so-called ‘gutter journalism’, pirate radio and cable TV stations, and magazines and books that circulated in the 1990s and before, although it is true to say that they were more easily ignored, as you could choose not to have potential access to that kind of content, rather than it being a perpetual click away in the palm of your hand.)

He then claims that, when the internet “industrialized attention, it stripped away every external constraint,” and facilitated people like Alex Jones. He “didn’t need a network to renew him” or “advertisers to tolerate him,” as he “needed only clicks.”

“Algorithms didn’t care if he was right,” Finnegan adds. “They didn’t care who he hurt, what truth he burned, or who got run over—only that audiences were watching.”

Agreed, Alex Jones is hardly a model for the kind of content that edifies and improves, but to suggest that he and the internet that empowered him are emblematic of the drift towards authoritarianism we see in the United States (which is more symptomatic of deep-seated issues around real and tangible reductions in civil liberty and the crushing effect of modern capitalism on grass roots society), and the rise of the so-called new culture war (although I doubt it is no more of a culture war than in previous generations; it is just more visible due to being online), is a leap too far.

What Finnegan and those in his wake fail to either acknowledge or, apparently, understand is that: a) the past was not better, just different, because; b) human nature has not changed in the slightest; and c) the internet as it stands today (in other words, now fully democratised rather than simply the plaything of well-off tech-curious liberals) is simply a reflection of human nature in all its many colours and stripes.

The problem here is that the hand-wringing commentators seem not to like human nature, and seek constantly to improve, better, refine or advance (pick your favourite from those) the way in which we behave and interact with others, and the ambitions that we harbour, as well as society in general. It’s all very Victorian moralising in its aim, even if the language and framework within which it is presented is different, and suggests a distaste for the true richness (in its both positive and negative extremes) of the way in which human express themselves and live their lives.

Finnegan’s solution to all the problems with online discourse, and that of many other commentators, is to take back or save the public square. This, he says “isn’t just about unplugging or scrolling less.” Instead, it is “about actively reclaiming the civic commons—using the very platforms hijacked for rage and profit to rebuild movements of trust, resilience, and pluralism.”

“The public square will not reclaim itself,” he adds. “It will be rebuilt—piece by piece—by those willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of restoring trust, resilience, and civic imagination.”

It all sounds very noble, but there is a problem at the heart of this strand of thinking, and the conclusions reached. After reading Finnegan’s piece, I wrote as a note on Substack:

“This whole discussion fascinates me. We can talk until the cows come home about reclaiming virtual public spaces, about being the gatekeepers and the protectors of online discussion, and us all taking the time to slow down and basically consider before we comment, but, but, but… the mistake that is made over an over again is to conflate what was presented as consumable media in the print and early TV age with how people interacted with each other in real life.

“Media was tightly controlled and packaged as to be edifying, public discussion has always been the opposite, in which we descend to the lowest common denominator and react unconsciously to scratch our basest itches. To paraphrase Wilde: “The twenty first century dislike of online discourse is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.” We do not like having to admit that humanity, in all its raw forms, is not that civil (in the given sense of the word), and does not conform to what we have chosen to be the rules and regulations of interaction.

“If we want to pretend that humans are, by instinct, sophisticated, polite and thoughtful (in the sense that we define it to ourselves), then we need to rent a room at the back of the pub of life and invite in only those with whom we want to discuss.”

The issue here is not that there is a sickness at the heart of modern society that is poisoning our public interactions, as all the problems that we ascribe as resulting from social media have always existed (remember, there were no smartphones and no online platforms during the rise of Nazis, to give an obvious example), but rather that we are all, people of every kind, having to share a space together that was once the preserve of rather snobbish liberals who were very happy when they owned the public arena and could dictate what was and what was not said.

That period is now over, and I hope that we are going finally to accept, and ideally embrace, the idea that ‘other people’ do not have to be like us, to live in the same way, to say the same things, wear the same clothes, desire the same objects, have the same political beliefs or sexual orientations, or have the same ambitions for themselves or for society as a whole. And that includes right-leaning people who want to drive a big car, buy a gun, pray in a church and live a ‘traditional’ family life.

After all, isn’t that what the internet was all about in the first place?